1181
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: EFF donations and the Bitcoin Faucet
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on: August 09, 2011, 12:35:32 PM
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The plan is the same as before: EFF coins will be redistributed via the Bitcoin Faucet.
Last week the folks at the EFF said they'd be sending the coins to a secure wallet I created for that purpose "tomorrow." I asked that they send them to address: 1vc3ZU4ae2cF6ZxqE44j5Ak3wfsZqybtb
I'll let you know what happens; they never told me where the coins are being held, it is possible they got caught in the mybitcoin disaster.
I'll keep that wallet secure and offline except to periodically top-up the Faucet's balance.
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1182
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Vibanko.com - FREE New Wallet Service by Bitcoin Consultancy
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on: August 09, 2011, 12:12:22 PM
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Getting insurance for bitcoin holdings is practically impossible, mostly due to the potential for massive swings in value.
So factor out the swings in value by insuring in a more stable currency. Obtaining insurance for "up to £X worth of bitcoins per account" seems like it aught to be possible. If X is a small number, then that's a strong indication that people shouldn't be using Vibanko for secure storage of coins. If you can't find an insurance company that will cheaply sell you (say) £1,000 of coverage for (say) 10,000 accounts then that is an indication that maybe you're riskier than you think. Can you afford to self-insure, and put up a £10,000,000 bond to cover potential losses? Or work backwards: how large a bond can you afford to put up? Divide that by the expected number of users and that's a good indication of how much wealth users should trust you with.
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1183
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Vibanko.com - FREE New Wallet Service by Bitcoin Consultancy
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on: August 08, 2011, 09:56:40 PM
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Potential questions for the FAQ; these are all questions I wish I had insisted on getting answered before trusting MyBitcoin with some of my coins:
Are the bitcoins on deposit bonded or insured against theft or loss?
Are the bitcoins on deposit backed up off-site? How often?
How many people have access to the wallet? How do you know you can trust them, or how are they audited?
What happens if you decide Vibanko is not a viable business and has to be shut down?
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1184
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Economy / Economics / Re: Bubble and crashes
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on: August 08, 2011, 09:06:25 PM
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As Bitcoiner had pointed out, bubbles must be in relation to another asset. Bitcoin experiencing a "bubble" in this case seems to be tied more to global instability than the Bitcoin system itself. Rather than a bubble, it looks like a deflationary escape from other assets (not always the same ones) mirrored by a rise in Bitcoin.
I think the rise from less than $1 per bitcoin to over $30 per bitcoin was purely a speculative bubble, fueled by all the press/publicity. Even in the absence of global financial uneasiness I think a bubble was inevitable; maybe a lot of the interest in Bitcoin is/was driven by people looking for a deflationary escape, but I doubt it. Measure bitcoin prices in milligrams of gold (the time-tested deflationary escape) and you'll still see a big bubble and pop over the last few months. I think it will be years (if we're lucky) before a significant number of investors look at Bitcoin as a deflationary escape from other assets. What's your prediction for the number of bitcoin bubbles over the next three years? (measured against whatever basket of currencies or assets you like) I based my projections on "feels about right to me."
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1185
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Economy / Economics / Re: Bubble and crashes
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on: August 08, 2011, 02:58:55 PM
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Bitcoin will get mentioned someplace with lots of readers, a bunch of those readers will like the idea and try to buy Bitcoins, their price will rise which will draw even more people to "invest", which will drive the price up even more... until people decide that the price isn't going to rise any more and everybody rushes to sell before the price drops. I predict there will be between one and five Bitcoin bubbles (price will double or more and then crash back down below the starting price) in the next four years .
I'm resurrecting this old thread because I like to reality-check my predictions. Number of bubbles so far: one. (the $0.008 to $0.014 price rise turned out not to be a bubble; the recent $10 to $30 back down under $10 was definitely a bubble) Zero to one bubbles and crashes per year for the next three years still seems about right.
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1187
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Illegal content in the blockchain
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on: August 08, 2011, 01:03:02 AM
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RE: protecting an innocent person: any lawyers here?
I have trouble believing that you could get into legal trouble for having illegal incidental data from legitimate activities on your computer. If you can, then we're all in trouble, because it is very easy to put illegal data in your web browser's cache (JPEG and other image file formats let you store arbitrary, not-normally-shown metadata, for example). I don't think it would be hard to convince a jury that the block-chain is like your web browser's cache-- full of lots of incidental stuff that is needed for the system to work, but doesn't have anything to do with you. Now if you happen to have one of the private keys involved in the illegal transactions, THEN you should go directly to jail....
Adding code to "shun" certain spend-able transactions wouldn't be hard, although I think that's a bad idea for the same reason it is a bad idea to respond to trolls on forums-- you'd just encourage the bad guys by drawing attention to their misbehavior.
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1189
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: BitCoin Deanonymization
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on: August 07, 2011, 03:30:04 PM
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Alternative algorithms for accepting deep block-chain re-orgs sound like a research project to me. Before changing something that critical I would like to see simulations of how different re-org policies behave under different attack scenarios, and non-attack "what if there is a bug that causes an inadvertent block chain split" scenarios.
And I'd like to see a whitepaper that lays out the issues and summarizes simulation results. And lots of extra credit if it gets peer-reviewed and published in one of the IEEE or ACM journals.
