Is it just me or would you need getrawmempool as well? Otherwise you would only see txs after they get into a block?

I'll buy more based on news, not based on price.

They only need to back up their private key in several secure locations. In case of a failure for whatever reason, the private key can be released and everyone can move their own money to where they please. Not unfuckupable, I'll grant you that, but nothing is foolproof to the sufficiently talented fool. It is certainly a vast improvement. If the same thing where to happen today, my money would not only be lost., it would actually be under the control of whoever took over Mt Gox.

If this is indeed the case (and it may well be) then it is a seperate issue that needs to be addressed, irrespective of whether Gox uses multisig.


No, I don't. I can easily verify the javascript that is sent to my browser to confirm what will and will not be sent over the wire. Of course I wouldnt want too study the code evry time I want to make a payment, but as long as someone I trust has audited the code since the last version change, and I can reliably detect version changes in my browser, I don't have to. Not only should my private key not be sent in plaintext, it should not be sent at all. All that  is sent to Gox under this model is a half signed 2-of-2 multisig tx. Even if it was plaintext it should be useless to any snoopers.


I don't  have to trust Gox. They are in no position to take my funds (my BTC denominated funds that is, they can have a field day with my fiat). Nor is any hacker that manages to compromise their site in a position to swipe my funds. At the same time I have the ability to trade instantly without waiting for six confirmations, as I would have to do if I chose to keep my funds local and only send to Gox each time I want to trade. Most merchants will accept payments from such an address without waiting for confirmations, since Gox will not sign a double spending transaction. Lastly, my money is safe even if a key-logger is installed on my machine.

Thanks, but I was just kidding. The one time I forget to add the smiley face  .

I'm hoping that Mt Gox will convert all their yubikey protected bitcoin accounts to multisig sooner rather than later. The clients private key can be computed from a passphrase using javascript "brainwallet style". Gox will then provide the second signature using their green address. Therefore I can then leave all my coins in a Gox wallet and they will be

- Safe, even if gox is completely pwned by hackers (assuming my passphrase is not password123 or something equally stupid).
- Immediately available for trading at any point without waiting for confirmations.
- Immediately available for spending to a merchant, who will not wait for confirmations if they trust Gox.

Of course anyone can provide this service, but Gox is uniquely well placed to do this since they have allready distributed thousands of  yubikeys to their users. (This model does not really work if you don't have a yubikey or some other 2-factor authentication device, since an attacker can then get all the access they need to your account by just using a keylogger).

Under this model an attacker would either have to compromise my PC AND steal my yubikey or compromise my PC AND hack Mt Gox.

I know the idea is not new (this is what multisig is for after all) I'm just wondering whether there is any official communication from Gox with regards to a roadmap for something like this.

 

Took me a while to realise how cool this actually is. Not just for the additional convenience it provides to those allready using bitcoin, while the rest of the world is still stuck in the dark ages, but also for the vast number of new users that will come to hear of bitcoin for the first time because of this.

The card looks sufficiently unlike a run-of-the-mill mastercard, that you are likely to get a question about it if you are paying for lunch with it (especially if you first load it from your phone). If other bitcoiners are anything like me, that is all the excuse they need to ramble on about bitcoins and how awesome they are until the listener's ears are bleeding  .

Not only that, but someone learning about bitcoins in this context (i.e. seeing someone pay for something in the  real world using bitcoins) will be much less likely to form a snap decision that they are "play money" or ultimately worthless. This bias towards the physical is what makes Cascascius coins so popular and such a powerful marketing tool for bitcoin itself. But  the card is even better, because merchants everywhere accept it.

A significant fraction of those introduced to biitcoin in this way will be the merchants themselves and any merchant who digs a little deeper will soon realise that he could have save a bundle on card charges if he simply accepted the bitcoins directly.  So, once everyone has the cards, no-one will ever need to use them again. 

Go Charlie!

I thought the same thing, but then, I missed Windows 1 through 6, so I suppose anything  is possible.

+1s all around.  Most hilarious thread ever.

The whole pirate debacle has been incredibly divisive. People on both sides have doubled down and then doubled down again on their opinions. When this train smash eventually plays out fully, there will be a lot of people with a lot of egg on their faces. I'm guessing if you were a pirate "investor" and he defaults, you would get tired pretty quickly of team ponzi asking you what you will buy with all your coin "once pirate pays out". Similarly, if pirate does pay out (yeah right (see what I mean about doubling down? (damnit  ))), Team Ponzi might get tired pretty quickly of being sent the odd satoshi along with condescending encouragement to "invest it wisely".

Perhaps  we need to provide an alternate forum where those who are  proved wrong can go to keep talking bitcoin without being continually reminded of "the events".

