I recently found out about Silk Road through an article on Kotaku, which contained quite specific instructions on how to use it...then I realized that this "news" had spread to quite a few other websites. Is anyone else worried about the potential attention this might attract?
Um, no? |
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Next you'll be one of those guys pissed off about the early adopters sitting on tens of thousands of coins for having the foresight to participate in this program.
i already am. its not because of greed. its because i don't think its good for the economy that 10 people is sitting on 90% of the money(over estimate). i think they should have many coins, but not as much as they have now. They won't after you offer them enough to sell. Problem solved! |
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Yeah I've calculated that mygox has made some 600,000 usd over the last year from fees
No, it has not. The fees didn't exist that entire time. The fees were instituted because the founder of Mtgox got burned by a scammer using a stolen paypal account. The fees were started just to recover that loss, which I'm sure has long since been repaid; but the current owner isn't that founder at all. If another market starts up with lower fees, some people will use it. This will force Mtgox to respond if the new market is comparable. There are other markets, I just don't use them because I don't like them. |
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The fee CANNOT be too high, because if it was, the market would react.
OR the market is stupid and didn't know and therefor didn't reacte. that why i wrote this post to make people know how much MtGox is earning. Start another exchange with lower fees then. The fees at Mtgox are there for a reason. It didn't start with fees. |
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Bitcoin is only currency if you consider the internet to be a sovereign entity... Which I do... Then again I'm kind of an odd guy so...
Sovereignty isn't a requirement for a currency. Market currencies have arisen from defacto standards in the past. The (original) dollar is one such standard, before the Federal Reserve stole the term and corrupted it. The "dollar" was, prior to the US revolution, a mispronuncation of a "Thaler"; which was a silver coin minted by a particular private mint in present day Germany. The "Thaler" was uncommon in the colonies, as the Spanish silver coins dominated, but they were all roughly based upon the troy ounce as the unit of weight. So a "dollar" wasn't a particular sovereign's coin, it was a common reference to a particular weight in silver. That unit of weight was the defacto standard, and any silver coin minted to that weight was such a currency. The silver content was money, but the currency was the standardized unit of measurement. Once again, a currency is just an arbitrary unit of measurement that is widely accepted; while money is a commodity with certain characteristics. The two things overlap in practice, but not in their core meaning. Trade, money and currencies have all existed prior to and in the absence of a sovereign government of any kind. A government is certainly not a requirement. |
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Does no one see this as an issue?
It's a present cost of aquiring Bitcoins, and adds to the present risk, but it will slowly resolve itself as the Bitcoin economy grows. So no, it's not really an issue. |
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No. Entering 127.0.0.1:9050 into the proxy space is really easy. The client doesn't need to take any longer to start up :p
I think the idea is to have a client that can securely use Tor even if the user is otherwise unfamilier with how to use it properly. So a client that has a secure, internal Tor proxy is a sound idea in it's own right. |
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I can't use the word plethora without being reminded of this classic scene from Three Amigos:
Plethora is one of those words that are happy and pleasant regardless of their usage or meaning. Like menagerie, hubub and brewhaha. I just like saying them out loud. |
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No, Tor should not be part of the standard client. But feel free to start a fork. I would suggest forcing the Tor client to use a completely different naming & default directory structure for the wallet.dat, but use the same internal structure for that. So that a Tor client and a vanilla client can be used on the same computer without great risk of sharing keypairs.
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Correct. If you have the skills, go for it.
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Would a statement like: Bitcoin, the Net's digital barter good ...
The word used in English for a "barter good" is "money". Bitcoin is not a "good" beyond the context of third party exchange and accounting, and is therefore not a "good". |
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This has gone a bit off-topic. The point was that a bitter insider or a police/law accomplice could, maybe, quite easily bring about the financial ruin of a criminal organisation.
I mean, how many of you would trust your best friend with your wallet.dat? Would you ask him to turn around when you type your passwoord or passphrase? Is your wallet.dat even encrypted? I daresay any C&TO that deals in bitcoins will take serious measures to protect their wallet.dat(s), but it would just take one person, one time, to take it all away from them. Therefore, C&TO's will not deal in bitcoins.
That's the hypothesis. Is it valid?
