http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com says its not just me

:-(

Oh dear, what has happened here ?

(Email sent asking, as well. )

Seems to have been down for an hour or so. Can someone please confirm?

http://www.bitstamp.net

Editr: Apparently is DDOS. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118751.0

Richy_T, thats certainly something to bear in mind. But am still stuck how to (chemically if possible as I do not have a robotic staming machine!) transfer the private key image to the metal.

Any further ideas welcome.

I have a question for you - and guess what, its bitcoin related!! Chemistry, I dont know, but you seem like a bit of a lateral thinker so here goes.

I'd like to manufacture a china mug, that like a casacus (can I even spell that!!) coin has a hidden private key inside it. I imagine that there would be a hollow botom in the mug and the key place in the compartment before it was fired. In this way it really is almost impossible to get at the key without obviously breaking the mug, or x-raying it which I assume is beyond a normal persons methods.

One technique is to "print" the key on to thin tungsten foil - such is available at reasonable cost, and this would not melt at the firing temperature of normal pottery. So you could use a stamp and stamp it on for example, you could do this by hand in theory. But this wont work because the process must be 100% error free - the only way you would find out a mistake had been made is when the mug is smashed and the private key does not work, (and you loose your bitcoins!!) so a better way to do this is needed. In practice, I need a way to photographically do this from a printout of the key from a normal printer. Some sort of UV sensative coating that I could contact print from, possibly develop, and then perhaps as a result of the firing or perhaps not would etch the metal so that it could reliably and certainly be read. Or can I glaze or enamel a tungsten foil photographiclly? What about a platinotype on a tungsten base? Too complex, methinks. (And expensive!!) Its got to be pretty certain to work, or capable of being checked for readability before insertion.

In truth I am dead-ended here and would welcome any further ideas from the OP or someone else. I want a bitcoin piggy bank, that truly has to be smashed to release its contents!! How cool would that be?

> potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide are interchangeable. They are both strong acids and

I think you meant alkalies!

Great news!!

I am assuming you can ship to London, Uk?

Please make that a yes!!

My address is below:

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Using low frequency AC and a 4 terminal resistance would work well, but there is an even better way to do this.

Use transformer with an airgap. (Operating around 50/60 Hz. Negligible skin effect at 50Hz.) A sheet of conducting metal inserted in the gap acts as shorted "turn" in the secondary of the transformer. The energy lost is detectable in the primary and is proprtional to the thickness of the metal and inversly so to its resistivity. So I believe that you could calibrate such an instrument in millimetres of gold and, well if it was actually mainly tungsten, then the reading would show as having a thickness of about one-fifth that observed in fact.

Certain assumptions need to be made about resistive and magnetic losses in the the core, the size of the airgap, the flux that does not go through the coin etc, but such an instrument could be made. It has to be designed correctly in short. And if it had an airgap 1cm by 1cm by 1cm this would allow its use on coins (there is a whole factory making fake tungsten gold coins in china, and has been for ten years so we have not seen the end of this!!) as well as 10oz bars. This seems to me much better than we previously discussed since it allows a measurement to be made without spiky contacts on your expensive polished gold bar, and it allows you to make a measurement even if you have not got a genuine bar to test against. You need a set of calipers and this instrument: thats all. In fact you can probably do it by eye anyway!! If your gold bar is 5mm thick and the instrument shows its thickness as 1mm, its tungsten!!

The most difficult part of the prototype is finding a suitable transformer type core that I can either hacksaw an airgap in. It needs to be laminated for low eddy-current loss at 50Hz.

So I'd like to ask the OP what it was that made him suspicious enough to risk cutting open a perfectly good bar? How did he know because I am not sure I would have been sure enough?

Next I would like to say that I am pretty sure that it would be quite a simple matter to measure the difference between filled and solid gold bars based on resistivity which would be a simple measurement to make in practice.

There are two key principles here - use a 4 terminal measuring device I would suggest that wooden or plastic block with contacts on the side and ends, could be used where the wooden block has an indentaion to match the exact size of gold bar. The principle of a 4 terminal resistance is that 2 terminals are used to inject a test current and 2 terminals used to read the voltage generated by this current. This cuts out completely voltage generated by poor contacts or leads.

