My understanding is that if you make a very big deposit Bitstamp with require some further proof of identity > $10,000.

But for more normal amounts, so far as I know, they do not.

Therefore they cannot tell if it is your bank account or someone elses!!! LOL!!

So although I understand that you might be nervous about this, I think you are good to go.

Perhaps Bitstamp have changed what ID verification they do as standard since I joined 2 months ago?

I'd also like to take this chance to say that my dealings with Bitstamp have always been straightforward and smooth, its a very good service.

I agree. But all I am saying is that in Satoshi's case it usually was, so we should be that much more certain if we think he was wrong.

prezbo: yes on futher reflection this is a fork, I was wrong.

As I understand it, Satoshi DID intend to increase the block size, and he intended to do it without a fork.

I think its worth remembering that Satoshi's view ought to get a certain amount of respect just because, he is Satoshi.

Various complex ways of adjusting the blocksize dynamically have been discussed, but mostly these sound too raw to me, and need a much longer period of discussion. The blocksize will likely need to be increased THIS YEAR, or some of the properties of Bitcoin may start to be eroded. Thats the current situation.

I say a moderate hard coded increase should be planned for now (this is not a fork) and more complex proposals FULLY evaluated over the next year or so.

Yes, that looks ok to me.

It often happens that bits of script that start as  one-liners get more complex and eventually you want to put them in their own file.

This has the advantage of saving on typing, making it easier to incorporate more functionality, and calling it something memorable.

You may have reached this stage.

You need to do two things to do this, and perhaps you already know, but just saying.

1) The first line must be
    #!/bin/bash
    with no space befor the #
2) Give the file execute permission. You can do it like this:
    chmod +x myfile

You also need to ensure that the file is in the path or you give the full path, perhaps like this:

     ./myfile

dot in this context means the current directory, myfile will only work if the current directory happens to be in the pathlist contained in the $PATH environment variable.

Please could you send me my equalcoin now?  I feel I have earned it.

I suspect your problem may be the use of su. This accepts a user as the first argument. The default is root, but in this case it may be looking for a user bitcoind.

Do you need su ?

The correct statement is this
while ! /usr/bin/bitcoind getinfo > /dev/null 2>&1

remove the backticks you have you do not need them.

Damn! Danny your right!!

Of course *any* store of value can be taken by force. That does not change.

But its about plausible denyability. The papers do not have to be here in the house. They may be in a bank vault, a friends house, etc. And when they march you to the bank and say open the vault, (weather they are or not) you *may* have a chance to get assistance.  They may be inaccessable to you because you have given them to someone else or to a layer. Or they may not exist anymore because you gambled them away one night in a game of poker in the local pub. You may have given them to your children, your mistress or your whore! You will get beaten up either way if you have thugs in your house, of course, and I hope that never happens but paper wallets can only help. And if you decide that the severity of the beating would be lessoned by giving them some or all of it, just like casy, well you can do that.

So thats how.  

If you do not use paper wallets, really you are very foolish.

You back up your computer, of course. +1 for that.

But here's the thing, people can get to your computer. Its connected to the internet. There are already viruses that track network traffic, keylog, and yes deliberatly steal Bitcoin wallets.

Its already happened. Why should it not happen to you. So you are careful. Me too. Some of the people who have lost stuff in this way were careful too. Most not. It helps to be careful.

But the security of a carefully prepared paper wallet or many of them, is much more than a computer.  Having worked for an AV firm, we used to say that nothing beats physical locks. Its very true. A good hacker can get in most places given time and motivation.  

Anyone with any significant wallet should put it in paper wallets. Many of them. Thats my view.

A singularity means a place where the behaviour changes completely and suddenly from what it was before. The its not a gradual change, its a single place where the change happens. Its often used to mean a place where the behaviour becomes unspecified or multivalued.

The OP says that he expects bitcoin to explode in value soon, and I agree. Here is one way I explain why this is going to happen.

The demand for Bitcoin is very much determined by *how many* people are involved. The supply for bitcoin, is pretty much fixed, or if you like, determined by price becauce to a degree higher prices do release more coin on to the market, but not as much as you might think. Sure, some will sell if the price goes up, but plenty of other fol will also say, well if its gone up this far I shall hang on. Yes, some bitcoins are mined, but I dont think thats very significant these days.

