OP, how strong was your password on the zipped wallet that was on DropBox? How many chars, and what kind of mixture of lower case, upper case, numbers, punctuation, etc, did it contain?

And what format was the zipped file in? WinRAR?

I hate when people make these posts and make you ask every little detail in order to try to help them figure out what may have happened. It's like pulling teeth. Just fucking give us all the info instead of making us ask for every little thing. Don't make assumptions like "I'm 99% sure that XYZ happened" and then think that posting additional details is no longer of any use. You are of course free to make your assumptions about what might have happened, but at least post all the necessary info that is required to come to that conclusion. If you leave things out like the info I asked above, you leave the possibility in everyone's mind that your zipped & password protected file might actually have been impossible to brute force. And then the community still has no idea what happened in your case and we are no closer to figuring out how people are getting hacked, and your entire thread was a waste of everyone's time. That also leaves open the possibility that all the "I was hacked" threads are troll or FUD threads.

Sorry, OP, this is not meant to single you out. This is a common theme in all the "My BTC was stolen due to hack" threads.

What is the max # of rigs you will be able to support in current facilities?

They should because they are using the user's electricity. They are taking money out of the website viewer's pocket every second that the user is on the site. A lot of less computer savvy users will not realize that this is what is happening, and therefore this is an unethical practice.

Looks like it means "Transfer and Distribution Utility" (http://www.texaspoweronline.com/learn/invoice/)

I'm guessing that means something similar to the charges that I described earlier ("supply" fees from one company, and "delivery" fees from the local utility company).

Couldn't you also put SSH onto a different port on Computer B, and forward that port as well in the router? Then you could access both directly from outside?

How does trading volume translate into health of the bitcoin economy? If that trading volume is based on speculation and not trade, isn't it liable to collapse at any moment? This is not a rhetorical question, I am really asking because I don't understand the statement.

Isn't leveraged trading by definition trading of someone else's property that you have borrowed? Sure, we could say that banks and hedge funds may trade on leverage, and if they fail then so be it, they will pay the price. But I don't think it's that black and white when a failure by those entities can put most of the world into an economic recession.

For the record I think any institution that fails should be left to fail, because without that there is no incentive for institutions to act prudently. No bank is too big to fail, and no bank is so important that if it fails the country goes to shit. If banks exist that meet those criteria today, they should be dismantled immediately as threats to national security. BEFORE they fail again. They will fail again, because the same basic rules that caused them to fail before are still in place.

This is an idiotic idea. It is unethical to use the compute power of a website's viewer's without their knowledge. That sysadmin guy in Australia got nabbed for putting this type of software on their servers, having their website's viewers mine bitcoins.

People who use this type of software in this way attract the wrong kind of attention towards Bitcoin. They are the scum of the internet, and by association Bitcoin's reputation is tainted.

In theory there could be ethical uses for web browser based mining, but I don't see why anyone would want to use it. If they had access to a computer on which they had permission to mine, most likely they could just install a non-browser miner on it. Running it on a website and mining on people's browsers without their knowledge is just as bad as botnets mining on unsuspecting peoples' PC's. Unethical use would also include logging into a site with browser based miner at a public place like a library, or computer lab, with the intention of mining bitcoins at the expense of the person operating the lab (without their permission).

Nagle, everything you've mentioned has already been discussed ad nauseum on this forum. None of your obvservations are anything new. I'm trying to figure out the point of you posting this. Was there one, or did you have something new to contribute that you perhaps forgot to mention?

I am not interested in personally "hacking" anything. But I am interested in learning about how to do it in theory, just so I know what to protect myself from. Even though I try to follow security best practices as much as possible I get the sense that there is more I could be doing to protect myself. It also just seems like an interesting thing to know a little bit about.

What exactly is the OP trying to do?

Correct.

You just described the mechanism by which all currencies get their value. According to your definition of "placebo money", the US Dollar, Japanese Yen, China Yuan, Euro, etc, are all placebo money.

The price is set by ask and bid. How can the exchange declare an artificial price. The only bad thing they could do along those lines would be to rollback the order queue back to the state it was in right before the hack/crash. Then you'd still have orders from last week where people were trying to buy and sell around ~17.5. It would suck for them to do that, but I don't think they are. I think I read other people mention that they are clearing the orders queue before going back online.

PSA guys, technically this isn't any more secure than encrypting your own wallet. If a hacker/malware were on your system and found the "secret" link in your browser bookmarks or saved somewhere on your system, the hacker could just use that URL to transfer the funds to their own wallet.

Yeah, it's one more thing for the writers of malware to have to search for the secret link, but it's not out of question. Look at all the hacks and stuff that have come up. WHere there are security holes these hackers will find a way to get in and steal stuff. It didn't take them long at all to make the malware to steal wallet.dat. The level of effort it would take to adapt that malware to also search for this secret URL is trivial.

Or am I missing something?

I understand what you are getting at, but I disagree. Just because you have a larger operation doesn't mean you will mine for longer. Given the equivalent hardware, once BTC earned from mining becomes equal to the electricity costs of mining, the guy with 10x more machines just loses 10x more money as the guy with 1x machine. The people who will last the longest are those with the lowest electricity costs. Efficiency of hardware will play a small factor (but not that large since there isn't a lot of variance in power efficiency). The bigger factor will the $/kwh paid for electricity. Basically one's geographic location will for the most part determine how long he/she can continue mining and still make a profit.

There will be a few people who get "free" electricity because they run their systems at work, in a dorm or whatever, but I think they will be outweighed by the tons of people who drop out of mining because their electricity costs make it unprofitable. Europeans I think will be the first to drop off, then big city dwellers in the US. Difficulty may dip for a while but it will eventually start growing again, at a slower rate, as some people jump back in, and those with cheaper electricity scale out with the new-found breathing room.

Please don't mine using someone else's equipment, facilities, and electricity.

I did this switch a couple of years ago and ended up paying almost exactly the same amount as before. The de-regulated company i purchase the energy "supply" from charges less, but my Utility company is still the one delivering it -- and they charge a "delivery" fee which brings my total electricity bill back up to the original amount (once you factor in flat fees, taxes, surcharges, etc).

It's a really stupid system. I hate corporations.

Were you trying to spam people?