As has been pointed out, this statement makes no sense. You cannot possibly have simply "created" a "send" address in your wallet. All addresses generated by your wallet are receiving addresses; a sending address can only appear in your wallet if you obtained it from somewhere else. Please tell us, step by step, exactly what you did to obtain the address you gave to Mt. Gox. At this point, it's not at all clear whether you really sent your coins to somebody else, or whether you only think you did and the problem is actually something completely different.

Blocks are groups of transactions which have processed by miners. This process requires a huge amount of computer power, making it extremely difficult to produce a "fake" block with different transactions. Essentially, once a transaction appears in a block it is almost impossible to reverse or alter it after the fact. Blocks are linked in a structure known as the blockchain, and each block includes data from the previous block in the chain, so that removing or replacing any particular block invalidates all the blocks that came after it, making it almost impossible to alter a block after additional blocks have been mined after it. The blockchain is fundamental to the security of Bitcoin and is the reason why Bitcoin transactions cannot be easily reversed.

The blockchain is currently about 2.75 GB in size and growing by the minute as new blocks are mined. However, you only need to download the whole thing once: when you run Bitcoin, the client will download only the blocks you don't already have and add them its copy of the blockchain, instead of redownloading the whole thing from scratch every time.

Due to the risk of friendly fraud, very few people will accept debit/credit cards when selling bitcoins.

About BTC0.0005 per hour, give or take. Nvidia cards are pretty much worthless for mining.

As with anything of value, the only way to obtain bitcoins is to either buy them or earn them. There are no ways to get significant quantities of bitcoins for free without effort.

You're not familiar with Poe's Law, are you?

GPG encrypted (TrueCrypt isn't really meant for single files), on an external hard drive, several flash drives, my camera, my dumbphone, my email account, and a good old-fashioned 3.5" DS/HD floppy disk. These devices are all stored in various physical locations. I'm not taking any chances.

The two transactions are almost exact duplicates of each other (identical inputs and outputs), and were sent within minutes of each other. Looks like your client somehow glitched and sent the same transaction twice. The first transaction has been confirmed, and SatoshiDice has already paid out on it,
so you should have two confirmed transactions in your wallet: one for -BTC3.005 and one for +BTC4.012196. If that's the case, you've got absolutely nothing to worry about. However, if you have an extra -BTC3.005 transaction which is unconfirmed, you will need to remove this transaction from your wallet (exactly how to do this will depend on what client you're using).

Note that since both transactions have identical inputs, and one of them has been confirmed, none of the coins still in your wallet are affected, however you shouldn't try moving your entire balance to another wallet, as the extra transaction may be causing your client to display an incorrect balance. Please tell us what client you're using, and exactly what transactions are appearing in it.

Under US law, you're not obligated to report a damn thing, and have the right to perform your best Sergeant Schultz impression if anyone asks.

Seriously dude? Removing my response to your question from your quote, then claiming I haven't answered it?


At first I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were ignorant or grossly misinformed about basic economics, but now I'm convinced I'm being trolled. But just in case, I'll reiterate the point you seem to be missing.

Nobody's going to pay anything for your poo unless they want to use it for something (organic fertiliser, or whatever). And they're not going to pay $50 for it unless they believe the thing they're planning to use it for is worth that amount.

This will be my last post on this subject unless you can come up with something resembling a rational argument.

I may be going out on a limb here, but it's entirely possible that at least some of the people who payed $1,305 for a share of InfoSpace did in fact plan on using these shares to receive the huge dividends that these new Internet companies seemed to be promising. Of course, the huge dividends never materialised, but that's the risk investors take when investing in highly speculative ventures. Most people who invest money in a thing do so with the intention of using that investment to make even more money.

The people who bought overpriced tulips planned to use their tulips to make a profit by selling them to greater fools. Not the most sensible use for tulips, and certainly not sustainable, as they found out the hard way, but it is a use nonetheless.

Yes. And why are people willing to pay for things? Because they want to use it for something!

You can't seriously be asking what will happen to the value of bitcoin when a particular event happens after people have already stopped using it and aren't ever going to use it. If nobody uses Bitcoin, its value is zero, regardless of all other factors. Bitcoin has value only because people are, in fact, using it right now. Some are using it to buy things and some are using it as a speculative investment, but it doesn't matter what they're using it for; as long as Bitcoin is useful for something, it has value.

Since bitcoins are not backed by anything, they have value solely because they are useful for certain things. If nobody's using bitcoins, they'll be worthless anyway, regardless of how many are being created.

Right. People are paying over $10 for something that they're not actually planning on ever using. That makes perfect sense.

You can buy an Amazon gift card with bitcoins. Are you happy now?

At the exact moment the block reward drops to zero (around the year 2140), absolutely nothing will happen, since by that time the block subsidy will have already been an insignificant fraction of mining rewards for well over a hundred years. Instead, mining rewards will come from transaction fees. Part of the reason for the gradual reduction in the block subsidy is to avoid any craziness happening when it disappears completely.

