They disbanded because their dox were dropped for all to see, and will most likely end up behind bars.

At most it would take 115,792,090,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts to brute force one of their AES-256 keys. Given all the hardware on earth you'd be crunching until long after the heat death of the universe.

A better attack would be to OCR the pages, intercept the drawing routines as the pages are painted, or exploit the PDF client in some other way.

Joining the party late here, but has anyone compiled meaningful statistics on how old the oldest coins are? If, at some point in the future, it turns out that a very small fraction of coins have either been lost or have never been used for X years, then it may be in the interest of the majority of users to adopt this new strategy.

IMO it's worth talking about this now, but we won't know whether it will be beneficial for the majority of the network until at least X years have actually passed, so it's not worth considering such ideas until we have the raw data.

Arguing whether it feels like a good idea or not without actually crunching the numbers is a flawed way of looking at things. Let's see some research folks.

Thread locked. No more replies please.

No, it would be held in your browser until you refresh the page, with only the deterministic public addresses being queried. I said self-hosted so that you're sure that the site isn't posting your private key back to the main site, web based so that it's accessible everywhere.

A nuclear warhead.
An AK-47.
A kit consisting of lube, condoms, face mask and rohypnol.
Thumbscrews.

I think it's fair to say that technology is neutral, but it does not exist independently of people and their actions. A Pair of Anguish sat in a museum's collection is not an inherently evil object, but if you were making them in the middle ages knowing that their primary use is to tear anuses and vaginas apart, it would be dishonest and self-deceptive to say that they are a neutral object with no moral ties.

The moral issues with a currency like BitCoin are similar to any other currency. When you spend currency you essentially swap your "work units" for the work units of other people, allowing them to feed themselves and their family, the morality of such exchanges depends on hundreds of factors like the type of work done and the things it supports.

The sensible way to look at the ethics of cryptographic currency like BitCoin is by comparing it to other types of funds. Store your money in the bank and you're essentially lending it to the bank, who in turn lend it to governments, who spend an enormous proportion of it on war. BitCoin circumvents this, so may actually lead to much less suffering in the world caused by war. In this instance I'd say that right now it's a more moral choice than having money in the bank.

Hoard your BTC and you're hoarding work units, work units which you created from energy made by other people's work, you're essentially taking food out of the mouths of others (the same as with other currency, except it doesn't devalue as there are a finite supply). Spend your BTC on things that you want and need, you're feeding your fellow man.

If it turns out that BTC is used to fund assassination lotteries, arm militias and cause more suffering in the world than the money held by banks, then at some point in future it may be a more ethical choice to choose the global banking system over BitCoin.

I like this idea and agree with da2ce7. I would prefer an email address and strong password to generate the key as this would further reduce the potential for collisions.

It would be really nice to have a client-side script (either browser plugin or self-hosted javascript) that can query a web service to get your balance from an email/password combo

I wonder how this could actually work. Would legislation that affects Bitcoin also affect Facebook's game currency or the Linden Dollar?

I can't imagine that they could rush something through like this

I have 1BTC in my MyBitcoin account, and when the MtGox hack happened I hardened all my passwords to ones generated by KeePass.

However, being new to this I lost my first KeePass database and had to manually recover a lot of my accounts, but there is no f*%@ing password recovery on MyBitcoin.

Well, I voted "don't know/care" but have since changed my mind to "yes" for the reasons stated by Mark Oates. I also think the UI of the client exposes too much of the technical details, it needs pretty icons and user-friendly metaphors.

MtGox already publicly said they wouldn't pursue you for the BTC you withdrew, but your account would be in negative balance. You should have just kept them

We need an answer about this. MagicalTux should make some form of public statement

We're gambling men, give us the stats, not selective facts.

How many other people logged in at the same time? Surely he wasn't the only person.
Does Kevin's story hold true, that he saw the price crashing to under $10 before he made any offer to buy?
How many other people also put really low bids in at around the same time? Was he the only one? Was he the highest of the low? Was he the only suspicious transaction?

Publish the stats and let people make their minds up based on probability, this fact-mining exercise doesn't do you any favours.

I don't understand. Which account? Kevin and the hacker used the same account?

My guess:

Hacker kid gets database via lamest 'sploit ever (trojan), posts it to a group of other hackers to show off and get cred, everyone rushes to get in and raid the accounts before the list spreads too far. Everyone is operating against the clock working against each other to crack passwords and cash out quickly before they're noticed, one of them hits the jackpot account and decides to sell all those BTC in a panic and puts an end to the game.

Reason behind attack: dynamics of a group of script kiddies, mistrust, one-upmanship and a lust for drama.

How many do they have? I suggest using them as bounties for EFF-related projects. Devs and campaigners can work for BTC, while they get useful work done for "free"

Or donate it to the TOR exit nodes project

Before you sink your half a million into Britcoin you can pay a mere few thousand dollars for an independent security audit of the entire site. If you're a skilled developer then you can conduct your own independent audit.

If you're putting the source code to your exchange online then you get instant respect from developers like myself, it shows that:

1) Britcoin doesn't believe in "security by obscurity", instead they opt for real, actual security along with transparency.
2) Britcoin's code is well written enough for them to state their reputation on it, which they have.
3) Britcoin is giving back to the community, they're not someone in this thing to make a quick buck, but actually proving they will invest in the entire community by starting new exchanges.

Having seen hundreds of proprietary, bespoke applications and hundreds of open source ones, I can say with some confidence that the code quality of open source is usually much higher.

Problem?.jpg

Jewish lizards control the entire BTC supply. CIA has an FPGA and quantum computer supercluster churning out fraudulent block-chains,  Rockefellers are in on it too. MTGOX WAS AN INSIDE JOB!11 Did nobody else notice that Satoshi Nakamoto is an anagram of WAKE UP SHEEPLE?!

Am I doing it right?

I personally like Britcoin, it's not very big but you know someone takes things seriously when they refuse to store any passwords at all on-site and put the source code for the exchange on github.