Yes, Cracker.  It means  "Criminal hacker", or someone who "Cracks" security to do bad things.

The primary purpose of the term is to distinguish criminal from non-criminal hackers - by people who are absolutely sick of having everyone assuming "Hacker == Crook" as the common media encourages them to.

Forget your racist crap, guys, we are all colorless on the Internet.  None of us has any clue what color any of the others are, and that is a *GOOD* thing.  Use online vocabulary instead, and you get the right meaning.

If the OP wants to dumb down the thread title so that people who don't know this very basic vocabulary can get his original meaning, maybe he should use the word "crook" instead.

I think the time scale is highly relevant too.  But, if you aren't just doing a brief pump'n'dump a long time scale is actually a very important feature for a serious altcoin.   As in, one I'd like to encourage, not discourage.

Would it make you happy for an altcoin to have a 1% premine in the blockchain as a transaction in the genesis block whose outputs become spendable only at given block heights - such that the developer never controls more than 5% of outstanding coins at any time?  For example, if mining 50-coin blocks, a 50-coin output of the premine tx becomes available to the developer only at block heights divisible by 40? 

Ergh.  You have no idea how hard I was trying to work out some kind of coherent meaning in that.  Latin gets twisted into all kinds of forms by people who usually speak languages that have different grammars, and often is a translation target for unfamiliar idioms from languages and cultures you've never heard of, and anyway it's not well understood now so mistakes tend to stand uncorrected.  So I'm used to having to go a long way to figure out what a given passage says.  But in this case, even though a few individual phrases have grammatical structure, they don't add up to sentences and the passage says nothing, no matter how hard you squint.  That's almost cruel, but I guess I was doing it to myself.  Guess if I'd been a typesetting geek I'd have recognized it.

What the hell?  Many of those words are Latin but this passage makes no sense.   It isn't even dog Latin, it's garbage.  It seems to be some kind of mangle of a bunch of sentences about pain and pleasure and motivation, but even accounting for mangled grammar I cannot work out what the heck it wants to be saying.

Here is your problem.  Eventually hard drives die.  Sooner or later, the drive in your windows box will stop working.  At that point, you should still know how to get your coins. 

I suggest copying your .rar to a USB stick, or another drive, or a CD, or some kind of media that you can read in another computer.  And then keep that stick, or CD, or whatever it is, safe. 

The encrypted .rar is not really protection: .rar archives use a light encryption format that's fairly easy to brute force (40-bit keys IIRC).  But it's a good scramble (prevents the file name etc from being visible anyway, or malware file-format analyzers from recognizing a renamed wallet.dat file) for a wallet that's kept in encrypted form to start with - and yours *is* kept encrypted by the client, right?  With a strong password, right?

If people can do better by not working than they can by working, then yeah, they'll produce nothing.  I don't think anybody's been advocating that.  No matter what happens, working has to keep on showing a marginal profit, and preferably a pretty steep one, over not working. 

Still.  What is, is, what can be, can be, and what will be, will be.  It doesn't matter whether anybody believes it now.  All you can do if you believe in something, is try it.

Look at the bitcoin money supply.  Almost five percent of it was just revealed to have been stolen.

That's unacceptable.  I mean, just completely, mindbogglingly, unacceptable. 

Put that in perspective.  Imagine someone stealing five percent of the world's total money supply, and the destruction of lives and livelihoods that follow.  We're seeing a limited version of that destruction right now, but as BTC gets bigger, this becomes more and more serious.  This is the kind of thing that can utterly destroy national and world economies if we don't get it under control, and I'm starting to think that the time to do it is getting here now, or already past.

We need accountability.  But I do think that accountability can be done without legislation - besides legislation would be limited to a single country, or patchwork different around different jurisdictions.  If there is an absolute demand for accountability, the blockchain makes it possible for the exchange and the people it serves to cooperate to verify that the amount currently held by an exchange and the amount entrusted to it by the customers are in fact equal. 

