I've received many of these dust transactions. they never finalize, they are a pain in the butt, ive always wondered what good does it do the person thats doing this? i know that multibit just kicks them out now, but still I hope they arent trying to find a security flaw or something..
There was one set of dust transactions that happened several months ago that was sent from addresses that were associated with addresses of known gambling sites. I would not discount the theory that the same rationale is behind a lot of these types of transactions. |
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Facebook actually owns instagram so any "market share" taken by instagram is still had by facebook. I believe the same is true for whsatsapp as well. |
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This will likely result (in the medium to long term) that we will see new advances in the crypto currency world, either in bitcoin or in some other alt coin or in the way that bitcoin is handled by users. Or potentially changes to the way that mining works (not the algo, but in terms of how miners are built and operate).
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TIL a huge number of cold storage coins held by bitcoiners will be lost forever on their death.
Not a huge number since most of the people giving "good" advice in this thread aren't holding more than a couple coins. Not a single person saying "Well, I printed my thingy onto a metal wallet and then I bought a safe." I think we're just securing a bit of money, not trying to trick Danny Ocean and his band of misfits. I printed mine out on multiple paper wallets. I didn't want to have the entire block of coins all on one address. The reason for this, in my mind, was that when I want to spend some, I wouldn't have to sweep the entire sum, then re-distribute once again. I have 3BTC here, 2BTC there, 1BTC there, there, there...you get the idea. It's a little more work, but if you're storing one somewhere, then why not store 5, or 6, or 12 paper wallets? I have multiple copies of each wallet, paper and digital, and I have the passphrase in my head, (plus encrypted on USB that my wife can figure out if need be). I've also left detailed directions for her on how to de-crypt the private key once she has the passphrase (including the link to my post where I freaked out when first trying to access the private key). If you used some kind of wallet service (either a web wallet or a software wallet) then the wallet would simply send the amount you do not spend to your change address, so you would still have access to the rest of your money. |
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Finally, what's the correct level of security that Bitcoin needs? A 51% attack would be detrimental, but it wouldn't mean the end of Bitcoin. There are ways to counter and mitigate it, and the worst that would happen is a suspension of transactions until the attack is resolved. So, what's to say that $10M of attack prevention isn't enough? Currently it would cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions, but is that really necessary? I'd be interested to see some analysis in that regard.
A 51% attack is not just a mining pool getting 51%. If some entity got 51% and mined secretly all past transactions could be wiped out from the block they started mining. It could mean weeks or months of transactions could be wiped out. If someone wiped out the last 6 months of Bitcoin transactions I think that would kill it. The cost analysis that I have seen calculated a price based on buying equipment from vendors. A 51% attack like this would mean the entity would make their own hardware. If they had control of places that manufacture chips that would make a big difference with the cost. I don't think it would happen but it is not completely out of the question. The key to this scenario is that they would need to activity attack the network by secretly mining and then reverse the past transactions (or perform some other attack). If they simply have 51% of the hashpower and do not launch an attack then nothing would happen. You give a good example of how it would be cheaper for someone to launch an attack, but you fail to mention the fact that if the attack was not launched then the would-be attacker could use their equipment to mine legitimately and earn a lot of bitcoin. |
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If you all did that... I would become the mining king with my Commodore 64. Greed is what keeps this from happening.
The difficulty of the network would still be the same. Any miner that you have would still produce the same amount of bitcoin regardless if other miners are mining or not until the difficulty resets. |
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it is very likely that your bitcoins were stolen because you logged into a fake localbitcoins site by accident and the site recorded your name and password.
Scammers pay for ads on google and when people type "localbitcoins" into google, the fake site is listed first because it is a paid ad. People click on the ad and log in because it looks just like the real site.
