Thank you nelisky, that clears up the part that I wasn't understanding -- as long as my addresses get backed up, I won't lose any incoming Bitcoin sent to those addresses. So if the first 100 Bitcoin addresses are generated when the Bitcoin client is created, how do I know when more are generated, and thus need to make another backup of my wallet.dat?
Well, I haven't looked at the code yet, but from what was explained to me there's an initial pool of 100 and every time an address is taken out of that pool, a new one is inserted. So you don't have a simple way of knowing you used X% of the pool from last backup. You get a new address taken out every time you send coins, or you create an address manually, or you generate a block, so as long as you know approx how many of these actions you do in a certain period of time you can get a notion of the safe timespan between backups. |
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I understand the use case for external miners, but I rather like the all-in-one approach. Will I still be able to compile in my own mining code? I really enjoyed the revamped interface you introduced some time ago, and would very much like to keep on using it.
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Kudos to you for this. Two quick questions:
- Where are these issued, or more specifically, what charges will there be for using them outside the US$ realm, other than the exchange rate itself?
- What do we do to use the full credit, if for example I have $13 left and I want to buy a $14 piece of gum?
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If you're using the latest bitcoin client, nothing was lost as there's a pool of 100 addresses pre-created when you first started.
With the old client what would happen is:
- incoming 10 -> address X
- backup -> address X is safe
- outgoing 4 -> 10 out of address X, 4 to some external address, 6 into new address Y
- incoming 5 (I'm assuming to address X)
- crash
- recover address X which has 5 coins, address Y and its 6 coins lost.
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So, if I have accounts and I still use the old sendtoaddress, will it fail if the empty account does not have enough funds? Or will it use these first, but then still go for the rest of the wallet addresses?
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@brucewagner:
Yes, there are some services to collect and change BTC. But this is not the point.
The point is, that some members obviously earn bitcoins the easy way because of their high-end equipment
(as it is said in the bitcoin FAQs: Earn bitcoins by solving mathematical problems and building blocks.
Oh, you don't use the newest 8GHz-Hexacore-64GB-Fly-me-to-the-moon-PC-o-Minator?? Haha, owned!)
Well, how is using your tech skills to put your machine mining better, or spending $300 in a GPU not count as buying bitcoins? Sure, if you have these things/skills you have a leverage on the getting of bitcoins, but how is that different from taking that huge bag of cash and buying bitcoins? I don't have a bag of cash, so I feel that to be very unfair. No one should be allowed to buy bitcoins, at least not if they have more money than the average user? |
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For all of us Europeans, does anyone know if a wire transfer using IBAN + swift is possible without receiver name? Someone, myself maybe, could allow wire to bitcoins, and maybe even find a way to do wire to mtgox. PayPal (sucks) could be used to transfer to and from mtgox, I'm sure, if a single trusted entity is used instead of mtgox having to deal with chargebacks and such from multiple users.
If done at low volume it should not be a legal problem and it would serve to help getting users into bitcoin. I wouldn't see this growing to a full blown exchange service without the legalities being solved, though, so just a "bandaid" solution for the time being?
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On the other hand I found these virtual visa cards at the post office today - http://www.virtualvcard.com.au/If I purchased one of them I could just email the code to the other party to buy bitcoins . That would be a totally risk free way of transacting. That would be great, if you could use them without needing an AUS address... but it surely is one step forward in transfering money, as the buyer needs not receive any details from the seller and vice-versa. You will still be bound to the scrutiny of VISA, though, but I guess that is not a blocker. If only you could register a foreign county's address  You only need to look like you are in Australia. Hypothetically ..... use a vpn to tunnel into the site with an Australian IP. Do you think they would go to the trouble of tracking you down because you exchanged bitcoin ? Ill just leave this here... http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/*gasp* I know I'm not keeping up to date when I didn't even consider the possibility of that service existing in the first place... not that I would ever use it, of course  |
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With enough time and effort, you can turn any piece of data into any other piece or date... if you already know what result you want to get and you have a source, you need nothing else. So, unless I'm mistaken and motive can be assumed from medium (like all files in bittorrent at some stage where considered piracy) I think we're safe. As Shadow already mentioned, it's hard to prove the bitcoin network is there for the purpose of trading lady gaga movies, or any other type of imoral material |
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Ahm, and a backup of the block chain too as a printout. Oh, you'll have to get many more holding such a printout for confirmation... and print out the source code too, but I guess DVDs would be safe from a solar flare, so that might work too I guess you've never microwaved a DVD  Ok, assuming a radiation surge powerful enough to be compared to microwaving a dvd... we need to add to the equation making paper printouts of our DNA, because we will also need to be recovered from such backup :p |
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On the other hand I found these virtual visa cards at the post office today - http://www.virtualvcard.com.au/If I purchased one of them I could just email the code to the other party to buy bitcoins . That would be a totally risk free way of transacting. That would be great, if you could use them without needing an AUS address... but it surely is one step forward in transfering money, as the buyer needs not receive any details from the seller and vice-versa. You will still be bound to the scrutiny of VISA, though, but I guess that is not a blocker. If only you could register a foreign county's address |
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...Just toss all the bitcoins into one bag, randomize the receivers, and send random coins to random people (but with correct amounts) while making sure the coins of A (sender) don't go to B - use coins of somebody else. Surely if random coins are sent to random people, it doesn't matter if the coins of A might occasionally go to B. In fact it's more random that way. Given the huge address space involved, I don't think the fact that 'address may or may not be used' helps in confirming or negating anything. I do see an up point to NOT having the address used, though, it will simply not appear on a search for the history of the transactions, even if it appearing is always subject to plausible deniability. |
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Remember, during any transaction, regardless of the countries involved, you may be required to provide additional details regarding the purpose of any transaction, the source of the funds, and the relationship between the sender and the beneficiary. I guess we'll never find a way out of that... Where is that quote from? Sorry, too fast here http://www.xe.com/fx/faq.php#faq"Are there any restrictions on sending or receiving funds?" |
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So I guess the easiest way about this is to have multiple people sending transfers through a simpler proxy that makes sure txouts are always from a different compared to txin? A simple one address black list would do, which I assume is simple enough to implement... Then, if other addresses don't have enough the txout will just wait until there is.
