Thanks. If it's not a scam, they have no business ethics whatsoever. Occam's Razor says..

Maybe we are misunderstanding eachother, but what do you think gets captured by a keylogger running on the *host* where you open a VM in a VM in a VM via a VNC session and you type in a TrueCrypt password, anywhere? Bonus points for guessing the same for what happens if you press PrtScr.


Security by self delusion is a new one Although, noooobody expects Self Delusion! We have two VMs.. no, we have three VMs! Wait, I'll come back in again. ... Chief amongst our surprises are such elements as TrueCrypt, VMs...


Security by underestimating your opponent is another good one.

I think for half a million an attacker will do push ups, run around the block every morning and wear double D in broad daylight, or alternatively pay 10k to a bunch of people who are quite prepared already.


A hall of mirrors is so Commodore 64 The object of security is not complexity, in fact the simpler you can make the more secure, because the less components can contain additional vulnerabilities. This happened: firewalls containing problems which made the machine less secure than without them. Virus scanners that kill your data due to false positives etc.


Yes, and in this case instead of complaining he would point out the murderer of the joke..

Where does it say that it was 0.01 last week? Client version 0.3.22 is dated 2011-06-08, so the fee was 0.0005 BTC last week. 0.3.21 is dated 2011-05-02, a month and a half old (no idea if that had 0.01 BTW).

Unless I'm missing something 0.0005 BTC equals 0.015 USD at $30/BTC, not 0.30 USD. That seems low enough already
With the current client and at the current price that drops 0.0019 USD (note the extra zero).

Do the small amounts consist of amounts like 9.11? If so then it might be a hacker laundering or botnet syphoning (see 25k hack thread) - the latter should cause a large number of new panic threads of course, unless everyone is sleeping/unaware.

If you factor in the more than likely possibility that the people behind the FRS will not stand for losing their money maker (hah, literally) and stomp hard on Bitcoin before it gets out of hand, then it is (logically if not technically) the perfect ponzi scheme. A corollary in that context would be that those cashing out at the right time deserved their payout, because the rest of the suckers didn't see it coming (and it took hard work building it up).

Anyway, don't get me wrong, I'm not calling it a ponzi scheme, the technology itself is certainly more than that and more power to the early adopter gazillionaires (unless they abuse it down the line, heh). I desperately hope this takes off and I'm proven utterly wrong.

Even a price increase might not attract new miners if for example suitable graphics cards are sold out. Another break in the trend could be once people start running into energy limits, or the price goes up to such an extent that FPGA mining becomes viable. Same for ASIC mining at some point.

If you really are who you are saying (company experienced with online currency), you should be aware of the rules (law) and business practices (common sense), such as not going live before you have this very necessary stuff in place. You can't claim a Google and slap a beta sticker on it. You are live, with real money. Does it even say anywhere you are 'trialing'? Have you told anyone? If you are truly serious about this you immediately stop trading until you have the proper licensing and notify all customers of this, with the option to withdraw all funds at no cost. Yeah, that sucks if you're legit. But that's the only way you will recover any kind of trust.


How about jgarzik's assertion that you offered coin for promotion? That's a violation of business ethics (bribery), which if it has got nothing to do with the country, then it has everything to do with you. Or was it another overzealous intern? Who is responsible for hiring? Who is responsible for hiring them? Come to think of it, what is your position within the company?


At this point we don't even know you are who you claim to be.


See above. If that is true your number one goal should be to not continue to appear like a scammer.


ROFL, nice reverse psychology there, you rip them off and now you are the poor victim and they are mean bad guys? You are already found out, (passive) agression only makes it worse.

Even if you are legit, I would never want to do business with you simply because you have failed miserably on due diligence and don't appear to care. And that for a business which must rely heavily on trust and should be eminently aware of this.

Ah, the French dude!

Funny guy too, sending 9.11 BTC I guess you can apply for that amount at least, though it's little consolation compared to the main sum.

I'm really curious now whether this eminently trackable thing is not just PR toward the man, or is this only supposed to be the case when you have their network sifting resources? If so then Bitcoin is anonymous if users are in trouble but transparent to centralized evil, which is the worst of both worlds.. On the other hand, that would be the best case scenario from a gov perspective, which might help convince them not to squash it. Hmm..

BTW, Twitter already caved in the super injunction case, so it shouldn't be too hard to get more info on that particular user. Although he's probably behind proxies etc. if he's any relation of LulzSec anyway.

LOL, IRS, brb?
I can see the Gawker headline: "First Bitcoin heartattack!" (maybe he got the test result?)

Anyway, useful info, thanks. For me it's still not clear though when you're trading on an exchange whether every single transaction is taxable, or only your eventual balance. (I'm kinda assuming the tax office will view this similar to trading on the stock market, so what are the rules there?)

Thanks for the links, I'll have a read this evening

He's got a point. You are advocating layering a lot of complexity on top of eachother, but none of that helps against a compromised machine. It will still happily grab all of your TrueCrypt passwords, your mouse movements, all the fractal windows you have open etc.