So price is very sensative to the number of people involved.

Now what is odd about this is that each person involved talks to other people, and over time perhaps at a linear rate, some more than others, gets other people involved. Consider bitcoin like a bubble, it started with a person called Satoshi Nakimoto and his friends, and gradually the word has spread. I see it like a circle. Inside the circle, everyone knows bitcoin. Outside, nobody does. At the border people talk, and after some talking some of those people move inside the circle, it gets a bit bigger. This is a bit inacurate because all the people in the circle know and talk to people outside (and suck them in!!) but you get the idea. Now here is the whammy: As the circle gets bigger, not only does its circumferance get bigger, read the conversations and conversions of people outside the circle but, and thei sis the important point the rate does as well its an upwardly accelerating curve that (on this model) has no bound.

Of course nothing accelerates without bound. What are the limitations? Well the main one I see is that the world is not an infinit sea of people but a finite one. Once we get to the state where everyone either knows about or already uses bitcoin, well the model doesnt work any more. (Something different is needed. This is called saturation.) You could think of it that the circle expands to fill or nearly fill the paper. Or perhaps it fills a corner of it. Point is we are noweher near that yes,  If bBitcoin reaches 1% of the size of paypal, an explosion will have happened and we will still have a long way to go!!

Mathematically the rate of expansion is proportional to some power of time, so it will go up at a massively increasing rate.  Focus on this relationship, because it is key to what is going to happen.

And the number of bitcoins in existance? Still Fixed!!

There is another anology here. Bubbles that form in a beer sitting on the table. The surface tension on the bubble is inversly proportional to the size of the bubble. So a large bubble has low surface tension and it can easily get bigger. But a small one has high surface tension, and its tricky to form. You can prove in fact that its impossible for a zero size bubble to form, and without the tiny bubble, obviosly there can be no big ones, so we just proved beer can never have bubbles. Haha! Its the same with bitcoin, If I had thought of this, all my friends would have laughed, not even bothered reading it I would have died a frustrated man, and all my friends would still be laughing about it long after I was dead. Bitcoin? Cryptographic currency they could say in their ignorance. Satoshi managed to get this thing started and once started, the bubble will grow and is unstoppable.  Focus on the dynamics, because I belive it will go ballistic.  (Dont get me started on ballistics!!)

Why does beer have bubbles in then? Its because the bubbles form round tiny particles of dust, perhaps on the sides of the vessel perhaps in the liquid, but mostly they need something to form around, just ordinary beer will not do it. Once a tiny bubble forms it rises to the top geting bigger all the time. Its the same with Bitcoin, ordinary beer wont do it needed Satoshi!!

So yes I expect a singularity, and it may not be far wrong the quote. "A Bitcoin is worth an ounce of gold, just that most people do not realise it yet. "

Interesting idea.

I am not sure its very easy to find your actual address from an IP address, but given unfortunate circumstances, interception of email, etc it can certainly be done - after all you give your address each time you order something.

I think the thing that makes this unlikely is that the 'thugs' do not actually know where you store your bitcoins. If you are sensible, you will have moved most of them to paper wallets and so they may not even be 'at your address'.

I did wonder if electronic thugs might be sent, but as I run Linux I worry less about this than I might otherwise. But worried about this and then moved most of my coins to a paper wallet.

Really, I think paper wallets are the answer. Just remember that there is no button to recover the password. (I mean private key.) if your house burns down and you loose them, they are lost!!

I think franky1 is essentially correct on this one. (And no I am not an accountant!!)

But HMRC still win, if you dont pay CGT you will pay income tax on it and for many people this is just as bad, so this is no biggy. (No big loophole, I mean.) 

The point about 'sets' is this. If I buy 6 antique photographs for £1100 each you cannot class it as 6 seperate purchases, you have to class it as a set and as such it will be over the £6k limit.

The OP's point is that there is no rationale  for any particular 'set' of Bitcoins, so they must be treated as individual units.

If you didn't understand, what it means is that no-one is going to believe you unless you provide some evidence.

Is this something you made up or did something actually happen?

If thats what you think (and you didnt provide any evidence), y'know talk is cheap, why not use one of the many other exchanges?

