|
In that case, don't bother importing or deleting. Just use the raw transaction API to create, sign and send the transaction.
|
|
|
|
|
Dare I ask why you are deleting the key?
Are you really that sure that no one will re-use one?
|
|
|
|
Tax heaven bank accounts hold 30 trillion dollars? But there are only 3 trillion dollars in existence.
You know that dollar isn't the only currency in the world? So 30 trillion is not the sum of safe heaven usd accounts, but just an usd evaluation of deposits in all the currencies? A bank account is not a container that "holds" currency. When you deposit a $100 bill at your local bank, they don't take that physical bill and put it "in" your account. Most of the "dollars" in the world are in the form of US Treasury paper. Paper dollars are only a tiny fraction of the dollars in the world. |
|
|
|
The most obvious attack is putting in a stealth bug that poisons key generation
That's not very stealthy. You would immediately notice money not going where it is supposed to go. And magic constants are rare in the bitcoin source code, so "send money to XXX address" would stick out as obvious. You would have to be far more subtle than that. I think they meant a subtle change to the random number generation which caused a stealth change to the key pair generation allowing someone to more easily crack the keys that get generated. Want to see the code that generates new keys? void CKey::MakeNewKey(bool fCompressed)
{
if (!EC_KEY_generate_key(pkey))
throw key_error("CKey::MakeNewKey() : EC_KEY_generate_key failed");
if (fCompressed)
SetCompressedPubKey();
fSet = true;
}
Good luck messing that up. Note: EC_KEY_generate_key() is an openssl call |
|
|
|
|
Gox just rolled over. Might have been a bull trap.
|
|
|
|
I think it's generally a wise idea to quote prices of those exchanges that allow everyone to easily get their money in and out, not just some people  No such thing. If there was, the prices wouldn't be skewed like this. Also, see below. Ah, so some people get to enjoy that arb. Nice way to do business. Almost like the traditional money industry.
You can thank the traditional money industry. Do you really think that gox decided to cut off 75% of their customers? Once upon a time, there were a variety of ways to get money in and out of gox, and pretty much everyone could do it. Over time, almost all of those ways closed up, leaving only wire transfers between Japanese banks. This happened to every exchange, forcing most of them out of business. Now, we have a variety of exchanges, but for the most part, each of them is only able to serve a relatively small portion of the world because the traditional banking industry in their country will only allow them to interact with locals. |
|
|
|
Somebody notice that we went way past the $500 on MTGox? Or is my internet playing up again  Yes, every other exchange is following... BTC-e is currently at $460 which is really good for arbitrage... Go ahead, sell your Bitcoins on Gox, transfer the fiat to BTC-e and take the ARB. Hint: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Incidentally, does anyone know what's going on at Gox? Where is the trading volume coming from, considering that you can't get money in or out? All mad bots trading with themselves? Just because you can't get money in or out, it does not follow that no one can get money in or out. |
|
|
|
Well, you can't have it both ways. You seem pretty knowledgeable so why are you so insistent that free trade is voluntary even though that would conflict with your other opinions?
If it's voluntary, that little quirk you mentioned about Keynesianism, wins: there's no loss from changing your mind 100 times.
You are ignoring friction. There is loss from moving things around. Even if the things don't move, just updating computer records of ownership has non-zero costs. Trade is beneficial when the benefit of the trade exceeds the friction cost. But if markets are like little heat engines that only go one way because energy is taken out of the system, then there's nothing voluntary about resources pushing from the hot side to the cold side. Your analogy doesn't really fit. There is only one "heat", but there are many, many "resources". When one resource is pushing from hot to cold, another resource is flowing in the exact opposite direction, but also from hot to cold, in terms of that resource. The voluntary part comes from being able to decide for yourself which resources you have that you want to trade, which resources you want, with whom you want to trade, when you want to trade, and at the exchange rate you want. Of course, the other sides are free to make the same determinations, so "voluntary" doesn't imply that you get everything you want for free. Money vastly simplifies this process by abstracting away one side of nearly all of those trades. The gains from the system come when you realize that for various reasons different people are able to provide different resources at various costs. Some soil is excellent for growing corn, some soil is excellent for growing watermelons, some people are excellent at producing car engines, some people are excellent at producing robots, etc. You can grow your own food and raise your own livestock, but someone out there can probably do it more efficiently, so if you are good at something else, you two can trade and both benefit. You get your food cheaper than if you grew it yourself, and the farmer gets shoes, or tractors, or kitchen cabinets, or whatever for cheaper than if he did it himself. You could run with the with the heat engine metaphor and argue that it's a huge chaotic system, e.g.: MtGox takes the fees they earned and pay for something else, which is part of another market with energy getting sapped by other middlemen, ad infinitum.
