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http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-went-to-sleep-friday-as-a-rich-man-i-woke-up-a-poor-man-20130328-2gxab.html


'I went to sleep Friday as a rich man. I woke up a poor man'

"Very bad, very, very bad," says 65-year-old John Demetriou, rubbing tears from his lined face with thick fingers. "I lost all my money."

John now lives in the picturesque fishing village of Liopetri on Cyprus' south coast. But for 35 years he lived at Bondi Junction and worked days, nights and weekends in Sydney markets selling jewellery and imitation jewellery.

He had left Cyprus in the early 1970s at the height of its war with Turkey, taking his wife and young children to safety in Australia. He built a life from nothing and, gradually, a substantial nest egg. He retired to Cyprus in 2007 with about $1 million, his life savings.

He planned to spend it on his grandchildren - some of whom live in Cyprus - putting them through university and setting them up. There would be medical bills; he has a heart condition. The interest was paying for a comfortable retirement, and trips back to Australia. He also toyed with the idea of buying a boat.
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He wanted to leave any big purchases a few years, to be sure this was where he would spend his retirement. There was no hurry. But now it is all gone.

"If I made the decision to stay, I was going to build a house," John says. "Unfortunately I didn't make the decision yet.

"I went to sleep Friday as a rich man. I woke up a poor man."

His money was all in the Laiki "Popular" Bank which was the main casualty of Cyprus' bailout package set by the European Union. Laiki is to be dismantled. Savings of less than €100,000 are to move to the Bank of Cyprus. Anything more than that will almost certainly be wiped out as the bank is wound down, its remaining assets taken by the bank's creditors.

Last week he heard a rumour that the bank was in trouble and went into Aiya Napa to ask his bank manager - a friend - if he should move his life savings.

"There's no problem, nothing to worry about," he was told.

Not so. "I go to bed and I can't sleep. I walk around, I have a coffee. I am thinking about my family."

John's tears flow. As he chokes up, his son George, who moved to Cyprus in 1990, explains.

"The whole family, we used to work at the markets. I would work at the markets on the weekend to help my parents while my mates were off having fun. Honest work in honest jobs. Now all that hard work is paying

the debts of other people and the government. It's disgusting, to be honest."

George says he can start again - if things get worse he and his family might move back to Australia.

"But not my dad. He can't go back to Australia. He is not allowed to fly because of his heart, and anyway where would he live? He has no house. He will have €100,000 left to live off. Soon he's not going to have a cent to his name."

John has a thin hope. His money was sitting in the bank in Australian dollars instead of euros, so he wonders if it would be exempt from the bank's collapse. But the bank's doors are closed, so he doesn't even know to whom he should put that argument.

"For the moment I am 'sitting on charcoal', as they say," waiting to see if he gets burnt.

"It's not Russian money, it's not black money. It's my money."

There are almost 5000 Cypriot-Australians on the island. Most are - or were - self-sufficient veterans of the 1950s engineering boom or the 1974 war who came back to retire or to be with family (John is looking after his 90-year-old mother).

This week Britain stopped paying pensions into Cypriot accounts, advising expatriates to open a British bank account instead.

Australia's high commission in Nicosia has already fielded inquiries from dual nationals seeking advice on their pensions. They were told to set up different payment arrangements, a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.

"We expect the main impact will be for Australians who have invested large sums in Laiki Bank or the Bank of Cyprus," she said. "There is no need for special measures at this stage."

Quote from: astor on March 29, 2013, 02:18 pm

ladyjane, the only security threat is if your private key is compromised, the adversary could read the messages you sent to others.

This is not correct. To read the messages you have SENT encrypted to others (using their public key), you need the receivers private key. With your private key, you can only decrypt the messages which have been encrypted with your public key, which will be the messages you receive, not the ones you sent.

Yeah, but we're talking about the case where you also encrypt messages sent to others with your own public key. In that case you can decrypt with them your private key.

You cannot encrypt you message to yourself 'as well' (you can make a copy of your message, encrypt it with your own key, and save it for later if you don't want to lose it). You can only encrypt it using ONE public key (the one on the vendors page usually)

And that's completely wrong. You can add yourself as a recipient, in which case the message will also be encrypted with your public key. You can also add as many recipients as you want to encrypt a message, at least with the reference gpg client you can. Some shitty PGP program you're using might not have that functionality.


Seriously, where are these people coming from? Is this an LE disinformation campaign?

Bitcopia will buy your coins. I think you can get direct bank deposits for Wells Fargo and Bank of America accounts, or you can get cash in mail.

Nice try, FBI.

The rise seems to fast for me and I wonder if a few are holding onto a large majority of the bitcoins and once they release them for sale the price will drop at a fast rate.

You don't have to wonder. Adi Shamir, the S in RSA, analyzed the block chain up to block 181,000 and determined that 78% of the coins are not in circulation. They are either being horded by miners and early adopters, or they are lost. Back in the days when mining coins was easy with desktop CPUs, people would routinely delete wallets with thousands of coins, because they weren't worth anything. Theoretically, 10 million bitcoins exist, because that's how many have been awarded, but realistically, from what I've heard people say about the early days, half of them could be lost until we get the technology to brute force SHA-256.

Among the existing coins, miners are holding onto a large chunk. Will they sell at $100? Probably not. Why should they? They've been mining since bitcoins were 1 cent, so why didn't they sell at $10? That's a 1000 fold pay off. What difference does $100 make? That's just another 10 fold. I think a lot of those people are true believers in bitcoin. They envision a world where bitcoin becomes a standard currency and they can use it without cash out fees and taxes.  Oh yeah, taxes and regulations, that's the other thing holding them back. You can't cash out millions of dollars worth of coins without getting noticed, and you stand to lose a big chunk of that in taxes.

So I don't predict a huge sell off by bitcoin horders. Not at $100 or even $1000. The more it's worth, the more incentive they have to hold their coins until they are an established currency, and then they will circulate them within the burgeoning bitcoin economy. As long coins aren't being traded for dollars, they won't lose value.

It took 3 hours to "crash" and 30 minutes to come back up. Don't call anything a crash unless it stays that way for at least a month.

BTW, your hair will fall out if you try to follow every twist and turn in BTC price like this.

Only if it stays down. BTW, it dropped from $48 to $33 a few weeks ago and came back up. It would have to drop from $92 to $62 to be as big of a crash percentage wise.

I don't understand what the fascination with voice communication is.

Anonymous sex chat, of course.

Oh yeah, baby, over.
Roger, that feels so good, over.
Who the fuck is Roger, are you cheating on me, over?
I didn't mean it like that baby, over.
Fuck you Irene, over and out.