Putting one's wallet(s) in the cloud is a good, but rather obvious idea.  They are then available from anywhere that one might find themselves even if one has been stripped of one's belongings.

Grouping the wallets with other peoples is also a good and rather less obvious idea.  If, as a for-instance, I am on the lamb and my wallet gets pulled out of an obscure corner of the cloud, that is an instant lead.  Of course I could (and would) be clever enough to make that a false lead, but perhaps not everyone would.  Grouping the wallets into a batch with a lot of others would create a lot of dead-end leads.

Probably the best way to achieve the goal of having one's wallet.dat file(s) available would be to hide them in images which are chronically found via Google searches, or simply put the images on a popular website if one is available.  Then random people from all over the world would be downloading the wallet.dat files regularly and one could do it without being suspicious.

It goes without saying (or should go without saying) that the wallet.dat files would be encrypted.  Most stego programs probably do a serviceable job at that anyway, but I tend to prefer openssl since the cryptography is more widely studied.

And while we are dreging up old memories, is it confirmed or denied that the guy's real name was something like Dalin Owen and he is a Canadian and his father was also vocal on these boards and had a real thing against Bruce?  I remember some 'whistle-blower' of sorts posting something about that, but do not much follow-up.

Did people really get half their BTC back?  I somehow thought that Bruce got all of his, but most people got nothing.  But I was not...er... victimized by the guy and didn't really track things that carefully.

And I should make a slight correction.  I guess 'Tom' didn't really get rich 'quickly' in that he was a fairly early adopter and it took a fair amount of time before he decided to pull the plug and cash out.

For best results, be all three.  'Tom Williams' comes to mind here.

Probably not without a non-disclosure agreement.  I am certain that it is a truly earth-shattering idea...hung up temporarily on the challenging technical question of how to encrypt a file.

The Belarus guy must be one of the few people doing such a thing.  One $10k 'visit' would be in the 5k BTC range being obtained and a bit later sold at today's prices.  If the guy and his family were using exchanges, it would not take more than a few of them to have a fairly noticeable impact.

I completely miss-estimated how commonly this form of 'transfer' would be and estimated the value of Bitcoin at much more than it is today.  I'm currently down a bunch of USD because of it.  Oh well.

I've not ever bothered to try to understand the ratio of trading via OTC vs. via Mt. Gox.  Anyone have guesstimates about this?

My thoughts also tend to be along the lines of alternate solutions deriving at least some of their value and legitimacy by being backed by Bitcoin.  It is for this reason that I see protecting and strengthening Bitcoin as job #1, and I think that alternates could both facilitate that and provide much more usable end-user results in the process.

If Bitcoin can survive under a massive load only by forming a collection of 'super-nodes', I fear that that limits it's robustness against coordinated attack and makes it more possible for collusion to occur.  I would be much more comfortable about the Bitcoin if the barrier to entry for operating a full-on bitcoind with the full block-chain remains withing the grasp of anyone who wants to do so. Also if the data management and data transfer requirements for a functional network remain such that they could be achieved under a much degraded (or limited) global network infrastructure.

I think it would be a good idea, and relatively practical, to develop a framework which could simulate the load of a whole economic zone operating largely on Bitcoin.  Then see what happens.  What developments need to happen to support it, and how well those implementations work.  That seems like a good use of time and energy.

I am also increasingly interested in ad-hoc networks (given the increasing calls for 'internet kill switches' and the like.)  If Bitcoin cannot survive active and targeted attack at that level, then we need to develop something with can.  So, I will be interested in how the Bitcoin network and the various ad-hoc network projects can inter-operate and may put some effort into fiddling around with that.

I've no particular interest in revenue from fundamental developments (although if the Bitcoin network succeeds, my holdings of BTC would pay off personally.)  Most of the more successful and important developments are not really driven by revenue directly (ssl, Linux/BSD, etc, etc.)

OK, now I have no idea what's going on and think maybe there is a bug or something (though the strongest hypothesis to me is remains that I am misunderstanding the system.)

I logged on from work, and hurray, I'm no up by $0.16.  The lower end of the spread was above the 'base price' of my single outstanding 'position' (the one I cannot get rid of.)  At least I am pretty sure they were, but not %100.

The window was open for a few hours and the spread display dutifully changed up and down, but my position is mysteriously static.  Wondering if perhaps only the spread display was AJAX, I hit the refresh.  It seems to be the case that the display on the page is generally not dynamic.  Although both elements of the spread are still above my 'base price', I am now _down_ by $1.04 and I didn't touch a damn thing.

Another thing that I thought was funny was that the lower value of the spread sat at my 'base price' exactly to 4 decimal places for some time.  I would not expect this unless the spread was particular to me, or unless my piddly little bet was a noticeable fraction of Bitcoinica's books.

As I understand things, the US saw that Iraq was going to lose the war to Iran and suggested chemical weapons.  They also sent 'agricultural' helicopters and survey teams to gather data from the little lab experiment (Rumsfeld didn't want to let that opportunity go to waste.)

But I understand that Iran did indeed also use chemical weapons after being attacked with them.

In the end, Iran was much more creative and simply better at it and won the war although they took huge losses.


I cannot imagine any country officially sanctioning Bitcoin.  Hoping for that seems to me like a total pipe dream and waste of time to me, and probably genuinely damaging to the potential that the system has.

I said 'probably' because I don't know the details on that level but it was his normal mode of operation.  Most Alaskans knew all about it.  The funny thing was that they were somewhat mystified that corruption in this way was even considered wrong.  I've spent a fair amount of time up there over the years and it is one of the reasons why the Libertarian ideology leave a foul aftertaste in my mouth.

Ah yes, that old chestnut.

