There was a accidental but successful double spend during the recent hard fork (sorry, can't remember reference but it's on this forum).

I found these two sister sites through reddit. Escrow is handled very easily for you. http://www.bitescrow.org/  http://www.bit2factor.org/  Here is the thread on reddit introducing them. They seem very well done.

I have neither tried nor studied them. Presumably they run in browser javascript. If only BFL would accept this for payment for a jalapeño!

During our meeting I mentioned deniably encrypted filesystems with multiple hidden volumes and complicated block analysis thwarting: rubberhosefs and phonebookfs. I can't find a link to phonebookfs anymore, though I do have the source code somewhere. I remember I tried compiling and using them as an academic exercise without success.

Rubberhose filesystem

More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption

edit: found it: phonebookfs

also, Bruce Schneier says a bit about rubberhosefs

another edit: forgot to say, these systems are obsolete, unmaintained and probably insecure.

Hey, I just realised this is the first time I've paid for dinner, or any food, with bitcoins! Thanks to all, great meeting. I'm gonna think some more about the ideas we spoke about. http://blockchain.info/tx/a1c25ceceee7b4eaf47bc3395d7f08024f8c3423d96975175ad65a48596927dd

Curious about that blazr link. Nothing illicit changed hands so it's a bit bizarre that the police would manage to get a warrant. I expect you need a warrant to intercept post too. I wonder would it be clever to pre-print a receipt in two copies before meeting someone, with a declaration along the lines of "The bitcoins being exchanged for €XXX at exchange rate €YYY/BTC to be sent to address 1ADDRESS, will not be utilised for any illicit activity and the buyer indemnifies the seller of any responsibility thereof." Then ask the buyer for ID which you photograph and fill in on the receipt before accepting any money, both parties sign and take a copy. At least then you have a written record to show a judge, just in case.

edit: I wonder will blazr be getting letters from the revenue authorities. €500 in cash is probably enough to raise a flag. Actually, anybody using this forum, or localbitcoins or similar, and has left a meatspace trail, has probably been flagged by now.

I owe some of ye some coins - 0.03 for Mahkul and notooccupanther and 0.06 for simplydt. Can ye post them here or in PM?

Too much noise at the Bull & Castle. We've moved to the Lord Edward pub across the road.

We're upstairs at the Bull & Castle right now, at the far end of the bar, in a dark, gloomy corner as far from the big screens as you can get really. Look for the three guys that look like bitcoin heads.

I'm still on for the meeting. 4pm Saturday at the Bull & Castle, Lord Edward St. Seems there'll be 8 or 9 of us. See ye there. Remember - bring a PGP key for signing if you like and maybe a couple of paper wallets with a bitcent preloaded (~€1), for tips.

OP, you didn't answer my question. Tor registrations are not permitted on bitcointalk, so your registration IP might reveal something about you. Or did you use an anonymous VPN like molecular did at the time?

Howdy, I've created another graph showing the recent fiasco.

In the new graph you can see that there was a steady exponential growth for two months from mid-january to mid-march.

Then cyprus went beserk, leading to an immediate and crazy exponential period with a doubling every 11.5 days! To make it clear, this doubling was even faster than the June 2011 bubble. See the linked post for the image showing that.

So, I can offer a hypothesis. When the Cyprus crisis went public, many people thought "Ahh, Cypriots are going to be buying bitcoins, ahhhh, all of Europe will want to be buying bitcoins, ahhhh, the whole world will want to buy bitcoins."

So speculators saw a chance and pushed the price way way up.

I happened to read an article a while ago which stated something like Cypriots, and the whole world, never did go crazy buying bitcoins after all(can't remember where). So this always was (as many many people predicted) just a speculative bubble. I guess MtGox lag and possible DDOS didn't help.

The good news is that we've more-or-less returned to a longer term trend. In fact, if the Cyprus crisis and subsequent bubble hadn't happened, but the Jan-Mar trend had continued, we'd be right where we are now.

For reference, you can also see the long term trend which has been holding since roughly Jan 2011.

I have only an idea how webbugs work, but it seems everybody says OP is using tor, including theymos.  However, I thought registration on this forum through tor was not permitted, so theymos should have OP's real IP address from that - though IIRC, molecular used a VPN-through-tor to register for his "findmeifyoucan" thread - can you confirm molecular?  Theymos, does your post refer also to OP's registration IP?  If not, then: OP, are you willing to let theymos reveal your registration IP?

I can't help with the technical aspects of this hunt, even though I'd love to be more capable of that.  Would it be possible to trawl through every post made on this forum and gather timing statistics for each member?  Assuming OP is still posting under his real username, then there might be a strong correlation with this anonymous id though it would probably take a while longer, and plenty more posts, to weed out the false positives. For the prize of 2.5BTC you could afford to make over 100 trials though (though it's not clear if the donation should be 0.02BTC or 0.005BTC).

Here's some linguistic analysis, which is all I can really offer:

This might suggest American English, though -ize is common in the "Queen's English" lands now. OP also has another post with "synchronize".