It's pretty simple in overview; customers keep track of transactions which are entrusting others with their money rather than direct spends.  IE, I spend my money for alpaca socks, that's a direct spend.  But if I send money to an exchange, or a bank, or anybody else whom I'm trusting to keep my money and give it back on demand, that's an entrusting transaction instead.   

An auto-audit capability could be built into the blockchain.  Imagine a protocol where at any time more than a week since last time an exchange got audited, anybody could broadcast a message initiating another audit.  This message would be received by all clients (it would be in the blockchain), prompting clients interested in the audit (ie, those which have made new entrusting transactions to that entity) to sign using the keys for the entrusting transactions.  The customers can remain anonymous; all the protocol needs is for there to be a response using the key.  The amount entrusted by all entrusting transactions is then visible, and then the exchange responds by countersigning its new spends and its unspent txouts.  Result: everybody can see whether the total held by the exchange has changed in a way that exactly matches the amount that customers have entrusted to it.

No need for KYC laws, no need for expensive human auditors, no need for licensing and barriers to entry, no need to pay for regulators and et cetera; instead, make it automatic. Build it in distributed trustless style the way we've built everything else.  Let the audit get checked in a distributed trustless way exactly the same way all the other tx in the blockchain get checked.

If you think about it ... That really has been the issue all along.  Satoshi built a trustless distributed infrastructure, and then we let these idiots butt in with financial service businesses which they constructed in centralized ways that required trust.    That was a mistake.  If you're going for a trustless distributed model, go for the trustless distributed model all the way from bottom to top.

In fact, it shouldn't matter if someone is a fast-food worker who majored in Philosophy, living in her mom's basement on a minimum-wage income; if she's smart enough to run an exchange and savvy to handle the software and professional enough to keep accounts secure and keep her own fingers out of the till, she'll pass the damn audits and she'll deserve to.  There's no reason (at least none yet) to throw FINRA and the SEC at her.

I'm looking at good long-term fundamental indications (increasing infrastructure, increasing awareness, increasing acceptance), and I've been buying steadily for the last couple weeks while the Gox debacle has been dragging it down.  I've acquired coin between $550 and $620, and stayed the hell away from Gox.  I expect its value to at least double sometime in the next three months. 

I don't try to sweat the market day to day and hour to hour.  That way lies madness.  Let the pumpers, technical analysts, and speculators play that game, it has little effect on the scale of weeks or months or years.  I prefer to look at longer-term indications.

'Scuse my goddamn language, but I'm pissed off right now.

There have been  too many examples of exchanges getting hacked, losing client's money, using buggy software that allowed them to get robbed, operating on a 'fractional reserve' basis without telling their customers, etc.  As far as we can tell, Bitcoin financial service businesses, especially exchanges, are being run by goddamn amateurs (or idiots, or possibly crooks) who have no fucking clue how to keep accounts secure, keep their fingers out of the till, and keep an honest business afloat.  Gox turned into effectively a scam that wiped out nearly a billion dollars worth of assets and dragged the value of another ten billion dollars worth of assets down by nearly a third.   I count that as losing about four billion dollars worth of other people's money, for no reason better than being fucking idiots.  

I dunno 'bout y'all, but I'm keeping just about all my coins back to my own damn wallet in my own damn house after the last blow-up at Gox.  I have one account now on an exchange with 0.02 BTC in it -- If I decide I need to sell, I can wait the extra couple hours for a transfer TO the exchange to confirm fully before selling.  Likewise if I decide to buy, I can 'sweep' from my exchange account to my own damn wallet after an hour.  

The cynic in me half expects the longstanding ID bug at Gox (which meant that they were completely sodomized by transaction malleability, while transaction malleability was a known problem that everyone else dealt with successfully) to have been deliberately placed there  (and deliberately not fixed) by an asshole insider in order to facilitate robbing the customers' BTC deposits with plausible deniability for Gox.  Seriously, can anyone be that clueless without doing it on purpose?  I know, I know....  stupidity is an unlimited resource.  Still, people were trusting those idiots.