You see middlemen, I see enablers. Mtgox provides a marketplace with access to more buyers and more sellers. Without that marketplace, you'd have fewer choices for trade, meaning that you'd get less when selling, or pay more when buying. In other words, they reduce friction. If you feel that the fees they charge for that service are too high for the value they provide, you are free to sell elsewhere. But the whole thing relies on the energy of the workers on the hot side being constrained as much as possible, before they get the freedom they want on the cold side. This is probably why Capitalism seems so unstable: everyone wants to use less energy, so people start cooperating instead of competing, then they form monopolies, then those monopolies take on political characteristics, as I think Odrec suggested.
Typical Marxist nonsense. Go read some better economics books. Hazlitt, Mises, Friedman, Hayek, etc. Capitalism and free trade in general do not rely on artificially hindering anyone else. One thing that Marx was right about is that people have a natural tendency to try to use government to protect their interests*. There are two ways to approach that problem. One of them works quite well, but requires diligence. The other is a complete and utter failure every time. One approach is to limit the power of government so much that it is unable to provide anti-competitive benefits. In this scenario, it doesn't matter that someone may attempt to use the state to protect their position, because the state is powerless to help them. This method works well, but requires that people not give in to the temptation to allow creep. The other approach is to make government more powerful. This is always and everywhere a failure. The government that you can use to tell someone else what to do is also the government that someone else is using to tell you what to do. People don't like being told what to do, so the trick here is to either get everyone dependent on the government so that their survival appears to depend on the system growing, or fill up the mass graves until people are too scared to speak out. * Marx was pretty good at observation. Less good at deduction. Terrible at projection. Not that it matters, no one has actually read his stuff in years, they mostly just repeat things attributed to his school. |
|
|
|
But that nice story is just your ideology -- it doesn't match up with reality.
Where's the voluntary exchange? It's just an oxymoron, unless you count open source sharing or some experimental "gift economy" with zero pressure to participate. You still haven't given any examples where it would make sense.
Profit is inherently exploitative and the "mutual gain" is not real. Otherwise people could trade the same item back and forth 100 times, and magically gain energy like a perpetual motion machine.
I'm sorry, I was laughing so hard at this point, I just couldn't bear reading any more. I'm a little worried that I might have missed something of merit later in the post, but given the intro, I just don't see how that would be possible. You do a very good job of describing why Keynesianism fails*. But Keynes is to free markets like pudding is to trees. (Not at all.) The gain from trade is not in the trade itself, it is in moving the system closer to a state where wants and needs are met. If Alice has an apple and wants money, and Bob has money, but wants an apple, they can trade. In trading, they both satisfy their wants (mutual gain). Unless something changes about what these two people want, it would make no sense at all to trade back, since that would move the system from a state of less want to a state of more want. Thinking that trading back and forth pointlessly can bring prosperity is typical Keynesian thinking. They look at the world and see trade, they see that trade is good. They then start to measure trade, and then make the fatal mistake of thinking that increasing that measurement at any and all costs is a good thing**. This sort of confusion over the measurement and the underlying principle is where ideas like hiring crews of people to dig ditches by hand, and then hiring more crews to follow the first crew to fill the ditches in. Along the way, many of the economic statistics took on this sort of perversion. See for example, the formula used for GDP. If the government spends a trillion dollars, no matter on what, the GDP is boosted by a trillion dollars, and people that don't bother to understand what the number really means just see that the number has gone up. * And good job at that, it took Hazlitt ~450 pages to debunk it the first time.** Sadly, they are not alone in practicing this fallacy. See cholesterol for an example in "medicine". |
|
|
|
Bitcoin was designed so that it is the miners who vote. If 51% of the miners agree to a rule change, then that rule change happens. Yes pools may become somewhat cetralized, but they are comprised of individuals who can move to different pools.
