Probably just better GUI, still I welcome it. Open source news, wikileaks and youtube programs are the future for informed intelligent individuals.

.. while persisting the blockchain db backups prior to the crash as hardcoded into the new fork.

The effect would be minor I think.

Interesting.. does the Silk Road sell medicine yet?

What a turn around if you could say Bitcoin saves lives and is not just for cocaine!

I shall be using that selling point in the future.

I hear this a lot, but is it really true?

You can't print BTC without sha256 and you can't steal peoples money without EC. Both are very secure as has been noted - even algorithmic weaknesses would likely only lower the brute forcing time, not remove it.

Sure you might scam and cheat a few guys clients if you found some bug or isolated them, but is there really something that could cause a complete breakdown when the 2 main principles are SO iron clad?

Now light clients and online wallets is another story... what we need is faster/smarter clients so everyone can do some verification.

Holy cow, all by yourself? I'm impressed! Maybe Satoshi really was just one guy then..

Exactly my thoughts; I have no idea what the sellers are doing a month before a halving but I will take it - paycheck coming in in ~4 days

I will eat my words if the price does not climb at least 50% during December/January.

I have just started using BTC instead of Western Union and its both easier and cheaper - even if the price dropped to 0.01 I would still be using this stuff. So yeah I'm not worried about BTCs value or adoption rates.

Can someone explain to me quickly the purpose of this line (from the wiki/as above):
"scriptPubKey: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 404371705fa9bd789a2fcd52d2c580b65d35549d"

I can probably figure out the syntax on my own, but what does it DO and WHY?

EC-pupkey-crypto is already used to sign the sha256 hash of the tx, so why this 3rd algo?

I just did a successful trade with MadSweeney of 25 btc. You can trust him I think

Anyway Sweeney; are you really charging enough? You got what 2-500 pesos (12$) tops out of our 12K pesos trade?

I appreciate it of course, but I think you need to raise your fee by ~1 percent point and use that money to expand and advertise BTC usage/your service - which could be a huge boon to your country/you.
Honestly your fee was so low I thought you might run with the money instead of continuing the service

The exchange costs in Denmark are minimum 13$ + mtgox buy-in/trading-costs or a flat 9% through BTCNordic, so you are definitely not the bottleneck here.

I think even with the costs on my side and an increase in your rates the total cost is less than when using Western Union or the same so you know, you really could have a big business here - especially if the danish rates drop in the future.

I think at least its a must you inform everyone you send money to that their money came through Bitcoin.

Right guys sorry I dropped off the map for a while. I became a dad and pursued some other projects (waste of time mostly), I also got a job as a real software developer. Nifty stuff.

Anyway I do have some progress to report and this is still my main and only hobby project.

Not really, the basic language is one the first languages and probably C like in performance. Further the whole basic card has been built around it so the instructions are almost hardware level from the get go.

.. and of course assembly is horrible to code, I don't think anyone uses it.

My main focus right now is a card talking to an android phone - even that is very advanced and android phones are more universal than the universal readers of one company.

Yeah I found out.

The EC-211 is just Elliptic Curve crypto over a integer field 211 bits large. It COULD likely have done secp256k1, which itself is just a variation of normal EC, but unfortunately their EC-211 does not use the normal EC curve.

y^2 + XY = x^3 + ax + b instead of y^2= x^3 + ax + b
secp256k1 is just specific values for "a" and "b"

This means the EC-k1 must be ported/implemented from some library - SHA256 is on-card. I still need to read more about pure BTC as I have been mostly reading about the cards and just EC.

I can't link to it directly, but is under "free download" on their english site: http://www.basiccard.com/.


Right now I'm looking into the T1 protocol, the basiccard terminal program from ZC will do it for you automatically, BUT it runs on a PC, not Android. After a quick look I doubt I could do T1 from the bottom, but other options such as reverse engineering the ZC terminal, contacting the company or finding a T1/DS1 library exist.

Thats all for now.

I'm just not very experienced with transfers and thought Smart money was easier.

I just sent you an email with a one-time key/addr. pair with 25.4 BTC on it so just use that. Its fine if the final amount is above 11500.

No... the whole point of my post was dealing with flawed software and still creating safe keys with it. Using vanity addresses DOES increase security since they take longer time to generate.

The question was whether the increase could be enough to eliminate the need for code trust.
Maybe someone who actually knows cryptography could answer?


Let's say I make a poisoned normal gen:
1. At least the first 10.000 installs would need different starting generation points (think 1.. 2.. 3...) or address collision would happen too often and oust my malevolent code.
2. Each generator would also need to generate at least 1000 addresses before cycling back to #1 to avoid address repetition ousting the malevolent code.

This gives a total brute forcing chance of 1/10.000.000, which is laughably bad. My laptop computer could generate ALL my users keys, check for BTC on the blockchain and empty the addresses in tops 1-5 hours.
How do you know YOUR favorite generator programmer is not about to do this right this second? Unless you personally checked every program line of your generator all your fancy-pants paper wallets could be empty in the next 10 secs.

Now lets try again but with vanity addresses:
1. We already have the maximum brute force chance of 1/10.000.000 from before.
2. Now you spend 1 hour to generate your key - possibly millions or billions of attempts on today's hardware.

Now the malevolent programmer would need 10.000.000 hours, not tries, to generate ALL his users keys. In case you are wondering that is ~1141 years.

So not too shaby huh?

