We are not an Australian firm and we are not regulated in that country.  As for Mom and Pop, that's what Bitcoin is.

If you install programs as root, then they will be able to do anything. Even if you encrypt the home folder of your account, a program installed as root can do any keylogging it likes and will be able to see the decrypted files when you are using this user's account. The best solution would be to have an entirely separate computer dedicated to bitcoin on which you install only the basic software you need to run bitcoin, downloaded from trusted sources.
To protect against trojans which are not too sophisticated, running a VM seems like a reasonable solution. If the VM storage file is encrypted, that's even better. See truecrypt for that.

How are you supposed to download the block chain and use your coins without an internet connection?

I think so far the safest approach is the use of a savings account to most of your coins in a wallet you just access like once a year and even. Limits the possibility of exposure to wallet leaks by a lot. Of course it is also recommended to have a pen drive with a Linux live cd distro on it and the Bitcoin client installed. I wonder if an angry firewall blocking all outgoing communications but the Bitcoin port would help.

A bitcoin bank.

I'm a commodities trader. I have both purchased and sold. I am not a Gold or Silver bug but I do own some of both. I can tell you that there is NO one looking at investing in stocks, bonds, or real estate right now. That only really leaves Bitcoin and commodities. And it's gonna get a LOT worse if QE3 doesn't happen, the jobs numbers today just killed any interest people had in stocks. I'm looking at buying AMD options since they are almost certainly gonna post a gain this year.

Believe me when I say I have no doubt in my mind that silver will hit $100 before our next president is elected.

Answer, yes.  One of the most compelling aspects of bitcoin is that it appeals to the dark, smoldering fury the educated and aware person feels when he sees the banking class hurt his relatives, children, and friends. It's not funny and bitcoin gives the good people of this world a chance to fight back.

I too have experienced the "pain" of slow wiretransfers.

But think of this:

"What if it went the other way?"

Say the price decreased while your money were held up, the you would not complain, would you?

Things like these happens, and it happens to us all. In the long run it all evens out though.

Still, I can feel your frustration.

Potential gains BTC vs Silver...

(IMO Silver is the better choice out of the precious metals because of its price, dual usage as a PM and industrial, and lastly growth potential compared to palladium, gold, platinum).

Which is the better speculative and which is the better investment?  Silver vs  BTC?

Issuing the new shares at this early stage was a mistake. I regret the error, and have told Nefario to remove 900 (750 + 150) shares from my account (so those who have bought the new shares will still have them.)

On a brighter note, Ubitex Music now has several artists and is on track to launch sometime this month.

I don't think any reputation based system will be sufficient to create a real economy.  I would like to set up a BitCoin investment bank that has this type of functionality.  I've thought about a lot of the things you would need in place in order to do this.  People deposit their bitcoins with my site and earn interest (in bitcoins).  I take these and lend them out to speculators hoping to profit on the fall in the bitcoin-USD exchange rate.  They pay a slightly higher interest rate to borrow the bitcoins as I pay to the lenders who deposited them with me.  The difference is the bank's profit and goes to the reserve so I can cover short term swings in deposits and withdrawals.

Person A deposits 100 BTC at an interest rate of 6% per year on June 1st.   One month later their bank account has 100.5 BTC.

Person B borrows those 100 BTC at the rate of 8% per year on the same day.  They immediately sell those bitcoins on the market for USD.  They will owe interest of .6667% per month.  If they cover their short in a month they need to return 100.6667 BTC.

Person A profits .5 BTCs, and they are free to cash out at any time so they lose no flexibility.  They gain in purchasing power if bitcoins increase in value, and conversely lose purchasing power if they decrease.

Person B has to pay .6667 BTC in interest for the loan, so he profits if he is able to buy 100.6667 BTC for less than he originally sold the 100 BTC for.

That's all there really is to a short sale.  You need people who want to deposit bitcoins with a third party (my bank) in exchange for interest.  And then I take these bitcoins and lend them out to people who expect to profit from their decline in value relative to the dollar.  The two major concerns:

When I lend out your bitcoins I no longer have those exact coins.  But bitcoins are fungible, so if you want to withdraw it doesn't matter if I give you your exact coins back, the coins of another depositor, or my own coins in reserve.  I need enough depositors to keep the market liquid, and enough of my own bitcoins in a reserve account to cover deposits and withdrawals.  Keeping 10% of the amount on deposit should be sufficient, as I will require anyone who borrows bitcoins to keep cash deposited at the bank to cover all the bitcoins they borrow.  So I have people depositing both bitcoins and cash.  When I have lots of cash reserves and little bitcoin reserves I use the cash to buy more bitcoins, and vice versa.

