I created this topic because the original Payment Protocol FAQ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300809.0) was locked and people were asking for a poll anyway.

The major concerns seem to be:
* Man In The Middle attacks
* The fact that Certificate Authorities in their current form and function are not cool
* Bitcoin's Official client should be neutral to any commercial uses and entities

Discuss... I start:

Fact 1: MITM attacks happen rarely.
Fact 2: MITM attacks are pretty much useless when the victim sees it happening.
------------------------------------
What's the worst thing that could happen when getting MITM attacked during BTC tx?
- You send your coins to a wrong address.

What is bitcoin best for?
- Making small transactions.

Conclusion:
Don't send a large sum of money in a single transaction. Instead, make many small transactions that you can afford to lose in case of this rarely occurring MITM attack. When the other party receives this small transaction, it should somehow communicate to you "Keep going, you're sending to the right address". The communication part should obviously use another channel based on some existing trust. If you know you can trust blockchain.info then you can just check the receiver on that site, trusting the CA used by blockchain.info.

But here's another idea:
How to memorize a bitcoin address if it is not a vanity address and contains random characters? Extract the address into the format of common words similarly to what brain wallets do. The computer should then draw a deterministic picture of the address, so that all the used common words would be drawn on the picture.

Hypothesis: if you memorize the picture you are likely to notice if suddenly there is an ELEPHANT instead of a HORSE on that picture. When you see such thing you know that you're sending your money to someone else. Vanity key mining would then become a whole new thing: for example one wants to have a picture of its public key that has 7 loads of gold on it

I just generally support modularity. Trezor should have its own host program to connect it to bitcoin qt instead of bitcoin qt directly including the Trezor specific logic in its own code.

If MITM is such a great problem then go behind the bushes and exchange your keys there. Really, to me this whole thing seems like an excuse to make everyone pay more money to CAs.

Also, if you absolutely need to make user experience more resistant to MITM attack then please create a branch bitcoin wallet instead of ruining the core code with features that are not really needed for bitcoin to work.

Well Trezor is cool, I don't argue that but it's conceptually wrong to add excess features to a bitcoin wallet program that should be the most trivial and standard one. You can always make a new program that would act as a proxy between bitcoin QT and Trezor. Thus, I still don't support the idea of bloating the standard wallet with anything other than what the bitcoin protocol needs.

Bitcoin QT should be commercially neutral. This means that it should not feature any entity that gets direct monetary profit from such features. Introducing features that glorify CAs is on the same level of wrongness as adding the following text to the Bitcoin-QT's GUI: "Click here to buy bitcoins from Mt. Gox!"

I believe bitcoin qt should only provide features strictly in the context of the bitcoin protocol. If you want BIP make a new program for that, different from bitcoin (qt) so that I don't have to install this crap.

If you are going to insert bloatware into bitcoin standard client then this is no longer a standard client for bitcoin protocol. What next? Adding support for http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ to the standard bitcoin wallet? This is getting ridiculous and it's time for a new bitcoin qt branch as soon as the devs go rogue and start adding bloat code and what not.

I hate the CA system. As merchant I don't want to pay to some CAs just to have them confirm who I am. I use self signed certificates when necessary. Bitcoin ALREADY HAS message signing. USE THIS.
By just looking at BIP it disgusts me. I really hope you're not going to change the underlying bitcoin protocol to introduce your bip. Better start using namecoin, really!

Changed my passwords in other places where I used it. It was about time anyway.
This helped a lot:
$ makepasswd --chars 16
uvULbCpFLKg9phb2
...

Any chance the attacker could have modified some of the php scripts temporarily? By that I mean the password checking function so that the user's password is e-mailed to him before hashing it.

When it initially fell down to double digits 140-150 range was actually worth missing.

edit:
also, the votes seem to form a Gaussian curve showing that a typical rational bull can estimate the future price pretty well.

I dislike hipsters and apple. Therefore I would never do something like this. However, I've been thinking about starting a scholarship for computer science students named after me once sick ass rich

+1

Wait for the next order of magnitude to sell. However, it will most likely come with a bubble.

Cool, I might have actually made a good speculation (150-160). We'll see soon

OP here. For a record, I do have an ASIC, so just because I'm sceptical doesn't mean I'm bitter. It's disturbing to see how many of you make assumptions without really knowing the context. How can your "wild guess about the bitcoin's future" be believable if you can't even make correct assumption about whether the OP has ASIC or not

I made this topic to see any objective opinions on my question. Unfortunately I got a bunch of emotion-driven-subjective stuff

So let's try again:
1. once developed, ASICs are sick ass cheap to mass produce
2. Nikola Tesla is no joke, it is possible to get free energy from Earth's magnetic field
3. there are people/families wealthier than your governments, they own you
4.
5. profit

Some dude said something about NSA. This was actually going to the direction I was hoping this thread will go.
I personally will prepare myself for Bitcoin's demise. I won't sell my bitcoins but I'm already looking forward to alternative crypto currencies that could be possible replacement for bitcoin. This is not FUD, this is an attempt to stay alert and objective. People tend to be blinded by their desires and slowly lose contact with reality, bringing totally laughable arguments like "OP is just bitter because he can't afford an ASIC" - come one, don't fall that low.

So, we're in a car and there's a curve ahead. This curve is "51% attack by entities who run this place". How can you turn the wheel on that?

From JoelKatz's reply I extracted that Bitcoin community would somehow act as a whole and maybe change the protocol rendering all ASICs useless? That is actually a nice argument and it might work. But nevertheless 51% attack can still be profitable. Knowing all that, I think it's reasonable for people like OP to think about such scenarios and even discuss it in mining speculation.

I think I got my answer from JoelKatz. Thank you for that. The answer is to not put all your eggs in the same basket, even if that basket is Bitcoin kind of obvious but for some reason I needed a topic for that. I guess I'm fool then.

TO DA DARK SIDE OF THE MOON!

I think there are plenty of sick-ass-rich private entities who could buy some ASIC company and produce as much computing power as they want. The worst thing ever happened to bitcoin is that money buys you (computing) power. We all know how the pyramid works. This will happen when bitcoin becomes a serious and obvious threat to the reptilians.

I would seriously consider investing into PPCoin as proof of stake is much more resistant to rich entities doing what they want. Maybe I'm not the only one who fears this scenario as I see the PPCoin's price has been going up lately.

Any chance this could be the end of bitcoin? Mass ASIC production as arms race. Some rich entity might then have more than 50% computing powder that it's not going to use so that nobody knows about it and then when the timing is right they will switch their miners on and bitcoin collapses.

I suspect this could happen because ASICs are expensive to develop but cheap to spam-produce. Maybe this will give rise to the PPCoin's proof of stake system then?

ok, I guess your arguments are valid.

that "feature" totally sucks. I need to send small transactions to test my business logic. I would be willing to pay enough transaction fees to make the small transactions possible. this is the first time bitcoin developers have pissed me off with their changes.

Ma ka eestis. Tartus täpsemalt. Keegi veel tartust?