Jered also responded to a comment of mine stating in no uncertain terms that everyone should always diversify and spread risk around (vs. keeping everything at Tradehill.)  Although this was preaching to the choir in my case, it impressed me non-the-less.

"Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue."

(Actually, so far only one of my low bids have been taken out so far...but the day is yet young.)

Thank heaven for diversity:

http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html

I like (and use) the above technique.  A couple of other suggestions if I may.  These are simply my own personal thoughts on things and I encourage people to think about things and roll their own...avoiding a monoculture is a good thing in my opinion.

--

When encrypting a wallet.dat, do NOT use a password you can remember (unless you are really good at this stuff) and for the love of God, don't forget your password(s).  That means keeping it/them written down in a secure place or several.

If someone is trying to break into an on-line account, there are a limited number of attempts they can try.  If someone has the encrypted wallet.dat file in their possession, they can try at a much higher rate, and with software akin to mining rigs.  So the password should be much better.

(If someone has a password hash from a dump stolen from some web site's database, they can use rainbow tables and other tricks to try to obtain the password.  That is a different beast.)

--

I also suggest re-naming the encrypted wallet.dat to reflect info about it.  e.g., 'wallet.dat__sav-2_20_20110802.enc-1'.  I can see at a glance that this is my second savings wallet, it contains 20 BTC, it was created today, and it uses my '1' encryption scheme.

It sorts nicely with my other savings wallets as well.  I personally keep an active working wallet with spending money and don't bother to back it up at all.  My savings wallets are in cold storage.

On mistake I made was forgetting to properly document the addresses of each savings wallet (so I could check the balances on blockexplorer and make sure all was as expected over time.)  Had to open a bunch of them back up to get it.

--

I also suggest if one is puttering around with command line tools, be most careful indeed to not overwrite or prematurely throw away a wallet.dat, and to double check that the end result can be turned back into a functional wallet.dat file when a technique is decided upon (and documented.)

Most people will want to use a canned tool for such an operation.  Fine, but be careful about where the tool came from and be advised that attackers will know exactly how it works and how to exploit whatever weaknesses it has even if the tool is perfectly legitimate.

--

Lastly, I suggest that deleting a file off a hard drive, pen drive, etc, is not as definitive as a lot of people think.  There could be a whole lot of 'deleted' wallet.dat files to be found if one's HDD is stolen and if the person who is looking is proficient.  There are programs which can securely and reliably nuke a file.  Depending on your risk profile, keep this in mind.

Or the next domino?

Now that would have an impact on the BTC price.  Especially if the coin were lost, and even more especially if they were lost to garden variety miscreant.

So you scan the speculation board in search of people to admonish?  Sheesh...what a life.

The (potential) trouble is that you cannot get blood from a turnip.  The exchanges are one screw-up away from being insolvent, and your Yubikey is only partial protection against one form of possible problem.  Should any one of a number of possible problems happen it will not matter what the disposition of the operators might be.

For my part, if I have excess funds in the form of BTC, I take them home ASAP.  And put them in encrypted storage wallets with backups and all that jazz.  If/when I want to sell, I'll crack some of the savings wallets open and transfer them right back.  I limit what cash I store with the exchange (Tradhill primarily in my case) to a realistic minimum.

If an exchange wants to hold my BTC, they can pay me interest.  In fact I would be happy to let them hold a portion of my stash to perform futures operations and what-not...but I want a cut of the action.  And at this point none of them are even close to meeting my criteria for confidence in this part of the game.

But, of course, do as you see best.  These are just the ways I do things.

+1 for joespie91 AND +1 for John Smith.  I feel that they both make some good points.

I think there are a whole lot of possible tests that each one of us would fail and there is a realistic possibility of any number of them coming to pass.

Sounds like that new outfit simply eats the losses themselves if they do not do what they are paid to do which is to reliably acquire funds from their users.  Simple enough, and more than fair given how Dwolla promoted their services.  Why cannot Dwolla do that?

I also have become involved with Bitcoin under the impression that it was highly speculative and that there is every possibility of losing every cent I 'invested'.

I actually am quite impressed at how well Bitcoin has held on so far under the never ending barrage of misfortune.  If anything, I have more confidence in it now than I did a month ago (and have upped my bet noticeably.)

I hope against hope that Bitcoin fulfills the desires of the 'good' people in the community, but even if it does not, I see a possible trajectory as follows:

Bitcoin becomes a tool used by non-state actors and the intelligence communities to hold and transfer value.  Bones are tossed out to keep people mining and transacting, but a lionshare of the utilization is cloaked.  Shadows and traces of it's primary function might be noticed by sharp-eyed observers, but not much more.

Come to think of it, the use as I've described above and the more 'wholesome' use as a currency free of debt-based money problems may not necessarily be mutually exclusive.  But I ramble...