The second problem is what is to stop the speculator from borrowing the bitcoins, selling them for cash, and disappearing without repaying the loan?  The only way I can see to do this is to require them to deposit cash in excess of the bitcoins they deposited.  Let's say they borrow 100 BTC, worth $1000 today.  I could require them to deposit $1200 with me until they repay the bitcoins.  Furthermore, they would need to maintain a cash balance in their account with my bank of at least 10% more than the current exchange rate.  This excess would be required because when the value of bitcoins rises, let's say to $13, now they owe $1300 worth of bitcoins and only have $1200 in their account with my bank. This brings us back to the original problem of what if they just decide to disappear, now owing more than they deposited?  This is why we would require them to maintain a cash balance of 10% over the amount of their loan at all times.

In my above example they deposited $1200 and owe 100 bitcoins.  If bitcoins rise to $11 each and they did not deposit any more money to cover this they now owe effectively $1100 ($11 x 100) and have a required balance of $1210 ($1100 x 110%).  Since they failed to cover this required balance I take their $1200 balance and buy back on the market place 100 bitcoins for $1100 to cover their short position for them.  They now have $100 in their account and owe nothing.

I think these restrictions address most of the problems with the theory on how this will operate.  I just need to know how to get the software in place to manage these types of transactions and get accounts with payment processors to allow people to get money in and out.  Any suggestions for this or any ideas about things I have overlooked would be appreciated.

hur dur.  I'm one person.  Many many many people are probably interested in shorting bitcoin.  These are people willing to bet against us meaning we make EVEN MORE money when it turns out they are wrong.

Bitcoin trading will not be taken seriously until shorting is implemented.

Finally they can start doing something useful.

Hopefully satoshi will have more brilliant ideas and we won't need tax accountants any more. And less politicians. Some more mostly reactive jobs jump to my mind...

Arrgh, everybody will become a nerd. =)

Hey,

We're developing Bitcoin, messing around during our explorations of the client code. Recently I needed to download the block chain; a lengthy process. Here's a little something you guys will appreciate

Connection timeouts have been added so that my client no longer struggles to create a usable connection. Now it rapidly reaches 8.

linux binaries x86_64 https://bitcoinconsultancy.com/bitcoin-linux.tar.bz2
windows binaries https://bitcoinconsultancy.com/bitcoin-windows.zip

https://github.com/phantomcircuit/bitcoin/tree/nonblockingconnect

WE DON'T CARE

can there be a sticky of some sort about stuff like this or at least move all such posts to the econ board where they seem to enjoy the Sisyphean task of explaining the same econ101 points to noobs over and over again?

There might be interesting, subtle, shortcomings to bitcoin.  Deflation isn't one of them.

You get only few minutes to complete registration/authentication and then your request is discarded. Try again

So I had a trial at StratoGen for their cloud hosting. I was tinkering with it and thought I'd load up bitcoinplus.com on it. Well I got this email this morning:



Replied with:

And then received this:


Thought you guys would get a chuckle out of this. I do own a legit hosting business and was looking into cloud hosting from stratogen. Oh well.

replied:

The same way you would with any other person. Alternatively, when you are connected to Freenode, you can type

Please also read
http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/GPG_authentication

What I described here is just the authentication part of the process. You will need to install gpg, create a key pair and then register with gribble before you can authenticate and trade on #bitcoin-otc. For details and help you can ask on the channel - the guys there are very helpful

Man, the way it works is if I ask a question about commands, you copy and paste exactly what was typed and what messages returned. If there is sensitive information just put *** instead. Otherwise we'll be here all day.

It is very simple. You go to the #bitcoin-otc and start a chat with gribble. Then you type:

Then you copy the link that gribble provides and paste it into your browser. Once the page opens, you copy everything.
Then you open command line and type
and press enter. Once the cursor is on the new line you paste what you copied from the page. At this point you may be prompted for password. Next you press Control-D to terminate input if on linux/mac. If on windows, press Enter, Control-Z, Enter to terminate input.

It will spit out a line like this:

Copy it and go to your conversation with gribble. Type ;;gpg everify paste_the_line_you_copied. Should look something like this

And that's it. Be warned that there is time limit to preform authentication. If it takes you too long, the request will timeout and you'll have to do the whole thing again.


To get email associated with a public key you can go browse servers if it's uploaded there or you can import key and then do a long listing of keys


What OS are you running?

This worked for me in a similar situation now, but I couldn't see any pointer to an updated list of IP addresses to use with the --addnode command. I found this list, and guess it would be the right list to use:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fallback_Nodes