So a group of unelected persons appoint themselves as a central authority to police a decentralized system.  Can't possibly see what could go wrong with that?  Maybe you should just use PayPal, they already are the sole judge without recourse for transactions on their network.

That is a dangerous road to go down.  The 51% of miners they could just drop ALL other blocks and keep 100% of the block rewards for themselves too.  Honest miners build upon the longest chain.  A block containing a tx involving a "MtGox address" (which you have identified to any degree of accuracy) is a valid block.  So your solution is a cartel of miners decide to start dropping valid blocks?  Why not drop all valid blocks and double their profits?  They are already breaking the spirit of Bitcoin why half ass it.

Also you do realize this cartel would be blocking txs based solely on their (likely flawed) guess as to what is a MtGox address.   Why not boost profits and start dropping transactions (and block containing them if they haven't already excluded all other miners) of users who refuse to pay an extortion tax?  Pay 1 BTC and we whitelist your addresses, if you don't then you never get to spend your coins again.

While these types of cartel behavior may be something Bitcoin needs to face in the future, it is another thing to actively recruit and coordinate miners to form the first cartel.

IIRC MtGox had a deal where Eligus would include their transactions.

What "appropriate group"?  The central bank of Bitcoin?  The Central Bitcoin Intelligence Agency?

You have no idea which addresses belong to MtGox.  It doesn't strike you as utter contemptible to just start blocking addresses because you think they belong to MtGox? Forget laws, on what ethical or moral authority do you have the right to arrest the wealth on another person? 


Except by the responses of this very thread you already don't have a consensus and that is with only a tiny number of people knowing about it.  What you want is a central all powerful authority to control the wealth of others based on the flimsiest of evidence.  Evidence which BTW wouldn't be sufficient in a court of law to freeze assets "Your honor we think these assets might belong to the defandant so we want you to freeze them for an indefinite amount of time just in case.  This was thoroughly researched by some people on the internet and stuff.".

When you "told" him that I am surprised he didn't correct you that there is no such thing as "balances associated with an address" either.  Bitcoin works on the concept of inputs and outputs.  So if 0.5 BTC and 2 BTC were "sent" to the same address they exists as two discrete outputs (valued at 0.5 BTC & 2.0 BTC) in the blockchain not a balance of 2.5 BTC.

Maybe this was a dream where you talked to "Satoshi"?

MtGox was created in 2010, it was a greenfield project.  Most developers relish the idea of working on a greenfield projects because it doesn't require them to drag forward decades of legacy cludge and instead allows them to do it right (at least initially).  Kinda hard to compare that to a banking system which may have its roots going back forty years and be the net results of multiple acquired and merged systems.  For long runnning enterprise applications, developers are rarely given the option to make a clean break.  MtGox didn't have that problem.  It started with an empty text file and ended up resembling systems which get that way after decades of hacks, workarounds, and patches. 

Sometimes a spade is a spade and you can just call it that.  MtGox's transaction engine was so bad it would choke at 5 tps despite running on server hardware capable of 1000x that (two very high end dedicated servers).  Yes facebook's early roots were in php (it has long since been converted to C++) but facebook would never have scaled to even a million users if its codebase was this bad.  Today we would be saying "facebook who?" instead of it being a household name if the code wasn't scalable.   

There is no excuse or justification for code this bad.  None.  Period.  Anyone offering it just looks silly.

IIRC Coinbase allows using credit card as "backup funding" for instant purchases in the event the ACH is denied.  There is no option to purchase using CC directly.

BitSimple can do 20+ BTC but you would need to fund by bankwire.  I don't think you are going to find anyone is going to let you purchase that much using a credit card for the obvious fraud reasons.

GPU operate in a "batch" mode.  They start hashing and attempt so many hashes before stopping to return results.  The higher the intensity the more hashes the card attempts in one batch but also the longer the batch takes.  The card only returns results at the end of the batch.  The higher the intensity (and longer the batch) the more shares which are computed but never "delivered" before the block changes and they become stale.  On the other hand the lower the intensity the more of the GPU time spent setting up and taking down batches which means a lower raw hashrate

You get paid for shares (or work) accepted so that is what you should be looking to maximize.  It is possible the accepted rate is still higher even with a higher rejected rate because the gross (raw) hashrate is higher.

Simplified example
100 shares gross w/ 1% rejected = 99 shares accepted
120 shares gross w/ 10% rejected = 102 shares accepted.

The later is more profitable.  Since you get "paid" for shares accepted that is the number you want to maximize.

