Satoshi walked away while the walking was good.

If the "Satoshi" identity had continued for very long, sooner or later its owner would have been exposed.  At some point, if he (or she, or they) was serious about remaining anonymous, he (or she, or they) had to limit exposure.  

This is basic with any "anonymous" alias.  You have to decide what you want to accomplish with it and how long it will last - both of which are big factors in how much risk to expose yourself to.  

"Satoshi" lasted longer than most anonymous aliases giving its owner far more time to screw up and do something that would allow him (or her, or them) to be identified. "Satoshi" also did FAR more than most anonymous aliases, giving many people a powerful motive to seek its owner.  The risk of exposure was really incredible before "Satoshi" walked away; I'm frankly astonished that he (or she or they) managed to remain anonymous at all.  It took some SERIOUS work to not leave a trail that could be traced back, when operating an "anonymous" nym through that much extended interaction and especially while working with financial AND crypto technology, both of which drive huge amounts of  investigation.

Right.  He goes to jail.  He goes directly to jail.  He does not pass go, he does not collect 200 bitcoins. 

And good fucking riddance. 

I do sort of feel bad for the guy.  Federal prisons in the US are harsher than some third-world prisons, and the treatment of prisoners is sometimes unconstitutionally harsh.  But that's a different issue.

EVERYBODY is better off with him in jail. Consider that Silk Road was not just drugs.  It was also arms deals that contributed to gang warfare, religious jihad, and criminal murder.  It was also extortion payments, slave sales to and by pimps including sales of underage girls for use as prostitutes, and transfers of money to jihadists and other damned murderers. 

This was all going on through his website, as well as him putting out a murder-for-hire contract?  He is exactly the sort of person that the nation has the right and duty to separate from society for the sake of the welfare of all its citizens. 

As far as Bitcoin is concerned, these are growing pains.  Give the Lions a bit of time to adjust to the new technology, and you're going to see crooks getting busted absolutely regardless of whether they're using bitcoin. And that's the way it needs to be. 

I for one sure as heck hope it's anthropogenic.

If it's not, then it's something we have no power to stop.

And if it doesn't stop, we're in really deep doodoo.

 

I don't know.  If the directory already existed, it wouldn't throw the dialog box.  So  first do a sanity check and type

cd ~/.newcoin

to see if the directory exists. 

If it does, your values will be in the last dozen lines of debug.log in that directory.

If it doesn't, then check ~/.bitcoin instead to see if you missed the file directory name when you were changing "bitcoins" to "newcoins."

Over the last four days attempts to log into the email address I use here have been up about 20% relative to the average 4-day period over the previous month. I do not use the same password I used here for anything else but for what it's worth I hope they burn every bit of comp time they've got trying to crack it.    

I've also gotten some very good spear-phishing recently, one of which took the "message from your ISP" thing to the next level by using the name/e-mail address of an actual real employee at my ISP, and another of which used an address that is held by a family member.  That's a lot more upsetting to me than the fake-login attempts.  

I have no idea whether the bump in activity has anything to do with the recent breach here.  But it's interesting.

Theymos: Good job.  I know exactly how hard it is keeping something up when the environment turns hostile, and these people saying this number of breaches is unacceptable - have no idea what it's like dealing with an "advanced, persistent, targeted threat."  The level of attacks and attempts something like this attracts is beyond what most ISP's are willing and able to deal with, and beyond a certain level of complexity all software leaks.   This forum having a public face means taking a lot of stuff head-on, and given that your up-time record is acually pretty awesome.

No, the last characters are not cut off, at least not at any "reasonable" password length.  My password here is over 60 characters, and it still cares about whether the last character is entered. 

And.... I don't think that one is even close to the duty-free zone. 

Nice card table and cash box though.     Some things don't change much.... 

Oh HELL no.  A billion of me would be a hell of a lot scarier than one.  I know myself better than anyone alive, and I don't trust me. 

He accuses them only of being more sane than I am. 

My imagination, unlike that of sane people, is every bit that dark. 

It took a long time to come to terms with my mental illness.  Most people are slightly more optimistic than reality bears out; I'm not.  Unmedicated, I can be paralyzed with dread of how horrible something is going to be and then it turns out to be no big deal.  I probably have as much unjustified pessimism as sane people have unjustified optimism - but optimism is "normal" hence I am the crazy one.... 

Honestly I don't think you can look at the mexican drug-war tolls without taking into account the fact that mexico has been basically forced to take an absolute hardline on it by the USA. 

Left to themselves I think Mexico would probably have tried to find a different way besides committing the huge investment of lives that keep escalating the drug war.  But the US wants to stop drugs from coming over its own southern border by making Mexico take more loss of life for the sake of drug enforcement than the US is willing to.  The drug war in Mexico has largely been a proxy war fought with US money and Mexican lives, driven by pressure from the US. 

Oh. 

Yes, exactly the same principle. 

What RodeoX said. 

Buying anonymously, if caught, means at the least losing your right to buy legally, and depending on what you buy and under what circumstances you're caught, can mean jail time and other unpleasantness.  So, don't do that.

On a trip to another country, you might spot a little open-air market thriving in a jurisdictionally-mysterious area next to the duty-free zone near the airport, where a 13-year-old girl with a sunny smile and adorable Irish freckles that don't match her Asian skin tone, straight black hair, or epicanthic folds at all is managing a cash box and sitting behind a card table that creaks under a load of Galiels, Kalashnakovs, AK's, and BARs.  If you don't bring up ideas like background checks or waiting periods or licenses, she probably won't either.  For all I know she accepts Bitcoin now.   And, now that I think of it, probably isn't thirteen any more. 

