The market is not rational and will do whatever it damn well pleases, regardless of my opinions on fundamentals and the long-term picture. 

No argument there - but the technology is also available to competing coins / blockchains.  Bitcoin is an amazing pioneer, but it has some significant drawbacks, and the community is very resistant to change.  That leaves a big opportunity for a competing coin to make some fundamental changes and attain truly mass appeal, obsoleting Bitcoin in the process.

There's no good answer you can get to this question.  It's like asking if you should sell your stocks now or later.  Anyone who answers has an agenda, and it's probably not to help you make you money.

The right place to ask would be over in the speculation forum, but I've given up trying to talk sense into that lot.  I've made some arguments about the current utility and future prospects of Bitcoin, but they're all too busy trying to talk each other into buying or selling at the same time.

If you want my 0.02BTC:  Right now the market utilization of Bitcoin doesn't justify the current price.  It should be cents, not dollars, based on present need, and tens of cents or maybe a buck net present value based on the potential (no, it's not INEVITABLE!!! no matter how many people try to convince you of that) that it could become a really big thing.

But my opinion is just as much speculation as any of theirs, so do your own research.  

To resolve any ambiguity about which transactions are valid (for instance, if there are two chains with conflicting transactions that spend the same input coins), Bitcoin clients always believe the story of the longest chain - IE, the one with the most blocks.  (More accurately it's the chain with the greatest sum of difficulties.)

The attack is to spend coins in one place and have it recorded by the 49%.  After taking delivery of the goods they bought, they would start mining a fork of the blockchain from before that transaction.  Since they have more hashpower than everyone else, they would eventually have a chain with more blocks (sum of difficulties) than the 49% chain.  In their version of history their original spending transaction never happened - so they can now spend their coins again, which is called "double spending".

Rather than smoothing jumps you can use a sliding window to update the difficulty on every block.

More on that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64048

Oh ye of little faith.  Rest assured, we are working on it.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56285.0;all

I voted no.  Not that they would have any hesitation to do so, but it comes with some risk of being caught, and why bother when we're perfectly capable of trolling ourselves to pieces without their help?

Sure, bump it up a couple notches. You can go up to 80C as long as you can stand the fan noise.  Running the fans flat out will reduce their life, but the chip will be fine at 80C.  90C is generally the hard max, but you need to leave enough margin so you don't overheat on hot days.

It sounds like you're pushing that GPU a little bit beyond its limits.

If you have more headroom on temperature, increase the core voltage.  You can also decrease the memory clock to buy yourself some extra thermal margin if you need it.

If you're maxed out on temperature and tuning memory doesn't help enough, decrease the core clock.

Either way you're probably not damaging anything.  Unstable operation usually just means you're going too fast for the current voltage.  Damage happens mostly by severe overheating.

Confirmed, these are non-Bitcoinica (and non-other-Linode) coins.

It's an easy linear chain to follow.  The previous output (a single coin) was here:  
https://blockexplorer.com/tx/6c1a56180de4d99f0a6bea59c3361fe186403271de459fcf1f6f1405e495aabc#o0

And its previous output was here:
https://blockexplorer.com/tx/9e5f547f4172e8bc28f1df70a6c0bb7de410d36f1ac84a66b2b42082e65896fd#o1

And that takes us back to 2012-02-26, before the hack.

I'm not sure what you mean by "cross domain restriction".

If you mean so you can access it remotely:  bitcoind -rpcallowip=<IP>

Make sure you have a good password set.

Here's where I dug for event markers when making my charts:

http://bitcoinwatch.com/headlines.html

No problem.

The -dev ones are the headers; the regular ones are the binary libraries.  You need -dev when compiling, but after your have the binary you can uninstall them and just leave the binary libraries if desired.

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen.git
cd vanitygen
make
./vanitygen

You may want to consider: A Windows VPS; managed servers instead of DIY; or whether you're in over your head and should stop before you lose money.  If you're still here and you want to learn, I'm happy to help. 