So? How to do this? When the Foundation is building shit, for example putting something in the official client that the community doesnt like, and i believe the foundation practically controls the client because the coders are in the foundation too, then how should the 51% react? And would 51% react at all? Or simply download the newest client and live with it? But even when... so how to fork? I mean the official client has no functionality included to fork the chain isnt it? But all miners and all wallets need to switch to the fork... otherwise they still would use the official chain. This isn't even remotely close to being true. Miners do not vote on rule changes. No one, not the developers, not the foundation, not the miners, not anyone, can force a rule change on you. |
|
|
|
It's interesting that you're so callous and only care about profit systems, even when dealing with something as basic as food, yet I'm somehow the cruel one?
Yes, you are. The "profit system" is the system that ensures that wants and needs are met through voluntary exchange. Profit is how society rewards the work it wants done. This is basic economics, grade school stuff. Are you really unaware of how this works? Or do you just feel that you have the right to use actual real violence* against others because you don't like the outcome? * As opposed to the imaginary violence you pretend that your body is doing against you as a consequence of you being alive. |
|
|
|
|
I no longer advocate hashing for the final transformation down to the private key.
I now always generate at least 1.5 times as many bits as I'll need (384 minimum for bitcoin, but typically 512 in practice since my tools were mostly set up for grabbing 256 bits at a time), and take the modulus against the order of our curve.*
This solves two problems at once. It ensures that the private key is not in the wrap-around range, and it should effectively blend as much entropy as possible into the key. As long as your entropy source isn't absolute crap, the keys generated from this method should have slightly more entropy embedded in them than keys made by hashing.
Methods for the rolling have been described in other threads. Two two main ones are to treat your rolls as the digits of a base X number, earning log2X bits per die per roll, and to assign a unique bit pattern to each face, up to the nearest power of two, and filling the other faces with fewer bits. (d6=00,01,10,11,0,1; d10=000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111,0,1; d12=000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111,00,01,10,11; etc)
Stop when you have enough bits, and then use it directly, XOR the two halves, has or take the modulus.
* I've heard this described as the NIST method, but I must've missed it when I was reading the specs, and I haven't bothered going back to check, so I'm not making that claim here.
|
|
|
|
Alice wants an apple for 80c.
Bob wants to sell an apple in exchange for $1.20.
They meet in the middle and settle on $1.00 and the swap proceeds successfully.
Was that a voluntary exchange??
Actually NO!
Alice needed the apple because she was hungry. In the language of Libertarians, "her stomach brutally coerced her and forced her hand."
What about Bob? Did he really volunteer to be selling apples? Actually, no. He'd rather be doing something else, but he needs to feed his family and they can't live solely on apples. I just had a beer with Alice and Bob. Alice isn't hungry at all, she's actually an exporter. She's shipping the apples to the city, where fresh apples as a luxury food and she can resell them for a profit to fat people. And Bob's family is just fine, thanks. He runs a hobby orchard to relax and recover from the stresses of managing his factories. But they are both thankful that you care so much about them that you are willing to enslave them to save them from petty annoyances like being responsible for their own wellbeing (and that of their families) when they'd much rather be a dance major like you. P.S. You are a danger to humanity. When you start to really believe that the drive for survival is a cruel slavemaster, how many steps can you really be from seeing murder as a net gain for your victims? |
|
|
|
Subtle implementation rules are not a problem, but it must be stated clearly not only in the code, but written somewhere.
This is a popular request, and progress is always happening in that direction. But it simply isn't possible to have a non-code description of the rules that is complete, accurate and more understandable than the code itself. |
|
|
|
Any answers for Jtimon?
yes |
|
|
|
The bottom line is that right now today, with no changes to anything, if you end up with coins bearing an interesting history, you take the risk of someone becoming interested in you. You cannot prevent this risk. You cannot mitigate it. If you ditch the coins, you are still part of the chain, and you may get a knock on your door from people wondering how they came to you.
You can mitigate the risk. Don't accept coins from shady people, don't use bitcoins to break the law, and keep good records of all your transactions. The latter is required for tax purposes anyway, and is greatly facilitated by bitcoin as compared to cash. If you run a business which sells to the public, then maybe you have to deal with shady people to some extent. In that case, not using bitcoins to break the law, and keeping good records of all your transactions, becomes even more important. On top of all that, if you do get a knock on your door, no matter how innocent you are, don't let them in if they don't have a warrant. I must've missed the "don't accept" button in the client that rejects unknown transactions. Oh, wait... Also, if the matter is serious enough, they won't be asking your permission to come in, and their only knock will leave your front door on the floor of your front hallway. Please go read my first post in this thread. We can't. But we can do what we can to protect privacy and security of the user. We can make all lists voluntary. Part of that means we have to keep pseudo-anonymity because without that anyone who doesn't like you from anywhere on the Internet could put you on a "scam" or "hack' list. Law enforcement is no better and they could target people for political reasons like with Aaron Swartz.
