I like my translation better, if only because of all the effort I put into literally translating the phrase "member for a whole juts be". I'm still not entirely certain I have the exact meaning (not that it really matters).

"For God's sake, I've made so many posts. The whole reason I became a member was just because I need some bitcoins and to make some friends. Yet I still can't post anything. Life is not fair."

The Debian package control file is supposed to contain a list of dependencies for the package manager to download and install automatically. That's kind of the whole point of using Debian packages in the first place.

No, mail drops are generally not necessary unless you're trying to hide something from your spouse, neighbours, cops, etc. For just hiding how much money you have, using different bitcoin addresses is generally sufficient.

1) Find a reputable bitcoin exchange in your country.
2) Place an order for bitcoins.
3) Pay money. (This is the hard part, since almost nobody accepts PayPal or credit cards due to the chargeback risk.)
4) Receive bitcoins.
5) ? ? ?
6) Profit!

If you want to verify that your software is actually working before you put your money on the line, go to dailybitcoins.org and receive half a bitmill for free (limit of one payout per day). This site takes up to 24 hours to pay out, so be patient.

Do you mean, like, a used-car dealer, or a blackjack dealer, or the kind of dealer where if you actually did go to dealer school, you would have learnt not to post on a public forum that you plan on becoming a dealer?

Don't purchase bitcoins in any way that can be traced back to you (ie, use cash). And create a new bitcoin address each time you receive bitcoins.
When buying things with bitcoins, don't have the goods shipped to your real address. Always use a mail drop. And use a different mail drop each time. Of course, mail drops are ridiculously expensive and inconvenient, but can you really put a price on your anonymity? (Very few people actually do this, by the way, and I only mention it to point out that although bitcoins themselves are anonymous, actually spending them anonymously on tangible goods is almost impossible.)

Um, I'm pretty sure you have to receive some bitcoins before you can spend them.

Actually, although a 51% attack can prevent transactions from being confirmed, the unconfirmed transactions are still in the network and thus will start gaining confirmations as soon as the attacker loses his 51%. So at worst, an attacker could delay you from spending your coins for some period of time, which probably wouldn't be very long: Since a 51% attack is ludicrously expensive, I think it is safe to say it will only last long enough for the attacker to do a single double-spend, since there's no other way it profit from such an attack and thus no point in maintaining the 51% any longer than that.

The reason for the YYYY-MM-DD format is not to remove ambiguity, but rather to ensure that sorting topics by subject puts them in chronological order. Using the YY-MM-DD format (or any other format) breaks that.

The value would go up, the same as if anyone else bought a lot of bitcoins.

I'm not sure what you mean. The government can't sell bitcoins for more than what people would be willing to pay on the open market (and can't buy bitcoins for less than what people are will to sell for). This is true of any currency, not just Bitcoin.

Yes, in a way, because the more you want to buy, the higher the price per bitcoin becomes, since you can only buy bitcoins if you can find people willing to sell them, and some people are not willing to sell unless an extremely high price is offered (and some people might be unwilling to sell at any price). However, the same is true of any limited commodity.

In case the above doesn't work, there's always the Magic SysRq key:

Hold down Alt+SysRq and press (in order):
R to unraw the keyboard (otherwise killing X Windows may cause your terminal to behave strangely)
E to terminate all processes (this should dump you at a text-mode login prompt)
I to kill all processes not terminated by Alt+SysRq+E
S to sync mounted filesystems (IMPORTANT: wait until this step finishes before continuing!)
U to unmount all filesystems (again, wait until this step finishes before continuing!)
B to reboot the machine (or O to power it off) (NOTE: this is NOT SAFE unless you have performed the above steps!)

These commands are hard-coded into the kernel, and thus will work even if your system is completely hosed (unless the kernel itself has crashed, but absolutely nothing will save your drives in that case). Note that this should be considered a last resort only. "sudo shutdown now" or "sudo reboot" are completely safe and if they work you should use them.

Note also that none of these things will protect your drive if it's already screwed up, which is evidently the case if you're getting "no boot device recognised". Your original post leaves me a bit confused as to exactly what is happening. Does it crash when you try to shut down, or does it shut down normally and then crash the next time you boot it up? Or am I misunderstanding the situation completely and need more caffeine?