This suggests colloquial English. Most foreigners would say "I need..." because they are taught that English requires that the subject be explicitly specified (unlike, e.g., Spanish, Italian where the verb specifies the subject, or Japanese where I understand the subject is usually implied). So either OP didn't know that (which seems unlikely given the quality of his English) or he is familiar enough with English to know that, casually speaking, it's not always necessary, eg: "Went swimming yesterday, bumped into a fish so I ate it up" - it's clear I am the subject.

Whereas this suggests non-English language origin. OP should say "... in the bitcoin community"

More stuff suggests non-English mother tongue.  OP should say "definitely gone" or "definitively gone" or "gone for certain" instead of "for sure".  This is not a hard and fast rule, though.  Just in my personal experience, lots of non-native English speakers say "for sure" more than you might otherwise expect.

This is not a trivial linguistic construction, but for all I can see there are no errors.

So, all I can offer, is the following. OP's first post was asking to be whitelisted to get out of the newbie jail https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg1621951#msg1621951.  Then he replies to a bunch of newbie questions with what seems to be very good English. Then he starts asking about escrow and penetration testers and we see a couple of mistakes creeping in, though a couple of posts still come through perfectly well. Then there are a couple more replies to newbie questions only now there are some errors:


So, all-in-all, OP seems to be a non-native English speaker but with very good English. Or he is deliberately introducing errors. Or... maybe... there might be more than one person writing. Last possibility, OP says he is following most of the advice from molecular's findmeifyoucan thread - my advice in that thread was to use an automatic translator (e.g. google) to translate everything he is writing.  Anyone here work at google and willing to search the translate history for a match, assuming the history is kept?    (that's just a joke, doing that would probably get you fired!)

Sorry if this post seems a bit confused.  I'm pulling info in from a bunch of different tabs at once.

edit: hmm, rereading this again after I posted yesterday - a substantial part of OP's posts are better than any automatic translation. Scratch that theory.

I have given paper wallets to a few friends and family, with an expiry date, and I kept a copy of the private key. I've told them that if the bitcoins are still there at the expiry date, I'll take them back. At the current rate, it will a couple of hundred dollars back in my pocket in a few months, assuming things don't crash.

Bull & Castle seems ok to me. Only doubt: if we want to talk then it's no good if there'll be constant loud music - that's why I suggested a hotel lounge. But if this place fits the bill, then I'm game.

We have:
dbulinbrian
mahkul
nereer
fergalish

Neither bowen151 nor blazr have replied again. I'd PM again, but I already told them about this thread, so I'd prefer not to spam.

Hey - let's turn it into a PGP signing meeting, so bring your key fingerprint, and, I'd say, bring a couple of paper wallets each with a couple of euros - we can use them for tipping the bar staff.

So, excepting indications to the contrary, the date is set for April 27th at the Bull & Castle, Lord Edward Street.  There are only 4 definites, so I'd say to meet there at about 4pm.

Get your brains working about how to increase bitcoin adoption in Ireland!

I would add that the bitcoin foundation should reduce its membership fees too. They were introduced when bitcoin was, what, maybe $7, meaning membership was about $18 per year, or $180 lifetime. Now it's $180 per year or $1800 lifetime (gasp!).

Ok. Unless someone else can come up with a reason against, I herewith call the meeting for the 27th afternoon in Dublin. Any suggestions for the location? I haven't lived in Dublin for 20 years, so I don't know what hotel might have a decent lounge and a good but reasonably priced restaurant.

If there are enough of us (say, more than 5), I'd say to meet for lunch, maybe tea & sandwiches from the bar, and if anyone's has anything particular to say we could rig up a timetable with informal seminars delivered from a laptop. More likely, if there only 3-5 of us, then we'll meet around 4pm and just chat.

Are there any miners operating in Ireland?

I've had a couple of replies. One from Derry, one from somewhere, and I'm in Cork. The most logical place to hold it would be Dublin - it's the de facto centre of the island's transport web.

How about the last weekend in April? We could meet in some city centre location for lunch on Sat. 27th, then chat all afternoon, and finish off with dinner and say goodbye. And then finish off for real with a pint or two.

Would we want something so formal as a meeting room, maybe with a projector, or will it be enough to occupy the corner of a public house, or maybe a hotel lounge? I'd go for the hotel lounge.

So far we have:
bowen151
blazr
mahkul
dublinbrian
fergalish

Any additions?

I've just PMd everyone who has posted in this thread, fortunately there aren't many. Let's see who responds.

Damn... that easy, huh. Just click on "image". Thx.

I would, but I don't know how... I'm sure it's really easy. Can anyone else provide please?

I updated the graph with another interesting curve. Bitcoin first hit the news in 2011 with a couple of slashdot and wired posts. So if we take from there to today, and fit an exponential, we get a doubling every 150 days or so.  So with this hindsight it's clear to see that the June'11 bubble was truly a bubble. Growth since then has been intermittent but constant over the long term. I'm not one to speculate, but the graph suggests bitcoins bought today will be worth 4 times as much in 12 months.

http://imgur.com/Hs6zMoi

@timo: I wouldn't say exponential growth is necessarily bad, but it is certainly always unsustainable. Perhaps that's what the bitcoin critics refer to.