It turns out that privacy and security are hard. I believe that a couple of guys are rotting in holding cells right now because they couldn't get privacy right, and they had very good reasons to try, what with every law enforcement agency in the world trying to find them and all. And unless you are collecting bitcoins to swim through like Scrooge McDuck, there will always be a link back to you. |
|
|
|
I don't think it's a good idea to start making lists unless you don't mind being on someones list. I think it can easily spin out of control here hackers have lists, law enforcement have lists, and everyone is caught in the middle of being scrutinized by both hackers and law enforcement.
If you want to be on a list it should be voluntary. The list idea needs to be more well thought out, that is all.
Yeah, that's how lists work. </sarcasm> Seriously, how do you expect to prevent other people from making lists? For all you know, I have a list. Maybe you are on it now. That would be fine if that is where it stopped. But it becomes a slippery slope. The next logical step is enforcement in the protocol that such coins can't be spent. The other problem is that it is an avenue of attack. What is to stop someone getting their enemies coins redlisted?
If the protocol had a mechanism that prevented spending of listed coins, there would be no point in notifying users. But first, how would you convince people to use the fork with enforcement? The bottom line is that right now today, with no changes to anything, if you end up with coins bearing an interesting history, you take the risk of someone becoming interested in you. You cannot prevent this risk. You cannot mitigate it. If you ditch the coins, you are still part of the chain, and you may get a knock on your door from people wondering how they came to you. Widespread mixing, if and when it arrives, will hopefully muddy the trail of every transaction, maybe even to the point that most investigations become futile. |
|
|
|
The only way you can enforce a resource based economy is through totalitarianism (at a degree that is probably impossible). Otherwise, people will acquire wealth, and a money will emerge spontaneously.
May I disagree.. If anyone have plenty of anything they want.. greed should disapear by default. The earth have enought to satisfy everyone. The scarcity is a consequence of the actual monetary system, wich enforce this scarcity. For the first time in human history, we have the knowledge and the technology to overcome any sort of scarcity. History cant apply as we've never been so aware and technologicaly able. We are seeing the begining of a new era, and the past milleniums of "trade" begins to show as possibly obsolete for the next society models.. The trade concept is prehistoric, when we will learn to do better, we may became a civilisation. It's in our value that the shift must materialize. No, sorry. You are dead wrong about this. Scarcity in economics is a consequence of the inability of a given atom to be in more than one place at a given time. It has nothing to do with money. I can't imagine where you got the idea that money is somehow causing scarcity. It may, someday, be possible for many things to be too cheap for anyone to care much about, but they will still be scarce in the economic sense. Also there is no reason at all to think that everything will fall into this category, and there are instead very many reasons to think that many things will never be in this category. |
|
|
|
|
Just FYI, this isn't a proposal to make any protocol changes.
This is an external system and a UI change. The goal is to provide a point of contact as close as possible to an event that may require investigation. If someone pays a ransom, for example, they can provide details to the service. The service tracks those coins, and hopes that they end up in the wallet of someone that subscribes to the service and cares. Now if law enforcement is investigating the ransom event, they can go talk to that person and ask them where they came from, possibly tracking back to the criminal.
Doesn't seem quite as sinister in those terms, does it?
Now consider the reality of today. The NSA sees all and hears all. Some major incident has a bitcoin connection, and they track the coins moving around from key to key. Eventually they land in a wallet that the NSA knows is owned by a US company. A national security letter shows up, ordering the company to divulge the info on that transaction. The FBI starts watching the customer involved, and eventually raids their home and/or arrests them, and the interrogation reveals basically the same information that could have been provided by a volunteer in the other scenario, just in a much less civilized way.
The notion of coins becoming tainted by their history is silly, just as silly as dollars becoming tainted by the drug deals they've been through. But don't fool yourself into thinking that there won't be a lot of time and effort put into tracking important coins just the same. How long do you think it will take for judges to come around to bitcoin? How many silly warrants are going to be signed until then? How many innocent people are going to meet the SWAT team along the way?
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