Actually, the reason they can't take it down is because it's a Tor hidden service, making it impossible to trace the IP address.

Bitcoins are not actual "things" that are stored on your computer. What is stored on your computer is the private key required to sign transactions to spend your money.

Actually, the worst they can do is send you to jail after taking all your stuff. Did you ever think of that?

Nobody is going to sell you bitcoins for PayPal due to the chargeback risk. Is there some reason you can't pay cash?

That's because people who are in the bottom 50% of their field aren't employed as university professors. Or at least I hope they aren't...

That's not necessary. You can store your wallet's private keys on a RED box (one that will never touch a network of any kind for any reason), and have it sign individual transaction messages, then transfer the signed transactions on a disk (which need not be encrypted) to a BLACK box (which is connected to the network and will never handle sensitive data of any kind) to broadcast the transactions to the network. Since a signed transaction message only allows specific coins to be send to specific addresses (and this information cannot be tampered with thanks to the digital signature), and does not contain the private keys necessary to spend the rest of your coins, it is perfectly safe to use it on an insecure system (and the assumption (if you're security paranoid) must be that any system connected to any kind of network is insecure).

Don't give me this "Linux is safe" crap. Although it is arguably much safer than Windows, any kind of network connection provides an opportunity for arbitrary code to be sent to your machine. If any program on your computer (especially those running as root) mishandles the data it receives on the network and allows that code to be executed - BAM! Proper RED/BLACK separation is the only true defence.

The offline computer being encrypted will make no difference at all, and it's easy to guarantee that nothing on the flash drive will be executed (at least on Linux). However, if an attacker has physical access to the offline computer, it can be compromised, and no amount of encryption will help you. If you think an attacker has gained physical access to your offline computer, you should dispose of it and create a new system, using your encrypted wallet backup. You should have an encrypted backup of your wallet even if you're not paranoid about security; at the very least it'll save you from losing all your money to a hard drive failure or some other such problem.

The second transaction won't start to receive confirmations until the first one is confirmed, however since the first one already has 1 confirmation (out of 6 required for total confidence that the transaction is valid) there will be no problem unless something exceptional happens. Even if the first one had no confirmations at all, this would just result in the second transaction being delayed until the first transaction was confirmed (though most clients won't let you send coins at all until you've got at least 1 confirmation).

Traffic to Tor hidden services doesn't get routed through exit nodes, making it impossible to trace the destination IP address. That's kind of the whole point of hidden services. I'd have expected Wired to get their facts straight... Just kidding, I never expected Wired to get their facts straight.

And why does anyone still expect privacy from Hushmail? The infamous Hushmail Report (PDF) was published nearly 5 years ago. You'd think people would have gotten the message by now...

100 addresses are generated in advance, but they are not displayed until you click "New Address", at which point one of your "hidden" address is made visible and new hidden address is generated, so you always have 100 hidden addresses (you start out with 1 non-hidden address). The reason for this is that if you back up your wallet, then create a some new addresses and receive coins to those address, then your hard drive dies and you have to restore your backed-up wallet, you'll still be able to access your coins, because the "new" addresses were actually already there to start with. However, if you've created more than 100 addresses since the last time you backed up your wallet, you will lose some coins if you have to restore from your back-up, so its a good idea to always back up your wallet at regular intervals.

Well, the transactions themselves are stored in the block chain, but there is no information about the transaction other than "this amount was transferred to that address". To keep track of your payments, you should create a new address for each purpose, eg you create an address labelled "Payment from Bob", give that address to Bob so that he can pay you, and then any transactions sent to that address will be labelled "Payment from Bob". You know it's from Bob because he's the only one you gave that address to (you should create a different address for every person who wants to pay you). If you only have one address, and everybody is paying you at that address, then there's no easy way to tell who is paying you what.

A wallet does not need to connected to the network in order to recieve coins, only to send coins. A wallet doesn't even need to be connected to the network to create addresses, because addresses are not actually stored on the network until coins are sent from them (this also means there is no way to guarantee that an address even exists if no coins have ever been sent from it, however the address format includes a checksum to prevent non-existent address from being entered by mistake - creating a valid but non-existent address takes deliberate effort). Transactions take about an hour to receive six confirmations (which is the standard number required to ensure the transaction is valid), but this is from the time the transaction is broadcast to the network (which requires that the wallet sending the coins be online). Transactions sent to an offline wallet receive confirmations as normal.