I actually looked that up when it was current many many years ago.  Gore clearly said that he was instrumental as a legislator in getting funding for the organizations involved in developing the Internet, but he choked on words very slightly.  This was actually quite true, and his legislative activities in this area were out in front of his peers and quite visionary.  People run with that basically non-issue to this day.

In the interest of fairness, Steven's 'bridge to nowhere' is pretty similar.  It is a bridge to Ketchican's airport which is the only fucking way to get into and out of that hell-hole much of the time (I've been there on a number of occasions.)  A big difference is that Stevens probably was tanking up on kickbacks whereas Gore was probably not (in the 'internet' case at least.)

What's your point?  Funny looking black people look funny?

If you want to know my next move, I'll happily tell you, but it's a tentative plan and I am always prepared to change it as the situation demands.

If BTC goes down into the $1.xx range, I'll make one more sizable purchase, but probably no more.

If there is a terminal exploit, I'll kiss my money goodbye, else I'll sit on what I have pretty much indefinitely.  If I can use the BTC collection for something which I feel is a good purpose, I may do so.  I personally am lukewarm about using Bitcoin directly in a consumer economy because I don't think it will scale to where I could envision such a solution needing to, so I likely won't be supporting efforts which promote that.

I am concerned about the scaling of Bitcoin if it does actually become popular.  I am also interested in the technical details or keeping it viable in the event of various disasters (like Lieberman's 'internet kill switch' and that sort of thing.)  I intend to switch my efforts over to trying to do some actual useful work in these areas.

Not at all.  I would have shorted to big time if I had thought that it was a good move and I could transfer other people's money into my pocket by doing so.

As it happened, I thought that the BTC I was buying was a good value proposition and was unlikely to go much lower.  I made this miscalculation time and time again, and was not informed or interested enough to learn how to hedge my bets appropriately.

I thought that enough people would have enough desire to have BTC 'in the bag' given that it can be easily and privately re-acquired from anywhere that the demand would be significant.  This contrasts with gold where one needs to carry it on an airplane or state-sponsered fiat which is highly monitored.  Anyway, I was wrong and someone else has some of my USD because of that.  If it's you or electric or whoever, congratulations...your analysis was better than mine so you deserve the money I once had.

I would if I had done so.

To the other poster, I personally am down in the neighborhood of 50% of my outlay or probably somewhat more, but I've not done the calcs for a while.  I'm surprised it is not much more, but since I was doubling down on the dips, I guess it worked out that way.

I have a vastly larger percent of one day's BTC supply 'in the bag' than I ever imagined I would however.  As always, I am prepared for the bag to be valueless in the end.

OK.  If anyone is interested, here is the result of my hammering on various buttons as outlined in my message.  I guess there is not UI way to get a history so I use the API.

curl....oinica.com/api/orders.json?n=10" --basic | sed -e 's/{/\n/g
...
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:45-07:00","id":70352,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"INSUFFICIENT MARGIN","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:52-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:05-07:00","id":70351,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3142","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:16-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:44-07:00","id":70350,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3142","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:51-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:02-07:00","id":70349,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3537","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:07-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:06:38-07:00","id":70348,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3537","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:06:53-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-21T00:42:07-07:00","id":69432,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":2.2952,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3144","type":"LIMIT","updated_at":"2011-11-21T19:31:17-07:00","user_id":1380}

Looking at the outputs and timings, I wonder if I didn't 'execute' correctly.  Seems like when I put the order in, at least one annoying box popped up. which I had to 'ok' or something.  It was unclear what that was, but in a typical UI, one only needs to be annoyed at most once by such a thing before an action is taken.

I think that someone has a bunch of purportedly stolen coins on Tradehill which Mt. Gox won't touch (or more accurately, won't give back if they do touch them.)

I think that perhaps Tradehill became unwilling to be cooperative either because they found out the nature of the stash, or because Mt. Gox shamed them.  Or possibly because there is official law enforcement involved.

I think that some of the shuffling (e.g., the 6000 coin flash buy which is gigantic for Tradehill) is the operator's attempt to wash and liquidate in conjunction with another party.  The operator is willing to take a significant loss to get rid of coins.  I picked up a few bucks taking advantage of the periodic dips which have come and gone over the last week.

Oh ya...I agree with BTX that the volume on Tradehill is simply not sufficient for anyone who is well capitalized to bother with trying to set up anything big at this time.

Yesterday the price lines for Tradehill, then for Mt. Gox disappeared.  Not to long afterwards, the lines came back for Tradehill, but have not done so for Mt. Gox, and the price there shows $0.000.

The depth charts seem unaffected, and the tape (trade values on the right) seems to be working.

I suspect a Bitcoinity problem rather than a feed problem since both Tradehill and Mt. Gox are/where acting up.

It sure would be cool if the problems were fixed up or explained.  I use Bitcoinity enough to contribute to the beer fund from time to time so I don't mind asking.

I also agree with the message, but find it pointless and counterproductive.

There is often a great utility in having people think you are a retard, and one can often achieve one's goals more effectively when that is the majority perception.  Look at G. W. Bush for instance.

BTW, my very favorite term is 'bag holder'.  This is in part because it has a very literal meaning in some of my other long-shot speculative adventures I suppose.

I suspect that it is just as likely that there are more big holders that wish to liquidate and/or people who want an even bigger position who realize that one more significant decline will shake out enough more weak hands to be worthwhile.

Actually the latter may not be true.  The couple hundred thousand of BTC dropped last time barely broke the previous low, and then only for a few seconds, so the potential to manipulate sentiment downward may be over...for now.

I retain the USD funds earmarked to pick up another load in the deep $1.xx drop, but it does seem to be less and less likely that I will be deploying them.