IIRC if you seed it before ever pulling a random number from it, it will only be seeded from your (quite likely weak) seed, and not the OS provided randomness. Seeding it should be unnecessary, and it makes it easy to screw yourself.

"There’s no mechanism to ensure that people who make money through such digital currency report the income to the Internal Revenue Service"

:-/

There's no mechanism to ensure that people who make money through CASH report the income to the Internal Revenue Service... and yet the world continues on just fine.

Generally law enforcement in free societies is accomplished via sampling and stiff penalties for cheating... not some crazy panopticon of ubiquitous surveillance. There are places where Bitcoin creates some different challenges, taxation isn't one of them.

Uh. This forum is full of miners.  If anyone here wants to ask a miner a question, they can just— you know— send one a private message.

But hey, I can play along— for a miner that has an Avalon and mines on a 3% fee pool.  "Do you think you're getting $90/month per Avalon you have mining at that pool?"

There are some other large pirate passthrough operators worth mentioning— including some which, according to popular rumor, were almost certainly short pirate in anticipation of his eventual downfall.

I don't believe that he did, it's kind of crazy when you think about it. It undermines the purpose and motivations of creating Bitcoin. If you don't actually care about decentralized cryptocurrency, why are you doing anything with Bitcoin in the first place? ... Because it's profitable, but that were so obvious it would have been created long before Satoshi did.

With a little more foresight, Satoshi could have both foreseen pooled mining and possibility of using the same consensus algorithm to decenteralize pooled mining (e.g. P2Pool) and perhaps the symmetry would have been broken differently, large centralized pools might not have arisen, and the world might be a very different place now. Alas.

See: "POW which involves queries against the UTXO set"

A whole bunch of variations are possible, but the general idea is to use the state you're mining against to make a deterministic random selection in a normative UTXO set, and then hash the result and thats your POW.  So your mining hardware would be boards of ultra fast flash memory coupled with sha256 fpgas or something instead of SHA256 chips.  It's a kind of memory hard POW.

Crazy. It offers the advantage of having security that is independent of other people. Even though your 'online' or lite node may keep its keys privately, this doesn't prevent parties you're connecting to from doing thing like lying to you about payments you've received (at some costs for true SPV nodes).  Even independent of the personal security benefits, it contributes to the health of the network backing these coins that you own.

Mining is something the network needs, don't understate that— but indeed,  we have frighteningly few actual miners in bitcoin a couple dozen pools plus p2pool users, pretty much.  Everyone is is just selling computing power to one of those parties. It's fragile and frightening.

It's possible to have a POW scheme which prevents this, but the tradeoffs aren't obvious, alas.

that number is pure fantasy. It's culled from addr broadcasts, but there are crap nodes that just send random addresses to anyone who connected to them, greatly inflating estimates based on watching addr broadcasts. (and at the same time, there are a great many nodes which never addr broadcast)

There are on the order of 4000 to 5000ish listening nodes. Average connection counts on listening nodes suggest that there are something on the order of 50,000 total bitcoin nodes.  It's likely that we're soon going to be going through cycles of running out of listening sockets again, this happened back in early 2011 due to rapid growth and now due to greater numbers of people running bitcoinj (android wallet, multibit, etc.) which consumes connections but doesn't contribute back to the network.

A lot of people use Bitcoin only via websites, what this says for the future security of bitcoin is hard to say.

I'm not sure it thats entirely inaccurate, go look at the bitcoin-dev logs from January. IIRC, there was reason to suspect that some of the duplicate nonce signatures were coming from BitcoinJ and there was some speculation about broken java RNGs that went nowhere.

Transaction ID: 77822fd6663c665104119cb7635352756dfc50da76a92d417ec1a12c518fad69 contains the patch for the second bug:


I guess this was code monkey-copied from abe?  I suppose someone should go fix that too.

Deep misunderstanding of how the blockchain works detected.

One address or one thousand, the number of addresses doesn't matter. The blockchain is not aware of addresses, addresses are a wallet construct. What matters is the number of txouts. Sweeping dust is fine and good, but addresses don't come into it.

If you were are one of the subpoena recipients mentioned here and are marveling at the multitude of demands and short deadline and are contemplating not responding:  That would probably be a very bad idea. You should seek legal council immediately.

It seems kind of sad to me that your mode of interaction with others consists primarily of manipulation and selfish exploitation to such an extent that you're just simply unable to comprehend that anyone else could be differently motivated.  This seems to result in you resorting to absolutely ludicrous theories to explain the actions of others.

(1) Perform joint transaction with people on a super highly public thread, with a detailed explanation, that easily shows up in google.
(2)  
(3) Profit!

Uh. Yea.  And you spoiled my diabolical plans, by some impotent whining on IRC!  Darn you girl/boy!

I've seen it said that sociopaths often eventually grow out of it and learn to have real human interactions as they reach middle age, I hope for you... and hope that your wheeling and dealing, playing fast and exploitative doesn't leave you completely alienated from the world, and potentially incarcerated by the time you finally realize that everyone else isn't just faking their humanity too.

Huh? Your reality distortion field is really quite impressive. Nice omission of your teenie-nudies/child-porn(?) links and the prior bans before that.  But just to make it clear to the kids following along at home— the consequence of all that is you were evicted from the channel, apparently to the reasonable satisfaction of "my betters". I'm not aware of anyone who is unhappy to see you gone, though perhaps they haven't told me.

As far as I know Giga still has a gold-star reputation, and he made good on his dealings with other.  The only thief involved there, as far as I can tell— is you.  But hey, I could be missing some information, please feel free to show me where you made good on your contract and made all the people holding your giga-passthrough assets whole.

