I'm sure when he said "Ungodly Pervert" he meant me. 

And you know what?  I'm fine with that. 

Use the built in wallet encryption. 

When it prompts you for a password, type something more than 200 characters long which nobody else will *EVER* guess.  No quotes!  Use interesting and memorable juxtapositions that make no sense whatsoever.  Make up something fictitious and describe it verbosely in terms of three or four other fictitious things. 

DO NOT: use a password less than 60 characters long that you can remember.  If you can remember it, a cracker can hack it.

If your password is secure, you don't have to worry about storing that file anywhere, whether you change its name or not.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies bring forth a new phenomenon, and that phenomenon is that the blockchain embodies a sort of "Law" or at least a set of minimal regulations that we have generally agreed about what is and is not a valid transaction and how the ownership of money  changes.

We have thousands and thousands of computers auditing the transactions and histories, and basically, if anybody breaks the rules, we just reject that transaction and proceed as though it hadn't happened.  If a transaction is not consistent with known history, we treat the transaction as having never happened.  And if we are ever in doubt about history, we can browse the blockchain to see what is True (or at least what version of Truth is currently the accepted version on which future transactions may consistently be based).  And the history that the present is based on, or the "True" history, is therefore, perforce, composed entirely of transactions that obey the rules. 

That is a powerful idea.  I'm wondering, how far could it be pushed?  We agree to some notion of law and require that our software enforces/audits all transactions for conformance to that law, and we build a history based on a combined record of conformance to that laws.   The law we have essentially prohibits double spends and counterfeiting, so false statements that would enable those things are trivially disprovable given the blockchain.

Is there a set of rules some community could agree to and audit and enshrine in a blockchain that would more generally allow false financial statements to be checked and disproven in the same way that a cryptocurrency blockchain allows us to easily check and disprove double spends and counterfeiting? 

I mean, what if, say, Bernie Madoff hadn't been *ABLE* to get phony earnings records for his hedge funds past the automatic auditing to send out to his customers?  What if investors instantly know that there is something Dead Wrong if they receive such statements in a non-standard form that won't instantly self-verify against the blockchain?  What if the many cases of outright fraud in the runup to the housing bubble collapse had been flatly impossible, because the blockchain verifiers involved simply would not allow the false statements to propagate due to the fact that they were inconsistent with other statements known true? 

Cryptocurrencies are an intriguing new idea, and the methodology they use is more broadly applicable than we've been using it for so far, I think.  We've been aware that we're obsoleting banking.  But consider that we might also manage to obsolete the investigation of some kinds of criminal financial fraud by making those kinds of fraud impossible? 

The current situation drastically favors anyone who has the means already in place to exchange EUR/CY.

Good grief, if I had an effective wire transfer/conversion channel right now (which a lot of bankers do) I would be making money hand over fist.

Yes, but as far as I can see the coinjoin is still a separate transaction with separate fees. 

Joe Blow buys a sandwich.  Why would joe blow, or the sandwich shop, then also pay to do coinjoin transactions?

I got in early enough for two orders of magnitude, and they've come far faster than I ever expected.  Another two seems -- possible, but I doubt they will be nearly as fast.

Yes, that's all very nice. 

Have a really nice day today. 

I appreciate the thought here with coinjoin, but the fact remains that people need to actually use it, and then people need to actually pay (transaction fees) for it. 

Honestly, I don't think they will.  If the manager of a sandwich shop spends 1/10 of 1% of his receipts on coinjoin transactions, he's going to get fired.  If you ask naive user Joe whether he's willing to spend an extra fifty cents for some abstract thing like privacy on a legitimate $500 transaction, he's going to say no because he doesn't care enough in the immediate case. 

If you want privacy, then you need to fix the protocol so that *EVERY* transaction is a mix, and people *DON'T* have to pay extra for mixing.

My thought on this is that the clients need to prefer producing outputs in "standard" coin sizes (to separate output addresses) such as [1 | 2.5 | 5] * 10^N - for ALL outputs including change - and that whenever possible *both* sides of a transaction need to be providing inputs that add up to at least twice the amount of money that's actually required to change hands. 