My best guess is that the site is not updating...but then I am a newbie.  Can get a block count here:

  http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount

(For posterity, as I tap this out:  bitcoinwatch: 139,071 ; the above link: 139205)

I'm hoping.  What would be really cool is if someone will wipe out Tradehills books and hit some of my absurd bids.  If one of the recent large(ish) scale scammers got in a hurry I could see that happening maybe.  Or just a general panic.

I dunno if I could live this my conscience if I ended up with dirty BTC...well...given the details of how they were acquired, I bet I probably could

Hmmm....10k sold 36 hours ago, and 6k just now.

The very interesting thing to me is the 18k purchased about 24 hours ago.  Looks to me as though someone with money wants BTC also.

(In my immature understanding of things, I expect that prices ending up lower indicate a large block being unloaded and vice-versa.)

If I were in need of fiat for BTC in the near-ish future, I'd do some trading most ricky-tick before this wave hits the markets.

Come to think of it, I did notice a chunk of around 10k BTC to through MtGox this weekend which out the $13.50 level with ease.  $13.00 even fell briefly.  I wonder it that were these?

I, for one, am not buying an EC2 failure.  Attaching EBS is kindergarten stuff in cloud compute land.  I don't think there would be any way for someone to develop and operate a trading platform in AWS without being keenly aware of the details at this level, and anyone with two neurons exchanging data would be mighty careful with the coin storage aspect.

I'd say that the scammers in the community, at least, are anticipating a downturn in BTC value (or more hopefully, increased competition from legitimate players) and are exiting stage left.  Good bye and good riddance.

I'm a relative latecomer.  Here are some reasons I decided _not_ to mine.  Fair warning:  I don't really stand behind the validity of any of them.

 - I wanted to establish a position in BTC fairly quickly, then adjust it up or down over time.

 - I did not sense that the bitcoin system needed the extra hashing power at this point in the game.

 - I expect that if I want to GPU mine, I could pick up a used rig when it became unprofitable to mine (and I have access to space in the one of the lowest cost per kilowatt/hour area of the US.)

 - I expect that if I want to GPU mine, GPU production will overshoot demand at some point, and the hardware and software may evolve to better support hashing as well.

Frankly, mining at this point offends my sense of efficiency to some extent.  There are plenty of places where electricity is used simply for the purpose of generating heat.  I am holding out for a solution like a 'Bitcoin hot water heater' and devices along those lines.

In fact, if anyone knows of such projects I'd be interested to hear of them.  I skimmed a few pages of the mining hardware part of the forum and only saw stuff about current methods.  Granted, there is room for improvement in my research effort.

Just after calibration, it is 100 (by convention).  Between calibrations it drifts.  It probably drifted downward at certain times (e.g., in Cambodia when the intellectuals were knocked off.)

Anyway, that is my interpretation of the Flynn Effect, and as I said, it's arguable.  And I sense that Flynn kind of dedicated his career to rendering the notion of IQ useless for whatever reason.  One way or another it's terribly pertinent to Bitcoin (although that is arguable too I suppose.)

Arguably (and fascinatingly) untrue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

What 'same topic'?  Seems like the thread has diverged in several directions already.

As the OP, I can say that I had hoped that the thread would expand into a kind of general conversation about the types of endeavors that would pop up and the necessity for people to be careful than thoughtful about them.

But the OP has on a limited amount of control over the direction of a thread in the best of cases.  They tend to expand into areas of immediate interest it seems, and one of the things I noticed in the intro material is that this forum is defined to be relatively less controlled than a lot of others.

Agree strongly, and find it heartening.


Would not rule it out, but I doubt it.

I'm not totally trying to rub salt in any wounds because hubris is a bitch, but...

The guy did name his service 'MYbitcoin.com' so from his perspective, there is an element of truth in advertising.  A cursory glance at things indicates to me that the best bet at people being made whole is if the guy is a Bitcoin enthusiast trying to make a point to people about the importance of watching one's ass.

I am throughly enjoying the rough raw frontier that is Bitcoin.   Bitcoin strikes me as a very sharp knife.  Very useful in some situations which I anticipate as possible on the horizon, but something to handle with a _lot_ of care in the mean time.

There is a genuine silver lining in all of this IMHO.  If Bitcoin goes anywhere, whoever it was that made the comment that we are all early adopters at this point is probably right.  The good part of all of the hassles is that everyone who is currently involved will, by necessity, be learning a fair amount about such things as:

  * the mechanics and properties of BTC
  * computer security
  * human nature
  * markets

etc, etc, etc. and thus will be much better prepared to have a positive impact in facilitating wider adoption...or formulating our own implementations of scams as the case may be.

In the here and now, a bunch of early entrepreneurships are establishing a fairly strong and hopefully fairly accurate picture of themselves.  It's at least a mixed blessing, in my mind, that there are situations which provide some contrast.