buttcoin

The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust

Buttcoin

The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust

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Don’t worry if those words don’t make any damn sense to you, because the entire thing is utterly nonsensical. Aside from the absolutely ridiculous name, the concept is outstandingly foolish: you, the hapless butt enthusiast, buy shares in the Winklevoss twins’ Bitcoin holdings and they take your money, then list dozens of ways your money can disappear, along with a hefty dose of caveat emptor, followed by cacophonous laughter.

Some choice readings from the writeup, thanks to SA‘s terrifying Bitcoin robot, …!, followed by translations for us regular folk:

As the Sponsor and its management have no history of operating an investment vehicle like the Trust, their experience may be inadequate or unsuitable to manage the Trust.

Translation: We, the absurdly named Winklevoss twins, have no idea what the fuck we are doing here.

The loss or destruction of a private key required to access a Bitcoin may be irreversible. The Trust’s loss of access to its private keys or its experience of a data loss relating to the Trust’s Bitcoins could adversely affect an investment in the Shares.

Translation: Oops we deleted our wallet.dat/reset the Amazon servers/forgot our password!

Political or economic crises may motivate large-scale sales of Bitcoins, which could result in a reduction in the Blended Bitcoin Price and adversely affect an investment in the Shares.

Translation: Some idiot will shout “Cyprus!” and the price will swing wildly.

It may be illegal now, or in the future, to acquire, own, hold, sell or use Bitcoins in one or more countries, and ownership of, holding or trading in Shares may also be considered illegal and subject to sanction.

Translation: The US government is cracking down on Bitcoin because all it’s really used for is to buy drugs and underage porn.

Shareholders cannot be assured of the Sponsor’s continued services, the discontinuance of which may be detrimental to the Trust.

Translation: We very well may just take the money and run.

The reviews thus far are mixed. Wait, no they aren’t:

http://twitter.com/SSVa_Raven/status/352135242380873728

 

Staggering

Goons are mostly amused

RedditWinklev01

Redditors are suspicious

RedditWinklev02

Sneak knows what’s actually going on

RedditWinklev03

It is, of course, reddit, so this guy is totally wrong.

Even some of the True Believers at Bitcointalk are not so thrilled:

BCTWinklev01

Not pictured: the worthless bits stuck to the toilet paper

Even actual money news people are critical and skeptical.

Do not give your money to anybody named “Winklevoss,” especially if they’re offering you Bitcoins in return.

Buttcoin

I’m a Bitcoin Baron

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If you’ve been to DEFCON, you’re probably familiar with YTCracker, eminent nerdcore rapper and “former” cracker. If you’re into Bitcoin, you’ve definitely heard of him by now, thanks to his outstanding pisstake of Bitcoin and its hilarious community:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/97120279″ iframe=”true” /]

We here at Buttcoin have taken the time to remix Bitcoin Baron:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/98803105″ iframe=”true” /]

Living on Bitcoin for a week: What we should have learned

Buttcoin

Living on Bitcoin for a week: What we should have learned

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If, for some reason, you missed it, Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill spent a week using nothing but bitcoins as cash in what I can only assume was an experiment to prove that it can be done and to demonstrate the viability of Bitcoin as a currency. The true believers will inevitably point to this experience as an example of Bitcoin working in the real world, but their bias blinds them to the truth: it is not possible to survive using nothing but bitcoins. As a publication is totally unbiased and entirely honest with regard to bitcoins, we’re here to point out the things that bitcoiners ignored or glossed over.

Our heroine (or victim, depending on your viewpoint) began with a sum of five bitcoins (when they were selling for roughly $142.00,) purchased through Coinbase, since the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange is awful and legitimate banks won’t allow funds to be transferred to a shady Japanese “business.” She immediately discovered that you can’t buy food with bitcoins unless you’re willing to buy questionable preserves from strangers or stock up on end-of-the-world survivalist rations. Someone eventually pointed her to a service which acts as a middleman, ordering things from local restaurants and then delivering them, adding a service fee for the convenience. For some reason, they accept bitcoins. She immediately handed over an entire bitcoin, giving them around $130.00 at the time for orders yet to be made.

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Bitcoin24 circles the drain

Buttcoin

Bitcoin24 circles the drain

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In case you haven’t heard the news, German Polish buttcoin exchange Bitcoin24 is no longer operating, due to “The Polish authority” closing their bank account in Poland.

