Nobody brute forced anything. They just took the string they wanted, stuck a correct checksum on the end to make it a "valid" Bitcoin address, and that's it. They did not find a private key whose public key hashes to that string, which is what you need to do if you want to actually spend coins sent to an address.

Same problem as producing energy from gravity or magnetic fields. Say you've got two plates attracted to each other by the Casimir force. They will move towards each other and you can extract energy from that movement (theoretically, at least). But they can only move a limited distance and then they stop producing energy, and the Casimir force will cause the plates to resist being moved back into their original position. Overcoming this force requires that you expend at least as much energy as you just produced. No free lunch there.

A real... what? You mean, the other kind of cock?



Remember, if you notice any fluid leaking from your cock, or you are having trouble maintaining a constant flow, have it checked immediately. Don't put it off until it's too late.

Tracking IP addresses generally isn't the problem, and where it is a problem it can be solved by just running Bitcoin over Tor (go into Settings -> Options -> Network and turn on "Connect through SOCKS proxy". The default settings are for a standard Tor installation; if your Tor setup is non-standard you may need to change them.) The real problem is that Bitcoin transactions can be linked to each other (though there are ways of breaking the trail), and it's difficult (but not impossible) to stay anonymous when buying and selling bitcoins.

It's change. If you have received (say) BTC1000 in one transaction and you spend BTC1 of that, you can't just spend part of it, you have to spend it all at once, so you send BTC1 to the recipient and send the remaining BTC999 to yourself (and most clients will create a new address just for this purpose). Then when you want to send another BTC1 to someone, again you send the remaining BTC998 to yourself (again, at a new address). So you end up with a chain of transactions each taking a small amount out and sending the remainder to a new address. This is perfectly normal and happens every time someone receives a large chunk of bitcoins then spends it in small chunks. There's nothing suspicious about it.

I said merchants, not exchanges. Exchanges have a metric fucktonne of regulations they are (or are supposed to be) complying with.

They're not saying that at all. They're saying "Fuck paying $1000 a year or more to try to secure a system that was never secure in the first place."

It was self-defence! He was reaching for a weapon! While he was tied to the chair...

There is no sensitive customer data involved when using Bitcoin. A merchant's failure to secure their bitcoin wallet doesn't put their customers at risk in any way, and the PCI Council doesn't care if merchants lose their own money/data rather than their customers'. PCI compliance is totally unnecessary for a merchant that only accepts cash and bitcoins.

No it isn't, it's an industry standard for securing credit card information, which is a major pain in the butt for merchants which Bitcoin completely eliminates. Not having to deal with the risk of identity theft and payment fraud and all the security concerns that go with it is basically the main selling point.

I'm a skinny guy too (32" waist) and I go commando all the time but you don't see me wearing a belt. I have complete confidence in my waistband.

The sheriff said six shots were fired. The reporter didn't infer this, he cited the county sheriff as the source of this specific information, and he's not likely to be mistaken about such a simple detail. Maybe he is, but I think it's most unlikely.

[citation needed] Last time I checked, 6-shot .38 Special revolvers were very common, if not the most common type of revolver used today. Sure, 5-shot revolvers are pretty common, but I don't think six-shooters are anywhere near as rare as you seem to think. Besides, who's to say this woman isn't involved in "cowboy shooting" competitions? I mean, who keeps a revolver for self-defence purposes these days?

What the Hell are you talking about? The article specifically mentions that the gun was a ".38 revolver" which is stated to be empty after six shots were fired. Presumably it was a .38 Special, which to this day is the single most popular revolver cartridge, with a 6-shot cylinder being most common for this calibre (although 5- and 7-shot revolvers exist), hardly a "rare animal". There were a total of 6 shots fired: 5 hits and 1 miss. Learn to read.

Of course. What else are you going to eat?

Well, if you want to barter them instead of eat them, stylish chickens can be worth up to 5-10 bullets more than ugly ones. People always pay more for a good-looking product.

Being offline does not prevent you from receiving coins, however they will not show up in your wallet until your client has finished synchronising (ie, downloading transactions that occurred while it was offline). If your client has not finished synchronising (the current version will display (out of sync) if this is the case) and it is missing recent transactions, this is almost certainly the cause. Note that this process will take several minutes depending on how long you've been offline (assuming it was already fully synchronised before you went offline, otherwise it will take much longer, even up to a few days if it was never previously synchronised), so if you're just opening the client to check your balance and then closing it immediately, that won't give it enough time. You must leave it open until it is finished.

Please don't use URL shorteners. This forum isn't Twitter, there's nothing wrong with posting long URLs. URL shorteners are considered suspicious by the forum software since there's no way to know (short of actually clicking on them) where they lead.

As I understand, that's actually the result of Japan's censorship of porn: apparently, depictions of erect penises were (are?) obscene, but tentacles were not... And so a fetish is born.

You sent BTC3.2 to SatoshiDICE without reading the warning that appears in two different places on the home page (once under "Read this warning first" and again under "How to play")? I'm sorry to say that your bitcoins have just bought you a lesson in reading comprehension from the wonderful (but expensive) teachers at the School of Hard Knocks.

SatoshiDICE can't get your money back, only Mt. Gox can. That address is a Mt. Gox address, and they did receive your winnings, though they can't credit it to your account because that wallet is shared by all Mt. Gox account holders, so there's no way to know which account the bitcoins are supposed to go to (it's not intended to receive bitcoins directly, which is exactly what SatoshiDICE does, hence the warnings on their page). Contact Mt. Gox again, and be sure to give all details on this specific transaction. If they can't or won't help you, your money's gone. Sorry.

I don't know what this is about either, but it's not even a scam. Bitcoin sellers are free to charge whatever price they want, just as if they were selling anything else. That's why you might see a pair of shoes on sale at one store for $80, but another store is selling the same shoes for $70. That doesn't mean the first store is trying to scam you, that's just the price they decided on. If people think the price (of shoes or bitcoins) is too high at one place, they'll just buy them somewhere else. So sellers will always offer the lowest price that they can while still making a profit, and anyone who charges excessively high prices will quickly go out of business. That's how competition works.

I've never used them, but according to their online cost estimator, they charge a lot more than $4.95.

Your certainty is misplaced. BitInstant charges a fee of 3.99% (which is clearly indicated on the site), in addition to the fee charged by MoneyGram, which varies but I think it's something like 8%, so that's about 12% lost in fees altogether. The rest was probably lost in exchange rate fluctuations: remember, bitcoins and dollars are completely different currencies, and the exchange rate fluctuates constantly. The bitcoin/US dollar exchange rate has dropped slightly over the last couple of days, so the bitcoins you purchased are currently worth slightly less than what you paid for them. But tomorrow they might be worth more. Or less. Nobody knows. That's the risk you take when dealing with other currencies.

I really don't think any fraud has occurred, I think you just misunderstood how the fees and exchange rates work.