Only if the organization is small and has a central command & control that is paranoid about their funds, and keeps them all in the same place. Like any organization, C&TO's are really just groups of people acting in concert. Bitcoin lends itself well to the movement of funds in any case, and the most likely use of Bitcoin for any organization is the compensation to their dispersed agents. A snitch could easily get a low ranking agent's wallet.dat, but how useful that data is to tracking the funds of the organization in general depends on just how savvy they really are. We've all seen the stupid pot dealers, they are the one's who end up in jail. But what about the smart one's? I've personally met a professional dealer that used a day job in the construction industry as 'cover' and was never prosecuted even though he was a 'known' criminal who had been arrested repeatedly. Capturing an agent's wallet.dat makes tracking of funds possible but it doesn't make it likely or useful; as this requires much classic investigations beyond the digital realm. A captured wallet.dat only lets the police watch the payments of one guy, it still doesn't tell them who the other agents are or anything about them. For all the cops know, the wallet.dat that they captured could be the agent's personal wallet.dat, and they could be watching him buy carrots. By definition, if the cops are watching an agent and have his wallet.dat, they already believe him to be an agent. The data in the blockchain doesn't add any new evidence to this end, although it could be used in court to prove payments had been made in larger amounts than he paid for in taxes. |
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Your take?  Don't care. (S)he wants his privacy, and now (s)he has the resources to enforce that. Leave it alone. |
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It's only a matter of time before they seize or shut down the biggest money exchanges. I remember so well Black Friday , when PokerStars and the other poker sites were taken out. The way to minimize your risk is to keep small amounts of money at the exchange and keep most of your BTC offline. Then, when MtGox gets the PokerStars treatment, we can just start up elsewhere. The most popular online eWallets are also vulnerable. Nobody said being a pioneer was easy.
It'd be just as well if MtGox were to publish their static IP, so that anyone with any tech savvy can still get there. |
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Your local wallet's addresses can be explored on http://blockexplorer.com/ just type one of the addresses you recently sent coins to in the box and click on the addresses in the table to explore. This is true, but it doesn't change anything. You can search your own addresses and see what you paid for because you have the secret knowledge necessary to make sense of that info because you were the one who did it. Give those same addresses to your cop buddy, and send him to the blockexplorer site, and ask him if he can figure out what you bought or from whom without your help. Silk Road takes deposits on their site, which winds up being a concentration point of illegal activity. It will show up quite clearly on a heat map, and could potentially be identified by depositing and withdrawing a certain amount of tracked coins, at certain intervals. A tech-savvy cop buddy could observe (a) bitcoin-like network activity at Bob's house, and (b) a flow towards the Silk Road "concentration" in the block chain. Observe several data points over time, and you can build a decent body of data evidence. This is still easier said than done. Like anyone else, Silk Road's internal escrow system can use a different address for every trade. In practice, this means that successful trades simply show up in the blockchain as A -> B, and then sometime later B -> C. If you can associate B to Silk Road, you can then assume that both A & C are dealing in illicit goods over Silk Road; but not only can you still not prove that, you don't know who they are and you can't find other Silk Road addresses as a result because even teh normal client will use exact value transactions without mixing them. And if the values are a round number common on Silk Road, say an even 10 BTC, then even knowing who A is doesn't tell you if C was his dealer, as Silk Road could pay out to the dealer from any single matching transaction. This is exactly how the bitcoin laundry works. The client doesn't do this kind of thing right now, but it can be done. |
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Currency is related to a physical object with either intrinsic value or backed by a gov't, and BitCoin is neither.
No, you are confusing currency and money. Money is any commodity that has the following characteristics... 1) durability; it does not rot or rust. 2) divisibility; it can be split up into very small divisions without harming the value. 3) transportability; a small amount of it has a high relative value, and can be thus transported relatively easily. 4) noncounterfeitability; it's hard to fake. 5) fungabilty; any measurable amount is of equal value to any other amount. A currency can have some or all of these characteristics, but these are not what makes a currency. A currency is simply a standardized unit of measurement. It's a raw number. A currency can also be a money, and vice versa; but most currencies are not monies, and this is true also with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has all of the above characteristics except it is not a commodity, as there has never been an alternative use for a bitcoin beyond it's trade value. So, from a technical perspective, calling Bitcoin a currency is the most accurate description in English. |
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restart your client, and give it about a half hour. If it still hasn't moved, post again.
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I'd love to see you succeed. This might compell the local CSA's to accept bitcoin from me.
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