Why would no one care about Bitcoin when the block subsidy drops to zero (after it's already been insignificant for over a hundred years)? That doesn't make any sense.

There are already many places where you can spend your bitcoins, and the number of places that accept bitcoins is likely to continue increasing in the future as Bitcoin becomes more widely known.

...implies that PayPal sucks (as if we didn't already know that) and that if your bank sends you sensitive information in emails or allows online banking without HTTPS, then there is something dreadfully wrong with their security and you should withdraw all your money immediately and take it somewhere else... before someone else does.

You mean signed, not encrypted, but otherwise you are correct. Of course, it's not necessary to use HTTPS for this - GPG and Web of Trust works too, assuming people are diligent about verifying signatures. Though obviously you shouldn't sign your Bitcoin address with itself and think you've done something useful...

Please re-read the original post. This question has nothing to do with modifying Bitcoin transactions, it is about modifying Bitcoin addresses as they appear on a webpage, before a transaction is made in order to trick users into sending coins to the attacker's address.

This problem isn't limited to Bitcoin, and applies to any kind of financial transaction conducted over an insecure channel, which is exactly why you're supposed to always use HTTPS for financial transactions. I thought everyone knew that already?

True, you cannot modify a transaction after it has been sent, but the question is about changing a bitcoin address as it appears on, eg, a store's webpage, in order to trick users into sending coins to the wrong address.

I don't think pirate was very clever. Just that his investors were not.

I lol'd. And I rarely admit that. Coincomm, if you're going to Hell, I know a great bar on the outskirts of Dis. We should meet for drinks some time.

That's what they said about GPU mining, and nothing of the sort ever happened. A bunch of people still mining with CPUs complained, but nobody cared, and now nobody uses CPUs for mining anymore, and still nobody cares. It's not clear what you mean by mining being "in the hands of only a few big players". Are you suggesting that only a few people will actually buy ASICs, despite being orders of magnitude cheaper than equivalent GPU or FPGA rigs? Or do you mean that with only one company producing ASICs, that company might put some kind of backdoor in their products to pull off a 51% attack (or some other kind of attack)? The latter is impossible for two reasons: First, miners are in total control of their own hardware, and since all mining operations are completely verifiable it would be impossible for the hardware to alter the blocks being mined in any way without being immediately detected. Second, BFL isn't at all likely to remain the only ASIC manufacturer in existence: as soon as other IC manufacturers see how much money BFL is making, they'll start designing their own bitcoin mining ASICs right away.

Also, the purpose of mining (which is often misunderstood) is to protect the network. Back when CPU mining was the only thing around, anyone with a botnet had a decent chance of pulling off a 51% attack, since many of the zombie computers would be more than capable of substantial mining. Now that more specialised equipment is required, it is becoming less and less likely that a successful attack can be made using conventional hardware. ASICs only adds to this security, and this is good.

In any case, ASIC mining cannot be prevented. For any concievable algorithm that can be executed by a CPU, it is possible to construct an ASIC that can execute the same algorithm more efficiently, since a CPU, unlike an ASIC, must necessarily have the resources and capacity to do other things than what it is doing at the moment. ASICs will be developed for any cryptocurrency that becomes valuable enough to be worth the R&D costs. Nothing other than worthlessness can prevent it.

TL;DR: ASIC mining is not likely to produce mining "monopolies", it increases the security of the network, it is a Good Thing, and even if it weren't, it cannot be prevented.

No and no. Debian stable (squeeze), by definition, doesn't have the latest versions of anything. Debian unstable (sid) has bitcoind 0.6.2 for amd64, and bitcoind 0.6.0 for i386.

If you want to install the very latest version of Bitcoin (currently 0.6.3, though 0.7 is going to be released soon), download the tarball from bitcoin.org.

That's a command, not an argument. The arguments (if any) accompanying such a command are usually fallacious (but not always - there are more than a few members of this forum who enjoy hurling abuse and sound logic in equal measure, which is always entertaining to watch).

Wallet encryption usess AES-256 in CBC mode, which is safe, but remember that only the private keys are encrypted. Everything else, such as your balance, addresses, address book, transactions, etc. is completely unprotected, so you definitely want another layer of encryption if you're concerned about privacy. The default encryption is only designed to stop people from stealing your money, nothing else.

I'd just like to point out that a personal attack is only argumentum ad hominem when it is used as the premise of an argument. e.g. "You are an idiot, therefore you are wrong" is an ad hominem argument, but "You are wrong, therefore you are an idiot" is not an ad hominem argument (though it is still abusive). This is one of those things that just irritates me when people get it wrong.

I agree on all other points though.

Yup. Perception is everything. That's how I became a multi-millionaire overnight by accounting in cents instead of dollars. Genius, right? But now it seems like everything costs 100 times as much as it used to. Being a millionaire isn't quite what I was hoping for.