Lol really bro I've made 50 purchases on localbitcoins.. It was someone I used before got he coins then 10 minutes later they were withdrawn no password or anything weirdest thing ever I don't understand exactly what happened. You said that you purchased .8 BTC from someone on LBC, was it a face to face trade? If so then the seller would have had to release escrow for the bitcoin to be available in your account. You seem to imply that someone somehow withdrew bitcoin from your account. I do not see what the person you bought from has to do with anything if this was the case. I also do not see how you know the coins were withdrawn with no password. |
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it means you do not have any license to handle money. you know how you need a fishing/hunting/driving license? it works the same way with many other things. a license is just a registration or record of something that has been granted to you by someone. it doesnt really have anything to do with anything in some cases, but in this case they want to know who you are and want to make sure you are not scamming people, so they require a license. also there are many fraud/corruption charges and moving money around outside the law is punishable(something the majority of people agree on and that is why it is law).
so next time someone gets their panties up i a wad about something remember that the majority kept it that way, bitcoiners are not a majority thus need a loud voice. thankfulyl the U.S.A is a republic where even the smallest group(1 person) get a voice, althought it might not be as effective as a larger voice.
It is not so much "handling" money but is more sending money on behalf of other people. For example you do not need any kind of license to have $100,000 in cash in your home or business. However if you were to take some amount of money from a customer and agree to give that money to someone else then you would likely be considered a money transmitter. |
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I would worry less about the NSA hacking into your computer via radio waves and more about the potential for your computer to be actually stolen.
I would think that many people would likely assume that since a computer is not connected to the internet there is little/no risk of getting hacked so they would use a weak/no password. This would make their bitcoin vulnerable once physical access to the computer is established.
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I am going play devil's advocate and suggest Coinbase  While you do not have control over the private keys, it really is very newbie-friendly. The chances of Coinbase turning out to be a scam is a lot lower than a newbie making some kind of mistake and losing their coins I'm pretty sure that Coinbase is not a scam, so that is not a risk. Also, their deposits are insured against theft, so that is not a risk. However, there is a relatively high risk that Coinbase will go out out of business and you lose will your money. It's a start-up, and start-ups go bust all the time. There is also a relatively high risk that someone will steal your password and drain your account. It happens frequently, and their insurance doesn't cover it. Yes, all this is true. While new people hear the word "insurance" and think that everything is protected, it is Coinbase itself that is protected. The one way that most people lose their coins (a compromised log in), is the one thing that is not covered. Coinbase does offer many ways to protect your account (mainly 2FA) and warnings to users when their account is not employing a recommended level of security. They also offer a "vault" service that gives an additional level of security. |
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Just like bitcoin it's an interesting concept and experiment for sure. As I understand it anyone can use the software to set up their own sites so new ebay-like sites and also darknet sites will surely rise up. I really would love seeing a competitor to ebay arise, especially one that is free. Why wouldnt people use it?
The only issue I see is the complicated method of setting up shop so far. Your everyday "ebay seller" won't have a clue how to do this they barely can turn on a computer.... https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-beta-1-0-tutorial/Yeah that's a good point actually. I'll have to read a bit more into that. I'm sure like most technology it will get easier and simpler to use as time goes on. I know somebody who has an ebay business. They would love to not have the fees. I could easily see them using this tech. At the same time, ebay/paypal makes buyers feel safe. And ultimately buyers need a way to feel safe. If a buyer is buying drugs that they can't get elsewhere, yes an open bazaar is worth a try. But if somebody just wants to buy regular things, amazon and ebay offer much more consumer protection. Until this point is addressed very well, this kind of tech will have problems. I am an optimist and I do believe that it will eventually be addressed. Open Bazaar will offer notary, arbitration and reputation system using proof-of-burn. When everything will be geared up, I don't see why it will be any less secure than ebay/paypal. It would be less secure because the arbitrator could potentially be influenced by one of the parties. Or the arbitrator could actually be one of the parties. When you are dealing with a site like eBay, you know that arbitration will follow a certain set of rules (regardless if you agree with these rules or not) so if you have the right evidence and enough evidence to show you are in the right then you would know with reasonable certainty that eBay will side with you. |
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You could establish credit with the party you are dealing with if they feel that you have a good enough reputation. You should understand that your examples are really not people paying after the fact but rather, the bank paying the merchant right away and people paying back the bank later on. The reason why many people are willing to pay in advance is because the merchant they are dealing with is reputable and they trust they will deliver the product as promised.
