And because I'm more cautious, I'll buy at $7 and sell at $38, and maybe someone more cautious still... until...

To answer the posters point, if I felt bitcoin were more stable, I would exchange ALL of my remaining USD to BTC and demand my grocer accept bitcoins or attempt to take my business elsewhere.

How does that actually work? Is the first ASK matched against the first BID in a FIFO queue, or averaged and settled, or what's the algorithm for an enormous queue batch process? Is 'fair' an NP-complete problem?

Your suggestion is just adding a simple variation to the hashing algorithm which may prevent an attacker from using an off-the-shelf rainbow table as long as it is a unique idea. If no one knows this is your technique then it is an effective security-through-obscurity measure but if the attacker does know of this technique then an attack table can be compiled even before or while compromising the password list. And what advantage do you have over a salt? saving 10 bytes on disk per user. Sure use a hash of the username as well. I don't think it'll hurt.

This is similar to including a secret into the hash, which is compiled into code (not the password file/database). It's a fine example of security-through-obscurity as it increases the difficult or required attack vectors, but not particularly robust.

Yes, we can add more decimals, but we already have eight. One might guess Satoshi was aiming precisely for a $21 trillion (short count) market cap.

21 000 000 . 000 000 00 potential total number of bitcoins

21 000 000 000 000 . 00 number of microbitcoins ($1/microbitcoin parity) for a total of 21 trillion in circulation, with two decimal micro-cents.

Suppose a small nation or colony decided to accept bitcoins to pay taxes and as a means to pay debt. Would that have positive or negative implications for the goals of the bitcoin community. And what would it take for bitcoin to be ready for this position if such a nation were shopping for a new currency?

I am not immediately inclined to equate bitcoins to diamonds, but bitcoins unlike securities, banknotes and most other goods, can be directly traded in a digital market. The digital market is the medium, just as vegetables are directly traded in the physical environment of a farmers market. In that sense, I don't see any different between exchanging cash for carrots or exchanging USD for bitcoins, making bitcoins seem like a commodity.

But since bitcoins don't have any other use than as a store of value, means of trade, they are certainly not a commodity.

I am not Muslim, yet I think this is a wonderful idea. If the rest of the world followed the advice of the good book, we wouldn't be facing financial collapse.

I think simply holding the coins and letting users withdraw to other addresses is quite useful. People don't seem to be able to secure their coins on their own machines. Mybitcoin.com already does this, but more competition is good.

Clearcoin is shutting down indefinitely. I understand it was fairly popular and was a good source of donations. I think you could provide escrow services as well.

Rather than TrueCrypt or LUKS partitions, just symmetrically encrypt your wallet.dat file.

$ gpg -ca wallet.dat

which will produce wallet.dat.asc . Just delete your wallet.dat after use (not the -.asc). You'll need to periodically create a new symmetrically encrypted version before each 100th transaction and back it up.

This is certainly true, but the salt/nonce can also be thrown out. Known as strengthening or stretching. Now both the server and attacker need to do extra work, just that the server at the time of authentication has much more information, namely the plaintext password.

+1

I think this is a great idea. Indeed I've suggested it myself several times, here and in the github threads. I like the idea of having minimal sized keys (none of the transaction history) in the wallet. Further, the wallet should 'optionally' cycle through the pre-generated keys. A user should be able to have a wallet with a single key. In fact, I would prefer a wallet as simply a directory (or plain text file) containing individual keys.

In my own use case, I create new wallets often. Deterministic wallets would simplify my backup use cases and make me a lot less paranoid. As it is, I feel the wallet is far too much of a black box. Predictability will go a long way to help bitcoins gain traction.

My first run crashed. I don't recall whether the net was connected, but assume it was.

Bitcoins (Satoshis) are integers, so unless all client implementations agree (not to fork and) to floating point (or rather retro-integer expansion), the 'division' is a bit shift: 50 * 01000 .. 00100 .. 00010 .. 00001 .. 00000


I'm not an economist, but it seems to me, many people are confusing the terms inflation and money supply. While one is a function of the other, it is the function itself and its management that the different schools argue about.

