Amazoncoin already exists. It's another name for gift-vouchers. If it was a genuine distributed crypto-currency, Amazon wouldn't have any special control over it and it wouldn't be better for them than Bitcoin. I think they might condone a crypto-currency one day, but it'll probably be an existing one rather than an invented one. Inventing a new crypto-currency is pointless unless you either have some novel technical contribution to make, or else are running a Ponzi scheme.

What makes you think the new IRS guidance doesn't apply to altcoins?

The option to show bitcoin values in milli-BTC or micro-BTC would be nice.

They adapted their systems to bitcoin in a very short period of time (two weeks, as I recall). So it's unsurprising that some things got left out. That doesn't explain why they've not added it since; perhaps they are choosing to wait and see how it goes before changing their systems again. Perhaps they have other changes that they want to roll out at the same time, and those other changes are taking longer.

Logically I'd have expected them to save more money and risk by shifting some of their sterling revenue into bitcoin, so I'm surprised it's taken this long.

You know that the 25 BTC isn't free either? It's paid for, by every owner of bitcoin, in the form of inflation. Everyone's BTC become worth slightly less with each block. It's as if using a credit card was free, but the government printed a few hundred million dollars each year and gave them to the credit card company.

OK, thanks.

Ideally the transactions would be broadcast from very different locations, so you'd want a crook in Europe pairing up with one in America (say). They'd need to be broadcast almost simultaneously, so they would take a bit of coordination. Even then, the vendors could probably detect it by listening for a few seconds.

That said, the college kid could probably write software that average joes could download and use. Script kiddies don't need to be very smart.

What would you be spending $10k on that couldn't wait for a confirmation or two?

Xapo charge 0.12% per year for storage. Insurance is included for no extra charge. Their charges and policies are on their website.

Because, as I said, we are at a special time in history. Today ASICs are new. in 5 years time they'll be old. Today, the state of the art advances so rapidly that current designs become obsolete quickly, rendering investment in them moot. That's partly because their technology is lagging behind the mainstream, and their rate of progression is largely how quickly they can adopt technology from the mainstream. In 5 years they'll have caught up with the mainstream, and then they'll advance at the stately pace of Moore's Law, which itself will slow down. It's partly because they are so new, and the benefit of ASICs is so large, that any old design yields big improvements, and then finding a better design is easier. There's lots of low-hanging fruit, relatively easy to pluck. After 5 years of this, finding new improvements will be hard because all the easy ones will already have been found. You'll be able to licence a proven design that any chip-maker could produce. They'll become more like commodities. Having your own ASIC will be like having your own hard disk drive. Sure, cloud storage exists, but it doesn't use some magic technology that isn't available to the general public.

I'm not talking about today. I'm trying to predict conditions in 5 years. I might have that wrong, but clearly, today mining is in a state of flux which will not be typical.

Um, I think you'll find the Enigma was broken by Damn Poles and Damn Brits, not Damn Yankees.

I hope you sent that a copy of that directly to them, ideally by registered post to their registered business address as well as by email. They have a Money Laundering Reporting Officer so it should probably go to him or her.

Whether or not they are legally required, they say they intend to conform to UK AML legislation voluntarily. As far as I can tell, their main extra duty in this case would be to report the transactions as "suspicious" to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, if they agree that it is suspicious. SOCA would then be responsible for investigating it.

Yes.

No. As I said in my first post, this is intended to be an offline wallet, using a cheap netbook running XP.

I tried using Process Monitor. That suggests Armory:

• Successfully finds _CppBlockUtils.pyd
• Fails to find registry key HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\MultiUILanguageId
• Fails to find _CppBlockUtils.pyd.2.Manifest
• Closes CppBlockUtils.pyd
• Fails to find ArmoryQt.pyc
• Fails to find ALL.pyc
• Fails to find ArmoryUtils.pyc
• Fails to find CppBlockUtils.pyc
• Closes various files and registry keys and exits.

That makes me wonder if some .pyc components are missing.

The whole file is at http://pastebin.com/H6q6RHQE. As I said, I'm pretty sure it is all from 0.88.1 that works, not from 0.90.99.4 that fails to run.

There's no Users folder on this XP machine. There is "C:\Documents and settings\<user>\Application Data\Armory\armory.exe.log.txt", but it's left over from the 0.8.8.1 install. It has data from two runs; the second one begins with:

2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:816 - Loading Armory Engine:
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:817 -    Armory Version        : 0.88.1
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:818 -    PyBtcWallet  Version  : 1.35
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:819 - Detected Operating system: Windows
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:820 -    OS Variant            : XP-5.1.2600-SP3-Uniprocessor Free
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:821 -    User home-directory   : C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:822 -    Satoshi BTC directory : C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Bitcoin\
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:823 -    First blk*.dat file   : C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Bitcoin\blocks\blk0001.dat
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:824 -    Armory home dir       : C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Armory\
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:825 - Detected System Specs    :
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:826 -    Total Available RAM   : 0.49 GB
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:827 -    CPU ID string         : x86 Family 6 Model 13 Stepping 8, GenuineIntel
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:828 -    Number of CPU cores   : 1 cores
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:829 -    System is 64-bit      : False
2014-03-23 20:22 (INFO) -- armoryengine.pyc:830 -    Preferred Encoding    : cp1252
I can post the whole thing if it would help. It's about 16k.