I did not mean to suggest that my suggestion was the only one, of course there are other possibilities. Its just one of the problems is that even for a modest house, its quite a lot of bitcoins!!

As a child, I always used to dream of walking into one of these smug looking estate agents offices, you know the one where they try to look too important and busy to even serve you. It would be even more fun to do this as as a child of course. I'd walk in with a suitcase, and without viewing or anything say, Yeah, I want that one there, and then proceed to pay the asking price in cash to the man at the desk. I need to move in tonight though, I'd say. I dont know if they would do it I suppose in fact they would bite your arm off because cash buyers are so very few and far between.

Knowing what I know now about real estate, I can say that simple deals are few and far between, and cash buyers rare. Many deals barely creak through, and I live in London (Uk) where the market is pretty buoyant.  Adding Bitcoin into the mix as I see it can only make it harder. 

I think it would be a great thing to set up, but I think if you are realistic about it it would be tricky to do. Not a reason not to try of course.

"Suddenly" is not going to work here for a number of reasons, the main one being the chances of matching up someone prepared to source and sink such large sums in Bitcoin and who happens to want to exchange a house are small, "Gradually" could work though, in a number of different ways.

1) Gradual purchase or combined rent/buy.  I have never done this but I think it has a huge capability to offere advantages to both buyer and seller even without bitcoins.
    It does need to be drafted fairly, and so seller and buyer need to have enough sense to recognise when this is not the case.
    In this scheme the purchaser effectively gives the purchaser a mortgage on the house and agrees to rent it to them for a period of time, say 15 years. There is also a deed of sale to sell the house in 15 years time for a nominal sum, provided that rent has never fallen significantly in arrears. The rental agreement allows the seller to evict the purchaser if "rent" is not paid, under certain conditions.
    Advantages of the scheme: The buyer does not need to come up suddenly with large amounts of Bitcoin which is tricky if you have not already got them. There is no 3rd party mortgage company involved. Steady bitcoin income for the seller (probably denominated in fiat.)

2) Part of the price is paid in bitcoin. Advantageous to the seller because the registered sale price is reduced, so capital gains and capital transfer tax is reduced. (Assuming tax is NOT paid on the Bitcoin part of the transaction. ) Advantage to buyer: capital transfer tax reduced, capital gains tax liability is transferred.

1) & 2) can be combined of course.

Two-factor Authorisation is useful for some people, but other things that have been suggested are useful too and would stop this. Its possible to make the account secure, even IF the password becomes known to a dishonest person, so why not do that? 2FA certainly does not suit everybody.

Actually its hard to say vote with your feet because thats the problem: there are not that many exchanges, and for many practical reasons the choice often comes down to 1 or 2. The exchanges therefore become complacent because people dont vote with their feet.

But you can be sure it reflects or will reflect badly on bitcoin even though actually it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. If someone using Bitcoin for a year can loose 200 BTC, then they are hardly a Noob.

I would strongly and politely suggest to the exchanges that it is very much in their own interest to implement these things. And it will be all the better for Bitcoin if they do, so lets start writing emails to our favourite exchange. I already have!

I think this is truly sickening, and I am very sorry to hear about it. If normal people make mistakes that end up in financial loss, then there is the suggestion that you need to be "superman" in order to avoid this. Well I for one am not!

Goldmoney, and most banks banks do offer better security here, and (in my view) the reason this happened is because MtGox is not offering reasonable security here. Other exchanges such as Bitstamp are equally vulnerable.

Goldmoney sends an email pin, and disallows email changes. (Or maybe slows them down, I dont remember.)

I think IP address locking is also very useful. You could also do it based on geo-location based on IP address. Someone in Sweden wants a withdrawal? Well I live in the USA and sometimes fly to London, so do not accept it from anywhere else!!  Challenge response is also useful.

There are lots of ways to do this well it seems to me and it seems to me that many Bitcoin exchanges are not doing it well right now. The non-reversability of Bitcoin means it needs to be done better than the companies doing fiat transactions do!! 

Thanks for the donation el_rlee. Sorry I was impatient, just wondered if it was what you needed!

Cheers!

So did this work for you? It seems rather bad manners if it did and you didnt say. Perhaps it didn't in which case I'd also like to know. Or did you just loose interest and not bother even reading replies to your post ?