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1191
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: DragonFly BSD patches for bitcoind
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on: August 07, 2011, 03:08:34 PM
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Two pull requests seem appropriate: one for the generic issues (talk with TheBlueMatt about the upnp #define, I believe it is working as designed), and one for DragonFly-specific stuff.
Frankly, DragonFlyBSD-specific stuff is unlikely to get pulled; there just aren't enough DragonFly-BSD systems to justify the work of maintaining support for it (according to bsdstats.org it isn't a very popular BSD variant).
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1192
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Would you give my BitDollars a chance?
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on: August 07, 2011, 03:19:01 AM
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No.
A better question might be: what would make me trust something like your BitDollars?
If you were bonded or insured for all of the bitcoins that you held, by a bank or insurance company or people I trusted (and were audited by that bank or insurance company or people to see how many bitcoins you were holding on behalf of other people), that might get me to trust you with real bitcoins.
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1195
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: So since no Bitcoin service can be trusted anymore ...
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on: August 02, 2011, 11:51:14 PM
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There's nothing keeping anything or anyone honest. There's no accountability
People don't want government involvement yet how is anyone/anything held accountable? Vigilante justice?
Private insurance with reliable, reputable insurance companies. Private bonds deposited into reliable, reputable financial institutions. All of which cost money, which was a problem a year ago when nobody really knew much of anything about bitcoin. We need legal contracts with businesses that are in a legal jurisdictions where the contracts can be enforced in court. I don't think we'll get a non-governmental legal system in my lifetime, so I'm personally happy to rely on the imperfect government courts we've got today.
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1196
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: A Tribute to Len "rabbi" Sassama
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on: August 02, 2011, 05:36:54 AM
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blk0001.dat stores all of the transaction data for the block chain.
So to "inject" data into it you transmit valid transactions that are then included in blocks. Dan crafted transactions that contain the tribute message.
I think it is a neat hack. ("hack" in the sense of "clever, non-obvious way to use technology") I wonder how much it cost in transaction fees, or if he managed to do it entirely with free transactions...
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1198
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: JSON-RPC error code format?
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on: July 31, 2011, 12:57:46 PM
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I followed the JSON-RPC-2.0 spec for errors, as described here: http://groups.google.com/group/json-rpc/web/json-rpc-2-0?pli=1(see section 5.1) ... with several bitcoin-specific additional error codes that I'd have to look at the source code to remember. I thought I'd documented the additional bitcoin error codes, but maybe that information got lost in the wiki move that happened last year or maybe I'm mis-remembering. Quick grep through rpc.cpp gives: (-10, "Bitcoin is downloading blocks..."); (-11, "Invalid account name"); (-12, "Error: Keypool ran out, please call keypoolrefill first"); (-12, "Error: Keypool ran out, please call topupkeypool first"); (-13, "Error: Please enter the wallet passphrase with walletpassphrase first."); (-14, "Error: The wallet passphrase entered was incorrect."); (-15, "Error: running with an encrypted wallet, but encryptwallet was called."); (-15, "Error: running with an unencrypted wallet, but walletlock was called."); (-15, "Error: running with an unencrypted wallet, but walletpassphrase was called."); (-15, "Error: running with an unencrypted wallet, but walletpassphrasechange was called."); (-16, "Error: Failed to encrypt the wallet."); (-17, "Error: Wallet is already unlocked."); (-2, string("Safe mode: ") + strWarning); (-3, "Invalid amount"); (-32600, "Method must be a string"); (-32600, "Missing method"); (-32600, "Params must be an array"); (-32601, "Method not found"); (-32700, "Parse error"); (-4, "Error refreshing keypool."); (-4, "Transaction commit failed"); (-4, "Transaction creation failed"); (-5, "Invalid bitcoin address"); (-5, "Invalid or non-wallet transaction id"); (-5, string("Invalid bitcoin address:")+s.name_); (-6, "Account has insufficient funds"); (-6, "Insufficient funds"); (-7, "Out of memory"); (-8, "Invalid parameter"); (-8, string("Invalid parameter, duplicated address: ")+s.name_); (-9, "Bitcoin is not connected!");
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1199
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Extending the Alert messages in the protocol
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on: July 25, 2011, 12:41:25 AM
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Here's a scheme that would work:
1. Exchange creates a special bitcoin keypair for each exchange rate it wants to publish. E.g. maybe there is a 1mtgxbtcusd9873919fp876... address for mtgox btc/usd
2. Exchange funds that address with a bunch of bitcoins.
3. Every 10 minutes the exchange performs a send-to-self transaction FROM that address TO that address with the number of bitcoins that correspond to the current exchange rate.
Voila, exchange rate is broadcast to anybody who cares to listen. You know it is the exchange, because the exchange is the only entity that can spend bitcoins from the special exchange address.
You have to trust the exchange not to broadcast a bogus price...
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1200
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Bitcoin / Alternative clients / Re: Request for Standardization
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on: July 25, 2011, 12:32:28 AM
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I've wanted a libbitcoin since... well, since I first started browsing the bitcoin source code.
The consensus of the core bitcoin development team is to move towards a libbitcoin in small-ish, incremental steps, NOT to move to a full-blown API in one fell swoop.
The Bitcoin Consultancy folks disagree with that approach, and are moving ahead with a libbitcoin of their own that it rewritten from scratch, and I suspect there will be at least two or three other alternative implementations rewritten from scratch popping up over the next year or so. Which is why I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and working on cross-implementation testing.
(I'm supposed to be on vacation here in Australia, but I'll try to find some time to upload what I've done so far to github).
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