I agree.

They are always 10 years about simple things they are AWARE of.

By the time they muster any kind reasonable policy towards BTC their fiat currencies will be crumbling. They think they can ignore the financial crisis both (EU and US), print money and shift the burden to the regular folks - this time it's different; with a click of the mouse people can flee inflation.

BTC is a time bomb, a delayed, but certain death sentence to today's corrupt governments.

It's cold as hell; un-awesome Finish ancestors probably died off.


Anyway I think larger transactions might be some of the first where BTC is used and not as some might expect your daily purchases.
It is simply easier to convince people to use something new if the amount is bigger and not that often.

This means dentists, rent, cars, paycheck and maybe your food if you make a monthly/exclusive deal with one vendor. Usually this also means smaller more flexible businesses and not big hospitals, banks or super markets.

BTC/fiat conversion is still pricey at ~10% so if BTC has become your new bank account there is a strong incentive to replace the currency  of even a few of your bills.

Thanks a bunch.

I'm researching this to develop a btc smart card which is more limited. If it's easy to do it it may be worth it...

Don't know if anyone knows this, but how do you take advantage of the speedup built into the koblitz curve?

Is it automatic?
You do something special?

Is the BTC client already using the speedup opportunity?
Even if it's not, could someone point me to the source code location of said algorithm?

Thanks in advance and sry for bumping.

Bankrupt the world's evil super power, end their wars and change the world for the better.

I have not followed much or invested with pirate, could you enlighten me as to what this is based on?

I mean if his ponzi has just arrived at 500K btc (say the "I am awesome address"), why stop paying out?

Surely the only way to tell is if more has been paid out total than invested total - does anyone have those numbers?

I am just wondering when MC/VISA shuts this card down on the grounds of drugs/terrorism/fraud risk/other BS.

I don't see why they would allow BTC to get very big... maybe the 1% fee is enough for them to forget how dangerous BTC is to them - you never know how stupid greedy folks can be.

"1st law of thermo-economics - The amount of facts in economics is always the same in a closed system. If some sub field experiences an increase in facts, another must be forgetting facts at the same rate.

2nd law of thermo-economics - Facts in economics have a tendency to spread between all sub fields and always moves from more informed areas to more deranged ones. The result is an increase in "econotropy" - the general uselessness of all economist theory."


"Say you have two cows:

In capitalism your boss butchers them both for profit, live rich a while and then you all starve next year.

In communism the government takes your cows and give you half their milk.

In a democracy the two other guys vote for you doing all the work and getting 1/4 of the milk.

In a theocracy you sacrifice your cows to your god and starve to death while praying all day.

In Africa you neglect your two cows to death and get three new and better ones in foreign aid.

In a bureaucracy the government milks one of them, shoots the other and then pours the milk on the ground."

I said BTC was in a local bubble, but if I could predict better I would be rich not talking here.

Still I bought at 5.06, held and I am buying more again now.

I still think end 2012 or 2013 will see the record ~30$/btc broken.

I consider it a greater risk to hold fiat than to hold BTC, hasn't changed from one bubble burst.

This will not be a problem, if people want to make a secure stable transaction they can put a huge fee on it and be sure someone will prevent it from being reversed.

Inflation is market noise and dangerous.

I was told that.

So clarify for me:
1. Thorium reactors could be built TODAY using the old 50ies blueprints (no research needed).
2. These thorium reactors would generate MORE J/$ compared to uranium reactors.

Yes?

See otherwise wind turbines already fulfill both of these requirements - competitive with coal, no radioactive waste, killing fewer birds than our windows and doesn't take up farm land like solar.

During the Fukushima meltdown only one wind turbine out of ALL the thousands they had fell down - hurting absolutely no one.

Maybe its because you are american and GE has been blocking progress with stolen patents over there, but a real wind turbine is huge, advanced and effective.

Metal coated aerogel would be unable to dissipate heat and would thus overheat and melt - at least the metal surface that is...


I am sure safe and responsible nuclear IS possible, but I KNOW that corporations and governments will fuck it up. What happens with the fuel pools and the nuclear plants once they aren't profitable to EvilCorp CO. anymore?

We get to pay OR walk around in it. Thorium might solve some issues, but its also less economical and it doesn't exist yet :s


Solar and wind please, keep the radiation.

Take a look at this (I have seen modern wind turbines with numbers at 70!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested

Well if it keeps doubling every year we will get there in 8-9 years.

However for this to happen the big problems have to be solved:
1. Paying with and receiving BTC needs to be dirt cheap and simple.
2. The BTC network has to be able to take the growth without fees rising much.