So what can we do?  Because BTC isn't technically recognized as 'money', these people aren't insured.  They aren't audited.  And they're barely regulated.  Can we use the blockchain to keep track of how much they're actually holding versus how much their customers have on deposit?  Just knowing that those amounts match would make me sleep a lot better at night.  

Can we insist that they get insurance?  Can we insist on audits?  Can we boycott those whose insurance won't cover their BTC deposits, or whose audits indicate they're not actually holding as much as their customers have on deposit?  

I hate to bring up the idea of treating them as full-fledged financial institutions under the law, but this is exactly the kind of crap that the laws governing financial institutions (usually) prevent, and it's why licensing financial institutions is so damn hard.  Maybe it fucking needs to be that hard, specifically in order to keep these goddamn goat-blowing amateurs out of the business.

There are new conditions there haven't been before.  It's never been possible up to now, but we are moving into unknown territory. 

Congratulations, you must have an address that someone found difficult to link to your real identity for them to be trying this trick.

They'll get dumped eventually as unconfirmed tx, but it'll take a while. 

If you want to get rid of them faster, you can use the command line client to transfer your "real" BTC to another wallet.  But if you pay tx fees that won't be worth it. 

I suppose you could also very carefully construct transactions to transfer the 1-satoshi utxo's to the mining payout from block #1 or something.    Back when 1-satoshi transactions were "normal" and actually confirmed occasionally, people would send satoshis to Satoshi that way.  But with the current client they'll just disappear eventually.

In principle, the guaranteed minimum income thing can work. 

It's like a graduated wealth tax, with the lowest brackets actually corresponding to a negative tax.  It'll become necessary as robotic production advances, because fewer and fewer people can be employed in production.  It's in the interest of business owners because they can produce their crap with smaller numbers of employees, but they want to sell to the much larger population of people who aren't getting paid by them anymore.  They can't sell their crap unless a larger segment of the population than can still be employed producing it have money to buy crap. 

But it only works that way if money itself doesn't represent debt anymore and people aren't under the spur to work slavishly to pay back their debt.  And as we know, there is no form of money that isn't made exclusively out of debt -- oh wait, now there is, isn't there?

The free software movement is composed of people who produce value for free, just because they enjoy creating things and believe that someone *should* create the things they do.  The Khan academy provides everyone who wants it and is willing to do the work with a world-class education for free.  Wikipedia and online lookups have taken over from pretty much every publisher of encyclopedias and reference materials by providing a crowd-sourced free service.

The very existence of such people and institutions demonstrates that even given a basic income, there are human beings who won't just sit on their fat asses and produce nothing, because the creative impulse is just too strong.  In fact I believe such people are in the majority; working for extra income can be purely voluntary and I think most people would still do it.  Maybe ten or twenty hours a week instead of forty or sixty, but more than half of them would still do it, just to avoid boredom, or because they want World of Warcraft access, Television, and more than 400 square feet of living space.  And of course there'd still be obsessive types who put in sixty or eighty hour weeks building businesses, because building businesses is what they love to do, what they take pride and identity in.  In fact that pretty much describes the current set of small business owners and CEOs in American business. 

The problem up to now is that such people haven't been able to be productive enough to provide a meaningful small income for everyone.  But that's changing.  Information is replicable essentially for free, and that makes the producers of free software, and the producers of the recorded lectures and interactive software of the Khan academy, and the people producing designs for automatic production shops on Thingiverse, productive enough that these new institutions are now significant contributors to the world economy.  Although measuring their contribution baffles economists a little currently because the price point is zero.  As automatic production facilities get better, it's not that big a stretch to imagine just downloading patterns for whatever you want to produce locally.  Humans can exist in a society where the basics are provided by robotic means and professional production is restricted to luxuries, land, and things not easily autoproduced.

