I just don't get it.... why people are getting into legal trouble with Bitcoin. How can they say you need a Money transmitter license for Bitcoin? What is the difference between Bitcoin and Swagbucks or XBox points? To me it's just a digital product with no need for Government regulation at all.
While bitcoins may or may not be considered a currency, Bitcoin[//b] certainly is not a currency, or not only a currency: it is a computer program, an accounting system, p2p network, a protocol, a public ledger of digitally signed transactions, decentralized time-stamping service, etc.
Keeping this in mind will help you think and argue more clearly.
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That makes sense. Miners are issuers of a currency.
If someone finds a dollar bill on the sidewalk, are they issuers of currency? No. They are 'discoverers' of the unit of currency. If a miner discovers a number that unlocks 25 of the 21M existing bitcoins, are they an issuer of currency? Magic 8 ball says 'reply hazy - ask again'. There is room in the definitions to argue with FinCEN's interpretation. Not that I can afford enough lawyerly badassery to get the job done, but it seems to me there is an argument to be made. These are all good points. Everyone should try and come up with as many interpretations as possible, then carefuly consider consequenes of each. Be careful what you wish for. Share your thoughts with others - these are critical moments for Bitcoin, as legal precedents are being set. |
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I would be more comfortable xoring than concatenating multiple inputs.
Your better off concatenating and then hashing the concatenation to the needed size. XORing is not a good idea. To see why, consider which of these is safer (where | is concatenation). 1) XOR(SHA256(X), SHA256(X)) 2) SHA256(X | X) The former is zero no matter what X is. The latter is safe so long as X is safe. Now, consider this. X and Y are fairly random but, due to a broken PRNG, only differ in a few bits. Which is safer: 1) XOR(X, Y) 2) SHA256(X | Y) The former can be insecure even if both X and Y are secure alone because all the common bits drop out. 2 is at least as strong as the stronger of X alone or Y alone. I was referring to seeded random generators f(xor(A,B)) versus f(A|B). With an ideal function, it shouldn't matter. With a broken one, it might matter. |
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Back to the autofocusing (non)issue. The last few updates presumably include the autofocus fixes, however - my Note was still not able to focus. Then I went to the settings and turned the continuous autofocusing off - and voilą! - the continous autofocus works, and my Note can scan small, close-up QR codes!
I just love the European absurdist sense of humor. Now I can laugh on my way to the coffee shop, and finally start using Mycelium to pay there.
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I may have missed it, but how exactly is this grand plan supposed to work? Funds are stuck at gox. You cannot withdraw USD. You want to withdraw Yen. To sell coins for Yen, you need to find somebody to buy them, paying Yen. Who would that be?
Hes not using USD nor is he from the US, and you can just wire the Yen SWIFT from your Japanese bank account directly to Bitstamp where it will be converted at nearly spot market rate into USD for trading into bitcoins at a 20% profit. Then transfer bitcoins to gox, sell, and repeat.Really simple actually. Right, so you need to sell BTC for Yen at gox. How would that work with the current market depth? |
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I would feel much better if bitcoin wallets generated new addresses using the following method:
SHA256(something_from_SecureRandom + some_user_supplied_constant + some_incrementing_counter + current_system_time/tickcount)
My first thought about this idea was: No, an app dev should not concern himself with crypto primitives. The underlying rng used should already do that (combine different sources). Best practice is to leave implementation of primitives to experts and crowd-scrutiny. Obviously this best practice failed. Seeing that combination of different sources doesn't remove any entropy (this is the case, right?), I changed my mind. I would be more comfortable xoring than concatenating multiple inputs. |
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In the August statement, they hinted to have suffered "significant losses" due to immediately crediting accounts with pending wire deposits. Perhaps this really is significant. Perhaps they got scammed out of months worth of profits. Add to this Dwolla and other frozen funds, legal fees, and regular expenses.
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I may have missed it, but how exactly is this grand plan supposed to work? Funds are stuck at gox. You cannot withdraw USD. You want to withdraw Yen. To sell coins for Yen, you need to find somebody to buy them, paying Yen. Who would that be?
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   I find it very funny how a group of anarchists, social rebels, free thinkers, sovereigns, and libertarians keep asking what laws they are breaking using bitcoins. That's a fucking crackup if I ever had a laugh. Thanks everyone! If you are so scared of the law, and so concerned about societal rules, you probably should get out of the game altogether. Bitcoin is the real deal, and it's the very dedicated to the overthrow of the bankers that have the spiritual staying power to fuck this beast till he hurts so bad he goes crying home to mama, like the banker bitch scum he is. If you are not one of those hardcore dedicated to overthrown of fascism, then go on home, your Mommas calling you.  If Bitcoin succeeds more and further than where we are today, mining (payment processing, that is) will become your new banking bitch scum. Off-chain processing can come, too. You will be busy finding ways to silence cognitive dissonance, likely by spending your coins. |
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So, does this only affect Android wallets (Private Keys) generated by the Android wallet apps, or would my BTC address which I already had and then added to the blockchain wallet app also be affected? I hope not, cause I like keeping the same address for Public use, and then moving the BTC into my private addresses, never revealing public keys or addresses.
