Let's say that instead of bitcoin it would be feathers or rocks.
Would terrorists use rocks for their own interests? Of course.
Gun (or bomb) dealers don't care what it is, they want to deal and get paid.
Doesn't matter what currency is used.

Do you really think there is any type of transaction that terrorists or "bad guys" in general have not used yet?
You can be sure that they have and are having still. Instead of dealing with banks or carrying big suitcases ful of money it's easier to just go with a smartphone and confirm a simple transaction.

Agreed Daniel91, there are several wars going on at any time somewhere on the planet.
Even though, sometimes I think they might be linked together.
And yes, I'm sure that the majority of them are about money.

How did you calculate that 21 BTC is necessary?
And what, in your opinion, is supposed to happen, in order to be rich with 21 BTC?
Because 21 BTC is more or less 21k $ - so not really that much to be honest - with that money you'd only get an average car.

Nothing about the fees in your video - interesting.
I understand that it's a paid video, but still - you should be open and honest about everything.
And as usual - it requires ID - of course they are trying to control and track users.
No ATM's for me, thank you.

The US is always looking for a war. Going into countries without the right to do so (only because they're the US Army) and doing what they want and making up rules.
I read somewhere that last year the US spent for war something like around 140 trillion dollars, when world hunger could be ended with a su around 90 trillion.
War is the best business that the US is having, so of course that they are trying all strategies possible to make it happen.

Of course governments feel threatened.
Even though it's obvious that fiat money are also needed.
But why not ban bitcoin. I'm sure that they are doing everything they can to find out ways to control or stop bitcoin one way or another.

First of all you can be sure that this is because some kind of a very clear reason.
Second - you don't know that Facebook and Big Brother were not working together from the start. Just because Zuckerberg was against giving access to their data (publicly), does not mean that it's actually true.
Last of all, Facebook is a socializing website, what's the problem if people are using fake names? They're called nicknames and were used since the beginning of the internet. Is Zuckerberg on some kind of power trip? Or he's out of the whole deal and people there are doing whatever they want?

If you get money from your wallet into your bank account it's clearly visible. The account is in your name.
And to the guy that said that you want to do that only because you're planning something  illegal, I must disagree. It's bad enough that we are made to pay all sorts of stupid taxes, big brother doesn't need to know what you're doing with your own money. Because that's what the government wants - to know everything, in order to control us. They want to tax your hard earned bitcoins. So why should anyone not want to hide their money? The best reason - not to feed the greedy piglet that is the government and the IRS.

Yeah, true, they are less active. On the other hand their hand-eye coordination is better. They learn faster, better, more.
Now we have 11 year old programmers. Children that speak many languages. Non English kids that know proficient English before they go to school. In a way it's about how you look at things. Technology is not bad. It's how you use it. People should be more responsible for their own actions and not blame everything else for their failures.

Seeing as how our friend - the government, tries to control even bitcoin (no escape from big brother's claws), face-to-face meetings would be best. Lately all exchange sites are required to get your photo ID. Wasn't the idea behind bitcoin exactly that? To be anonymous?

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just use 10 sided dice? This way you can skip some conversions?

or even more crazy, just take $10 in pennies, shake them in a bucket, dump them out and line them up. Not sure how many bits you would need, so I just guessed $10 would be enough (1000 pennies).

So, there would be a way to create a private key without doing any math and just entering 1's and 0's for heads and tails.

Now, this is what we need:
Starting with a bucket of dumped out spread out pennies (so none are overlapping), take a picture, have some software to recognize heads and tails, and convert the result to binary. Though perhaps just looking a the bits in an sha of an image from a lava lamp would be sufficient.

I just read the original article:

http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto.html

and it seems to fit nicely, but everything mentioned is very circumstantial. Also, I am sure if anything didn't fit with the narrative it was dropped from the story.

The video also doesn't seem to be much validation either. "I never communicated with bitcoins." That would be a very weird way for anyone on the project to talk about it working on it.

Nothing is either proved or disproved, and good luck reading anything useful into his body language.

In the end, yeah, there is a darn good chance is he is the founder, but it is very inconclusive.

If I could pick someone to be the founder of bitcoin, this guy would be it. He is a humble sweet old guy with a penchant for collecting model trains and his dad was a Buddhist priest. So many people involved in bitcoin are pricks, so for the good of the currency, I would be happy if it turns out that this is the guy in question and not someone else.

