Most people would agree with this.  The problem lies in getting everyone to agree with what is "wrong" and what is "right".

Karmicads, thank you for a very insightful post on the IP debate.  It's rare to see such a balanced viewpoint; many of the more vociferous people here are often highly polarised in their opinions and it can be difficult to have a rational discussion that doesn't descend into slanging matches.

I would contribute a couple of arguments here, not necessarily applicable to IP law, but more generally to the validity of some legal system.  Take the road and cars.  Here the law says "drive on the left", there it says "drive on the right".  Now, it may well be that, given some peculiar asymmetry in human anatomy, or the laws of physics or chemistry, it is somehow 'better' that we should drive on one side and not the other, and all those countries where you drive on the other side have simply 'got it wrong'.  For sure, though, those countries that have it wrong are certainly better off than a country where there is no imposition and anyone can drive on whichever side they please.

Similarly, current IP law is almost certainly flawed, but I suspect that if there were no such law, we would never have had the steam engine.  This argument does not fare so well in defence of the current entertainment industry, though Karmicads has made it clear that he would be quite happy to see the greedy middleman eliminated.  However, in the global village, it is easily possible for a creative inventor or artist to be greedy aswell.

Here's a hypothetical situation for Karmicads to consider.  Suppose I sweat and labour for a week and manage to write a song that becomes a global craze, but I insist on some small contribution from every person that downloads or otherwise obtains a copy.  After a month I have received enormous wealth from the 'honest' downloaders, and have started a million legal claims of IP theft against the 'dishonest' ones.  Shouldn't there be some point at which this income stops being "earnings" and becomes "greed"?  Isn't there some point at which the inventor or creator has been paid a "fair" amount?

You can't really fall back to the argument that the market will decide how much a fair amount is (the "no such thing as inherent value" argument).  If that's the case, then you implicitly justify 'dishonest' downloading of my song - all downloaders, both honest and dishonest, *are* the market.  If they *all* download without rewarding me, then the market values my work at zero.

Excellent phrase.

So if you don't disappear you have to pay 1,000,000 BTC to.... me 

I think satoshi is *all* of these, and kiba, theymos, grondilu, and loads of others.  He's good at having multiple online personalities but he's good at it IRL too.  Ha ha ha, you fools all think there are lots of people working for bitcoin, but really it's only one.  I'm just waiting for that little slip-up, when he signs a post the wrong way, or one persona contradicts its own argument... waiting... and watching... and listening... then I'll do something cunning and sneaky, and profit  

But this is not is not an optimal solution.  This guy now has two wallet.dats with more-or-less the same info.  But now if he tries to send those 80BTC again, they won't necessarily come from the same source addresses from the backup wallet.dat (he might have spent other coins in the interim and received change which the client would prefer to spend first).

So now he must either completely empty all coins from both wallet.dats or continue using both in parallel, and each client will miss transactions generated by the other, not to mention that the cache of 100 addresses will be different.

Or... maybe... does -rescan also capture *outgoing* transactions on the addresses in a wallet?  I seem to remember that it doesn't, but that it would soon.

A while ago I had a strange thing happen which might help this situation.  I transferred to another wallet, then shut down the receiving client as soon as it received the transaction.  The transaction was NOT in the blockchain at this point, it had simply been broadcast throughout the network, including to the receiving machine.

Now, before restarting the receiving wallet.dat again, I had in the interim updated the blockchain with another wallet.dat.  So I restored the original receiving wallet.dat (with the 0/unconfirmed coins) and started with -rescan.  No luck.  At this point the transaction *was* in the blockchain, the client *was* rescanning, but those coins stubbornly stayed at 0/unconfirmed and I couldn't spend them.

I gathered eventually that rescanning doesn't work so well for 0/unconfirmed transactions and the only solution I found was to start a new client and either download the whole blockchain from the start, or use a blockchain that hadn't yet downloaded the block I needed.

After all that, though, if your transaction is neither in the blockchain nor the pending transactions, then it would seem the coins were never sent.  Don't know what to do there, sorry!

Agreed.  If a nuclear EMP happens your way you're gonna have *plenty* of other things to worry about, like, oooh, WHY IS MY SKIN FALLING OFF???

Energy has absolute value.  With technology, the amount of energy required to do anything decreases - this includes keeping people alive: one person requires *rougly* 5MJ/day (~ 60W) food energy just to survive.  But by making food production more efficient, the energy expenditure can be reduced.  So with a constant energy supply this currency is, in a certain sense, deflating - with a given amount of energy you can do more thanks to technology.

BUT, population is growing, and energy-consumption-per-person is growing, so, really, it's inflating - there is less energy available per person, and each person is demanding more energy.  So in this sense, it's inflating, but it's an inflation originating in a supply/demand mismatch.

Somebody (maybe famous) once said "energy is the one true currency", maybe you can find out and tell us all who it was.

If you look at the price of oil (the world's biggest energy supply, excluding perhaps food supply via photosynthesis) in terms of gold, you'll see that the ratio is reasonably constant, fluctuating between 10 to 30 barrels/oz since the early 1970's.  If only for this reason, gold is a reasonable measure of value.

That's my 2 kJ worth, corrisponding to maybe 30sec of survival, less than it took me to write this 

Preferably a forum where the devs are listening...

