this, fucking this.

i really hope it has an export to paper wallet feature.

Sure, I can. But can my mom?

Just because there is a solution, doesn't mean its the solution for the majority of users. Maybe a bootable OS is totally the wrong way to go with this. But we need something and soon.

I don't know that a bootable OS is the best solution, maybe its ultimately a hardware wallet or something that uses trusted computing. This is not my area of expertise, but I feel like the need is so strong and so immediate that I'm very much hoping that people with more skill than I are realizing how crucial this is.

interesting, thanks.

The most important quality of money is trust. If something that acts as money loses trust, it stops acting as money. History is full of failed currencies whose demise was brought about through the loss of trust in the governments backing those currencies.  

In the summer of 2011, when a Mt Gox user's account was hacked and coins stolen, the result was that trust was lost in Bitcoin itself, plummeting the value and temporarily retarding its progress. It doesn't matter that "the hack had nothing to do with Bitcoin, only an exchange and a user on that exchange", the message heard by many was that the currency was not to be trusted. Its taken almost 2 years to build that trust back up in the eyes of members of the general public.

We are at a crucial time in the development of Bitcoin. User adoption is exploding and new opinions are being formed daily. As the value and distribution of Bitcoin increases, so does the incentive for evil and theft. An encrypted wallet, stored on a computer connected to the internet, is not safe from a rootkit or a keylogger deployed through bundled malware distributed through an exploited website. A patient and malicious actor can ultimately do much more to destroy Bitcoin than even a corrupt overreaching government, or a client based software bug can. If funds are stolen from a large enough percentage of the user base, we might as well pull the plug on this whole experiment, because the trust will never be repaired. Never.

The message we are sending to new Bitcoin users is that they should not trust web based wallets with more than a small percentage of their funds. That, coupled with the fact that most people do not have an extra computer that can be permanently left offline, means that right now there is NO good solution for MOST users. Paper wallets are great, but they present their own challenges. The armory team have done a wonderful and admirable job with their wallet, and for the more technical amongst us, it is a great solution. But as things stand today, we most go further. Bitcoin desperately needs a trusted bootable operating system that can serve as a better cold storage for a majority of its users. And needs this distribution to be extremely user friendly and robust. I don't personally have experience in creating a customized linux distribution, but I'd like to work with people who do, so that this need can be filled.

To the people placing their trust and wealth in Bitcoin, especially to the least technical amongst them, we owe them a committed effort to protect that trust. Their adoption benefits us, and Bitcoin's success ultimately depends on them.
                                                                                                            

Thank you for being a good person and an outstanding member of the community. 

Awesome!  Good luck!

Hal I really appreciated reading your story. Thank you very much for sharing it with us.

http://www.fincen.gov/forms/files/fin107_msbreg.pdf

For those curious, this is the actual federal form.

Right, standard I'm not a lawyer disclaimer but here is my interpretation.

Anyone trading bitcoins for fiat with another person is a money transmitter regardless of amount or frequency (though perhaps not if they are using a licensed exchange who takes on the role of MSB). All money transmitters are MSBs. All MSBs have to register and are then subject to expensive fees and regulatory practices by their states.

I would like a lawyer to explain why this interpretation by FinCEN is legal

It does not make sense to me that I grew carrots and sold them I would be a farmer, but if I mined bitcoins and sold them, or earned in game Diablo gold and sold it, or earned second life dollars and sold them, that I would now be subject to extremely expensive regulation.

Apparently anyone selling any type of virtual currency on ebay or craiglist is now a money transmitter, and as such a MSB, and as such now in violation of FinCEN interpretation if they haven't registered as an MSB.

There has to be some lawyer out there who is interested in Bitcoins and who can offer their interpretation on this matter.

Step 1, start a new thread on the exact same topic that a significant number of other threads have been started on.
Step 2, make no real new points in new thread
Step 3, ignore any new contrary points raised in new thread
Step 4, refer all criticism in new thread to shit you said in other threads
Step 5, ?
Step 6, profit.


you're a guy who has openly argued for a world in which a bitcoin transaction costs $15-$20, when the actual costs to process a transaction are in the hundredths of a cent, and you are calling us capitalist wonks.

And the system will always have as many full nodes as it requires, because interested parties will contribute resources to maintain security. That doesn't mean that every user will or should run a full node.

The lower the barrier to entry that running a full node is, the less capacity the system can support overall. There has to be a balance, and decentralization as a core tenet will be persevered, just not to the degree that it is today with a fraction of overall capacity utilized.

you are kidding yourself. eventually it will be dominated by companies and the only hobbyist miners will be the ones willing to lose money performing the activity. Its already the case that you can't mine on a CPU and it will soon be the case that you can't mine on a GPU. Once all mining is done by ASICs, companies will stop selling rigs and start larger consolidated mining operations themselves.

The original post was only taking about mining. Being able to run a full node is a separate discussion. My mining rigs are not running full nodes.

Someone explain to me why its ok that mining is now (almost) effectively a professional level only activity, and will become increasingly more so with ASICs, but that its not ok that larger block sizes could make mining effectively a professional level only activity if the block sizes ever grew faster than commodity bandwidth, which is currently at least 2 orders of magnitude greater than what the system requires.

The bottom line is that if there is money in it, it will become more centralized (to some degree) simply because it will begin to create competition, which will increase startup costs for new participants. That's how the fucking world works. Everyone ignores that it used to be the case that bitcoin could be effectively mined on CPUs, and will very soon require speciality single purpose hardware, but makes a huge deal that you might also need reasonable bandwidth and storage resources to be a miner.

Understand this very clearly, difficulty already makes mining become increasingly more centralized. It has the entire time that Bitcoin has existed.

If Bitcoin becomes so popular that mining becomes very expensive, just from the bandwidth and storage reasons arising from a slowly growing max block size limit where sufficient transaction fees are being paid (as they are in the case of SD), we'll all be very happy with the value of our coins, and how freaking useful they are.

This is SO great. Thank you!

when is that?

17aMZs2LRiuQUCahebVKCoxkCgs6zt9WVg

Thanks so much

17aMZs2LRiuQUCahebVKCoxkCgs6zt9WVg

Thank you!

sweet, just subscribed