Its not necessary to use a particularly large current - modern amplifiers are capable of accurately measuring very small offset voltages, and you are measuring a true differential voltage here that makes it a lot easier.

The last 'trick' which would add a little to the cost of what I have so far described a very simple cheap instrument, would be if it did in fact turn out to be too difficult to measure the offset voltage accurately due to offset noise in the amplifier. In this case you instead use an alternating current to perform the measurement and a synchronous decode to accurately measure the offset voltage. Such a decoder will reject all other frequencies including DC so that you only have the signal you want. I dont think this would be required, but it could be.

I can see that provided that you were happy to have an instrument that effectively only measured one size of gold bar, it would be very easy to devlop such an instrument. How could it be made more general purpose (to cater for many different sizes?). Not sure. To compare the same sized gold bar, its essential to have the contacts in the same place.

Indeed perhaps the hardest part (really) is that if I did this you'd have to loan me a few genuine bars to calibrate it! (As well as the fake!)

If there IS anyone who wants such an instrument I do actually have relevant experience to develop such a thing and am looking for work right now. Please PM me. It wont be cheap for a 1-off instrument, but it WILL work (I'd do a better feasibility study first. and it could save you a small fortune!! ) It would also be pretty interesting in that I have never heard of such an instrument but am pretty sure I could make one.

My list of honest traders:

salty001 on  aka salty

You know Goat, just stating the same thing over and over again is pretty boring and not going to get you anywhere.

When you brought these shares (after the fact so you say), there was a good chance that they would have been converted but there were plenty of reasons why that might not happen. If they had been, you would have made a killing. But it was never a dead certainty, so you must accept that there was always a chance this would not pan out. If you had had a bit more foresight, you might have asked additional questions - you might have realised that this would mean dilution of existing shareholders holding and you might have realised that it would require a board decision, not just the word of the ceo.

Its not a scam because it was never the intention to scam. Scam requires intention and it must be obvious that that is not what has happened here. This is the meaning of the word, and its not applicable here. You Goat, took a gamble, and lost. I think you would be lucky to get back what you paid for the scammy glbse stock, after all then you have your money back. (Well let me clarify, perhaps an equivalent to fiat since the value in fiat terms of the bitcoin may have changed since then.)

Probably Nefario was careless in what he said - what he might have said is I will take this to the board with the recommendation that they honour the scammy stock with intention of protecting the good name of GLBSE because it would surely be worth it to the board. But in fact the board have made a different value judgement. They could have agreed, in which case Goat and others would have been quids in!! But they didnt and they are not and its not at all unreasonable to suggest that Goat could have foreseen this as a possible outcome.

If you look at normal stocks and shares, price spikes caused by comments, sometimes careless are common place and you cannot claim afterwards that they should have the value they had during the spike - you brought - you lost out.

Goat keeps on stating the same simple minded statement again and again because he still sees an outside chance that he might profit enormously. But I think that he should be given no more than their original value back for the shares, possible less and that this should be a time-limited offer. (After that the offer is OFF!!) And I'd say no way does Nefario deserve a scammer tag.

If it were up to me. But, of course it is not.

> Questioner: When will I be able to fund/withdraw my GoldMoney Holding with bitcoins?
> Turk: Probably never.

You have to understand that Turk has worked hard for his legitimacy. Goldmoney can only be funded - in either direction - from a bank account that bears the name of the account holder. And in addition, to get a goldmoney account you must also pretty much prove your identity and address. This is quite the opposite of bitcoin. The government would not allow a service like goldmoney unless they knew exactly who was buying and selling and unless they also knew that it coul not be used for transferring funds between people. Actually you used to be able to do this with Goldmoney, but (if my understanding is correct) not any more. The same is true if you buy or sell large quantities of gold bullion. You must register for the privilege, or the transaction cannot happen. This is just how it is, and I am sure this is why Mr Turk says this. I am talking about the Uk government here, but governments are not so different in this regard.

I agree there has been a lack of press coverage, and online coverage, just as there was last year, and certainly this is an opportunity missed.  I could not go to all the talks and that's regrettable.

I was there and I can tell you, I felt the speakers were in the main awesome, I really enjoyed meeting and talking to people that I know online. It was a great experiance which will stay with me for a long time.