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If you've been watching Bitstamp, you will notice the sale very periodic. Since its quite consistent, i suspect one of the farms.
Whats your opinion?
It may be from one of those big guys like DELL or Expedia. As these guys need to pay their vendors in USD, they'll dump regularly in bulk and this trend is gonna increase with more mainstream acceptance. They use a 3th part processor for the Bitcoin payments. They don't keep or directly deal with Bitcoins. But the dumps might very well come due to Dell's or Expedia's salles. But we will never know for sure. They still are essentially selling the bitcoin they receive as payment. Technically coinbase is selling the bitcoin on their behalf when they receive a payment, but the effect is still the same. I believe that the coinbase price is linked to bitstamp so it could well be a lot of coinbase customers receiving payments from bitcoin paying customers, although this would be speculation. |
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Is he arrested for selling bitcoin or because of his link to silkroad?
There are still a lot of btc sellers on localbitcoin. Some have been selling for more than a year and these sellers don't appear to be worry.
Because he not only knows BTCKing are using Bitcoin for laundering money, but also Charlie Shrem supports BTCking to do it and help him to do laundering. Well they probably went after him just because of the link to Silk Road, but they do occasionally go after Local Bitcoin sellers too. Been a few sting operations on there I believe. The LBC sellers that have been charged with crimes were told that the bitcoin being purchased was going to be used for illegal activity. The government is saying in Shrem's case that he knew the bitcoin was going to be used on SR. |
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With due respect to Mike, the human element is what ultimately makes bitcoin resilient. No matter what current problems exist, there is a huge body of people with incentives & knowhow to keep bitcoin going. Real world example: March 2013 chain fork recovery. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawikiTheoretical example: If the core SHA256 hashing algorithm is compromised, software cannot automatically recover from that. It will be humans who decide the best course of action for the network to take. It will be other humans who evaluate that judgement, and agree (by downloading & using new software) or disagree. But while we figure it out, the entire system is offline and what does the economy do in the meantime? If the software protocol (rule set) is broken or not working effectively enough then you need to stop all connections and implement a change. Bitcoin is a set of rules that connects clients together to make magic happen because all the clients know what to do and they do it all by the rules that are set up. You may have a little thing that needs to be fixed that is in the wrapper. You have to stop everyone's connection (shut down the network) put in your little fix (give everyone worldwide a new copy of the fix) and then restart everyone. If the change is small and you tested it well for every outcome then we all march along happily ever after. What if the change is big? What if the base set of rules that make your release work needs to be changed because it was broken from the start? Your little test net group most likely won't be big enough to discover every problem and everyone around the world will be running a broken Bitcoin. What the economy will do in meantime is sit static waiting for the fix. There will be issues that can't be corrected because it's to late the damage is done (think Mt Gox - malleability). But what are the draw backs of not fixing the problem, not taking the risk? Then you end up with an even bigger problem because your are shutting down an even larger economy that can have even more damage done and even more lost money. There is no logical choice other than to fix the problems now and that's not really a good choice it's just the only thing you can do. That's the problem with letting this little experiment get so large before you fix big issues. As a dev when you work at a big company then you benefit from a group of sometimes thousands of computer scientists and software engineers working on the same problems. We have a test-net and a handful of volunteer and paid professional and semiprofessional programmers some working only part time. They have done a great job so far making sure that things stay running and fixed but they have a working disadvantage. Bitcoin has been balancing on the edge of sword since it's release. You need a lot of users to drum up interest in development and you need a lot of developers before you have a lot of users spend money. I was just trying to point out that any suspension of service would be catastrophic for the economy. If bitcoin is used by everyone and no one can do any purchase while developers fix and deploy a new version, we would be back to the stone age. The user I was replying to didn't seem to realize that software that must run 99.999999999% of the time must be treated very differently. Bitcoin has a long road ahead but hopefully it can grow slowly just like the internet did. It is not actually possible to "turn off" or "disable" the bitcoin software. That is not a feature of bitcoin. The closest thing to this that could happen is to recommend that users not spend any of their bitcoin. This did happen somewhat when Gox announced that they were suspending withdrawals due to malleability as other exchanges followed, however mining still very much continued and people that had bitcoin in wallets they controlled personally still were able to and did spent their bitcoin. |
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At 20:30 i send money from my localbitcoins wallet to my silkroad wallet but still no money inside. 3 hours passed what is going on?