Most software can be installed without compiling.  The distribution you choose will come with a whole bunch of software already prebuilt.  For Ubuntu and other Debian-type systems, do "apt-get update", then "apt-get install aptitude", then "aptitude search <partial name of thing you want>", then "aptitude install <name of thing you want>".  All those commands should be run as root.

For bitcoind, you don't need to build it yourself.  Just get a precompiled one like this (As a non-root user):

wget 'http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bitcoin/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.5.2/bitcoin-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz'
tar -xf bitcoin-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz
cd bitcoin-0.5.2-linux/bin/32
./bitcoind -daemon

A tar file is like a zip file, except it also stores unix-type permissions and ownership.  In this case it stored the fact that bitcoind is set executable.  You can see the permissions with 'ls -l'.  Permissions are the column on the left with -rwxr-xr-x which means read/write/executable for owner/group/everybody.  Read 'man chmod' if you'd like to know more about how that works.

bitcoind will bitch that you need to set an rpcpassword.  To edit the config file:
nano ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

Or just right-click, Edit in WinSCP.



http://winscp.net/




If they're in your path ("echo $PATH"), just type their name (like tar and wget above).  If they're not in your path, type the path to them and then their name - for instance "./bitcoind" above which means to run bitcoind in the current directory.

Most services have startup scripts to do extra stuff when they're started.  Take a look at "ls /etc/init.d" to see a list of those.  For instance, "/etc/init.d/apache2 start" to start the Apache web server after installing it with "apt-get install apache2", or "/etc/init.d/apache2 stop" to shut it down.




"top" to see a list similar to Task Manager
"ps axf" to see a tree of everything running
"ps axf | less" because it may be too long to fit on one screen
"killall bitcoind" to shut it down by asking nicely
"killall -KILL bitcoind" to force-shutdown
"kill <bitcoin's PID number>" (get the PID from the left column in the ps command) if you have multiple bitcoinds and you just want to kill one
"./bitcoind help" to get a list of RPC commands for bitcoind
"./bitcoind getinfo" as an example RPC command to bitcoind

Ask for anything else you need to do. 

I see.  I actually had a related idea earlier: why not create a way to add an expiration time to an address?

If you want to be sure someone has that address right now, get one created now with an expiration time in 5 minutes.  When generating addresses generally you can make one that expires in a month or two to prevent legacy addresses from accumulating coins.

The expiration wouldn't need to be enforced by mining.  It's just a sanity check in your client.  Using an expired address would just pop up a warning before you can proceed.

How do you ensure the handshake is happening with the right person?  Cut-and-pasting a handshake is just as vulnerable as cut-and-pasting an address.

If you mean immediately safe, yes.  If your Linode didn't mysteriously reboot, you're safe for now.

Long term you should encrypt your wallets and keep them in a secure location if possible.

Do they really want the collective consensus of a handful of miners setting their monetary policy?

I'm all for Bitcoin growing into something big, but it has to do it one step at a time.  There's no way an entire country is going to convert to something as Beta as Bitcoin.

From an ethical standpoint I think he accepts the responsibility for managing the security of his wallet.  In that light, I view his response not just as farsighted, but mature.

Also, from a purely pragmatic perspective, he has nothing to gain from a lawsuit.  He's running a very successful business and taking time off of that to fly to the US and spend a couple weeks blowing money on hotels and lawyers would be foolish.  I could easily see such a case taking weeks since he'd have to spend a lot of time explaining first to his lawyers, then to the courts, why this data was so valuable and why just getting it restored from backups isn't a remedy.

That would not be a fun vacation, and honestly, I think he'll make more money just focusing on what he does best: running an innovative and successful trading platform.  Looking at a longer term, he's also a student, and taking time off of his education won't help him with whatever his long term goals are.  I expect we'll see more interesting things out of him in the future, and I don't expect them to be in the legal system.