I suspect wheresmycoins.org and icallponzi.org are  both still available?

jk

I won't be terribly surpised if waits a while longer and then starts making a few payouts just to see the effecct on the market. So many believe that BTCST paying out will crash the market that it is quite possible that the APPEARANCE of BTCST paying out will crash the market.  Of course pirate will be happily buying more iif this should happen.

Another option open to him is to wait until friday, by which time it will be widely accepted by all but the most deluded of his investors that he won't be paying out. Then buy back a large portion of his liabilities for a fraction of their worth (possibly using an alternate identity), and then pay out the rest. In which case he would not technically have defaulted.

I don't really think the second option will happen. But I am so dumbfounded by the large mass of supporters (some of whom claim to not be investors) who religously maintain he will pay out, even in the face of mounting evidence that he won't, that I am forced to try and come up with plausible scenarios where he doesn't default.

Am I missing some information here? I have admittedly not been following this saga closely from the beginning. Is there ANY case to be made for BTCST NOT being a ponzi (other than "You can't PROVE that he IS running a ponzi so stop with the baseless accusations?") If so, could someone please provide a link?

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/08/20/bitinstant-may-bridge-virtual-real-world-currencies-international-bitcoin-credit-card/

I'm guessing this is the mysterious september announcement.

1. The decline from ~$30 to $17, yes. The long slow slide referred to in the title of THIS thread, no.
2. Sure. Having THE BTC/USD exchange closed for trading for several days and realising that the security of the third party that you've been trusting with 10s of thousands of dollars is poor to say the least is not a change in fundamentals.
3. There's no definitive way to tell whether the sell-off was initiated by a single major player or a more organic event. So you've got me there, I was speculating, wrong sub-forum I guess, oh wait...
4. Well let's agree to disagree on this one. Time will tell. If Pirate pays all his customers in full and on time I will gladly admit my error. I trust you will do the same if he doesn't.

Last years crash was due to a change in fundamentals. Until such time as you can get paid in bitcoins and buy everything you need in your day-to-day life for bitcoins a secure and functioning exchange will be a critical part of the bitcoin ecosystem. Mt Gox lost the trust of the community in one fell swoop and had to gradually earn it back.

This years crash is due simply to a big player dumping bitcoins and (intentionally?) setting of a selling panic. There has been no negative news. There's a lot of uncertainty in the market as to how the BST drama will end this week, and how the ending will affect the market. But compared to the loss of the major exchange, this is just a blip. Lots of BST "investors" will be very disappointed this week and some of them will inevitably want to cash out of bitcoin as a result, but for the most part they will have no coins to sell. So I fail to see how even the worst case can approximate last year's drama.

Good point. Perhaps we should take it one step further and simply send donations in BTC whether the target officially accepts them or not. Good use case for coinapult. If I remember correctly they return unclaimed funds after 30 days. But it would be a good idea to synchronize so everyone who wants to support a given cause would do so at once,  providing a significant incentive for the receiver to claim the funds.

Perhaps we could do the same thing with online stores. If you want to buy something from them with bitcoins just send them the coins and a message explaining what item you would like and where it should be shipped etc. Of course you run the risk that they take the coins without shipping the item, but you would be in much the same position even if they officially accepted bitcoins.

Don't really want to get this further off topic, but I can't resist. What is the most likely attack location for a double spend according to you?

Keep in mind that any supplier not in meatspace will  have little qualms with making you wait. If not for a block, then at least for a minute or two. Unlike meatspace retailers, their other clients are not waiting in line behind you, so the 1 minute waiting time is not cumulative. If you take care to broadcast the tx to the best connected nodes and those with the most mining capacity and you surveil the network carefully for the next minute, the risk of a double spend succeeding dwindles to zero real quick.

I'm not sure that I understand your objection. The protocol would not enforce any ratio between the amount spent and the amount available. So what you describe is perfectly possible, and in that case the entire 100 BTC would get burnt (well, 50 BTC would go to a miner and 50 BTC would become unspendable forever).

Where some ratio might be enforced, is by the vendor. So if I pay for a 1BTC cold drink from a vending machine with an output worth 1BTC and I subsequently try to double spend, then the vendor loses his cash. BUT, if I pay from an output or outputs worth 10 BTC and get 9 BTC change, then the vendor can dispense the product, since any attempt by me to defraud them of the 1 BTC would result in me losing 9 BTC. Therefore rational behaviour by the vendor would be to accept both kinds of payments, but in the first case I will have to wait for one or two confirmations before getting my drink, In the second case I can get it immediately. If the reasoning about how much harm a thieving user would do to himself does not reassure you as vendor, you could always take out insurance on your receiving address. No sane person could offer such insurance in the current system, because you would see insurance fraud on a massive scale, with people executing double spends against themselves and claiming against their insurance.

