Okay - but f you don't pay then do I need to do anything to stop the repayment (am just trying to clearly see how it gets completed without any race condition)?

Stupid post - I must have deleted some brain cells (I would blame Chinese wine for that) - yes indeed I did create the key pair (your post update instantly reminded me that I went through that step).

Must have not kept any record of it so I ended up confusing myself (all the conspiracy stuff since the PRISM thing has perhaps got me a bit paranoid).

Okay - some trust has now been restored (thanks).

Will lock this topic now.

Oops - typo (edited to fix - my bad) - I do understand how key pairs work - but again no choice was offered.

I did wonder about the security of this after I bought it (and the lack of any instructions to use OpenSSL to create a private key).

Am pretty sure I would not be the only one in the same boat (although it was admittedly the first time I've bought a cert - prior to that I just created self-signed certs).

Cert was from RapidSSL (signed by Geo-Trust) - as stated there was simply *no option* to provide a public key.

It was purchased from my VPS provider (so should I bring this up with them?).

I've read in recent posts regarding the new payment system being integrated into the next version of Bitcoin that we can now trust the CA private keys to be *unknown* to anyone but the cert owner.

As an *owner* of a CA cert where the private key was *not* created by myself (which would be the case for most people unless they are using self-signed certs AFAIA) how exactly does one obtain such a cert (as clearly my own cert now needs to be changed)?

Like most website owners I purchased a cert - and there was no option for me to provide the public key - instead I was given a link to download the private key (so I would be about 99% sure that the NSA has or can get a copy of that key).

Can you enlighten us as to how this is possible?

You might also be interested in the "coin control" patch - it allows you to select which UTXOs to use via the GUI itself.

The raw tx's API is only recommended for expert users as it is very easy to screw up and end up losing large amounts of BTC.

I think Google, Microsoft and others have *proven* themselves to be inherently untrustworthy and yes I do think it will be a concern for the future of Bitcoin if say the NSA starts making decisions about future security aspects.

Sure but I would not use SSL for anything I really cared about (if it really mattered I would trust GPG).

I think the payment protocol idea itself is fine but we do need to have our eyes wide open when it comes to SSL.

I think anything that Google (MS or any other such company) suggests would not be acceptable by anyone (apart from those that of course work for Google, MS, etc.).

We need a system that has *no ties* to any large corporation or we have nothing that can be trusted at all.

You should read up about Bitcoin accounts before deciding whether you really want to use them.

Some things to know are that accounts != addresses (even though the API commands are likely to lead you to believe that they are), accounts can end up with negative balances, you can't send BTC "from" the address of an account and "moves" of BTC between accounts are internal wallet operations (i.e. nothing to do with the blockchain).

Also if you are using bitcoin-qt then you are going to end up with a lot of confusion between "accounts" and "labels".

Probably so - although (let me just quote your last sentence)...


..the apps in question are Chinese ones that my wife (and not myself) uses (so unfortunately not much choice for me with regards to changing that apart from buying another device). So if I didn't have the ability to shut down the tasks in question then it would be much worse.

I am not joking that at times it gets so slow I think it must have crashed (but then suddenly comes back to life) and I don't doubt that the problem is most likely due to badly written applications.

The point that I'd like to make is one of "leaky abstractions" - yes it would be nice if apps all performed correctly and never had bugs but that won't be true ever as you should well know. So to take away the ability of the user to do something about an app that is behaving badly IMO is a stupid idea (although making it an *advanced* menu item or whatever is fine with me).

Well actually it *does* as when the S3 is poorly performing I go into Settings->Applications click in Running and kill off a bunch of them and voila it performs much better - are you gong to tell me I just imagined that (every time I've done it)?

We are talking the difference between taking up to 20 seconds to respond to a click (before me killing tasks) and less than 1 second to respond (after).

As for the file explorer whether added by Samsung or not I find it to be a very useful tool for copying files and installing apps to/from USB flash drives.

Strange - the Galaxy S3 I have clearly shows whether an application is "running" in the Settings -> Applications (and you can stop them from there too).

Also it has a file explorer (the only way I know how to install APKs via USB) which I think would be classified as a "user-navigable file system".

Please stop this nonsense - if anyone sends you a private key then obviously they have a copy of it and will be able to steal any BTC sent to the address that it is for.

Congratulations to Jan Tenner on completing the CIYAM logo (http://ciyam.org/open/?cmd=view&data=20130131141145457000&ident=M100V131&chksum=3607d735).

The result looks at first glance as though it might be just a great font choice (clean and comfortable on the eyes) but if you take the time to look at it closely you will end up working out that it matches no existing font and is instead a minimalist work of precise angles, curves and spacing.

Work on the new design is progressing well and we are expecting to go live with the new look by October 1st.

I think that by the time we get to BTC3 or BTC4 most will have already learned to ignore BTCn (where n is anything at all) - I might even consider offering a small bounty for the creation of BTC3 just to kill off this BTC2 and any such future silly rubbish.

In regards to the HKD that is simply not possible unless the USD goes to zero as the HKD is *directly* pegged to the USD (i.e. 1 USD has been around 7.75 HKD since 1983 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_dollar).

Although the RMB isn't directly pegged to the USD it is used along with various other foreign currencies to determine its value (so also very unlikely to see the USD ever on par with it little own being worth less than it - and the Chinese government would simply change the mix to ensure that the RMB is worth less for export reasons so the US is not likely to ever *win* a currency war against China).

I think I was the first to get a refund after mistakenly paying a fee of 110 BTC (and it was BTC Guild that refunded me just over 100 BTC).

Most likely it is someone using raw tx API and has either made a silly typo or not understood correctly what they are doing (i.e. that all UTXO BTC that is not *sent* to an output address is the tx fee).

What might help reduce these problems would be for bitcoin to spit out some kind of excessive fee warning (such as 10x the calculated minimum fee required).