It is called a confidence job.  If the first small transaction was never paid ... they would be able to steal one small transaction.  Scammers aren't dumb.  The early payments are in investment in the scam.  Payout a couple early transactions, and now they are "legit".   When the bigger transactions come in they have some "problems".  Interesting that the "solution" to their problems is you sending even more bitcoins no?  Eventually they go silent and just hope to catch noobs who stumble across them without researching first.  When that dries up the site will disappear and a new one with an amazing deal will pop up.

I really am sorry for your loss but once you see a couple hundred scams it becomes very obvious to spot them.  
The brand new site with "back history" appearing out of nowhere - check.
The long time bitcoiner who has never had an account at bitcointalk - check.
The better than anyone else but not too good deal - check.
The big logos of partners which don't stand up (virwox never heard of them) - check.
The swam of single digit users who appear out of nowhere asking about and vouching for the site - check.
The bogus delay tactics and requests for more money - check.


Joe gave you the right answer almost three weeks ago.  

I believe (not 100% sure) Coinbase uses Silicon Valley Bank but they are not accepting new accounts for any Bitcoin related companies due to regulatory uncertainty.  Just about any bank has the ability to offer ACH service.  Also as noted above MongoDB has nothing to do with ACH.

No.  Neither are correct.

There is a private key (a random 256 bit number).
ECDSA is used to generate a public key from that private key (compressed or uncompressed).
The public key is hashed (PubKeyHash).
The PubKeyHash is versioned, checksumed and then encoded in base58 to produce the address.

There are four distinct things
Private Key
PubKey
PubKeyHash
Address

Each of these are used in different areas in the Bitcoin protocol.  A user may provide you an ADDRESS which your client reverses to the PUBKEYHASH.  Your client create a transaction which uses the PUBKEYHASH in the output of the transaction.  The transaction is signed by your PRIVATE KEY(s) your PUBKEY(s) are included in the input to allow other nodes to verify the signature.

"Cold Storage" is just words.  You would need to ask the exchange in question.

Blockchain.info isn't the blockchain (confusing choice of a name) it simply a service which scans the blockchain and shows blocks & transactions.  A few other people have been reporting similar issues.  There is a transaction showing on blockr http://blockr.io/address/info/17kN7ZAGHkwAV3kQmGSms5tM3E4bKVdHFz

It would be best to retitle you thread "blockchain.info not showing transactions" it might get more direct help.

Well I think we are done. 

He must have missed that one minor exception in the history of money.




This I agree with.  Major changes never happen overnight.  I always thought (and got laughed about it year ago) Bitcoin was looking at a 10 to 20 year road to mainstream adoption.

The "money chain" doesn't magically go from 100% fiat to 100% alternative.  Companies that have Bitcoins will spend those instead of converting them if they can.  If for no other reason than it saves them the cost of conversion.   Our company has revenue in Bitcoins and we now pay namecheap for domain names and SSL certs in Bitcoins.   Now namecheap might convert 100% of that to dollars but it still adds one link to the chain.  Maybe some namecheap pays some of their costs in Bitcoins or some of their employees wish to take some of their salary in bitcoins.  The chain extends one link at a time.

I do own (well partially) an exchange, and I did initially did code it all myself.  I still used concepts like scope delineation, separation of concerns, encapsulation of internal details, test driven development (unit tests), mocking, inversion of control, etc to be used.  These aren't just academic ideals, they are used every day in millions of software projects.  One programmer or one hundred there are reasons code is broken into logical groupings not one monster horribly do everything superclass.  The later produces fragile, unmaintainable, untestable code with the very obvious and expected end result.

I am not gods gift to software engineering but I have written hobbyist projects which had better design.

I think the articles sums it up
All these things don't belong in the same class.  The http header generator doesn't need to know about the business logic, the SQL connectivity doesn't need to know about the routing.  Good software is hard, the capabilities of the computers, and languages already push the limits of what humans can process effectively.  Software developers use design tools to help the human manage the code/project.  You could write a web application in machine code if you wanted to, ultimately it all ends up there anyways but try spotting a bug in something low level like that.  High level languages were developed to allow a better code view.

Personally I am no fan of php for a variety of reasons but php doesn't mean you have to write code like the leaked gox source.  It is possible to write good (or at least better) php.  The major issue isn't the choice of language but how that language was (mis)used.

Warren Buffet is a very smart investor in that he ONLY invests in things he understand completely.  He has indicated he doesn't understand Bitcoin (and a lot of other tech concepts he missed out on completely).  The good news for him is you don't need to know every home run just enough of them to beat the average.

Now if it was leaked that Buffet (or Berkshire Hathaway) was short 1M BTC well that would be a little different. 

Um this goes far beyond "not perfect".  It essentially breaks every rule in software design, resulting in a fragile, unmaintainable mess.

Oh and it gets worse