I figure if Mutually assured destruction could keep two superpowers from war for 46 years, surely it can protect my 1 BTC from a double spend for 10 minutes.

I've been thinking about 0-confirmation txs and how accepting them can be made safer. I'm of the opinion that they are already safe (well safer than competing options) for most applications. If you are buying something from a bricks-and-mortar retailer and attempting a double spend shortly after leaving the paypoint, there is a real chance that you can still be apprehended. The longer you wait before sending the second tx, the smaller the chance of being caught gets, but the chance of a successful double spend also shrinks very rapidly. In addition, CCTV footage of the paypoint means that you can still be identified and blacklisted, even if your double spend attempt failed.

However, there are applications where a customer could attempt a double spend with essentially zero risk of negative consequences. It is these that are of real interest. One example is a bitcoin vending machine. The second tx can be sent as soon as the machine dispenses the product, and the machine cannot reasonably delay more than a few seconds after receiving the first tx. CCTV could also be trivially defeated in this case (masks, hoodies, or even just holding your hand  in front of your face). The chance of a successful double spend is  still low, but since the risk is almost non-existent, we can expect many double spend attempts and consequently, some successes.

My proposal hinges on the way that miners handle the case when they see multiple conflicting txs. Today, they are supposed to accept only the first tx seen, but this behaviour cannot be enforced. A profit-optimising miner would accept whichever version carries the largest tx fee and no-one would be able to prove that it wasn't following the rules. This allows for miner bribing double spend attacks, where a larger tx fee is offered in order to increase the odds of one version of a tx winning the race into a block.

Others have proposed earlier that miners should include BOTH of these txs in a special "double-spend alert" section of the block. The problem remains that we have no way of knowing which of the versions goes to the merchant and which is the back-to-self version. I'm suggesting that we can improve matters without knowing which is which. BOTH versions of the tx become invalid and the money is effectively destroyed. Therefore, the merchant doesn't get paid, but the cheating customer does not get his money back either. Importantly, both the paying output and the change 
is destroyed.

So, if I am a vending machine operator, I may "safely" accept instant txs for a value of X, conditional that the input(s) used to pay me add up to at least 10 X (or some other multiplier of my choice, the more paranoid I am the higher). Then I know that the cash I accepted can still be burnt after I dispensed the product, but the customer would also burn 9 times as much of his own money in the process. This seems pretty safe to me. If I was really paranoid, I could buy insurance against events like these. The premium would be incredibly small, because there is no possibility of defrauding the insurance company. The only way to claim X would be to burn 10 X. In a rational world that never happens. In the real world, it happens very rarely and with very small amounts.

An improved variation, would be to burn only half the money and award the other half to the miner who reported the double spend attempt. This incentivises miners to mine these, while eliminating the "bribe-a-miner" attack.

Then the only way for someone to safely execute a successful double spend is to not broadcast the second tx and mine the block containing it themselves. This radically reduces the number of potential  perpetrators (essentially only a pool-op has a non-negligible chance of doing this). If we wanted to close this theoretical loophole as well, we could allow a double spend report to occur, one or two blocks AFTER the first tx had allready made it into the chain). This complicates book-keeping, since the tx fee reward for the first block is now effectively less than what is stated in the block, but it is certainly possible.

I realise that it is probably too late for this to be used in bitcoin as it would require a hard fork of the blockchain. Might be useful for an alt-chain though. Or am I missing something?

Was thinking the same thing. The only  advantage that I  can think of is that in cases where the expected final transaction value is less than the prize that can be won, and therefore the mean number of winning "shares" is  less than 1, the blockchain impact (and therefore the tx cost) will be less. But the variance will also be more, and pools have taught us where the population stands on the variance-efficiency tradeoff  . So this will be niche at best.

Still a fascinating concept though. Would like to have access to something like the hash of block number X in the script language as a source of randomness. Feels like there would be all kinds of interesting applications beyond the obvious gambling stuff.

Some miners still include zero fee txs today because it is not a bottleneck in their processing. When it becomes one you can be assured that only txs with fees that cover the cost of processing will be included. Similarly you can expect miners to voluntarily sign txs for you today at no cost. But in an anonymous system where you have no power to punish a signer who reneges, the signature is not worth anything. And even if it was, it will go away when miners become CPU bound. That's the way of the world.

Nope. The network is working just fine. If you could make 0-confirmation transactions safe (and this proposal won't) that would add value, but bitcoin certainly won't lose value without it.