That should be safe so long as you use that OS only for sending and receiving bitcoins. There is a remote chance of something nasty living in the motherboard bios or a GPUs bios, but it is very unlikely. Also it would be a good idea to make sure that the permanent drives were never mounted when running from the USB drive.
If you have $100,000 or more worth of bitcoins you should consider a complete dedicated system.
1. That is a worry indeed... as I would potentially be using this USB thumb drive across multiple machines. How common is such a thing from happening? I have only ever heard of a seagate hard drive shipping with malware on it and that was a very small batch a few years ago. 2. @bcearl: What security benefits do I notice by disabling swap space? What are the drawbacks of disable swap space? I have heard that disable swap space is recommended whenever running the OS from a USB hard drive due to wear on the flash memory or something? What smaller distrubution would you suggest? I have time to play around with setting them up. 1. If you don't need fancy graphics, maybe you can disable video hardware acceleration as well. But I don't know whether that protects you against that at all. 2. Benefits: You don't have to worry that some memory page with critical data like keys or passwords gets stored on the disk. Drawback: If you have enough memory and don't neet hibernation (suspend to disk), everything should be fine without swap. Thanks guys. Most of the motherboards I buy nowadays come with "virus protection" I think they are pushing... as in it would be tough to install a virus/trojan on the mobo/cpu or something?? I don't know.. :S Don't have millions to protect, but I don't have much money period so even $1,000 is enough for me to start getting worried about! Question: How would one make a duplicate bootable copy of this same USB hard drive? And what if I received 200 mining pool payments to this wallet without loading up the OS? Would the wallet.dat keep track of all 200+ transactions? Doesn't it only do 100 at a time? |
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What do I get if I get your money back?
You could take whatever you wanted and give him some of it I am sure he would be happy enough  |
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sry i have trouble actually beliving this, you just lost 500k$ and you have a problem with turning off your work pc? seriously?
personally i think this is a troll, but if not, then you did everything in your power to lose that money, short of posting your wallet.dat on forum for "safekeeping" and it most deffinetly was not a hack from far away, physical attack vectors are always 100X easier
if you dont know how to protect your assets they will find a new owner, that applies in both bitcoin and offline, someone having 500k$ under their bed and telling their friends about it will lose it very quickly too
One of the best replies here. No offense OP - but I do disagree with you losing your faith in bitcoins. Bitcoins served you well, you lost them on your own account. |
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Meatspace is more likely.
I have to agree with this possibility as very likely as well. If the BTC was transferred from your physical computer by someone at the keyboard, computer forensics might yield useful data. Unless you keep messing up the datestamps on files via virus scanning. With forensics in this case, it might be shown what other things occurred on the machine at the time of the transfer. Like, if it occurred at night at a particular time and there were only a few people in the building at that time.The other possibility is that you were targeted online specifically. Just think if you've received targeted email, PMs, IMs, etc. Social engineering this way can be one of the easiest methods. Just look at HBGary Federal as an example. If the attacker stole the wallet.dat file... they could have placed the transaction when the victim was sitting at his computer using their bitcoin client. It could have literally disappeared before his or her eyes. |
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If the guy is selling right now on mtgox he will be selling all of them as fast as possible.
Phone up or do whatever you can to get hold of mtgox, pretty sure this person would have loaded all the coins onto mtgox so even tho he isnt selling all of them in one go you could freeze his mtgox account and sort out the matter with evidence etc to make sure who the legit owner is.
That would be your best option.
Really? If it were me. I would hold on to them. A) because I know that people would be looking for movement of those coins immediately. B) I would be hoping for the value to increase since I am a greedy, stealing bastard of a human being. I was just thinking the other day since we have had a lot of motorcycle thefts from our apartment building (presumably somebody is driving in with a truck and some big dudes... lifting up expensive motorcycles and then driving off with them...).... anyways I was thinking... again... if it were me, I would leave the van in the garage for a few days so it wouldn't be obvious on the cameras at the garage doors of the building. Eventually people will stop caring and you can probably drive out riding the motorcycle in question without any problems. |
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That should be safe so long as you use that OS only for sending and receiving bitcoins. There is a remote chance of something nasty living in the motherboard bios or a GPUs bios, but it is very unlikely. Also it would be a good idea to make sure that the permanent drives were never mounted when running from the USB drive.