The only downside I see is if volume is low, transfers may take a long time to be forwarded... the proxy could probably run on a fee based structure (1 coin for 100 transfers?) and the accumulated fees are there to mitigate this?
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Remember, during any transaction, regardless of the countries involved, you may be required to provide additional details regarding the purpose of any transaction, the source of the funds, and the relationship between the sender and the beneficiary. I guess we'll never find a way out of that... |
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It might be good to have printed backups in case a massive solar flare wiped out all the hard drives on earth!
Ahm, and a backup of the block chain too as a printout. Oh, you'll have to get many more holding such a printout for confirmation... and print out the source code too, but I guess DVDs would be safe from a solar flare, so that might work too |
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BTW, How does Bitcoin make sure that every generated address is unique ?
Is it just at random + seed, so there is a theoretical possibility of collision one in a billion billion times ?
Collision is theoretically possible but is astronomically unlikely. Remember that there are much more addresses than there are atoms in the universe. If two people were randomly choosing an atom in the universe, how likely do you think they are to choose the same atom ? The likelihood of that happening is directly proportional to the amount of damage that event would cause, according to good ol' Mr. Murphy |
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This step actually does the disconnection. I am assuming the send address, as values differ the addresses used for sending should be different from the ones used for receiving. Did I understand this wrong?
And yes, a user can carefully do this without a proxy, but we know how many will do that...
You can see him send the BTC to internal addresses. Someone looking at the block chain will see A send to Y, Y send to a few addresses, and all of those addresses send to the destination. You can only completely remove identities from transaction histories if you use someone else's coins: A sends to Y, and some other address sends to the destination using coins not gotten from A. Is this not the default behaviour? I mean, the multiple coin pockets (addresses) will not have the correct amount for the final transfer, and yes I am assuming multiple users so multiple coin owners will all get randomized. A waiting period will always exist as the internal transfers will also need at least one block to get confirmed. But I see now that this prevents the "one wallet per transfer"... maybe one wallet per day? Just span a new bitcoin every 24h with a brand new wallet, transfer any coins still in the old one there, rinse and repeat? |
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This prevents casual spying, but there would still be a connection between A and B. If an attacker was really serious about seeing where A was spending his coins, they would follow the transactions down to the the first known identity. If this is B, then they can force him to reveal who he received coins from at that address. They then either find A or find a closer person who they can question.
This simple mixing can be done without a third-party by creating some new addresses on your machine and doing the mixing yourself.
- Once enough is transfered, proxy sends to one or two new addresses internally, breaking the value in pieces with a little randomization along the way
This step actually does the disconnection. I am assuming the send address, as values differ the addresses used for sending should be different from the ones used for receiving. Did I understand this wrong? And yes, a user can carefully do this without a proxy, but we know how many will do that... |
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So the block explorer served one purpose above all others, showing what information is actually being stored. What if I want to make it harder to trace transactions back to me, by design? Mind you, I have nothing to hide. But that doesn't mean I don't *want* to stay stealthy, and it should be our option to do so, if only for the heck of it Ok, enough politics, not for the technical side of things; Transactions can be traced to addresses, sort of. It's hard to know which part in a transaction is a transfer, which part is change, and new addresses are always being created, but consider this: - A sends 100 coins to B - B sends 10 coins to C - C sends 1 coin to A looking at the block explorer, and assuming the wallet address that receives each transfer is the same that sends to the next hop (possible, as values are lower at each hop, thus unless there's a better match at the user's wallet, that one will be used, right?), A can see that the address used to send to B is the same C used to send to A, thus establishing a connection between B and C. That and a little googling may disclose the identities of the people involved, not to mention inbound address for C that B is using, thus (assuming C doesn't provide a different address to B each time) recurrent payments from B to C are now traceable. And if you know that C gave you that address to pay for something morally opposable, like lawyer's fees, you will then be able to know how many coins C is receiving for such a service. I know this scenario is kinda lame, sorry about that, but how can one avoid that without needing to do anything hard or complex? Someone had a service for hiding transfers by proxying, delaying them and shuffling values. I think this is the answer, if we take it to the next level. A stealth proxy for bitcoin that would work close to this: - A uses the proxy API to say "I want to send X to B". - A receives an address Y - A sends some value to Y, could be more, could be less multiple times - Once enough is transfered, proxy sends to one or two new addresses internally, breaking the value in pieces with a little randomization along the way - proxy sends X to B - proxy sends change to A --- and the tricky part - after enough confirmations on both to A and to B transfers are received, proxy deletes the addresses from the wallet If you add a 48h log rotation to /dev/null (the 48h are there to debug any real issue) and this should be completely untraceable. Another option to prevent tweaking the bitcoin client in to deleting addresses is to use a new wallet for each transaction and killing it afterwards. The hard part here is keeping a block db available to 100 bitcoin clients, but I'm sure we can think of something. Am I forgetting anything? |
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