No, I did it using the "deseed" command line option. BUT I have just tried it using the 'restore from mpk' way and it has the same result: I can still see the private keys. I'm using version 1.9 which I believe is the latest?


ETA: could someone just check if their electrum does the same thing? ie. use a seedless wallet, go to the receiving tab, right-click an address. Is there a menu option there to display the private key? Does it in fact do so? Can you verify that is the right private key for that address? For me it's 'yes' to all three questions. Am I right in thinking that this would be a serious flaw if it's replicated?

Huh, still up.

In all cases I ran "electrum -w <walletname> deseed" from a terminal window (ubuntu)

I have no idea how the 'master public key' works.

ETA: and just to be clear, I realise that that command leaves the original wallet untouched and creates a new file <walletname>.seedless - it's the latter file that's displaying the behaviour I'm talking about.

I'm going to bed now. It's bedtime where I'm at. The lack of any posts for twelve hours... unnerves me. Somebody please explain how I'm an idiot by the time I wake up.

Either this is a serious security issue or I've been badly misunderstanding what a 'seedless' wallet really is all this time.

In all my seedless wallets, I can right-click an address in the 'receiving' tab, select the 'Private key' menu option, and... it tells me the private key for that address, in wallet import format. Should it really be able to do that? I thought 'seedless' meant the same thing as 'watching only' which meant 'you can't spend from any of these addresses with this wallet because it doesn't have any of the private keys'?

Yes, provided you hadn't imported any other private keys that weren't generated from the seed. Also, just the seed wouldn't give you any labels you'd made for addresses, or record any addresses that you'd frozen or prioritised.



No, no and neither, as long as you have the key.


No idea about this. You'd want to be careful about malware on your machine, e.g. keyloggers.

Any curve looks linear if you take a small enough part of it (well, not EVERY curve, but all the curves normal people [non-mathematicians] are interested in). That doesn't mean it's useful to pretend its linear. Indeed your very question, 'when will the process END', involves looking at the behaviour of the entire curve, not just a small 'almost linear' portion of it.

Perhaps you are not still in high school, but if you don't understand these ideas you should probably go back.

Anyway, just read DannyHamilton's link. The answer is 2140, give or take a year.

I think you mean "dead drunk", though I like your way better.

Use the binomial expansion: Let x=2^256, then p=[(1-1/x)^x]^(2^576) ~= (1/e)^(2^576). ~= 1/(10^173). So yeah, pretty close!

I don't have an "oh shit" price. Quite the contrary, the lower it goes the more urgently I'll try to find some spare GBP to buy more BTC.

What I do have is a (very mild) "oh shit" worry about the soundness of the bitcoin protocol. My confidence in Bitcoin is entirely based on what I've understood about the protocol (the mining, the validation, the consensus mechanism, the blockchain etc etc). If a fatal weakness gets discovered tomorrow I just hope I can cash out in time. Then again I've been following this for over two years now and every time I learn a bit more about the guts of Bitcoin, I'm more impressed.

IOW if I see the price is $50 tomorrow I'll hunt around and try to find out WHY. If it turns out someone's found a way to double-spend, or broken ecdsa, or the last twenty blocks in a row have all had a Merkle root spelling "LOLFAG" in ASCII, I'll sell toot sweet. If it's because MtGox has closed shop or someone's run off with online wallet funds or China's assassinated Gavin Andresen, I'll take advantage of the panic and buy, buy, buy.

I'm also very interested in this question. ISTM the best thing to do would be to keep the ability to recognise old wallet seeds and generate old style address blocks indefinitely. Presumably it's just a short python module that can be retained without significantly bloating the code?

Link: http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/4-reasons-bitcoin-hoarders-are-screwed/

I read Cracked for the lolz, not in the expectation of accurate reporting or wise counsel. So I'm not too incensed by the article. But it is rather lazy.

Point #4 (working backwards like they do) is irrelevant to anyone with half a brain. I'm very happy to brag, fate be damned, that no one is EVER going to steal my bitcoins. It's NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. But yeah, if you don't know what you're doing (hmm I'll keep 'em all on MtGox  ) you'd better not hoard any.

Point #3 has of course been done to death over the years. It's ghash NOW but it was Deepbit a long time ago, then BTC Guild, then ASICminer, then BTC Guild again, now it's kind of ghash and BTC guild combined. And they all know it's in their interests not to get 51% (or if they temporarily do, not to do mean things to the network with it)

Point #2 - well, yeah. So what?

Point #1 - it's as anonymous as you're willing to learn how to make it, just like, re #4, It's as safe as you're willing to learn how to make it. And this actually ties in to point #2. If you really consider paying taxes as the worst thing in the world, you have the means to evade them if you take your security and anonymity seriously. For myself, I'll be happy to use all the tried and tested methods that fall under the term 'avoidance' (legal yay!) rather than 'evasion' (legal boo!). In particular, I'll spend BTC rather than fiat whenever it is possible (and I have no more fiat left), and when it isn't, I'll convert BTC to fiat in as small quantities as possible. Not likely to go over CGT allowance there I reckon.

Unfortunately "Einstein's laws of the universe" work precisely the other way round. Bump something up to near lightspeed for however long you like, then bring it back, it'll only have run SLOWER than if you'd left it on Earth.

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

I suppose Bitcoin could be included in the game as a technological advance, or perhaps a 'world wonder', that conferred some kind of economic benefit.

... yeah. Thought so.

...and feeding them to thin people, thus solving two problems at once!

I've added my row to bigtimespaghetti's sheet. Thanks for doing this!

I actually got all my chips refunded, but have had no board refunds. As with most people here I would be prepared to come to some <100% arrangement with Steve if only he'd speak the hell up.

He invented a cryptocurrency - in fact the first of its kind. You might have heard of it. Also, the point I was making, which you seemed not to grasp, is that his wealth IS IN THAT CRYPTOCURRENCY. So he doesn't actually have a huge amount of wealth unless Bitcoins are valuable. And if they are valuable, that answers your question of what he has contributed. Do keep up.

Hello Mosper, when are you going to pay back your defaulted loans on BTCJam? You ran off with 27 bitcoins, remember?

Bitcoin either has value or it doesn't. If he hasn't contributed anything, he hasn't made millions. But he has, so he has.

So:

Does anyone here still use BTCJam?

How is it working out for you these days?

When someone defaults and you get an 'arbitration award' via email... does anything actually happen after that?

I ask because I finally gave up on BTCJam in September 2013. I have 16 'Arbitration Award Case' pdfs on my hard drive now from the times of April to September. And only one of those ended up repaying me. The others... well, maybe the awards 'were passed on to the authorities' but what fucking good is that?

I suppose I'll also ask for form's sake, not because I expect an acceptable answer: Tulkas, all those defaults from before April 2013... what are you DOING about them?