'Coz honestly, it doesn't matter how good your coinjoin design is if people still have to pay tx fees to use it, because they won't.

Also, you know what I bet didn't make their damn list? 

Blankets. 

Blankets are awesome.  It's a damn shame we don't remember who invented them. 

Bzzzt. Wrong.   

There are two different ideas here:  "Market Price" and "Value."

Identical, perhaps in theory, but not in practice.  "Value" is some kind of equilibrium point that, in the long run, "Market Price" driven by rational traders ought to converge on, or fluctuate around.  It is mainly determined by whether something is useful, how many people need to use it, how much of it they need to use, and how much there is.

Bitcoin ties some of these qualities in knots because "how much there is" and "how much people need to use" can be downward- rescaled arbitrarily due to its near-infinite divisibility.  If there were only half a bitcoin in the entire universe, it would *STILL* be "enough".  That said, it cannot be upward-rescaled.  The 21-million coin limit is a hard limit, and in actual fact it's probably more like a 15-million coin limit by now due  to the number of keys that have been lost.  Oh, make it 14-million because Satoshi's not likely to spend his.  

Bitcoin is useful because it is needed for sending payments across the internet more effectively and with less hassle than any other method now known.  I'm going to skip a lot of other things because honestly doing them via banks is not problematic enough to require bitcoin as a solution.  

So ask yourself:  What fraction of the total money spent is sent via the internet using bitcoin daily?  That's the market (you can include other things if you think those things really have a pressing need for bitcoin as opposed to some other means of doing them).  Now ask yourself; how much money is spent in a day, total?  That's the scale.  

Rationally speaking,  (market * scale) = the value of all bitcoin in circulation.

But as we all know, traders are not rational.  If half of bitcoin is held by speculators who do not use it to trade, then it's not "in circulation" and so the "Market Price" will exceed the value by a factor of 2.  if 90% of the bitcoin is held by speculators who do not use it to trade, then it's not "in circulation", and the "Market Price" will exceed the value by a factor of 10.  And so on.  

Such an excess over and above the market price is speculative, and will eventually either collapse or be justified by changes in market and scale.  If a collapse goes too far and the "Market price" actually drops below the value, then people will not be able to get enough bitcoin to do the internet money transfers they want to do and will be forced to use less efficient protocols to do those transfers until a correction drives the "Market Price" up to meet the value again.

Now, at this moment, Bitcoin is used to do a very very TINY amount of actual internet money transfers (ie, the market is ridiculously small which would give a correspondingly tiny value to bitcoin)  but it is overwhelmingly held by speculators, which multiplies that tiny value into a large Market Price.

On top of this you have to speculate about future market and scale numbers in order to know whether the current price is expected to become the rational value at any point in the future.  The price is completely unjustified relative to todays market, but the speculators are all betting that the rational value at some point in the future exceeds the current price, and that's why they're holding it.  There is some danger that they will drive the price *above* its eventual equilibrium point, but I don't believe that has happened yet.


Cryddit

If you find this helpful, consider tipping me a millicoin:  1C7hWrfhyv31BZA13B16pTXCuWRM1uT6Ny

Don't be silly.  I didn't invest $400 per coin.  I invested $400 for many coins.   

Oh, don't worry, it'll go down. 

And it'll go up again.

 

And anybody who tells you they know exactly when and exactly how much, is a liar. 

It was a small investment when I made it.  It isn't a small investment any more.  

I'm expecting the current silliness to peak around $1000 and crash back to about $500.

Rather than preparing to sell, however, I'm just going to hold on, in the expectation that in a year or two there will be a higher peak, and by that time my preparations to cash out without owing taxes will be ready to go.  

It is stunning however, to watch something I picked up for $400 as a "whimsical long-shot entertaining" kind of investment having day-to-day swings the size of my house mortgage.  And you know what, it isn't a cheap house.  

Honestly, I figured it out the other day. 

There is no hard proof, of course.  And I'm not going to name names, because privacy.  But I'm confident that I know exactly who Satoshi is. 

And if I'm right, I admire the context in which his work took place almost as much as the work itself.  His devotion to family and future generations of humanity is the purest conceivable.  I'm completely serious when I say that he did not do this for the money.