You could always use BitSimple.com rather than take a risk with a noob buyer.

I am pretty sure all major miners (pools and solo miners) ensure they are well connected to other miners.  It doesn't really matter if non-mining nodes delay blocks a few seconds.  No miner is going to delay building off a block which extends the longest chain as it would only negatively affect their revenue.

Of course even that overstates the scenario in the OP which is a "inuse key".  Given the size of the key space in the highly improbable event of a collision it is very likely between two unfunded addresses created by the same mass creating entity.

No.

The problem is there is no central agency of weights and measures for Bitcoin.  So lets say some people adopt your provision and some don't.  You would see people saying "selling my steam game for one million Bitcoins" and other people being utterly confused as to why someone would be willing to pay close to $1B USD for a video game.  You can't force everyone to use your (or any) naming system, so any naming system which attempts to revalue a Bitcoin is dead before the author finished writing it.

Maybe even one as successful as MF Global.

The 88,267 is accounts which still have a balance with MtGox.  Someone who created an account, got verified, deposited funds, traded them, and withdrew them from the site would not show up in the list.

Did anyone actually read the article?

Companies can submit "applications" despite there being no application process, requirements, or standards and they will be bound by rules which haven't even been written yet but may be written sometime around the end of the 2nd quarter.

In related news I am sure your local car dealership would be glad to sell you a car which doesn't exist yet with features and price to be determined next year.

Because bitcoind "accounts" system doesn't scale beyond a couple hundred users.  If your system relies on it, well that will be an exciting day when you realize you have a complete recode in front of you.  You will notice performance issues at around a thousand accounts or ten thousand transactions.  RPC calls involving accounts will start to takes hundreds and then thousands of milliseconds. 

Roll a bunch of dice?  Flip a bunch of coins?  It may not be particularly useful for random wallets where a new random private value is needed for each private key however it would be fairly easy to do for a deterministic wallet.

I got this email today and here is how it shows up in gmail


One thing to look for is this

what this is saying is the email was sent indicating it was sent from btc-e.com however it actually came from smtp.com.  Now that this isn't that uncommon many sites move their email off their domain however there is a way of authenticating these off email domains and it wasn't done.

So any time you see a "via" in gmail be wary.  There is a high chance it is a phishing attempt.  It could be an uneducated operator or some misconfiguration but your phishing radar should be going off when you see a redirected email.

Looking at the source

A couple of things in here.  The first is that the sent from and reply to emails are simply lines of text.  There is absolutely no security.  You can send email with a from email address of obama@whitehouse.com as easily as you can type the letters.  So never rely on those.

This show where the email actually originated from

now as I said before it isn't that uncommon for email to originate off domain however this is the warning sign

In simple terms it is saying btc-e has not approved the originating server to send email on its behalf.  Google should really make these types of "soft" failures more pronounced with scary warnings but they don't.

Lastly the actual originator is a commercial service.  They provided this information in the header

If your email client gives you the option to report as phishing (not just report as spam) be sure to do so.  Most will forward this back to in this case to abuse@smtp.com.
You can also manually forward it to abuse@smtp.com and report it is phishing.

The only issue would be if this phrase is from a book or movie (potentially even one you are unaware of).  That is why systems like diceware exist to create a truly random sequence of words.

Although brute force capabilities have come a long way, passwords consisting of 10 digits (all keyboard symbols) are beyond the brute force (see below before you complain) capabilities of most entities and 12 digits would be beyond the capabilities of nation states in most situations (i.e. no nation is going to expend a year of super computing time at a cost of $500B in order to break your facebook password ).   If your a significant threat to a nation state and they would be willing to expend billions of dollars to attack you well you should probably push that out to 15 digits.  For those who prefer dicewords that would be 5, 6, and 8 dicewords respectively.

However that assumes the attacker is just doing a pure brute force attack of all possible passwords.  The reality is that beyond 9 digits it starts taking an increasingly incredible amount of time for each additional digits.  So password crackers are going to try a variety of methods which are often much faster (even on much longer passwords).

1) Check the hash against databases of known compromised passwords (you can find on various sites lists of 15M+ previously leaked and broken passwords).  If your passphrase is on that list your toast.  Even some hobbyist with a single CPU can break it in a matter of minutes.

2) Check the hash against phrases from movies, books, memes, pop culture (no doubt Satoshi's genesis block quote is insecure).