If you have $100,000 or more worth of bitcoins you should consider a complete dedicated system.
That is a worry indeed... as I would potentially be using this USB thumb drive across multiple machines. How common is such a thing from happening? I have only ever heard of a seagate hard drive shipping with malware on it and that was a very small batch a few years ago. @bcearl: What security benefits do I notice by disabling swap space? What are the drawbacks of disable swap space? I have heard that disable swap space is recommended whenever running the OS from a USB hard drive due to wear on the flash memory or something? What smaller distrubution would you suggest? I have time to play around with setting them up. |
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start making $2k per day. After 10 days of that you'd have it back.
$20k != $500k Please don't remind me  . That 25K BTC could've done a lot of good for the BTC community when I eventually would spend it on BTC related projects - which I had in mind to do. For example I wanted to set up the BTC equivalent of ebay, which I believe is one of the things that the BTC community needs - a strong auction site. *sigh* This is what pisses me off the most. The hacker is probably just going to spend it on hookers and blow. You would have used it to benefit us all. What a crying shame it is. |
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Sorry to hear about your loss. In all likelihood it wasn't a virus or malware - it's a bit too early for that and if it was we'd see way more stolen wallets. From what you've written, I'd say it's a targeted attack. Depending on amount stolen, you may want to hire IT forensics expert. If it was a script kiddie you have a good chance of catching him. If you consider to pursue this, I suggest you turn your computer off ASAP. Unfortunately, we gonna be seeing this more often as value of Bitcoin increases The problem is that I can't shut the machine as this is my work machine. I doubt any forensic expert can do shit. Bitcoins are 100% non reversible and even if this "expert" were to find out the IP address of the person who got it there is no guarantee that it was his real IP and well I'd be spending more than 25,000 BTC just to chase this. What I'm going to do though is shut the machine down and let the symantec antivirus clean the supposed infection it detected when I ran a scan of f-secure online scan (for some reason it detected a bunch of virus in the temp dir where the online scanner stores its temporary work - could be false). And then I'm going to backup my important data. Format and reinstall the machine. Then I'm going to sell whatever bitcoins I have remaining, take it as a life lesson, and count this as a not so fun experimentation with cryptographic currency. I am then going to focus on making plain old paper dollars and store them in a bank where at least I'll have the full force of society or some central government insurance backing me up - not to mention some recourse to the law in case of any theft. Sorry for your loss. On a lighter note, I thought you had gone crazy for a moment and had written "I am then going to focus on making plain old paper dolls and..." =P |
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So here is my "safety plan"...
1) Install ubuntu to a USB Hard Drive and select the option to "encrypt hard disks".
2) Install bitcoin on the ubuntu OS that is running off my USB hard drive with encryption.
3) Done.
You would need phyiscal access to my USB drive AND the login password in order to transfer and bitcoins.
The only other step I might include would be making a duplicate copy of that USB HDD and uploading it to "the cloud" but I don't know how to do that yet...
Would it be even "safer" to use a lesser known distribution like Fedora, CentOS, or some other linux variant that is less commonly used to run a bitcoin client perhaps?
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I'm using a mix of Phoenix/polcbm-mod on my machines, but unfortunately my main rig is having hardware issues and will error out after several hours. I tried resetting my bios to factory settings (no overclocking) and maxing out my fan speed. That seemed to help a little, but still after maybe 5 hours it will inevitably decrease by a factor of 10 (!). Obviously I don't want to keep it mining at that rate, and there don't seem to be any ill effects when I restart it. The only thing I haven't tried is underclocking the GPU, which I'd rather not do since it should be running fine at stock settings. My case has very good airflow, so I don't know what's going on. Anyway this is a separate issue so...
