The developers don't have a choice. Bitcoin uses strong cryptography, which, for reasons which don't really make sense, is legally classified as a military weapon under the Wassenaar Arrangement, and therefore illegal to export to "certain" countries. Simply making the source code available for download worldwide is legally equivilant to selling bombs to Iran. As fucked up as the law is, it must be obeyed if you want to avoid being jailed for arms trafficking.

No it doesn't, for the reasons I already explained. It's not even a disclaimer in any case: where does it even say that anyone is disclaiming liability of anything? It's just a warning and a reminder that brain use is required. Normally such warnings would not be required, but since we're potentially dealing with the same people who apparently can't drink coffee without burning themselves and then suing everyone who didn't warn them that hot things can cause burns, it pays to play it safe and just include stupid warnings for stupid people.

Warning people about potential scams makes one a conspirator in the eyes of the law? What crazy law are you talking about here? And you've got a long way to go if you think that simply refusing to censor lawful communications based on unproven accusations of unlawfulness counts as racketeering.

Exactly which politicians are pushing for Bitcoin to "open up its data", and do they realise how silly they look when not only is all the data (both the code and the transaction database) already completely open to "close government scrutiny", but being so open to scrutiny is precisely the entire point of Bitcoin (since that's how it prevents fraud without relying on trusted third parties)?

No. He's talking about the MyBitcoin fiasco. Though, he's got a lot of other things confused:

This is already implemented. In the Transactions tab, type the address you're interested in (or it's label) into the search bar, then click Export. Open the resulting file in your spreadsheet software. You now have a list of all transactions associated with that specific address in spreadsheet form, ready for you to calculate totals, copy part or all of it into another spreadsheet, or whatever else you want to do with it.

It doesn't. Anything which can be proven to be a scam is deleted on sight (though this is rarely noticed as nobody except moderators can see deleted threads). Moderators do not (and should not) delete things which are "likely" to be a scam when there's no real proof, to avoid inadvertently ruining the reputation of honest borrowers. People are considered innocent until proven guilty.

Do you have proof that it's a scam? Remember, they've already delivered on their FPGAs, as promised, and they function as advertised, so they would seem to be a legitimate company, albeit one with extremely poor customer service. You can't just accuse a legitimate company of being a huge scam without evidence. You can say it might be scam, and you can list reasons why it's probably a scam, but you can't outright say it is a scam unless you have damn good evidence to support your claim.

You clearly have absolutely no understanding of freedom, in particular freedom of association. Freedom of association means that if a private association has certain rules, and you voluntarily agree to those rules in order to join said association, then the association's leaders have the freedom to punish you if you break the rules you agreed to. If you disagree with the rules, you have the freedom to leave and form your own association, with your own rules. You do not have the freedom to make accusations without any supporting evidence when this is against the rules you voluntarily agreed to.

Bitcoins (along with gold, and dollars, and many other things) are valuable. Criminals try to steal, embezzle, or otherwise fraudulently obtain things that are valuable. Sometimes they succeed. This isn't a problem with Bitcoin, or the Bitcoin community (or gold or dollars for that matter). It's just a fact of life. If you really are an SEC agent, you would know that already, and you would also know that it's your job to make some attempt to actually investigate these crimes instead of just complaining about them, since most of us here are mere private citizens who have neither the authority nor the ability to do so.

There is also a third option: an actual SEC agent who's never used the Internet before, and while he probably learnt in his training that scams of various kinds are prevalent on the Internet, he hasn't the faintest idea of just how prevalent they are, and the impossibility of getting rid of them without outright banning discussion of any business proposals of any kind (which obviously isn't an acceptable solution on a forum about Internet currency). Hell, I've seen scams advertised on well-moderated furry porn sites ffs; the very idea that all scams can be eliminated from a site devoted to money represents a ludicrous level of wishful thinking.

That said, I tend to stay away from the lending forum for exactly this reason. What exactly goes through people's heads when they're told "Please irreversibly transfer your money to my anonymous account. I'll pay you back. Honest."? I mean, seriously, stuff like this makes you wonder how a fool and his money ever got together in the first place.

It's not another halving, or a special one, it's just the first (regular) halving. Block number 210,000 is expected to be mined sometime in December of this year (which is just under four years after the Bitcoin network became operational).

