So, how does that protect you from a bugged package? Or one with an ATM style liquid paint bomb in it? Do you have a garage nearby the mailbox with scanning equipment and an underground railway escape route and a place where you can hide out for a couple of weeks until the paint wears off?  And you can never go back, they can sweep the neighbourhood for who suddenly didn't go to work for a couple of weeks. Which one from all the mobile patterns in the neighbourhood suddenly went AWOL etc. If they want you badly enough, you cannot hide. |
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I feel that all the talk of how bitcoin is for some higher-nerd class are proving correct. I'm not the average dumbass windows user, and I have used truecrypt for a couple of years before coming across btc. . .but damn man. It feels like I have to make a choice between using a cool awesome currency like btc (and being secure) and HAVING A LIFE
I hear ya. I had to choose between awk fu mastery and women (no, I didn't choose awk ). But to answer your question, you can have both, if the upcoming wallet encryption is implemented correctly. I.e. at all times only encrypted data is written to storage, whenever the client needs a key, it reads only the pair you need from the wallet and decrypts in memory. If you sleep your system, the memory is cleared and you will have to retype your wallet pass again. If you make transactions, your wallet is loaded, decrypted, transactions are written to the memory image which gets encrypted, written to disk and deleted from memory. The client must not allow the OS to page its memory. That still doesn't help against deleting your wallet if you don't have a backup of course, but at least you can only blame yourself. |
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The schiffradio podcast has a download link under "Today's Show". It's 56k mp3 but for speech that's fine. The CNBC video is pretty good, it's fairly balanced (most use/trading in UK, huh?) and sounded positive overall. The other CNBC piece has a gem too, Gavin saying: "the nature of dealing with money is that you will deal with thieves." - out of context it sounds kinda subversive too |
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I like how they call Bitcoin a fiat currency |
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More sock puppets? According to the charts b7 hasn't done more than 1 BTC every day since they went live. Or their API for this is broken too They already had CSS history, CSRF, I wonder when they'll be SQL injected too. |
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Yeah that's smart, going to some website to check your password LOL. You can bet your ass some people will have referrers pointing back to here and the site will connect the dots, find the password file, tie hash to entered pass, look up email address in file, hack mail and fish for balance when Mt.Gox comes back.
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My back of a napkin calc says it's currently worth <$0.80 when you look at the size of the economy using it, my gut says $4 as an investment point for the potential, until very close to zero when the evil mammoths start stomping on it, unless they fail and it could go to several thousand $ in a couple of years (alternatively the $ could devalue to that level), and possibly several million if/when it replaces all other currency. In other words, this is a useless poll, and this isn't financial advice.  |
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BTW, a good defense against Silk Road arguments would be to highlight that the majority of cash has traces of cocaine on it. Although I'm not sure they aren't working on that as we speak with Quantitative Easing..
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I'm pretty sure any number of entertainment industry piracy statistics will spring from this: "Schumer to congress: Proof that 693 million people use Silk Road! If we kill Bitcoin we have won the war on drugs!"
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That means Alice will get isolated and go very hungry after a while. ...except that (granting your very extreme example) Alice could choose at any time to end her self-imposed blacklist, and no one is the worse for wear. Exactly. It seems you agree it's pointless, because it's unworkable. Arguing against letting the client keep and update a blacklist for you is like arguing against letting the client compute hashes for you rather than getting out a pencil and paper and doing it yourself. Noone is stopping anyone from implementing this. If you do it separate from the client/network though the only thing you can do is send the coins back, which will taint your own address as well. If you include it in the client, you must make network changes which open up the network to both technical and social attacks. If anyone is truly serious about this, they can always fork the code and the chain. Good luck. |
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Look. Answer me a question. If I had solid proof, say photographs from a balcony of Hitler using a Bitcoin address to pay for trains to transfer Jews. Would you blacklist that address? *facepalm* What is this, bad science fiction? Argument fail, anyone disagreeing with you automatically invokes Godwin's Law. |
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Functionality would have to be added to the client so that the transaction would never happen. It would be proactive, not reactive. I would never accept the Bitcoins in the first place.
I honestly don't know if this is technically feasible, but I think it's a fine idea. IIUC, right now to transfer to an address you simply sign the transfer with your own private key and send the transaction to miners to be included in the blockchain. Your public key is used to verify you sent the transaction. The recipient has no say in any of this, the address has the coins whether it likes it or not (and will see the new balance on the next update). If you want to prevent this you have to change the whole protocol by including two way communication where the recipient or a centralized db is queried (really bad idea technically too), or some kind of delay mechanism where every transaction has to wait for approval from the recipient (again really bad idea), or the blockchain includes an a priori chain of blacklisted recipient/sender address pairs. The latter is technically feasible, but is also a new avenue for attack. If someone wants to bring down the network all they do is create a bazillion wallets and generate blacklists against another bazillion sender addresses. All of that will bloat the blockchain beyond usability. Unless you also create a blacklist against such abuse. Which would demand incontrovertible proof in each instance ROFL. |
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Damn dude. Just wow. Can't be proven... LoL. What he means is this: Mathematics prove cryptographic integrity. Nothing can prove human integrity. |
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I'm suggesting everyone carry a gun to protect themselves and others from assault.
You are saying that I'm asking for a police force with authority that the average citizen doesn't have.
