Bitstamp was audited by Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin dev back in May 2014. He said that everything seemed OK and all the funds were fully backed in their cold storage wallets. This was just 8 months ago and I'd be surprised if the situation has changed since then.

Bitstamp has 200,000 BTC in reserves. Unlike Gox, they only lost a small percentage of total bitcoins during this hack so I think customers' deposits are safe. Poloniex suffered a similar hack which saw them lose 12.3 percent of their total BTC. They made it out fine.

I was surprised to see that NXT isn't mentioned there but I guess everyone already knows about it now. He talks about NXT in this article which explores the same theme.

"Kaczynski" sounds more like a Polish name than a Russian one. The languages are very similar though.

In terms of security, Blockchain.info kind of in between online wallets and offline wallets. They're not as bad as inputs.io was because you can control your own private keys.


So I take it you store your bitcoins on the cloud?

I'm surprised that BitSharesX isn't on that list because it's one of the biggest players in the 2.0 game. It's original source so it isn't based on Bitcoin. It has market-pegged assets, DACs, and a unique proof-of-stake design.

I agree with this too. However, if BTC is to become well and truly mainstream then people who aren't very familiar with technology will have trouble keeping their bitcoins secure without entrusting them to a third party. The average 50+ year old man or woman isn't going to want to bother with cold storage, paper wallets, etc. Also many people have terrible computer security habits. My parents, for example, managed to get their laptop infested with malware because they kept clicking on popups which displayed false error messages and security warnings and "DOWNLOAD" buttons. Not everyone is a computer expert.


Some exchanges have already been audited. For example, Bitstamp, Kraken, an OKCoin have all had audits done by third parties and passed so it would be nice if these new Bitcoin banks do the same thing.

As for Bitcoin insurance, the whole concept seems quite difficult to implement. Ideally, I would like to see the insurance be in the form of a reserve denominated in BTC to protect against price swings but I'm not sure if its feasible for a company to hold so much BTC to cover 100% of users' deposits. Mt. Gox, for example would have needed close to 1 million BTC in reserves to cover everyone's deposits after they blew themselves up.

Also most traditional insurance companies today practice fractional insurance, i.e. they don't have enough reserves to cover everyone's payment obligations. In Bitcoin land however, it's quite common for services to have most or all of their bitcoins disappear at once (e.g. MyBitcoin, inputs.io, Mt. Gox) so in these cases, even having an insurance policy in place would still have been hopeless.


That sounds about right. I'm not sure what happened to Vekja.net but MyBitcoin got hacked months after Satoshi wrote that post so he was definitely right to be cautious. It's pretty much what I think as well. Online wallets are good for pocket change amounts. You wouldn't keep thousands of dollars in a wallet in your back pocket. But $50? $100? No problem.


Well, Xapo and Circle both offer services labeled as "vaults", so I think it's kind of in the middle. They definitely have the appearance of a bank in the sense that you have a spending account and a cold storage savings account. Both claim to insure users' deposits (like a bank) and Xapo gives you a debit card linked to your account (also like a bank).

Another one is Elliptic, again another insured vault:

http://www.elliptic.co/vault


Blockchain is an online wallet, but it's a bit different than other online wallets since you actually have control over your private keys. The encryption is client-side and the site operators don't actually know your private keys. I wouldn't trust it for holding large amounts of bitcoins but it's far more secure than a typical online wallet.

Payment for last week has been received so thanks for that! Glad to see this campaign is running well! Just posting to confirm that I just checked the list and everything looks pretty much fine from here.

Which one am I supposed to download? 1.4.5 or 1.4.6?

On the main NXT website at Nxt.org, the download link is for 1.4.5. The OP also says 1.4.5. But when I look at the announcement on the NXT forum at Nxtforum.org, it says "HARD FORK AT BLOCK 330,000 - Update to the latest Nxt Client 1.4.6".

Is 1.4.6 an unstable version still in development? I don't usually like to download alpha or beta versions due to the risk of bugs.