I'm this close to creating a python/ruby wrapper just for this machine that will kill/autorestart when this happens, but it would be nice to have some built in support (warnings, stderr) if we get a hardware failure or our Mh/s is very low. Is there any tool that does this?
If I have to write one myself, I'll release it to the forum in hopes it will help other people with hardware woes.
What card brand and model are you using? What do oyu have clocks set to? |
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How do I:
a) install the very latest version of phoenix miner to my persistent linuxcoin usb flash drive?
b) install (and switch between) sdk 2.1 (since it is 2.4 by default and poclbm favors 2.1) to my persistent linuxcoin usb flash drive?
c) pop open all 6 of my poclbm or phoenix command line miners on persistent linuxcoin startup? It is such a pain to open up 6 miners using the start_mining script...
Please leave your Bitcoin address in your answer post.
The first person to leave a competent answer that is linux-noob-friendly for any question will receive 0.05 BTC sent to their Bitcoin address. Answer all 3 and you get 0.15 BTC.
Never used linuxcoin, so here's some generic instructions - a) wget http://svn3.xp-dev.com/svn/phoenix-miner/files/phoenix-1.48.zipb) Download the SDK, extract to /opt/ Export the following for 2.4 - AMDAPPSDKROOT=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32 AMDAPPSDKSAMPLESROOT=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32/lib/x86: sudo ldconfig There are similar settings for 2.1 - replace AMD with ATI and point to the correct path. c) for i in {1..5} do start_miner.sh $i done Looks pretty good... so phoenix does not require any sort of "install" process? Just download and run? Can you show me answer b) for sdk 2.1??? That is what I am after because apparantly poclbm is better at reconnecting to downed pools than phoenix. Thanks! |
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in fact, I sent some BTC to myself  ka ching. |
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This is AWESOME!!
Definitely watching this thread. Hope to hear more. Will donate!
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The only thing we know for certain is that a single Bitcoin Difficulty re-target can not change by more than a factor of four up or down. It sounds like NameCoin could use a similar circuit-breaker.
Name is simply a fork of bitcoin, there are just a few tweaks to it's inner workings. There probably is one. |
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Is vBulletin free and open-source?
No. PHPBB is tho and it's even better than SMF imho. Why can't I see a list of all my started topics in a row? Whenever I want to find a topic I created I have to search for it or make sure I bookmark it after creating it. |
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I don't get the reference but I wholeheartedly agree with you.
It took me about 20 seconds for this page to load on a 100mbps dedicated connection.
Whoever is in charge of this forum... increase it's server power and increase every bitcoin forum member's productivity! Also new user take up... Studies show that if a visitor to a "new" web page has to wait more than a few seconds they will usually hit the back button and forget about it.
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I have been looking into that yes, but was hoping for a quick fix (remove 2.4 and install 2.1) to speed me along. I will end up doing so eventually. Thanks for the suggetsion! |
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How do I:
a) install the very latest version of phoenix miner to my persistent linuxcoin usb flash drive?
b) install (and switch between) sdk 2.1 (since it is 2.4 by default and poclbm favors 2.1) to my persistent linuxcoin usb flash drive?
c) pop open all 6 of my poclbm or phoenix command line miners on persistent linuxcoin startup? It is such a pain to open up 6 miners using the start_mining script...
Please leave your Bitcoin address in your answer post.
The first person to leave a competent answer that is linux-noob-friendly for any question will receive 0.05 BTC sent to their Bitcoin address. Answer all 3 and you get 0.15 BTC.
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Most every "professional" forum on the internet uses vBulletin.
There are some good reasons for that.
Why are we any different?
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Question: Is the pool being DDoS'd or is my phoenix miner outdated?
I am running linuxcoin v0.2a with the default install of phoenix miner.
Everything goes good for a few hours. Then eventually I read "mining queue empty" and disconnect from deepbit.net and/or hashrate goes down to 0.
Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it does not.
Anybody else experience this and/or have a solution? How can I check what version of phoenix miner I am running?
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