Multiple bitcoin card projects are in the works so #1 will likely be covered in a year or sooner with costs falling after that and options multiplying.

#2 is harder but also less critical. We probably have ~4 years before it will impair growth. Swarm algorithms should be under development or developed if we get that far by then.

Keep in mind that BTC can grow in many ways:
 - Amount of people.
 - What they use it for.
 - The amounts they use it for.

This means the fast growth phase could be sustained for much longer than that of say Facebook.

People usually want to dilute OTHERS savings and NOT their own. For this simple reason I don't see QE happening with BTC.

Translation?

How much do you pay for your cards?

I think I will have to pay 3.8$/piece in order to get the crypto functions I need. (ZC5.4 card - 16 kbyte, SHA256 and EC-211 on co-proc).

The EC I could probably do, but the SHA seems to take a lot of code to implement and the price-step lower is a card with 16kbyte to implement both algos + BTC program. (16kb basiccard = 2400 code lines)

Nope completely new to this. I might be interested in your package - I will just look through what I already bought first though.

Would your package include your card code so I can steal/port it XD? I am planning to make mine open source.

Yeah, but the cheaper cards allow quite few lines of code and SHA256 is the problem. ZC 5.4 is the one I think.

I was probably going to port algos from some example project if I did that, but yeah I hope it can be avoided.

They are.

According to the producer they cost 1/3 of javacards/multiOS cards.

They use a version the Basic language which is DOS like.

The cards run near-byte code at the hardware level which supposedly means they require less EEPROM than javacards etc. (hence the price difference).
I don't know to what extent this is all true, but they SEEM cheap when I compare them to other cards on the net.

A comprehensive manual/datasheet/Basic language tutorial is free for download on their site - the SDK just lets you have a cybermouse and some cards on top of all that otherwise free stuff.

They also provide you with a free IDE that lets you test/step-debug smart card programs and program your cards - example programs are included.

Anything else just ask.

And thanks for the interest.

Yeah I'm just starting out alright, still I can see the path ahead.

What you are doing seems very similar though focused on securing the computer wallet.
I can see you chose the JavaCard; with dropping hardware prices that's probably a good choice too.

I would love to share notes, that you have come so far already is impressive - I myself usually work slower.

Do you sign transactions on the card or do you only store information on the card?

If its the second, how do you prevent keys leaving the card and getting used by someone else?

I will keep it in mind. Currently I mostly need help to develop, which money won't help a great deal with.

Also I am still not entirely sure what I am trying to do is possible so I don't want to owe people money yet!


Progress report:
I have looked into Bitcoin a bit more and what my cards need to do.
It seems ECDSA is used to sign and what is signed is a SHA256 hash of the transaction data/tx.

Both of these algorithms are unfortunately a bit heavy computationally for a smartcard - simply programming them could use up a lot of/all EEPROM.
Hence some co-processing will likely be needed - I still have to research more on what my exact options are there.

Further I have found that the card needs to store a reference to any transaction it wants to spend as this is required info in a tx.
This will not be a major problem as most of these txs will be generated from the card itself and only a few will be "refills" that may be relayed to the card by a merchants terminal.

Fraudulent data from a terminal to the card can at worst only lead to having to pay twice and some unintentional doublespends by the user - security is still fine.

It will still be a no-trust security model.

I have also received the SDK which is very slick and all, I will share it with you guys when/if possible.

Next is finding out the exact card specifications needed (16EEPROM? ECDSA/sha coprocessor?) and what to program. If an algorithm is not supported I can program it, but this is CPU? expensive and a bit time consuming.

ZeitControl sells many different cards, some with different coprocessors and some with lots of EEPROM for custom implementations of unsupported things.

If you are a libertarian and you vote for a US republican you are an idiot.

Same goes for socialists/progressives voting for democrats.


All those guys care about is ripping your eyes out and selling them to the highest bidder.


Vote third candidate, Ron Paul or just don't vote. Don't talk to me about "wasting your vote"; you sound like a fifth grader.

Right vs. left debate does matter in the rest of the world.

That right=left in the US because of DEEP corruption is another matter.

I once read a debate between a nobel prize winning economist and a physicist (note not the best we had).

... the economist had to retract almost every single statement and BASIC assumption.

He ended up talking about virtual castles and virtual worlds where growth could continue - which neglects computing costs/how nice the matrix is - the physicist let him limp off at this point I think.


One of the best arguments was that the planet surface would literally boil in 100-200 years if our economic/energy expansion continued.


On topic: yeah keep my BTC protocol stable, I like it that way.