I say someone should talk to him, and even if he isn't the real Satoshi, we ask him to take the credit for it, and we will adopt him as the founder. In exchange we can all chip in and buy him whatever supplies he needs to keep working on his model railroad.

As far as properly denying anything, the only way I could see it happening is if Dorian was on a live video feed that couldn't be faked, and the real Satoshi signed something time dependent and unpredictable such as the current value of the S & P 500 at the same time. I would call this the Superman Defense as Superman and Clark Kent could never be seen at the same time. This would of course require some collaboration between Dorian and Satoshi, and could only be faked if Satoshi let someone else use his private key (which would give that person the power to pretend to be Satoshi).

Alternatively Satoshi could publicize his private key thus making it impossible for any claim to be Satoshi to be verifiable.



Now that is a scary thought. He is going to need some serious protection now, or for safety sake, if he is Satoshi, he might want to destroy those bitcoins in a public way. For people that think that is crazy talk, countries have been invaded to seize less money. He now has a billion dollar price tag on his head to extract the information out of it.

Ok, this make so much more sense. Thank you DaT.

So if I set up a trading system, and
* someone makes a withdraw
* I have a log of the transaction id A of that withdraw
* They make another duplicate transaction B which has a different transaction id of A
* I see that A didn't make it into the blockchain (though untracked transaction B did make it in)
* Upon the user's request I make another transaction C to remedy that A failed.
* Rinse and repeat.

Wow, that is a problem. I now have more sympathy for gox and others as this could easily happen, though they should have had some basic human powered fail-safes to prevent a run-away situation.

So as a provider, what information should I keep as the unique identifier for the transaction that would prevent this issue. I guess it would be something easily searchable in the blockchain.

Ok, now I finally grasped the attack I think on gox.

In my own wallet(s)
Transaction A is created
Transaction B is created Based on A.
Transaction C based on B is sent to Gox
  ... gox acts idiotically and recognizes C before B is finalized
  Bitcoins bumped up in my gox account
I invalidate B so the bitcoins are still in my wallet
I withdraw bitcoins from gox and it says ok as its database of my account shows bitcoins it never really got.
I have just doubled my money

Rinse and repeat until gox notices the problem.

Sounds like gox would be empty in short order.

So then they wise up and shut the door (or they just see no money in their wallet). If they didn't lose most of their bitcoins in the process then they could just make a minor tweak to their process and only recognize confirmed transactions. Unfortunately I think they have been drained dry and are just looking for a way to open the bank with no money in the vault and prevent a run. They need to get some reserve of bitcoins back in their vaults to make payouts so people can feel calm and safe, and I suspect their bluster about waiting till bitcoin fixes itself is a delaying tactic.

Or if you want to be optimistic, gox could have kept 90% of their funds in a cold wallet and all is safe. They could easily verify such things to the public though and their lack of transparency is discouraging. A simple, "look guys, don't sweat it, here is one of our many addresses in cold storage with $1M in bitcoin and this message was signed from its private key. Chill out, and we will have things flowing smoothly in a jiffy."

Unfortunately, I am a pessimist, and this is the second time that gox has f-ed up on a massive scale. I think this will lead to a level of disappointment that wil make mybitcoin look like a small pickpocketing.

I don't know if I would call the attackers thieves. By the looks of things they aren't making off with bitcoins, they are just invalidating transactions that others are making, and thus making the db's of exchanges inconsistent with the actual bitcoins they possess. They are more like griefers.

The piece of the puzzle I don't understand is how this is a problem for exchanges. Since the very start of bitcoin it was considered that 6 confirmations were required before a transaction was considered valid for any serious financial situation. This probably could drop down to 1 or two conformations since the network is pretty robust now, but considering 0 confirmations as being worth anything? Heck, you wouldn't even do that for an e-commerce site.

My basic conceptual model of how you build any online service using bitcoins as a unit of account is you have a bitcoin address for a user, and you get bitcoins received at that address with 1 confirmation and use that to base the user's balance off of. In your db you then record transfers to and from that user and add and subtract accordingly through a transaction log. So the balance is the sum of bitcoins received + credits - debits.

Not really rocket science, and I feel something must be missing in my view as this very basic system seems the most obvious to me, and it seems like it would be immune to the problems that are plaguing all of the exchanges. Is it just that they were dancing on the edge of the razor of zero-confirm transactions because they felt that turn around was that important?