However our malevolent programmer is smart so he will now change the program so that vanity addresses only have 10 different starting points and a cycle of 5 (so generating for the same vanity phrase will only ever yield maximum 50 unique addresses).
It would then take the malevolent programmer 50 hours to generate all his users keys.

So okay 50 hours is more than 5, but still not that good.
However if you increase your generation time to the full 8 hours of sleep he would now have to generate ~16 days.
Still not that good.

Still that is at least 80 times safer than a regular poisoned generator.

Does anyone have a program that checks if a generator is really generating different addresses each time? Then only ONE programmer has to trustworthy out of 2 or more.

Well it looks like the Android wallet, but if its actually in use that is cool.

(Tillykke til Danmark)

I think the clients still RUN, right? Otherwise THAT is a major issue.

So it's just a question of using TOR, torrents or a simple MIRROR site to get A client.

For Iranians that should be like a given - you think porn is unblocked in that country? Hell being blocked there is like a seal of approval.

Largely I agree with you, but I think its fair to speculate on downtrends since BTC are likely "overpriced" to account for that potential you speak of.

A stock with the real world value of 1$ may have potential and thus be priced at 10$ or 100$, but it would still be fair and make sense to dump that stock all the way down to 1$ again if you doubted that potential.

A lot of Bitcoins current value is speculation and hopes for its future and then like a "pitiful" 2000 companies using it a bit. A drop to 5$ might not be crazy - who knows the true value of anything?


Now, after keeping it real; I still intend to buy more at my next paycheck since I'm a believer.

That's an isolation attack, its pretty well known, but rather hard to execute.

Additionally you would likely only be able to scam small merchants for small amounts for all your effort.

I'm not worried about this at all.

Okay so maybe someone can tell me whether this idea would work or not:

Obviously generating keys yourself with your own code on your own offline computer is safest, but lets say people don't know how to code..

In this case they need a generator that they can be reasonably sure is not code-poisoned ie. spitting out pre-determined and easily calculable keys.

My idea is using a vanity generator and then getting it to generate for something requiring like an hour on a offline Ubuntu live USB (perhaps while you sleep).

Why does this increase security you ask? Well lets assume a poisoned vanity generator:
1. You know the generator is offline so it cannot possibly convey the key/address generated.
2. Even knowing the fake randomize function the attacker has to generate for minimum 1 hour or whatever you chose.
3. He can only do this in 1 hour IF he KNOWS your vanity phrase - since there is NO way for him to know if a given blockchain address is from his poisoned generator he would have to try on all blockchain addresses for 1 hour.
4. Your "vanity" phrase could be random numbers to make it harder for the attacker to brute force just obvious vanity addresses.
5. Now to avoid immediate detection his fake generator would HAVE to seem somewhat random, even 100 preset addresses would quickly be ousted by the naked eye or normal use - this variability would have to be multiplied by the 1 hour YOU used to get your vanity address. So even with a ridiculous 5 preset "key-types" and a 1 hour vanity address it would take the attacker 5 hours to crack it even if he KNEW the address was from his gen.

A live USB can be bought and setup easily for ~10 bucks, but what do you guys think; is this an old idea? Would it reasonably protect small amounts of BTC for "newbies"?

Okay simple economics:
A medium risk stock paying out 10$ is worth about 100$ which gives you a nice 10% yield.
If the stock suddenly gave 20$ the stock price would quickly shoot up to 200$.

Bitcoin inflation with the current reward is ~26% so even at steady prices like now the total BTC value is increasing 25% per year.

When that inflation halves the effective yield of BTC goes way up, 12.5 percentage points, to adjust to that the price has to increase.


Why would the market be surprised?
1. 7200 BTC are created each day if 10% of that is immediately sold for $ then the reward drop leads to an immediate ~2% shortfall of BTC at mtgox which leads to a rally.
2. People valuing BTC will buy at some constant rate, like at each paycheck like myself - since the rate is usually going up, whenever we can. Even if I knew with 1000% certainty that BTC would be worth 1000$/BTC tomorrow I would NOT be able to vastly increase my buy rate.

So with constant value going IN short-term and supply sharply dropping short-term a 2% rise is near guaranteed to be a shock event. A 2% upwards shock could easily trigger a upwards correction.


Add to this deduction that alt chains experiencing reward halving DID see a price doubling - the reward change was no surprise on those alts either.

So to summarize, both logic and empirical data suggests a market shock will happen. Just because it is expected doesn't mean you can prepare!

Taxes would change for one.

Obscure taxes would be impossible to claim in a BTC world as it is too easy to hide.

Instead things easily controlled like property and personal permits/IDs would be taxed with flat taxes. If you can not pay those things will be claimed by the government.
The tax level would then be determined in such a way that government take-overs become rare enough that it does not cause public dissent.

Tall office buildings and stores would be taxed more than farmland.

Income and VAT taxes might disappear or be levied only on those who don't hide well enough.


Governments could still improve as such taxes would create a lot of political pressure on what the taxes are spent on - as opposed to inflation which is invisible and flies more under the public radar.
Massive bailouts and debt would simply become impossible.

On the other hand rich people may selfishly benefit from a flat tax rate and the ease with which they could hide wealth - this however may turn out fine if governments in turn are pressured into spending more on the poor and middle class to justify taxes, instead of rich men's subsidies.

The 40-50 pesos for 1000 pesos for phone transfers, was that a flat rate or actually a 4-5% rate?

I want our friend to receive about 11000-12500 pesos, so how many BTC would I need to send for that? Is 23.4 enough?