 

"African American" is the currently accepted term for an American of African ancestry.  

It replaces "Negro" and "Black" and several other terms which were, evidently, used in a racist way often enough for the people to start to feel that those terms were in themselves insulting.  

I suppose, for some reason I'm unaware of, that the same fate might not befall "African American."  I sincerely hope that it doesn't anyway; I'm tired of retconning language every few years just because assholes keep right on being assholes when they adopt a new term along with the rest of the world.  But I've never yet seen a new term that can convince assholes to stop being assholes and loading whatever term they use with their own asshole sentiments, so I'm dubious about the process.

two things are possible.

1.  You have a backup of your wallet.dat

2.  You have lost your bitcoins.

There is no third thing that is possible.

I don't social media, so forgive this question born of my ignorance....  

What exactly does a tip bot do, and how is it different from people just sending each other coins?

Also, why is it associated with a particular social media channel, and would a different channel need a different one?

Only one of my exes was Asian.  Definitely she was the tiniest woman I've ever dated, she weighed under 90 pounds and was a few inches less than 5 feet tall.  She could stand on my outstretched arm.  A friend of mine said, "I didn't know you were into Asian women," and I replied to him, "Dude, I'm into *women.* She definitely qualifies!" 

I enjoyed the heck out of cooking for her, because she was very appreciative and hadn't experienced much of the huge diversity of American cuisine.  Everything from Red Velvet cake to cherry cheesecake to key lime pie to our dozen different styles of barbeque to lutefisk to crab cakes to clam chowder was new to her.   And pizza she'd had back in Hong Kong but American versions of it (Chicago deep-dish style for the win!) were unbelievably different.  So she was constantly amazed and (usually) delighted when we went out to someplace that had an awesome specialty, or when we stayed home and I cooked something she hadn't ever had a chance to try yet. 

When we met she was in terror of dairy products, believing herself lactose-intolerant; but it was an intestinal thing, not an allergic thing; she could eat yogurt or cheese.  It turned out that whenever she'd recently had live-culture yogurt, she could handle other dairy products with no problems, and discovering that was like opening up a whole new universe ( my god, ICE CREAM!!! ) for her.

And, oh yeah, she was hot.  Dancer, Gym rat, and one of those people with the unbelievably hyper metabolism that keeps them going at top speed twenty hours a day.  She positively radiated energy and her smile was like pure distilled sunshine. Also smarter than your average college professor, which is hugely attractive for me, though it doesn't make the list for a lot of guys. 

And I haven't heard from her in twenty years.  Sigh.  She had to go back home at the end of her student visa, and her family definitely did not approve of trips to go see the gwai loh she'd met in the States, and I couldn't get a work permit in Hong Kong and wasn't sure I wanted to be there anyway as it was getting reabsorbed into China and her family was basically hostile to me.... 

I'm pretty sure that there's a good solution. 

I want to think about it for a while and work out the details, but right off the bat, we need to remember some of the tools that are available.

1)  A transaction to spend bitcoins from a given utxo can exist and be witnessed (possibly even signed) by both Alice and Bob before the utxo itself is created.  Either one may be "holding" this transaction and ready to release it when the utxo appears on the blockchain.

2)  A script can hash any secret and compare the result to a blob, releasing the coins to spend if the hash matches.  So if Alice creates the secret she can create a transaction that includes the hash of the secret, while never giving the secret away.  But if she uses the secret to spend the coins, then Bob can learn the secret from the blockchain - and that could enable him to spend a different utxo, possibly from a different transaction. 

3)  A script can release coins on any of several conditions.  For example, a 2-of-2 multisig *OR* a secret whose hash matches. 

4)  A transaction, even one signed by all parties involved, can be invalid until a given lock time - thus even if it is released on the network it will not take effect until someone has had a chance to execute a different transaction.   So in the event that someone is being obnoxious and refusing to cooperate, "refund" transactions could take place (or become available for the other party to exercise) after some delay if the obnoxious person refuses to go through with the original transaction as mutually intended.