Also my laptop running XP has 1 GB of RAM and running the NXT client along with multiple tabs open on Firefox is very slow. I am thinking of switching to a light client like Mofowallet (I don't use online wallets as my main wallet for security reasons) but I don't want to lose out on the forging benefits.

EDIT: Wait, does Mofowallet support forging without running a full node? How is this possible?

Ouch. Well, it seems to be confirmed:

"Bitstamp customers can rest assured that their bitcoins held with us as prior to temporary suspension of services on January 5th (at 9am UTC) are completely safe and will be honored in full.

On January 4th, some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC. Upon learning of the breach, we immediately notified all customers that they should no longer make deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses. As an additional security measure, we suspended our systems while we fully investigate the incident and actively engage with law enforcement officials.

This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are are held in secure offline cold storage systems. We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.

We appreciate customers’ patience during this disruption of services. We are working to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment and will be bringing this online in the coming days. Customers can stay informed via updates on our website, on Twitter (@Bitstamp) and through Bitstamp customer support at support@bitstamp.net."


Unfortunately, I think exchanges will continue to exist, whether we like it or not. Even if smart contracts and automated transactions are developed to the point where they can provide all of the functionality of centralized exchanges, there will always be the less technical people who prefer the simplicity and familiarity of centralized exchanges.

EDIT: Also, smart contracts and automated transactions won't solve the fiat problem too. As long as there are still people who want to buy bitcoins with fiat or sell bitcoins for fiat, some form of centralized exchange that deals with "real" money (e.g. dollars, pesos, yen, etc.) must exist.


Technically, the funds can be "frozen". But doing so would require the cooperation of the devs and miners. Blacklisting of coins would also destroy the fungible nature of Bitcoin and most would agree that the repercussions of doing so would outweigh the benefits.


Only if it was a small amount. Definitely not the whole 18,000 BTC. In the past 24 hours, DRK has had about 120 BTC volume. Trying to buy 18,000 BTC worth of DRK would drive up the price of DRK to insanely high levels and you'd probably exhaust all of the DRK that's sitting on the exchanges as well.


This would only work if the hacker mixed a tiny percentage of his funds. The more coins he tries to mix, the less effective it would be. Trying to mix the whole 18,000 BTC in one go would be impossible. 99.99 percent of the output would be tainted coins. The hacker would simply get his coins back mixed in with a tiny percentage of coins from others who were unlucky enough to use the same mixing service when he did.

I usually alternate between pre-ev (where the 'ev' is the same sound as the last part of 'dev') and preev (rhymes with 'Steve').


If Preev is a word that has no meaning then it, along with Google, goes to show that what your site is called doesn't really matter. It's the service that you provide that really counts.

Well I was able to get back into a couple of old hard drives which were gathering dust and it turns out I was actually quite a fan of Bitcoin back in 2011. Looking at my browsing history, the earliest references to Bitcoin are Google searches that I made in mid-2011. This was just after I learned about it from a forum I used to visit. Then I can see links to this forum (but back then it was called Bitcoin.org) and a site called We Use Coins.

I can see that I then searched the phrase "buy bitcoins" and then registered an account at Mt. Gox but didn't do anything after that. I think I made a MyBitcoin account too but I'm not sure. I also signed up to a site called Bitcoinplus which lets users generate bitcoins using their computers. Amazingly, when I entered my email address, I found out that my account is still there but because the hardware I used was very poor (I was mining on my laptop running Windows XP), I was only able to generate 75,000 satoshis:



Then, as I go further up my history, I see that I browsed these forums quite a bit. I can see references to laszlo's pizza, the person who got hacked and lost 25,000 BTC, a topic called "new real tangible physical bitcoin coin" which I'm guessing probably refers to Casascius coins, and the announcement thread for Namecoin. By the end of 2011, the references to Bitcoin start to fade and it seems I lost interest by 2012.

Technically speaking, I guess this makes me an early adopter. I was into bitcoins and even obtained some while the prices were still in the single digits. But with only 75,000 satoshis to show for it, I must be the poorest early adopter in the world.

To be honest, I'm actually a terrible coder... I'm currently taking it as a minor for college and we mostly use Java. I'll be learning more C++ in the following months along with the more advanced programming stuff.