I'm only suggesting people police themselves. What is so scary about that? Bad analogies and statistics. Look at murder rates of the US (the NRA^H^H^H constition says, guns for everyone, yay! (not really, but that's another discussion)) and say Europe. BTW, in every conflict between citizens and government, citizenry lost against an army equipped with tanks, planes, the lot (think 1956 Hungary, 1968 Czechoslovakia, 1995 Bosnia just to name a few), unless that army had against it the terrain, covert superpower support and total lack of scruples (Afghanistan guerilla warfare, using their own citizens as cover). |
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No, this would be voluntary to each individual. No central control. If you are convinced the coins were stolen, you can blacklist them to avoid transactions that involve them. The point is that as soon as you put it in the client it becomes a vulnerability that may be exploited by central control. Masses will voluntarily accept such central control with enough propaganda/marketing. Obviously no one would blacklist coins without solid proof. That is naive. I'm sure a lot of people will happily blacklist any amount of coins because their congressman is photogenic or free coupons at Starbucks etc. Yes, it would open the door to abuse by reporting other people's coins. Again, it would require hard evidence to convince me to black list an address. Maybe you, but plenty of others will happily believe the moon is made of cheese. What if "we must freeze Pakistan's coins because they harbour terrorists"? I'm pretty sure a lot of people would do that. Put Iran on the list. Put some geezer in a rival company to the congressman's daughter's on the list too, noone will know. This is absolutely rife for abuse because you are exchanging cryptographic strength for trust in third parties with possibly limitless budgets for propaganda (OK, I *do* believe the moon landings happened, but you get what I mean. Something like that is seen as ironclad evidence by most, but could actually easily be faked today). Don't think of this as an individual choice here, because masses are comprised of individuals, and masses are stupid. Coins would not be lost this way, after enough time, there would be new users that don't blacklist those coins and they would be clean to trade. You cannot predict how blacklists would be handled. If automated, they could become permanent, hereditary etc. (because you know like, we wouldn't want Hitler's grandkids getting grandpa's army building stash, you know..) You could also blacklist coins that are linked to known "bad guys" around the world. Bad example time: Say Hitler used Bitcoin to build his army. When he buys some munitions (or whatever else) somewhere and his Bitcoin address is leaked, the people of the world could freeze his funds. Terrible terrible idea. See above about every country and ethnic group that doesn't like eachother. This just opens up the door for perpetuating all the political, religious and ethnic feuding misery of every conflict in the world. Bitcoin must remain untainted by this. Also, people could refuse to do business with known companies or individual that they disagree with. Same as above. What if Alice has strong principles and blacklists every coin coming from Monsanto, Halliburton, BP, Microsoft, Oracle, Goldman Sachs etc. etc. (totaling say 1 million BTC). If cousin Bob (net worth 1 BTC) ever receives payments linking back to any of these, the amount which Bob can transfer to Alice decreases by that amount. If 5% of the economy is tainted by these companies every year, after a few years Bob cannot transact with Alice at all. And that's only if only Alice, voluntarily, blacklists on her end. Supposedly everyone is connected to everyone else in at most 6 steps on average. That means Alice will get isolated and go very hungry after a while. You are completely disregarding the network effects here, this idea has just not been thought through. |
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But for the sake of brevity, the way I phrased it was: No one I know has used Silk Road. With a side dish of hyperbole: "It's blatantly misleading to imply that ANYONE uses Bitcoin for such things." - that's like a substance abuser in denial It's obvious that at least a few people have done this, otherwise the whole thing wouldn't exist. Unless it's something like an HBGary false flag operation of course, but I doubt it (even if it is, this kind of thing is bound to happen sooner or later). 0.0000000001% would equal around 0.01 dollarcent total BTW (@15 USD/BTC). The fact that people use it, is irrelevant to the fact that no one I know has ever told me they've used Silk Road. Actually, it makes it irrelevant what you think about the number of people having used it, since if you have talked to many many people, then either many many people is much smaller than a significant enough sample, or it isn't but noone is admitting to having used Silk Road. This boils down to defending your earlier position, instead of validating it. |
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I did some research into the claims made by that article. If you read the actual text of the act, it only outlaws the trading of commodities on margin by unlicensed brokers. That's a far cry from the headline's claim. This won't affect most of us, it seems, and it certainly won't affect the gold and silver bugs with their vaults full of precious metals. It does basically prohibit trading for the average Joe. You need to take an exam and have a net worth of over $1 million (excluding primary residence) or make $200k a year. Someone very astutely commented: "the modern control matrix of prohibiting something is to leave it technically legal, thereby diffusing anti-tyranny opposition, but bury the actual activity in so many regulations, fees, and licenses, as to make it virtually impossible for a person of average means, knowledge, motivation, and connections, to conduct it with any level of enjoyment, profit margin, or benefits." |
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Popcorn eaters can choke on those salty seeds!! OMG OMG OMG THAT IS SO 10000% INACCURATE!!! Corn seeds are not salty!! I imagined Bruce running around with his hair on fire while typing  Moderation is necessary, you can't contradict media hype and inaccuracy with your own, they'll see right through it anyway. You can't bullshit a bullshitter. Playing on people's greed with the price angle is a terrible way to promote Bitcoin because you are pulling in the wrong people before the market is ready. Even if you are only interested in driving the price up to whatever level you have set for yourself, the market is simply not liquid enough yet for the sharks and amateurs who will walk away quickly giving it a bad name. We need users without profit motives and businesses who can rely on them, without the daily dose of fear regarding the worth of their business. |
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