It only affects addresses/keys that are generated on Android. This is incorrect. The problem also affects imported keys if they were ever used to send funds from an android client. |
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To "make money" you have to be able to cash it out, don't you?
It depends what money you want to cash out. If it's BTC, no problem. If it's any other currency, no problem - except the USD. Not true, I am waiting on EUR, GBP, PLN, and JPY transfers for weeks now. Are there any U.S. banks involved in your withdrawals? |
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To "make money" you have to be able to cash it out, don't you?
It depends what money you want to cash out. If it's BTC, no problem. If it's any other currency, no problem - except the USD. |
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The market making mechanism is to build a reserve and deal with short term supply and demand volatility, for long term change in supply and demand, those delay at banking will not affect dealer too much
I'm not talking about supply/demand volatility. I'm talking about supply/demand imbalance within a particular country. Some countries will be net importers of Bitcoin. Some countries will be exporters. Fiat (or some commodity money or good I suppose) will have to be used to settle up the difference. This. Traditional banking and exchange channels would still be required. The only way to put them to rest and let bitcoin be all it can be is to nurture and grow bitcoin economy, where coins are directly used for goods, services, and salaries. A global currency. |
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dismantle a smoke detector
Or a bowl of brazil nuts Formerly known as ... the hero of? Quit generating randomness, and get back to the topic. I read in the news that Google has acknowledged the problem, and recommends developers use dev/(u)rand. Good luck patching Android with third parties between Google and your phone. |
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% arbitrage between gox and bitstamp is proportional to percieved % odds of mtgox defaulting
What is the constant in that proportionality? |
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Well why on earth would anyone new get into Bitcoin? The value prop is disappearing. The mining goldrush is ending. There is, however, still strong reasons to get involved in bitcoin as a value store, and method of value transfer. If mining disappears, so will the bitcoins...It will take forever to confirm even the smallest transaction. So if you plan to store value in bitcoins you better start mining. That's not how it works. The difficullty adjusts. It will always take an average of 10 minutes to confirm a transaction, as long as there is at least one CPU hashing somewhere. |
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when it comes to taxes, it just a matter of the taxman interpreting it however they want in their favor so you get tax the max
In Canada, the tax bureaucrats from the CRA corrected my tax return to save me a couple of grand. Few years later, they did it again. |
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Did anyone ever get clarification on whether being a miner in the USA requires registration?
The fincen guidance from march 18th says:
' A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter. By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.'
I'm an LTC miner, and i convert LTC to BTC and I'm thinking of selling that BTC for USD thru campbx.
If I do that, I'm thinking I'm a user of the currency, and the exchange (campbx) is the money transmitter.
I'm not selling them to another person, I'm using an exchange to convert BTC to USD.
What do you guys think?
Most of exchanges simply match your offer to buy or sell coins to another individual's offer to sell or buy coins. They facilitate the trade between the two of you. They don't buy and they don't sell coins. |
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Makes no sense. How can you treat a barter exchange as income? If $600 worth of sex between two individuals took place, that logic leads to a total of $1,200 dollars taxed. What happens in case of a threesome, or an orgy? One orgy.
By the same token, if I am selling potatoes for US dollars, those dollars are my taxable income, but so are the buyer's potatoes. Does the buyer pay income tax on the value of potatoes? It's an exchange.
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@casascius: do you know about this page: http://www.random.org/bytes/ ? that could also be a source, which could replace the mouse-moving-timestamp thing because it comes from an external source. Sure, though I have every reason to believe their bytes are truly random, for security purposes, I don't. When I generate keys, the machine doesn't have internet access anyway, so I suppose it's just an alternative (sub)string to paste as a response to the "keyboard mash" if I want to copy it in with a flash drive etc. You should make your own hardware for pulling random data for your coins. Something like a geiger counter near a radiation source. Now that would be truly the best source for truly random data. (Unless if you distrust the laws of physics ) You may be missing the point here. There is more than enough entropy available in a phone or a PC. The problem is with human errors when coding and otherwise implementing the RNG. In this case, lazy Google employees who copy-pasted broken Apache code without reviewing it, and didn't even bother fixing it or rewriting the documentation when some of the flaws were made public half a year ago. Building your own hardware, by yourself, will likely lead to more errors. |
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