The bitcoin money supply is inflating (infinitely on the first day) and less than 50% today. However the number of participants is also inflating, but at a faster rate. Thus on balance the number of bitcoins that can be obtained in exchange for most goods and currencies are deflating and will continue to do so as long as the number of participants increases. But unlike a ponzi/pyramid scheme, new participants are not paying earlier participants, only increasingly demanding a relatively decreasing supply.

There are 6.6 Mbtc today and about 3 Mbtc more next year. So, roughly 35% this year, 25% next, and (after 1.5 Mbtc per year), less than 10%, until the money supply inflation is negligible (back of napkin math).

While eventually we may want a stable currency, deflation is a necessary bootstrap. If bitcoins were stable, few would buy today in expectation for the future. And few of us would have heard about bitcoins if it inflated even a basis point per year. It is *ONLY* because I think that bitcoins will be very useful in the future that I'm willing to bet on it today.

People who think the early miners have an unfair advantage seem not to have considered whether anyone would purchase the coins today if it were not deflationary. Bitcoins are no more a ponzi/pyramid scheme than any other great but risky idea or service whose price increases with popularity, such as concert tickets or the dating game. Any limited resource with expanding demand will deflate. We may not like the House of Saud, but our ideologies have not reduced our consumption of deflationary oil. Is carbon trading a pyramid scheme?

You realize that 'cent' is already an SI prefix (in this case suffix). Whether bitcent or centibitcoin, it's just a term and it means 1/100th. I expect no semi-computer literate human would have trouble with milli-, micro-, nanobitcoins. In a given year, we'll probably only use one or two terms. I expect people can learn - it's money after all.

I expect slang to drop the 'bit' and personally expect we'll soon be exchanging picocoins (nano is so last decade!).
 

I'm surprised there are not a lot more mybitcoin.com competitors already. I will not help my grandmother secure her local wallet, but I can make her an account and give her a really clever password.

On a log graph, even with the viruses, pump-and-dump, heist and Mt. Gox, and all you nah-sayers, week over week, the price is on a pretty consistent exponential trajectory: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?m=mtgoxUSD&v=1&t=S&l=1&r=60 Assuming no major catastrophes, I expect we'll hit $30 on schedule, mid July, and $50 in August.

That's not a bad idea. I'll offer one gram of kitten for each bitcoin.

I wish I ran into this thread earlier, but none the less, dacoinminster, I'm happy you've shared your thoughts with us. Your use of the decimal component to set the bid position is simple and clever.

Maybe you'd consider updating the Wikipedia. If true, that is a very interesting fact missing from the discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar#Conviction

Receiving coins to a previously used address will not (significantly) alter your wallet.dat (no new address/keys are generated nor need to be backed up).

When you send coins, one or more addresses will be drained of all of their address/keys and the remainder will be returned to a new address in your wallet.dat (at least one new address/key will be generated).

At any point you have 100 more keys in your current wallet.dat beyond the latest address displayed in the GUI.

--

Question: Is there any single user action that will return to more than one address or in some other way generate more than one key?

(I have assuming that if I have numerous addresses containing a small number of BTC each and I send a moderate number of BTC, then the total remainder will be returned to a single address in my wallet.dat)

Yeah, people are quick to jump on him. We can speculate about his motives about any number of imagined facts.

I am curious about the distribution of Linux, what services were running, how many users, type of networking (wifi?), how often the system is updated, and (since I assume the password has been changed) what the password of the victims account was.

You may be correct about the withdrawl amount (if pulled out before the immediate upward rebound, which would require fancy clicking). However, the $17.50 price is subject to the global market price when the opening bell rings irrespective of Mt. Gox time-freeze. All orders have been cleared, that means Mt. Gox is an entirely new market that just happens to have a bunch of accounts and currencies in it (we should hope).