A VM is only useful for protecting the host from guests, not the other way around. Also, that may not be the case anymore either, as there have been exploits for detecting and getting out of a VM (exactly because people expect VMs to be safe).

The only way you can be secure is by using a separate, clean, minimal installation on different hardware from the daily use, net connected machine.

I don't think it would. If you look at how EU policy is under the US' thumb (various MPAA/RIAA/IFPI subsidiaries, ACTA, asymmetrical banking privacy, French 3 strikes, covert CIA prisons, EC vs. Parliament, people like Gates and Zuckerberg dictating at G8 etc.), there is very little chance bank accounts in the developed world would remain useful.

That means even if an exchange evades shutdown by being located in say Venezuela, the links to any major fiat currency will be cut. Paypal is out the window, Dwolla and similar will be leaned on to stop passing through etc.

Also, a lot of traffic goes through US controlled trunks, not to mention BGP black holes. If all else fails, operators can always receive offers they cannot refuse.

I LOLed when this said: "The last time he’d been this excited was when Windows came out."

That's just so wrong on so many levels. Does the Observer not care which version, or is Bruce rightfully assuming his target audience to be the average Joe who thinks IE6 is 'The Internet'? And if we look at the statement itself, if you were excited when Windows came out you were either mental (1.0), or working for Microsoft marketing (95). Or you are well aware of what Microsoft were/are doing and represent but you have no moral fiber and are trying to drive up prices with less than subtle Microsoft stock parallels.

I must admit I'm fairly new to all of this and Bruce seemed like an OK guy when I first saw his show (with Plato's cross country trip), but this and the ponzi talk he gave on the freedom radio show puts a big dent in that.

OK, lemme get this straight:

- complete unknowns
- cannot be bothered to post themselves (don't see how you can miss the 5 post/4 hour rule)
- offered a developer money to promote them (this should ring alarm bells)
- get (apparently random) newbies to promote them
- operate from Las Vegas/Bulgaria (who owns the casinos, anyone?)
- ripped off Tradehill (no morals, no trust)
- can't be bothered to have a valid SSL certificate
- offer double the referral rate compared to Tradehill (too good to be true)
- "1 BTC is $1USD not bad!" (WTF? definitely too good to be true)

This just screams scam. Obviously most effective when they wait until enough people have decided it isn't. Or possibly fed stomps on other exchanges.

Also, don't click on URL shortened links, especially in Bitcoin related fora.

Another one: do not click on any URL shortened link, that also goes for forum posts. It might almost immediately open a legit site, but go through an intermediate infectious redirect.

Spot on. I only think they will (try to) move in sooner. The most likely scenario is that news stories will keep coming, then probably in august/september when everyone goes back to work/school etc. Bitcoin will become hotter, the (illegal) businesses jumping on the bandwagon after the Silk Road publicity will come online and gov will have the excuse to accelerate things. Maybe 3 more months until exchange domain seizures start.

Exchange rate should be slightly increasing until then, probably with big ups and downs as people cash out, but I doubt it will hit $100 by the end of the month as some speculators predict, let alone $10k, ever. There is still some room to trade and make money, if you know when to cash out. Ironically the price has been stable for a few days now as probably many people are sitting on the fence, waiting to see what others will do. BTC however is still way overvalued compared to actual economy size, and only approaches speculative value if there will be more mainstream coverage to push prices up above $30-40, and I don't mean fringe libertation Youtube operators, or niche economy magazines.

Once the seizures happen price will bottom out below USD parity and stay there with some speculative zigzags that underscore the volatility.

All of this means no mainstream acceptance and Bitcoin will sink into oblivion, perhaps only saved by black market use. Ironically this will guarantee a lot more utility and stability, but sadly not for law abiding citizens, let alone any kind of antidote against the Fed. The idea might survive and resurface in a different implementation, hopefully without the bubble.

I don't know if all accounts trading with exchanges will be frozen though, maybe only some larger ones to serve as 'money laundering' scapegoats.

Of course the above is not financial advise, I'm not qualified to give it etc.

I'm also curious if its possible to have distributed exchanges, perhaps involving webs of trust (at some point there has to be some kind of way to transfer fiat currencies in and out, I very much doubt a suppressed market can sustain itself without exchange).

The SHA1 signature was posted here with the announcement. It's a good practice not to put the signature on the same page the download resides, since if one is compromised the other can easily be altered too. That's assuming the forum is hosted on a different machine of course.

And that ladies and gentlemen is what you get when you let 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica rear your kids

Additional security measure: don't click on URL shortened links, especially in Bitcoin related fora.

Change wallet addresses too, see 'allinvain's thread, he lost his balance too (you might not have enough credit on it worth bothering now, but maybe later). Assume your machine is trojaned. If you have the funds it would perhaps benefit the community if you could have the machine analyzed for the attack vector.