3) Check the hash against a dictionary (possibly foreign languages as well).

4) A modified version of #3 is to take the same dictionary and perform derivations (which is why Troub@dor1 is a lot weaker than it may initially seem).

So having a long passphrase is good but it isn't a guarantee that the password is strong (unless it is random).  To ensure it is strong it needs to not be breakable by the four methods above as well.  I noticed in your example you wrote "Tooast" not "Toast".  If that was intentionally then congratulations it ensured it probably isn't going to match any phrase search.

Exactly. Reindexing on a 3Ghz machine with 1GB of RAM and a 5400 RPM drive is going to be slower than reindexing on a 2 Ghz machine with 8 GM of RAM and a fast SDD.  A good CPU helps some especially on the more recent blocks (which are larger, and have more txs to validate) but someone looking for the best bang for their buck when upgrading a system should look at getting a good SSD.

Company A would be issuing prepaid access (formerly called stored value) which is regulated activity in most states.

You have been scammed.   Sorry but no sense in getting your hopes up.  Coinabul has a long history of ripping people off.  The CTR is limited to cash (i.e. the real physical currency of the US or foreign nation) and virtual currencies don't meet the requirement, hell even a bank wire in dollars doesn't meet the requirement.  Unless you paid them with a stack of US federal reserve note there is no need for a CTR.   Still that is beside the point, even if a CTR was required it doesn't require any sort of delay not even a single minute.  You have been scammed.

If you look at the parent tx they aren't some long mined unmoved coins.  Someone create a bunch of 50 BTC outputs.  I can only think of one reason and that would be to freak people (who can't follow the blockchain) out.

I have no problem with someone convincing a rich person that Bitcoin is useful to them.  I think it is utterly silly for people (who I imagine are not millionaires) deciding they need to help a millionaire like Bitcoin by giving him free money.  To each his own.

Yes sent money to a millionaire in the hopes that it will convince him to let you donate more money to his foundation which relies on donations?

Hell 0.1 BTC could have bought a lot of meals for homeless people but if you want to give money to the 1% to convince them to use Bitcoin well I guess that is your right.

Good logic, but you have a math error I believe.  The network is 30 PH/s which is 30*10^15.  Simple trick is to just count the metric prefixes (each one is a factor of 1000).  So kilohash, megahash, gigahash, terrahash, petahash is 1,2,3,4,5 so 1000^5. The time required with the assumptions you have would be  359,676,102,360,200 years.  If we assume a network one trillion times more powerful it would still be 360 years.  

However even that is unlikely.  A couple points to consider:
1) The network can't do anything but compute hashes but if we assume it could be repurposed to brute force EDSA keys it would take more computing cycles to perform one ECC attempt than it does to perform one SHA-2 hash.  It would be something on the order of 80x as long (although that is some crude estimate on my hardware).  So 30 PH/s wouldn't be 30 PK/s but maybe 1 PK/s (peta keys attempted per second) but his is minor compared to #2 below.

2) The security of ECDSA is 128 bit if the PubKey is known.  If it the PubKey is unknown the only fastest attack is to attempt a preimage of the PubKeyHash.  That has a complexity of 2^160 which is 2^32 larger or ~ 4 billion.  Even if you could break a known PubKey in one year it would take 4 billion years to break the hash of an unknown pubkey.

Keys with 128 bit security are infeasible to break by brute force using classical computing.  However this doesn't mean that they can't be broken by cryptanalysis or quantum computing (which "go around" the problem rather than try to beat it by the pure expenditure of computing power).

Someone that foolish is also likely to use "p@sswordZ1234 as their password instead.  See the @ and the "Z" give it strength.  Even "Horse Cart Galloping Away" is stronger than most passwords (based on the results of password table breaches).



Please show me the math where it takes 10 to 12 random words from a list of say the diceware list to equal the entropy of 16 random characters.  If you are right and have the math to show it I will give you 100 mBTC.

Don't get excited how about we estimate it like this.  There are 80? 96 characters (upper, lower, number, and symbol) on standard keyboard.

A guestimation game.  Do you think 96^16 >= 7776^10?  If not what x do you think solves this equation 7776^x >= 96^16

For those playing along at home, don't grab a calculator right away.  Just take a guess based on the base and the exponents.