And if you need some local flexibility, I'm given to understand her younger (!) brother drives a taxi and one of the first English phrases he learned (because it gets him big tips when he says it) is "now wasn't that much nicer than going through customs?"  But if you buy a gun off that card table, you're being a big idiot.  If you try to bring that gun back into the USA, you're being an even bigger idiot.  No matter how easy it is while you're away, it is never worth the hassle and risk, let alone the expense.  It's a cointoss whether you are at bigger risk of winding up in jail in the US or in the country where you buy, but you've got to figure that risk in when you're looking at the jaw-droppingly cheap prices on that card table.   And you've got to understand that neither she nor her brother gives a crap whether you wind up in jail or whose jail you wind up in, as long as it happens after they get paid.

In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you mean when you use the words "claiming coins through a bitcoin distribution."   

Sure, that works.   It's elegant even; it means nobody has to download the snapshot unless they're actually trying to import coins from the snapshot.  They'll need the snapshot to build the merkle tree but the people checking the transactions wouldn't need to see it.  The distinction in terms of code is that now your methods to import things from the snapshot have to build a merkle tree proof, and your methods to check those transactions have to check the proof. 

If you really want to do this?

First, take your snapshot of the bitcoin UTXO set and package it with your distributed client.  It'll add a few hundred megabytes to the download.

Second, in the chainparams.cpp file where different types of key are defined and identified with prefix bytes, you make sure that none of your altcoin's keys can be confused with any of bitcoin's keys - and then you define prefix bytes for additional classes of key - one matching every type of bitcoin key whose balance you're offering to carry forward into the new block chain.

Third, in the places in the code that look at the prefix byte to determine what kind of key something is and apply the different methods for spending pay-to-pubkey-hash, pay-to-script-hash, and pay-to-pubkey altcoin addresses, you have to add methods for spending the corresponding types of bitcoin addresses when those prefix bytes are used.  These methods look it up in the txout set snapshot instead of the block chain history, and create altcoins 'ex nihilo' when bitcoin keys are used to spend the snapshotted txOuts.  Be absolutely sure that they work without making the corresponding privkey available in your block chain, because thieves will use your block chain as an information source enabling them to steal bitcoin otherwise.

But these additional spend methods only work up until block 10K or whatever your expiry block is. 

Fourth, you hack the client so that when someone 'imports' a bitcoin key it will find the corresponding balance in the utxo snapshot and make an immediate transaction creating altcoins in that amount - which must FAIL if that particular key has already been claimed by a previous tx in your block chain, but you knew that right?

After block your expiry block you can trim the database of all the bitcoin txOuts that are still unspent in the alt, as expired coins that will never be imported into the alt. In later clients you distribute the reduced database of imported keys only, to enable them to check transactions when verifying the block chain and make sure that the 'imports' are legitimate.

At least, that would be my approach.  A fair amount of coding is involved.

My advice on learning C++ is, learn C first.

C is actually a sane language for doing crypto.  C++ is insane, because of all the different ways code can look the same while having different semantics.  But C will provide you with the basic syntax etc that you need to start to understand C++. 

I would be considerably happier with the bitcoin source code if it were written entirely in C, and do occasionally spend time ripping C++ constructions out of code bases I maintain.

As far as I'm concerned, the more people are familiar with this codebase, the more robust technology that uses block chains becomes. 

I've been thinking of weird applications of block chains.  We think in terms of cryptocurrencies because bitcoin, but that's NOT by any means the only application within which we want a protocol for determining a consensus history. 

   
Well, because nothing ever posted online really disappears, here is a quote of the deleted post, as captured by a script when someone followed a link from it to my "how to make an altcoin" blog post on my server.




While we're at it, I've got a couple more articles up at this point which people making altcoins could be interested in.

Altcoins cannot use the same difficulty adjustment algorithm as bitcoin.  Miners being responsive to profits and difficulty make a positive feedback loop which quickly goes nonlinear and crashes the block chain if you try.  So I did an update article, where I posted code to replace the difficulty adjustment with MIDAS.  MIDAS (multi interval difficulty adjustment system) as far as I'm concerned actually delivers on what KGW promised and failed to do.

http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/04/21/altcoin-difficulty-adjustment-with-midas

And here's a post about how to add a premine (and fix it so you can SPEND it!)

http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/04/23/adding-a-premine-to-an-altcoin/

What I want to know is how he thought my guide was dated?!  The version of bitcoin source code I was using is still the current version!

What really stuns me about these devices is the security implications. 

You realize we're talking about a box controlled by someone else, with its own network access and sensors and probably also attached to your own home network, sitting inside your home? 

Hello? 

Does this sound like a Bad Idea to anyone else?

These chips are an absolute plum of a target for anybody who wants to do REALLY invasive snooping. And I would guarantee that those capabilities will be baked in; it is simply too profitable for these guys to not do. 

Those are some nice franklin notes, but I've been looking for a briefcase like that that'll fit my laptop.  I just don't trust this soft case to be crush and bend proof.

This was never a problem with my old laptop.  I got it second hand so I don't know who it was originally made for, but it has a titanium body and a little sticker that says it's warrantied (presumably for the former owner) against shocks of up to 300G.  Who the hell needs a titanium-cased laptop?  I mean, it's awesome, but by this time it's also obsolete.