What, every one? Look harder.

If you look past the obvious answers, you'll see one that's even more obvious. Specifically, there are scams everywhere. These forums actually have relatively few scams, at least when compared to the rest of the Internet, or even just my spam folder.

Go shut down the U.S. Dollar. It's involved in far larger and far more numerous scams and illegal transactions than Bitcoin ever has.

We already have one. It was established long ago as a government agency, a commission if you will, in charge of regulating the exchange of things like securities and other investments. I just can't remember what it's called. The Commission of Exchange of Securities? No, that's not it... Oh wait, I remember now, it's called the Securities and Exchange Commission. You may have heard of it. Why aren't they doing something about all this?

Of course not. The light-speed delay will mean more stale blocks. Although non-mining nodes may go to the Moon, all the hashing action is going to remain on Earth until the InterplanetartyCoin fork (with day-long confirmation times) gains acceptance.

You're right, but to be fair, you could have chosen your words better. I mean, what about all the women without vaginas, did you ever think about their feelings? You really should have said "humanoids without a Y chromosome". No wait, that doesn't work in all cases either (eg those with Swyer syndrome or de la Chapelle syndrome). You know what, how about we just forget about classifying individuals based solely on the appearance of their genitalia and instead just call them all "people" and treat them all equally?

There definitely exists a "magic number" which allows whoever knows the magic number along with 32 bytes of the PRNG output to completely predict the rest of the output. The algorithm designer may (or may not) have had a specific magic number in mind when designing this algorithm. If so, it's a backdoor. If not, it's not (but there's no way to know for sure). Consider also that this algorithm is about a thousand times slower than other PRNGs and produces random numbers with a slight bias, making it an extremely poor choice even if it doesn't have a backdoor. The only reason I can think of for the NSA to endorse such an obviously flawed algorithm is that it's the only one they were able to get a backdoor into. What other explanation is there?

I don't think this has ever happened to any reputable modern algorithm (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). All now-broken cryptographic algorithms that I know of were widely known to be broken long before an actual attack was successfully demonstrated.

Of course it's possible to send "old algorithm" coins to an "new algorithm" address. It's already happening: compressed public keys technically function as a new algorithm, even though it's all ECDSA.

Yes. That's the whole point of using encryption in the first place: for those situations where you know (or at least suspect) that an eavesdropper will see all your messages, but you want the eavesdropper to be unable to determine the content of the messages that they see. If you need to prevent an attacker from knowing a message was sent at all, encryption won't help; you need to use other techniques to hide your messages, such as steganography.

No, as that's not what encryption does or is supposed to do.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Wait - extract the public key efficiently? How is that even a problem?

The headline is misleading, as Dual_EC_DRBG is a pseudo-random number generator, not an encryption standard.

Only if you use Dual_EC_DRBG. Bitcoin doesn't use it, or any other PRNG for that matter, instead relying on the OS's entropy source, which (normally) produces random numbers from hardware sources. Note that ECDSA (which Bitcoin does use) is not related to Dual_EC_DRBG in any way other than being based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, and does not have this backdoor.

Polymer frames are easy. Designing polymer barrels that don't instantly disintegrate from the combination of heat, pressure, and friction is a slightly harder engineering challenge.

They're just addresses, they don't "want" anything. More to the point, A, B, and C are addresses that belong to either the same person (who probably doesn't even know or care about individual addresses in the same way that a person using cash doesn't bother keeping track of individual coins and notes), or (though this is far less likely) multiple people acting jointly as a single entity (in which case there is no way to tell what each individual was thinking, other than that they were all in complete agreement as to how the money was to be distributed - exactly how they came to that agreement is their own business and no-one else's).

A, B, and C are almost certainly different addresses in the same wallet, and belong to one person. But in case you're wondering, clicking "Show scripts & coinbase" in blockchain.info will show you exactly how much came from each address.

No, this has always been around. In fact, it's pretty rare to find a transaction that doesn't send to two or more addresses, since transactions usually have to make change.

Both of these situations are explained in Chapter 9 of the whitepaper. Note that there's actually no limit on the number of outputs, and although a transaction from one person to another will normally only have two outputs, it is possible to use more than two outputs, for example when sending to multiple people with one transaction. The whitepaper only provides examples of the most common situation.