It isn't. It is morally neutral. It would be a good deed to put up the person in your 14th bedroom but you don't personally have a moral obligation to do so. You are not actively making someone sleep rough - you are simply allowing them to do so. It is definitely morally wrong if you actively make someone sleep rough by, say, bulldosing their house. Everyone has a right to shelter and there is clearly a problem with society if some people have excess shelter and some people have none.

It is morally acceptable. I am not making someone die, merely letting them die. It would be morally good to give them a kidney and morally bad to remove both kidneys from a healthy person causing them to die. In the case of kidneys, there is a better supply of them than from living humans anyway - from people who have recently died.

I believe people have a right over their own body. If you force them to give up a kidney that is denying that right.  The operation would cause pain and suffering which should be avoided. Also, any corruption in the system would be much worse than just with money because it is dealing with health. Beaurocratic mistakes could be disastrous.

It should also be noted that there is a great difference between artificial property like money and land and true property - your life and your body. The artificial property is completely dependent on the society you live in. A society where these concepts don't exist is perfectly imaginable. However, your body is indisputably yours.

Well I agree with the problems but not the solution. Bitcoins aren't easy enough for most people yet and it's difficult to buy/sell/spend bitcoins but creating a whole new layer of currency isn't really needed to solve these problems. IMO the concept of a currency backed by another currency is more confusing than a 'pure' currency like bitcoins. It's this kind of confusing abstraction that leads to our financial problems today.

I think a much better solution is to provide a set of services around bitcoins as a currency - this is already being started. I'm personally in favour of the bitcoin banking proposal outlined here.

.deb package and PPA available

Installation should now be a lot easier. You can install Wallet Manager from:

• The PPA: ppa:david4dev/walletmanager (for Ubuntu and derivatives)
• .deb files on the downloads page (for Debian and derivatives)

You should probably rename this to avoid confusion:

Version 1.0.0 is out

This brings in the new file format and breaks compatibility with previous versions.

I made a video showing some typical use of the application.

Changes to file formats

I've worked on this project for a couple of days now and I now have a clearer picture of where this project is heading and what problems there are currently.  I have concluded that changing the file formats and the file extensions will help with this. For this reason, if you are using any of the current versions, ensure you keep an unencrypted backup (or a backup encrypted using a different program) because the change will break compatibility with the old encrypted files.

Problem 1 - file recognition
Using set file extensions will help both this application and users recognise which files are wallet backups and which files are encrypted wallet backups. Therefore, when I make the change, I will enforce file extensions when saving.

Problem 2 - verifying decryption
Currently, if a user decrypts a wallet but gets the passcode wrong, the application will spit out a garbled file that is no use to anyone. It is currently unable to check if the decryption was successful. To enable this, I will change the file format of encrypted wallets to include the sha256 digest of the original file which will give an easy way to verify the decryption. A side effect of this is breaking compatibility with the current encrypted format.

The file extensions
I will use the following file extensions:

• Unencrypted backups: .bw - bitcoin wallet
• Encrypted backups: .ebw - encrypted bitcoin wallet

As always, feedback is welcome  .

It looks like someone has at least started a project to do exactly this. It's called paper-keys. I haven't tested it myself, but it looks like a good start.

If you can prove your authenticity through an Ebay history or something similar, you can use Bitmarket.

If you don't mind waiting 45 days, you can use Youtipit.

There is a list of exchanges at http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/. From that list, only Britcoin and BitMarket support £s.

What are you looking for from an exchange?

That's an interesting idea that I may look at in the future. There are some big difficulties in implementing this though - for example, you generally need to be root to create a ramdisk. Although, I could possibly use fuse to do this.

Put simply, I don't. This is a problem with shredding algorithms in general. All of the limitations of shred(1) are inherent here as well.

However, it is more secure than a normal delete (which itself is more secure than the default delete function of most file managers which send the file to a rubbish bin) and it should stop most simple undelete programs (It won't stop high grade forensic programs).

The only way to be totally secure is to shred the whole file system! 

Import just copies the selected wallet stored somewhere else of the disk to ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat, overwriting ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat in the process. So this does delete the current one. It doesn't do a merge. Maybe import/export is a bit confusing and I should use a backup/restore metaphor instead.

Decrypt and import is the same as normal import but first it decrypts the file (which needs to have been encrypted using Wallet Manager), prompting the user for the passcode.

Maybe 'Create Backup', 'Create Encrypted Backup', 'Restore Backup' and 'Restore Encrypted Backup' would be more self explanatory.


It *does* need a little work. Currently its just at the proof of concept stage.

Wallet Manager is my little project to create a simple GUI for the common tasks of backing up, restoring and encrypting wallets.

The GUI isn't that great at the moment (just a set of buttons) but its simple and it works:



You can download it here or grab the bzr branch .

Feedback, bug reports, suggestions etc are all welcome

I'm making an average of 0.00013505 BTC/day. Good job I'm not mining with any real intention of making money 

Just use SI prefixes!

1BTC = 1 bitcoin
0.1BTC = 1dBTC = 1 decibitcoin
0.01BTC = 1cBTC = 1 centibitcoin
0.001BTC = 1mBTC = 1milibitcoin
0.0001BTC = 1dmBTC = 1 deci-milibitcoin
0.00001BTC = 1cmBTC = 1 centi-milibitcoin
0.000001BTC = 1µBTC = 1 microbitcoin
0.0000001BTC = 1dµBTC = 1 deci-microbitcoin
0.00000001BTC = 1cµBTC = 1 centi-microbitcoin

I don't see bitcoins as an investment. They are a tool for me to easily pay for things online, particularly with donations.

So far, I've put £30 into Youtipit and I am awaiting more people to post things there that I feel are worthy of donations.

The amount I plan to spend is directly related to what I can buy with or donate to using bitcoins and how much I can afford.

I'm guessing there isn't a version of this trojan for Linux ... yet.

I don't really have enough bitcoins to be worried about this yet. When I do I will definitely move to a more secure model than just using my installed Linux machine (I'm thinking a couple of USBs and encryption for my 'savings account' walet).

I hope other Linux users aren't being complacent. While it is inherently more secure than Windows, it is still very easy to create a simple trojan. All that's needed is a script to upload ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat to some remote server and disguise this as some other (probably bitcoin related) software. Stick to the official repositories for your distribution where possible.

Well, I am a student and hobbyist programmer. Bitcoins are a very interesting experiment that I hope will succeed. I plan to do some Bitcoin related coding in the near future