I am firmly convinced that it is not a hoax, ancient to modern.  Besides that, I have only some theories, but not much faith in any one.

I see no reason to believe that the text is unrelated to the illustrations.  So it is probably what it seems to be: a compendium of herbal, medical, and astrological stuff.  Unfortunately, only a couple of plants can be identified with certainty, and they grow all over the world.

In my view, the statistics of the text fit either: (a) some East asian language with monosyllabic words -- like Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, and several others -- encoded in an invented alphabetic script, possibly under dictation by someone who did not understand what he was writing.  Or (b) a codebook cipher, where words of the dictionary are mapped to random numbers and these are written in some invented system similar to Roman numerals.

In either hypothesis (a) or (b) I don't have much hope of deciphering it.  If (a) is true, to decipher it one must identify the language (among hundred possibilities), learn it with the vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation of 500 years ago (and we know that Chinese changed a lot in that time), figure out the orthography that the author used (which can be very complicated because of tones) and then wrestle with the inevitable scribal errors (it is quite possible that the book we have is just a copy of an older original, made by someone who could not read it). If (b) is true codebook ciphers are notoriously hard to crack.

Indeed.  If I may be allowed to enjoy a little sadistic pleasure, let me point out that if one bought a lot of BTC on 2013-11-27 at ~1200, exchanged them all for LTC on 2015-05-15, went back to BTC today, and sold them immediately for fiat, one would have made about 10% profit.  As if the BTC price was now 1400 instead of 400. 

Bah.  I invested even more work and time on the Voynich Manuscript, and don't regret it at all.

Well, I did learn *a lot* of interesting and useful things from the bitcoin project, much of it from this thread.  I don't know whether it was worth the investment; but one never knows, even afterwards, what will pay out and what will turn out to have been wasted...

I bought 0.00000000 BTC when I first learned abot bitcoin -- in nov/2013, when the price was ~1200$.  So, even though my investment was fairly modest, and (as you already know) I have been able to double my holdings every day since then, I am still quite disappointed by the loss of almost 70% of the money that I put into this coin.

Well, my sermons do not seem to have any effect, as you can see.  It will not spoil your fun.

Did I ever tell you that only fools invest in currencies?

Well, six months ago 68% of the coins were already mined.  Why wasn't the price ~$340 back then?  

Didn't investors then know that, within six months, 70% of the coins would be mined?

Whatever the cause for the rally, one thing you should keep in mind: every penny of profit that a bitcoin investor makes can only come from the pocket of another bitcoin investor...

Please, there is another user with that name (my very personal troller): do not confuse us two.


Who knows? The MMM ponzi is global and has many imitators.  Their victims can buy their bitcoins anywhere.

The surge may be just held-up money finally reaching the exchanges after a bank holiday.

Or perhaps Sergei has un-paused the scam.

Do you have a better explanation?  I don't see any news or rumor that could explain it.

Taiwan declared it illegal after the kidnapping case; perhaps people there or in other countries are stocking it before access to exchanges is blocked?

His undoing (like Assange's) is his cockish arrogance.  At some points during his video interviews, my arrogantometer registered close to 300 millitodds.  That seems to create instant hate in some people. 

Gavin, on the other hand, registers negative on that scale, most of the time.  That in turn seems to make people dismiss him as incompetent.

Just being right gives you only a very small advantage in the business of trying to convince people.

He is actually too soft on Blockstream. He forgot to mention the developers who are not on Blockstream's payroll, but work for it as contractors; and those two that are the CEO and CTO of Viacoin, another company whose chances of success depend strongly on bitcoin becoming even less usable than it is now.

But of course the Chinese day traders and MMM victims do not care about the block size war.  I bet that 99% of them could not name even one bitcoin developer, or explain what a "block" is.

Indeed, only 8 upvotes; a rather disappointing outcome.  Please try to be more pathetic next time, OK? 

Wait, perhaps you are thinking of John McAfee?

Maybe not even then...  I wonder if the Japanese police has got a clear picture of what happened to the 600 kBTC that disappeared from MtGOX.  The crimes that they have charged Mark with so far do not shed light on that question.

As Lily Tomlin once asked, "when I was younger, I decided that I was going to be somebody; should perhaps I have been more specific?"

He has been sayinng that since he lost the first place among Chinese exchanges...

Until ~2013-12-15 BTC-China's (B) volume was the largest, follwed by OKCoin's (O) then Huobi's (H). Then the Chinese govt closed the bank accounts of BTC-China and OKCoin, while Huobi continued to operate using the CEO's personal bank account.  The volume at these two crashed to nearly zero while that of Huobi more than doubled.

Eventually OKCoin got new bank accounts in Jan/2014 and recovered more than 2/3 of its pre-closure volume.  Meanwhile BTC-China tried using some voucher system, and remained with near-zero volume for another 8 months, until they got bank accounts too.

The volumes of Huobi and OKKoin varied relatively little since Dec/2014 to the start of the "MMM rally" in Sep /2015.  BTC-China on the other hand had a huge increase in volume from Sep/2014 to Apr/2015; then dropped back to roughly the same volume it had before the surge, and remained constant until Sep/2014, like the other two. At that time it was still a distant third place.

Roughly, in kBTC/week:

  Dec/2013, before decree:  B  350   O  320   H  260   Total  930
  Dec/2013, after decree:   B    0   O    0   H  600   Total  600
  Feb/2015:                 B 1310   O  830   H  620   Total 2760
  Sep/2015:                 B  160   O  730   H  420   Total 1310 

So, Mr. Lee, was YOUR volume inflated before the Dec/2013 decree? Why did OKCoin's "wash trades" stop when their bank account was closed?  Was YOUR volume 80% fake between Sep/2014 and Apr/2015?  

Some services that map IP to geographic coordinates return 0 degrees latitude and 0 degrees longitude when they cannot find the true location.  Those coordinates identify a point the Atlantic Ocean, in the Gulf of Guinea. The nearest land is ~600 km away, almost due north, in Ghana, ~200 km west of Accra.

Well, if he pauses the system a few times, and each time he reopens after a couple of days, then, when he closes it for good, the victims will wait patiently for several days before panicking and calling the cops...

Thanks for doing the math that I should have done.  So the difference is real and not due to the exchange rate; and it is new (on June 19, for example, the prices were ~1422 CNY and ~228 USD, which are consistent with the exchange rate at the time, 1:6.21.)

Well, that is another possible explanation for the rally of the last 30 days: the Russians are stocking on bitcoins, by buying at their Localbitcoins, before the new law goes into effect.

If I understood correctly, new law is going to criminalize the trading of bitcoins in Russia -- that is, local exchanges and Locabitcoins.  It cannot do much about Russians using bitcoins for illegal payments, or truly private trade (not going through Localbitcoins).  Hence, it seems to me that Russians who will not be able to use BTC-e (or are afraid of being tracked if they do) will try to buy at Localbitcoin as much as they can, while they can.