Please, tell me where I am wrong. Something is not adding up.

Long ago I predicted Gox will have to deal with a run. It has shown many signs of being poorly managed, frequently hacked, and lacking any transparency. If the sun were to shine on their books it would be apparent that they would not be able to settle up a massive withdraw.

I don't know if it is FUD (the doubt is very reasonable) that governments would ban bitcoin and trading floors would be shut down. If a govt doesn't have control over their own currency, they have nothing. This is an existential struggle for them (as well as the banks that control the govt).

Bitcoin will never go away (or at least some form of it), but any business based upon it is on shaky ground, and this will eventually be forced underground.

Node.js is server side javascript. It doesn't need an apache server to route calls to it as it is the webserver itself. It answers directly to the port 80 calls. PHP is a seperate thing which gets called every time apache gets hit. This has two side effects:

* A startup and a tear down delay for every server hit.
* No memory of previous interactions. Php starts a new process every time, so you have to re-establish file connections, db connection and all info. Theoretically you could maintain all app data in the app memory in node.js and just save to a db to keep the memory load lower and to deal with if/when the server restarts having something to recover from.

Some things to be concerned about with node.js:

* An error anywhere in the app could make all routes go down ... php might have an issue on an individual page, but it won't cause an issue on other pages.
* Shared memory and continuous running node process can present an issue if your code has memory leaks - objects accumulating, but never being destroyed.
* Javascript can lead to a lot of potential complexity and bad programming styles could create a very very nasty to debug code ball - especially when considering the possibilities of async coding.
* PHP class system, similar to programming in Java is nice for large teams with various coding skill levels as it provides more structure. This slows things down, but it also leads to less chaos.

I love node.js myself, and try to use it in every project I can, but it is not all roses. Or maybe it is, but the thorns can really get you if you don't handle it well.

Why? Please argue your reasoning rather than just saying coin X will be successful.

I have been a web programmer for well over 15 years, so here are my 2mBTC

Python: Fun easy language to learn, but it is not web-centric. It is great if you are building some independent desktop app (many BTC wallets use python), but I after learning it, I never really had much practical use for it web wise.

PHP: The ultimate in web languages for a very long time. It allows you to be a pretty sloppy programmer and still get something up on the web, and if you are a disciplined and advanced programmer, you can build a major website. PHP is what I would recommend to anyone who is a newb that just totally wants to get the job done. Using a framework like codeigniter is also helpful in making a more maintainable site. Upside: there are a lot of php jobs out there. Downside: there are even more php programmers. They are a dime a dozen, and the pay isn't great. One potential upside: there are some libraries to interact with Bitcoin APIs.

Ruby on Rails: Learned it, built the basic blog stuff from tutorials, but I dislike the whole idea of scaffolding and code generating code. It seems if you want to build anything that is not straight-forward you are in for pain.

Java: I know it backwards and forwards and built some crazy stuff with it. That said, I absolutely refuse to program in it. It is way too structured, incredibly slow to develop in, and induces carpal tunnel in people who code in it (too f'n verbose). Upside: You can develop native apps for android in it. (checkout phonegap though if you want to just use html/js/css)

Node.js: A really nice development environment that reminds me of coding in scheme back in college. It is functional, so you have to deal with deep callback stacks effectively. This will be hard at first, and you will need some discipline to not create a nasty code ball. It has the best darn module system around, and reminds me of the best of python regarding modules. You will be using javascript on the front and back end here. Theoretically this means that you will reuse some of the same code on both sides. Realistically, this doesn't happen much, but it is nice not needing to change mental gears between client and server programming. Node.js programmers are in demand now too.

C++: Really, don't bother. We are moving to an interpreted code world and unless you are working on something that needs the speed, this isn't needed. Even if you do need the speed, use python and on the very speed dependent things you can squeeze some c modules in there. Upside: Just a step away from Objective C so you can do some iOS native apps (checkout phonegap though if you want to just use html/js/css)

.NET: Pretty much Java, but on the MS stack. Expect to need to know a lot about libraries and such. It is good for getting jobs, but I try not to touch anything in the MS stack.

Flash: No. It is on its way to the dustbin of history, and good riddance.

TL;DR: Php if you just want to learn enough to get some stuff done. Node.js if you want to take yourself to the next level.