OK, so I just read the thread and the comparisons to Stackcoin don't seem to hold since that was just photoshopped pictures with no code to show for it. In this case, there still seems to be a working wallet and source code, correct? If so, does the wallet actually have the features promised in the OP? Can you actually use it to embed torrents in a user-friendly way? What about the blockchain torrent search engine? Is that also available?

The scammy part of this whole thing seems to be that the dev went AWOL and sold his coins and didn't put up a buy wall like he originally promised in the OP.

I know that it is possible to embed torrents in the Bitcoin blockchain so it isn't a huge technical leap to create a coin specialized for this purpose. I'm more of a Java guy but if the essential stuff has already been written, then this might be enough for me to work with and build upon.

This is, of course, assuming that the dev isn't coming back. It seems strange that a dev would abandon such a promising project so early for a quick buck.

I was replying to the OP. I just found out about this coin now and was unaware that it was a scam. I think that torrents are a good application of the blockchain (in addition to other things like DNS systems) because they are far more resilient, resistant to censorship, transcend geographic lines, and incorporate almost unlimited redundancy. A lot of people talked about it for ages but nobody actually attempted to do it until now (which really bugged me and got me into learning C++ until I learned that programming is far more difficult than I originally expected it to be ).

Looks like an interesting coin. As you can read in this post of mine created in response to the shutdown of The Pirate Bay, I've always felt that some form of decentralized torrent network could really take off. The technology behind the blockchain concept is particularly well suited for applications such as this due to its decentralized aspects and superior redundancy. And while I admit creating this sort of thing is far too complex for my programming skills, it's nice to see that others have identified a need in the market for such a system and are working on bringing the full potential of Satoshi's creation into fruition.

It's still hovering at 51 cents. It's value hasn't changed much when priced at BTC though:

What is your opinion on services which claim to hold your bitcoins?

On one hand, I can see a use case for such services. Someone who doesn't want the responsibility of taking care of their computer security or believes that their computer security is not good enough but wants to hold bitcoins could find them useful.

For example, a journalist who travels around the world and visits dangerous places might not want to keep their bitcoins locally in case their computer goes missing. Even paper wallets could be stolen.

I was on Freebitco.in the other day and saw this:



According to Wikipedia (link), Xapo is supposed to be an online wallet and vault for the storage of bitcoins. It seems legitimate but then again, almost all of these services do until suddenly they aren't. I know Circle is also offering a similar BTC storage service too (link). Both claim to insure their customers' deposits and that any bitcoins stored with them are safe.

History, on the other hand, tells a different story. Ever since MyBitcoin got "hacked" in 2011, the track record of third party services (e.g. inputs.io, Mt. Gox, Flexcoin, etc.) which claim to hold your bitcoins for you has not been very positive.

Reading Satoshi's posts, it seems that he was distrustful of banks on all levels. I'm not sure if Satoshi ever used these words himself, but the phrase "be your own bank." shows up a lot during discussions about Bitcoin. So does the phrase "if you don't hold the private key, you don't have any bitcoins". I wonder what Satoshi would think of these Bitcoin "banks" ? Do you think they are providing a legitimate service as Bitcoin continues to evolve and become more mainstream or are they a parasite upon the Bitcoin world?

Every single major crypto is down in the double digits. The price of a single bitcoin has reached its lowest point in 14 months. What's going on here?



The only cryptos in the top 50 that have gone up in the past 24 hours are 17. Marinecoin (979 percent but with <1 BTC volume), 24. BitcoinDark (0.57 percent), and 48. Unobtanium (16.46 percent).

I know this is a bit of a weird question but I was going through Electrum seeds a couple days ago trying to find a memorable one and every so often, I'd get a 12 word seed with word pairs that you would not normally expect to find together if they were generated in a purely random manner. Is the 12 word phrase truly random and are these just coincidences or have the devs implemented something into the generator to make it more easy for humans to memorize?

EDIT: I found several such pairs but the above three are the first ones that come to mind.

EDIT 2: Obviously, I'm not using these seeds since I posted them here!