I was not at last years conference, and for a while I didn't get it. To experience it you need to come to it!! I also happen to belive that bitcoin conferences like this are a fairly transitory thing - the way things are going, in 5 years time bittcoin will be way too big to have this style of conference.

Having said that I think it would be a worthwhile aim for the next one if video cameras where set up, and that evening some minimal indexing and editing was done, and the aim was to have talks on line by next day - say within 6 hours of the end of the last talk, probably served from a specially set up server not at the hotel location. This would be a great thing to do in my opinion.


The comments about Bruce Wagner and earlier ones about Intersango I understand, but life goes on and Bitcoin is way bigger and more important than either of these two. I would, very much like to thank Amir Taaki and the other organisers for making this happen, overall I think they did a stunning job, and I am sure at times this was stressful. You know organising an international conference in your spare time is not such an easy thing.

For next year, I feel possible changes could be:
  * More online of the presentation.
  * More press and TV interface locally. No BBC report? Bah!!
  * The auctions were great fun, and I think this ought to be expanded. Its clear that a more professional approach to the auctioning would be useful, perhaps with pre registration, or at the very least your ticket comes with an auction registration number. I'd like to see this as a bigger item with more items for auction and more parties involved.
  * The stalls we had were great, but we need more of them and perhaps a separate room for "The Market" as it did interfere with talks going on in the same room.
     I think a lot could be done with the sale of bitcoin "novelties"

Once again I want to say Amir, thank you for doing this.

Is there really STILL no coin control options in this release? This is the major feature I have been waiting for for many many months and I am so disappointed that it seems to be not here ?

I will be there. Looking forward to meeting people.

Reading this makes me want to weep. Mtgox, Intersango, Bitcoinica, Bitfloor, I am aware of these before of course, but seeing this from a traders perspective is something new for me.

Nobody will use bitcoin if it always happens like this!!

I think its high time that some code was put in the public domain that will allow anyone to run an exchange with the security already taken care of.  As someone else said, allow the sunshine of public scrutiny to sanitize the code and perhaps there is a chance of avoiding the hacks! Perhaps we should also consider an injection of peer-to-peer which would (in my humble opinion) greatly improve the securioty both of the platform and of individual transfers.

Really we cannot keep recommending bitcoin to traders and recomending that they use exchanges that are not safe.

And with out exchanges that are safe and trusted, bitcoin cannot grow.

So we really need to focus on the exchange problem, because its a problem for everyone of us and needs to be solved, and evidence is that tomorrows whizzo exchange will have exactly the same issues as the old ones, unless this becomes the priority.

Gweedo,

 Yes I am aware that the design of the site is, well at the moment, nothing. I have concentrated on making the site work.

 So far as people sharing their address, what do you suggest? I could say, its 48 hours you have and thats it, but that seems a bit harsh.

 And after all, they could just share the file if that is their intention!

 Thank you for looking and for your comments.

 

This is to announce yumfiles.com.

The idea is to establish a market place for files to download of all sorts, and a mechanismn where the author gets the proceeds of the downloads. (Well the site takes 2% in fact.)

The site is in a very early stage just now, there is not much content and what there is is is cheap and really just for demonstration purposes.

I'd like to hear if you like it. or if you dont.

Please consider uploading to the site if you have something to sell.  Repayments back to people posting content will be at least weekly possibly more often at first.

No registration is needed to download, registration is required to upload, and I ask for an email address. Although at the moment no use of the email address is made. (It probably will be in the future.)

I am still puzzled. It took more than 24 hours. If I was paying for something with paypal on line I would NOT be happy. How could it take so long?

Yes, it was many small coins.  I had been testing a shopping cart and had done many small payments - I'd estimate at least 80 but maybe many more. I also checked the block involved. So far as I could see the current block at the time lasted a half hour but the previous one only 2 minutes. I thought that was odd. But then it wasnt in either!

So lets say the fee was too low. Lets say I designed a client where I could put the fee too low  - or always zero - is this what happens? Does the transaction alwaysd eventually get processed or does it sometimes just get left out?

And now, only now, its come through with 1 confirmation, 24 hours latter?

What was happening here ?

Is it coincidence that I posted this and then it got confirmed within minutes!!!

I tried a rescan and that produced no results. I looked with blockexplorer and the address and the transaction are there but marked as Unconfirmed.

So what next ?