That'd be nice.

The bitcoin forum used to be a place of lively discussion of political and economic theories and practices.  Now it has descended into a junk name-calling forum full of irrelevant and ridiculous topics, each topic full of irrelevant and ridiculous posts.  Can anyone suggest an alternative bitcoin forum for me to join?  Is there any?

I deleted this comment.  It's not relevant.

This page contains a serious flaw.  It may well be true that padding increases the strength of your password, but if an attacker cracks one of your passwords, he will know what padding to use for your other passwords.

Maybe we should store our wallets on 1440K media, stored inside a faraday cage in the event of an EMP from nuclear war.

The idea of base58 is so you can write the transaction down on paper, only for the ultra-paranoid: what if there's a trojan on your USB key?  To keep your offline wallet.dat as safe as can be, there must never be any possibility that information is digitally taken from the offline machine and placed on a networked machine.

Obviously, for the super-ultra-paranoid, you'd have to physically destroy the USB key you used to copy over the blockchain.  The regular ultra-paranoid could simply overwrite the USB device file with random data before removing it from the offline machine - see shred(1) or wipe(1).  You could, I suppose, take a sha256sum of the usb key before removing it, or mount it read-only, but that's all just software security.  USB keys do all sorts of funny dynamic block remapping and wear-leveling, and I wouldn't be too surprised if someone somewhere knows how to exploit that.

The normally paranoid (i.e. not ultra) amongst us (and who isn't, given the recent thefts), could use binary or json as you suggest, and copy the transaction over USB.

This could be used in conjunction with private key dumps (there was a thread about that) in order to keep a backup copy of the (encrypted?) private keys - still in base58 to write it down of course.  The super-ultra-paranoid might have to worry about EM radiation from their monitor leaking crucial information though... see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_channel_attack

Was this such an extraordinarily terrible idea that nobody wants to waste their time criticising it, or was it such an extraordinarily excellent idea that nobody wants to waste their time praising it?

Good point.  Except, maybe, the trojan/virus/worm/whatever has to hijack the VM controller's memory and instruction stack aswell. So it wouldn't stop a determined attacker, but it might stop more casual opportunists.

Inspired by the Isosceles's post linked below, I thought it would make an *excellent* addition to bitcoin - the ability to generate and export a transaction from an offline machine, then import that transaction to a networked machine which would broadcast it.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15068.msg215743#msg215743

So suppose you have your offline savings wallet.dat, and your online one for spending.  By shifting entire .bitcoin directories around on USB keys, and running two instances of bitcoin simultaneously on the offline machine (one with -nolisten, and with different RPC ports,  not for the faint-hearted), the offline wallet could come to know about its balance.

But in order to transact it must be connected to the network.  So... how about you could generate a base58 transaction from the offline client, save it on USB (or write it down if you're really paranoid) and import it to the online wallet which would then broadcast.

You could use an encrypted file container within your guest VM, which will then be inaccessible as long as the VM is switched off.  Of course, a keylogger will get your password unless your VM can also use a mouse & gui to select a key-file.

Nice site. Nice service.

You should consider allowing people to conduct transaction with the mixer of only a single size, e.g. 5BTC.  Otherwise an attacker could try some statistical analysis to identify coins in with coins out.  With a single transfer size, there will be no way to associate input size with output size.

Next, you really should check out the legalities of this.  If you offered such a service with paper money, your most obvious clients would be organised crime and you'd probably be classified as a money launderer.  I had been thinking of setting up a bitcoin mixer, but got turned off once I thought of this issue.

Bitcoin has many appealing features and, if nothing else, as an experiment in economic though it's about as interesting as can be.  It may cause political upheaval and worse (or better?), though I somehow doubt that it will ever substitute fiat currency.

But I agree with the OP.  Talk of illegal activity is bad for bitcoin and bad for bitcoin users that want to stay legal.  It'll never appeal to a broad base as long as that stays.  And any political discussion conducted by fanatics on any side is also bad.

Here's a compromise: censor any and all posts or threads condoning or promoting illegal activity and put a warning on borderline cases to the effect that the forum is public.  Leave the politics boards in place BUT with a big disclaimer to the effect that the opinions contained therein are, as with all political opinions, personal opinions of individual users, some extreme, some not, and do not necessarily reflect any official opinion of any bitcoin dev, or the general opinion of bitcoin users, or of the general direction of the bitcoin project.  Heck, include a religion sub-forum too, just to make the point that there are other aspects of life where extreme opinions can be found :-)

Make forum.bitcoin.org about development and adoption of bitcoin and its economy, but leave space at the bottom for people to chat aswell.

Gotta say, the extract from IRC below reflects *very* badly on those involved, I can only hope it doesn't make it's way into mainstream headlines - I can just see it now: "Bitcoin developers and project managers condone illegal activity according to secret IRC log files"  Then the next day, *after* a million sheeple have read the headline, try explaining that refusing to condemn is not quite the same as condoning, and InternetRelayChat ("InternetWhaaatChat?") is not secret at all.

Just in case it's not clear, I am not suggesting that anyone involved with bitcoin condones illegal activity. You guys should just have a care as to how you might be perceived.