This is really not a good idea. Generally speaking your identity can be linked to your LBC account. Since SR is generally associated with illegal activity, your identity could potentially be linked to illegal activity. Have you checked blockchain.info to see if the BTC was sent to the address? You can use blockchain.info/address/(your address) replacing (your address) with the address the bitcoin was suppose to be sent to. This would allow you to figure out if the issue is with LBC or with SR. |
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HAHA fail. I remember there being an eBay auction of some girl selling something and when she took the picture of her item you could see her naked reflection. Her auctions ended up being very successful and sold for thousands of dollars (what she was selling wasn't worth more then $50 IIRC). Nude reflections are a part of that entrepreneurial spirit that make this country great. I think it was actually an accident, well at least it was claimed to be an accident but who knows. I personally don't quite understand why people would bid on these kinds of items so much, yea people would likely want to visit her auction more, but you don't need to bid just because you looked at the pictures of what is being sold. It's a tip that doesn't cost you anything...unless you're the one holding the bag at auction end. It is going to cost someone a lot of money, and there is no good reason for the price of the auction to be that high. |
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What if you are in a signature campaing tho? they remove you from the campaing if you don't use the same address every month, and you have to put it publicly in your bitcointalk profile. Is there any risk into any of this?
I have absolutely no interest in encouraging the excessive spam in this forum by legitimizing the ridiculous signature campaigns. The fact that they require you to re-use bitcoin addresses is evidence enough for me that they are not well thought out and are poorly managed. What about mining on eligius? Or mining on a pool that allows you to lock the payout address (BTC guild is one example of this). If your account at the pool gets hacked and your payout address is locked then you would not be able to suffer any losses. I agree that signature campaigns do somewhat add to the level of spam on this forum, but I think it would still be here otherwise. I would argue the same principle would apply if someone's forum account were to get hacked that was enrolled in a signature campaign, their earnings would not be stolen by the hacker. Both of these examples would give disincentives for people to try to hack forum accounts (and pool accounts). |
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I would like transaction times of below one second. That would be very powerful. And I would like to have the coins stored safely on the block chain without me having to do cold storage myself or having to trust a third party storing the coins for me. And I would like to have zero transaction fees for all transactions. The price/performance of information technology is improving exponentially and having to pay for transactions feels like the old fiat systems.
I agree with all the points mentioned above. In any case, time is the key to measure success. The problem: people today are generally impatient. The transaction times are already only a few seconds if a TX has an appropriate fee attached. It will not confirm in seconds, but it will be safe to assume that it will confirm within a few blocks. Coins that you have in cold storage are stored in the blockchain. Cold storage is a form of additional security, if you want to keep your bitcoin safe then you need to use it. There is zero way around this. The TX fees are very low as of now. At most it will cost ~$0.05 to send a TX, but often you can send a TX for free. With that being said the TX fees are what gives the miners incentives to mine over time, as eventually the block subsidy will go to zero. |
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I predict old school muggings will make a comeback in localbitcoin transactions. Or a more likely scenario would be more sophisticated malware through apps if our phones start becoming wallets (which is already a trend being set).
There have been a good number of attempted robberies on LBC. There have been a number of reports of people trying to trick them into giving the release code for the funds to be released. We could also certainly see an increase of robberies at BTC ATMs by people trying to steal the private key receipt from bitcoin buyers. |
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