--skip-announce-check made no difference.

--test-announce with/without made no difference.

(Ignore what I wrote earlier about the weird files. Windows was hiding the file extensions. That's what you get from using a freshly-formatted machine; I should know better. The ArmoryQt.exe.log file hasn't been modified since February.)

I've just installed 0.90.99.4 on netbook that I intend to become an offline wallet, and it doesn't seem to run. Clicking the desktop icon, ArmoryQT.exe shows up momentarily in Task Manager, and then disappears again. The notebook is an Asus Eee PC 701 running XP SP3 and not much else. The screen is (faked) 800x600 and there's no network driver; it's a pretty minimal configuration. I've tried adding "--offline", and also giving it an explicit logfile path in the command line, and it doesn't seem to get as far as creating it. I've tried rebooting the machine.

Hmm. Looking in the Program Files directory, there's a file "ArmoryQt.exe" that's only 1k long, and claimed by Windows to be a text file. It contains lines like "(ERROR) BDM.pyc:1122 - Resetting BDM and all wallets". There is also a file "ArmoryQt" (no extension) that's 251k long. Weird.

I previously installed it on my Win 8.1 desktop and that seemed fine. I'm using the Windows installer, from the first post in this thread. Scanning this thread, I seem to be the first person to mention using XP. Lucky me.

Edit: I've now uninstalled it and tried the old 0.88.1 instead. That runs up fine, so I guess the netbook is capable. (I've not actually created a wallet with it as I'd rather use the new version with the improved randomness.)

Few would recommend holding more in bitcoin than you can afford to lose. "All your wealth" is more than you can afford to lose.

I would go for gold. I'm very sure crypto-currencies will still be successful in 10 years, but I'm far less sure that Bitcoin will be the one. I'd guess there's a 20% chance it won't be, in which case it will probably crash to zero. Gold prices may drop, but not so low as that.

If the rules in the original post allowed me to transfer funds between different alt-coins during the 10 years, I might go for Bitcoin instead.

That's at best irrelevant (since we have to hold it for 10 years), and at worst a liability as the weight and bulk of silver makes it harder to store and move high value amounts.

I have to admit, that's part of the reason I have some silver.

Is there some reason you don't consider the statements they make on their website to be evidence? From https://xapo.com/#aboutVault

In addition, the Vault is fully-insured, backed by Meridian Insurance. The insurance is provided at no charge to Vault users and covers all incidents that are not caused by you. For example, the insurance covers attacks by hackers, theft by a Xapo employee, a break-in at the physical vault location, and our bankruptcy. In this event, any bitcoins you lose will be replaced by Xapo. The only thing you’re not insured against are your own actions or error, for example, if you don’t follow basic security precautions (like picking “internet” for your password) or if you give you password to someone else who then steals your coins.

"Theft by a Xapo employee" is right there in the list.

It's not a double-spend unless the network sees both transactions. In those scenarios, the network only needs to see one of them. There is no need for the counter-party to publish their time-locked transaction before the lock has expired, and if you have spent one of its inputs before then, there's no point in them publishing it ever.

As a newbie, publishing a time-locked transaction before the lock has expired seems like bad practice to me. It's surely unreliable; and at best selfish and at worst a potential denial of service attack. Suppose the transaction is locked for six months. Why should the network remember your transaction for you for such a long time? It'd be more reliable to remember it yourself and then broadcast it when the network can accept it, when the lock has expired. The same argument applies to shorter periods.

My take-away from discussion in this thread is that broadcasting time-locked transactions early, in the situations you describe, is also morally wrong and dangerous. Whether a party gets paid should depend only on whether they fulfilled the real-world contract. It should not depend on transaction races or on block-chain re-organisations.

So I am agreeing with you that transactions with expiry times are similar to various kinds of double-spends, but my conclusion is not that expiry times are OK, but that those double-spends are not OK.

When the new transaction is the same as the old one but with a higher fee, the race condition is benign. The receiver doesn't care which transaction wins, because they get paid either way. A block-chain re-organisation is harmless to them. So that's fine.

The double-spends that are bad are the ones where different receivers get paid. Who gets paid should not depend on race conditions in the block-chain. It shouldn't depend on luck. That's always bad.

That's a bit of a hypothetical, isn't it? Why should one company get a monopoly on ASICs? Even if they have do, their product merely does hashing. It doesn't set policy.