BTC24Before we proceed, let’s take a moment to look at Bitcoin24’s long and untarnished history. Founded in May of 2012, Bitcoin24 was allegedly the largest buttcoin exchange in Europe, with only the mighty Mt. Gox surpassing it in terms of volume and profit. Apparently they also surpass the Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange in terms of utter incompetence and hilarity. Recently, people found the admins asking questions on StackOverflow about how MySQL works and how to round numbers when working with financial data.

This was followed by the site’s trading engine shitting the bed and started to give people more money or bitcoins than they deserved, like a faulty ATM spitting torrents of cash into the street. It then broke down even further, with trades randomly appearing and disappearing before the site’s functionality went down entirely.

A few days ago, the site made the above announcement, in even more broken English. Today, we find this PDF, outlining the following (thanks to SA forums goon Greyhawk for the translation):

Oh, boy. So first thing this is a very, very bad translation from Polish into German. Very bad. Half of it doesn’t even make sense.

But the gist of it is:
– The German prosecution knows everything there is to know about bitcoin-24 right from when they began operating. And I do mean everything. Current bank accounts, old bank accounts. Who the money was coming from, who it was going to. Everything. In total over 500000 Euro were transferred via these accounts mostly from Germany towards Poland, Romania and Bulgaria
– German prosecution sees bitcoin-24 as a massive money laundering operation and are proceeding against the owner
– German prosecution has evidence that the owner is involved in phishing attacks and is proceeding against him about that too. Apparently the owner was retarded enough to send the “pure profit” of those attacks to the polish bitcoin24 bank account.

Furthermore, we find that his home was raided and he is no longer free.

jail

Meanwhile, MtGOX is suffering from yet another “DDoS” and having a slew of issues with banks and Bitfloor is gone again. Just another day in the life of the currency of the future!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bitcoin

Buttcoin

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bitcoin

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For anyone who has been under a rock or in a cabin in Canada or something for the past thirty-six hours, the price of Bitcoins has crumbled. After hitting a high of 266 filthy fiat dollars per tulip bulb, the price crumpled as thousands of people stepped back and realized they’d made a terrible mistake. The resulting selloff once more devastated the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange‘s servers, pushing the lag up to over an hour, allowing us to watch the price topple down the charts like distant starlight reaching the Earth for the first time in millennia. It finally settled at a low of $105 before jumping back up to $200, then back down, then up, then down, up and down like a yo-yo. Relatively smarter people and panic sellers got out, while the true believers rode it all the way down, despite their losses.

KongBitBomb

GIF credit @bakedinapie

MtGOX finally admitted that they were not being DDoSed, instead announcing that they are merely incompetent and unprepared for actual web and exchange traffic. They then pulled the brakes and halted all trading entirely to let the market “cool down” following the price crashing.

goxbrakesMeanwhile, trading continued at smaller exchanges, with the prices falling well below $100 as wary “investors” jump ship. Many of them have experienced their own issues from the flood of traffic, with Bitfloor crying wolf DDoS.

What drove this ridiculously huge bubble? If you ask the average bitcoin chump, he’ll tell you that the citizens of Cyprus are buying up huge amounts of bitcoins to hide from their government’s “theft” as the country tries desperately to save its flailing economy. Amazing bitcoin ATMs and fantastic new bitcoin services are springing up all over the country, as well as everywhere else in Europe. None of this is true, however. Cyprus is involved, but not in the way that everyone is trumpeting. Bitcoiners saw the crisis in Cyprus and attempted to pitch their flaky “currency” to Cypriots as a way to escape government controls, hype built up around this, media attention built up around the hype, and then this all began feeding back on itself until yesterday’s reality check.

7JOxqoA

Today, prominent posts in the bitcoin subreddit included links to suicide helplines, angry screeds about MtGOX, people calling each other out for giving bad financial advice, and the occasional smuglord showing off that he’s still hoarding his buttcoins. The atmosphere there is rather deflated. Bitcointalk just wants MtGOX’s blood.

cb

Who’s left holding the bag this time? Everybody who was gambling on the price going up uP UP forever, all the true believers who’ve been led astray by the likes of Rickard Falkvinge, Max Keiser, and Alex Jones, foolish investors who read about this newfangled “bitcoin” thing in shitty financial rags, and the Winklevoss twins (notable for such aptly named websites as “Hukkster” and “

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