I just can't believe that with all these tools available we can't manage to lock down the ratio of the final payouts before the money is sent to  the txout where it gets paid out from.

There is no way they will allow withdrawals of bitcoin sold at $100.  If they intended to allow bitcoin withdrawals, there is no way they'd be allowing bitcoin to trade so cheap on their separated market.  They're allowing deposits of fiat to buy those bitcoins, but they cannot get bitcoins *ANYWHERE* at that price. 

So look at it.  If they ever allow withdrawals of bitcoin, then they lose $400 per $100 they're allowing to come in now.  There is no way they're going to do that.  They'd rather not be allowing the money to come in now.

So ask yourself, why is fiat money so important to them?  Is it because they intend to allow fiat withdrawals?  Hint: if they had been allowing fiat withdrawals then customers would have withdrawn fiat, and their bitcoin market would not have become so depressed.  Hence there would be no "lure" to draw in more fiat. 

To me, this smells like someone is either getting ready to either take the money on a vacation to the islands, or close the books repaying a paltry amount of fiat to some limited class of investors or lienholders - but the market is giving 5 to 1 odds, and I personally will offer 10 to 1 if someone cares for a bet, that Gox's customers will be left twisting in the wind. 

The extant solution for anonymous networks (Tor) requires extra steps that many users won't do, many of those who do will get wrong, and many of those who get wrong won't be aware that they've got wrong.  It is subject to attacks where the compromises of a few selected machines outside your control (your route and exit nodes) can cause your privacy to be sacrificed even if every other node in the mix is honest.  And it is subject to traffic rerouting in transit on the backbone, which is known to be done by at least one sophisticated attacker specifically in response to the fact that it is Tor traffic in the first place. That attacker, and presumably others, specifically reroutes Tor traffic through attack sites which use browser flaws to compromise the machines that originate the traffic.

Tor was a good design once; but the attacks on it are in place, sophisticated, only getting worse, and not easily detectable from the originating node.  So I think that its usefulness is closer to its end than to its beginning.  While Tor may still be good more than 90% of the time, I'm not willing to trust it in the long run. Nor am I willing to trust that people using it can keep their machines from getting compromised by reroutes to attack sites which are using zero-day exploits against their browsers.  Most of them don't even fully disable scripts and cookies in their Tor browser sessions.

The dc-net solution requires you to trust only that there exists at least one other node (ANY participating node) that is not compromised; that's a strictly stronger guarantee than Tor.  If it's built into the protocol then it involves no steps that many users will not do, nor steps that users will attempt but do wrongly.  It is not dependent on the security of machines other than those directly participating, and does not expose machines to attack via a browser as Tor in normal use generally does.

Further, its guarantees are orthogonal to those provided by a (properly functioning) Tor network;  With Tor alone, (if the critical path machines and your own remain uncompromised) you can't associate nodes with IP addresses, but if you're sniffing packet traffic you can associate inputs and outputs with particular nodes.  With the DC-net alone, you can't associate inputs or outputs with particular nodes, but if you're sniffing packet traffic you can produce a list of the IP addresses of the nodes.   So I claim the proper solution is to implement the DC-net as the "fundamental" basis of the protocol, and then let people use it over Tor if they want the extra layer of obfuscation and can correctly use Tor.   That way, even if they fail at configuring Tor, or get unlucky with their Tor network routing, or fail in keeping their own machines secure while using Tor, they still have some fundamental amount of protection.  And if they use Tor correctly, they get additional protection that the DC-net alone could not provide.

True.  But Blind signatures alone are not sufficient to implement reliably untraceable coinmixing.

In the solution with blind signatures, you still have someone listening to the packet traffic able to associate inputs and outputs with particular IP addresses - and therefore with each other.