The current GUI does have encryption. Just go Settings -> Encrypt Wallet. Enter a passphrase and don't forget it. God Himself can't get your coins back if you forget your passphrase.

Encrypted wallets aren't like encrypted hard drives. It is not "mounted", instead it requires a passphrase to decrypt the private keys needed to send coins and create new addresses (viewing your balance and transaction history does not require your passphrase, and doesn't even require your wallet if someone knows all your addresses, since all transactions are stored in the blockchain). While obviously entering your passphrase in an insecure environment is a bad idea, using an unencrypted wallet in an insecure environment is an even worse idea, for equally obvious reasons. The main idea behind encrypted wallets is to prevent people with access to the wallet file (or a backup of the wallet file) from stealing your money; it is not intended to prevent the sort of attack that involves reading keys directly from RAM (which in fact no form of encryption will protect you from).

Any exploit that allows execution of arbitrary code with root privileges will allow reading the key from RAM, then sending it along with the wallet file to some remote location for the coins to be spent. If you need real security, check out Armory's Offline Wallet feature (true RED/BLACK separation).

Actually, you picked exactly the wrong example of why legal tender laws don't matter. People are legally obligated to accept legal tender (even in ridiculous forms, such as a dump truck full of pennies) for the payment of debts (eg, taxes, mortgages, bills, etc) (however, non-legal tender may still be used to pay off debts if both parties agree to it). The reason for legal tender laws is that if someone refused to accept payment for a debt and the case went to court, the judge would be extremely annoyed to learn that the debtor actually is willing and able to pay his debt, and that his attempts to do so were refused for arbitrary reasons.

However, legal tender laws do not apply when the transaction is not a payment of a debt (eg, retail purchases, bank deposits, etc), so people are not obligated to accept legal tender in these situations (which includes most of the transactions that MintChip will be used for).

No, and furthermore I cannot understand the level of confusion as to what Bitcoin is or even what money is that could provoke such a question. Since bitcoins (and all other forms of money) are traded on the open market, there is nobody who "decides" how much it is worth. It is simply worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it and what people are willing to sell it for. Your question makes no sense as long as a free and open market for currency exchange exists.

While there are ways of reducing the initial blockchain download, the client still needs to download new transactions that have been made while it was offline (how else would it know if you've received coins?), and I don't see any possible way of avoiding this. However, since bitcoin does not depend on the Internet specifically, but rather it can use any kind of network connection, it is possible that some kind of specialised high-speed network infrastructure could be developed for broadcasting bitcoin transactions, though that's a long way off, if it ever happens at all.

Providing a way for banks to "recover" from their mistakes is a bad idea in my opinion (but it's not possible given the way bitcoin is designed), because it encourages banks to take greater risks which may eventually lead to the banks making a mistake so big they can't recover from it, causing a global economic collapse. Sound familiar? But because bitcoin transactions are irreversible, bitcoins banks will have to take great care to ensure no mistakes are made, since mistakes are costly. If, for example, a bitcoin bank gives too much money to someone, then the bank has lost that money and they can't get it back. If they give not enough money to someone, they have to make up the difference from their reserves to avoid getting sued, again losing money they'll never get back. (If the bank doesn't have enough bitcoins in reserve to pay the debt, then they (and their depositors, unfortunately) are out of business.) Ultimately, I think the fact that bitcoin banks will suffer mightily from every tiny mistake will force them to develop sufficient security that big mistakes don't happen, thus ensuring greater stability in the long run.

The price will stabilise as more people start using it.

Yes.

Actually, a number of major grocery stores already do online orders with home delivery. All we need to do is convince them to accept bitcoins as payment.

Why? The great thing about bitcoins is that anyone can accept them, with no limits.

Or delivered in refrigerated trucks.

Again, why? Not only is this trivial to do (customer presents the goods and their receipt, along with an address for the refund, and they get their bitcoins back), it's actually illegal not to do it in most jurisdictions.

Unless one of the dependencies conflicts with your current version of libc6, and APT decides the best way to resolve the situation is to uninstall libc6. The fact that the following command: appears more than once in my .bash_history would seem to indicate that Synaptic does not always know what the Hell it is doing.
</rant>