A fact?  You mean snipes in a private IRC channel that where only ever seen by the couple people who dutifully forwarded them to me to laugh at your insanity somehow SPOILED MY DIABOLICAL PLANS?!?  Wait. I'm failing to see how anything was sunk, your slander never went further than your little closed clique of sycophants and the thread proceeded like normal and was a lot of fun, ultimately involving over 60k BTC IIRC.
Case in point about slinging infinite shit and eventually getting a few hits.

But hey, if someone with a ignore throbby that has a color indicating some kind of serious urinary tract infection, who's been established to have ripped people off by going short assets and then declaring them worthless, who revels in (and writes mealy-mouthed excuses for) racist rants, who can't handle being asked to stop distributing apparent underage nudies in a general commerce IRC channel without blowing their top and going on a multi-year attack binge, and engages in sociopath gender-bending to attempt to manipulate the forum ... thinks I'm a duplicitous piece of shit,  well I suppose I should be flattered.

Probability is often the wrong way to think about adaptive attacks.

This isn't some wabbly toothpaste tubes going down an conveyor belt in a factory, where you can measure the rate at which they fail to get packaged and just account for it in your yield.

You might have some button on your website that costs a user nothing to hit but has a 1:10000 chance of paying them a Bitcoin.  You only get about 5000 users pressing that button on your site a year right now, and the cost of fixing the bug is 10 Bitcoin.  It sounds better to not fix it, or at least not make a priority of it— under the random model. Just increment your prices a little bit to cover the loss and you're good to go.

And indeed, the results would support that decision _until_ an attacker finds the button. And then they've pressed it 10,000,000 times in 10 minutes and you find yourself bankrupt.  These surprises are magnified by the fact that sometimes attackers take advantages of deep properties that you may not be aware of— things like button pressing being botnet-automatable. Toothpaste doesn't usually out think/research you, toothpaste isn't usually an expert who makes their living by failing to do what you expect them to do, toothpaste doesn't change its behavior just to make your day suck.

There are cases where you can armor against attacks by simply twiddling the prices, and cases where you can't. Actually delineating them can be hard because the distinctions depend not just on the details of your operation (can people automate transactions with you? can they attack you over and over again without you noticing? Are attacks which have a low cost to fail possible with you?) but on the attackers (can the partner with miners? or buy hashpower? can they get access to large amounts of funds? do they know where your bitcoin nodes are located? Can they attack multiple sites in parallel with one set of blocks? Will they still attack if it hardly makes them no money at all?). There is a lot more to things than just P(x,y).

MP also has a lot of misses, for example (s)he was apparently telling people that I (0_o) was trying to rob people with my "I taint rich!" thread.  It turns out that when you talk smack about everyone and everything, eventually you get some hits.

What I'm curious about is if MP predicted MP own default on MP's fraction(reserve)alized GIGA shares? I mean, if MP can't predict when even MP is going to rip off people, why should anyone care about the rest of MP's predictions?

Almost all altcoins use forks of really old versions of Bitcoin with a mish-mash of (partial) exploit fix backports and are, as such, not all that similar to current versions of Bitcoin.

A forum newbie emailed me and suggested this link would be informative for the thread: http://www.scribd.com/doc/131955288/Randomly-Failed-The-State-of-Randomness-in-Current-Java-Implementations

No, no effort is conserved when mining so none is lost when you turn it off. You do need continual connectivity to the network, but there is no need to mine 24/7. You'll just earn proportionally less.  Though if you have costly mining hardware it might be wise to locate it someplace where you can mine 24/7!

Chosen by fair dice roll, guaranteed to be random.

No,  I'd prefer the case be genuinely made by those who had already found ideological common ground and earnestly weren't seeking a selfish result here.
It's fair for me, because it's exactly what I expect people to say. It's fair for them because its actual evidence supporting an earnest, if not entirely correct (/representative), belief. But... really? fair?  I wasn't aware that there was some particular formal structure for convincing people.

In any case, the whole approach of collecting up funds and handing them over conditionally was making the same statement implicitly to anyone whos perception was sensitized to read it that way. I was trying to caution you against that kind of position before you actually said it outright.
Yes, people's motivations are complicated. For example, one non-altruistic motivation sometimes at play is the feeling the need to be consistent with their past outspoken positions. It's usually easier to find locations for common ground when you're not saying things that play right into the wrong side of people's past battles...

I've seen Wikimedia turn away million dollar scale donations with strings which would have been easier to swallow than "do something that promotes Bitcoin's value" and that was at times when a million dollars was a lot more to Wikimedia than it is now,  if your strategy is it to exploit non-pure-altruism in the form of desire to bring in more funds, I do not predict success. Wikimedia's challenges are more in the domain of managing growth, not in bringing funds. With some additional effort but without Bitcoin Wikimedia could already bring in more funding than they could safely and sustainably apply to their mission at this time.

If instead people seek out ideological commonality— can a world with politically motivated mastercard blockades reliably share in the sum of human knowledge, when sometimes that knowledge is unpopular with people in power? (take care: Wikileaks is also a sore spot for some at Wikimedia)— or points of convenience for some donors I believe success is more likely.  Or even that bitcoin is a geeky toy and so geeks like both Bitcoin and Wikipedia.  These paths are also less incompatible with some positions that some people have previously adopted, bitcoin could still be a worthless scam but also still be easier for some donors to deal with or supportive of a vision of a world where people can speak more freely because they control their own finances.