I think there should be some special notes added to the API documentation (or at least a link to something) to describe clearly what Bitcoin "accounts" actually are because much of the negative views about them is due to not understanding them correctly (such as thinking they are the same as "coin control").

I don't think that this is correct as I have created vanity addresses whose "firstbits" don't show up on blockchain.info until sometimes as many as 10 confirmations (which is when they seem to first appear on firstbits.com).

You can but it won't do what you think - when you do a send and include an account label this label is then put into the tx - whether the addresses chosen to be used have a "label" (which looks the same as an account unfortunately) on them is irrelevant.

The getaccount and setaccount commands are actually rather unintuitive as they are only having any affect on the "receive" transactions when you issue a listtransactions command.

As far as I can tell the way that it is working is that your outgoing tx's have the account label included when stored in your wallet but as this is not possible for the incoming ones the setaccount and getaccount commands provide a mapping from an address to an account label and it is this map that is used to work out the "receive" tx's "account".

Okay - this does make sense and is indeed a sensible approach - a "brain wallet" is also something worth considering for at least holding a portion of the "savings".

If you want to be super secure you might want to consider buying a cheap computer and generate the savings wallet on it without ever connecting to the internet. The tricky part is getting the software needed onto this computer if you don't want to trust say a Linux distro designed for this purpose (there is at least one or two such distros mentioned in threads on this Forum).

Another way that this can be at least partially solved is if you use a brain wallet that is a single HTML page that can be used offline (https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.6-SHA1-162d1ff4fd1e09222cbaca6c282672ee6c195e1b.html) but you still have the problem of getting that single HTML page on the PC.

If you don't want to trust using a USB flash drive to accomplish this then it is possible to get a USB to USB "serial cable" and then you would need to investigate using something like Zmodem in order to copy the file (I think the guy building Armory was looking into that very idea).

Not placing all your eggs in one basket is sage advice about any sort of investment.

Multiple wallets are not really necessary provided that you have tested that your "backup wallet" was correctly backed up - to be sure of this you really need to do a trial "disaster recovery" and verify that your procedure works as expected (perhaps best done with a "backup computer").

Brain wallets are another potential approach (in which case I think the use of multiple addresses is probably a good idea in case you are unable to recall the password for one or are being forced to reveal passwords under duress). Bear in mind though that coming up with a secure enough password that you won't forget is not a trivial task for most.

The only reason to backup more than wallet.dat is to speed up the recovery time (as a rescan won't be required).

I think the real question is whether "longcoin" will have 672 million or 1.334 billion.

Please also note that if you are using a laptop or an old desktop those few seconds might turn into a few minutes (I have experienced waits of more than 10 minutes myself).

To be fair the problem is not that the accounts don't work but that they serve a completely different purpose to coin control (and yes intuitively most people would tend to think of the things as being the same).

At least in 0.7 there is going to be support for "raw transactions" which will allow you complete control.

This is very much correct as I also had a lot of misunderstandings about what "accounts" were when I first started playing with bitcoind.

So just remember that when "sending" an account != address and the purpose of setaccount is really only for "receiving" (and probably should not be allowed for external addresses but unfortunately I think that that is how the labels are handled).

Interesting to see this after I just recently added tagging to the Forum package as part of the CIYAM platform.

The approach I've taken is that each user creates their own tags - when you click on a tag it displays the posts beneath (from newest to oldest although I might add the ability to reverse the ordering).

This is most useful when combined with searching and also can be useful for determining posts to be split/merged (which is available for mods/admins).

I think it is a pretty useful feature.

I would advise that at the very least some of your "answers" (assuming each one is a part of the pass phrase) should include numerical characters and also other characters (such as - $ @ &).

The following might give you some ideas:

Q. Birth date of someone important:
A. 1779-03-14

Q. Price paid for your first bitcoin:
A. $5.55

Q. An obvious equation:
A. 1+1=10

Q. Gave you a nudge:
A.

Q. Long live:
A. Rock&Roll

Q. Full Metal Jacket:
A. *****

Pass phrase: 1779-03-14$5.551+1=10;)Rock&Roll*****

An interesting point - I think that the status of "virtual commodities" is most likely something that has never actually been tested in law in Australia (and without precedence it is very hard to say how that would be judged although perhaps some case has been brought up by the ATO before?).

If, however, you looked at the buying and selling BTC as being similar to the buying and selling of stocks then there would be no GST but instead tax would be due after any profits made from the sale of the BTC (most likely at your normal income tax rate).

You can confirm you are the holder of a private key by signing a message for its pubkey (this feature is in the current client) but this of course doesn't solve the problem of being the "sole" owner.

Am thinking that perhaps some sort of multisig approach might solve the latter although you'd never be the sole holder of the private key but instead could be recognised by some sort of joint signing with a trusted 3rd party as being the *current* holder.

Unfortunately though one thing you can never stop is people sending trash *to* the collectible address and even a small amount send from the vanity address 1asswipe might slightly devalue your otherwise pristine address.  

Sure - am a little confused though about the ownership transfer mechanism though.

Is that you are wanting the money to never actually be spent but somehow the "ownership" of this money to be transferred to another user?

(If this is what you are after then perhaps multisig could be of some use to accomplish this?)

As coin control won't be making into the main trunk you might want to instead look at the "raw transaction" API stuff (that will be in 0.7 and will allow you to do this - is just more low level than the "coin control" approach).

And assuming that this is true then the guy would probably have some major "guanxi" with people in authority (so not even worth thinking about trying to start any legal action in China).

Certainly true - actually the idea would perhaps be more of an educational exercise in showing people how easily "traces" in the Blockchain (to an individual) could be severed without having to even use any special software.

1) Attendees at a Bitcoin event are each given a physical Bitcoin (from a trusted source and perhaps in paper form to reduce overheads) that contains zero balance.

2) Each attendee then sends an specific amount (say 10 BTC) to their physical Bitcoin's public address.

3) Swap physical Bitcoins of the same amount with another attendee (after checking balance and making sure private key is still hidden).

Anyone tried this yet?

Here is a suggestion as to how one might be able to artificially create "collectable" coins (well addresses actually) that could have their BTC value (well most of it in order to preserve the address from being pruned I guess) transferred and yet allow the receiving address to become even more valuable.

How would such a thing be possible?

Step 1) Create a vanity address that starts with 12coo1 (for example).

Step 2) For a premium over an agreed amount then owner of the "original" l12coo1 address will send the agreed amount to yours (making sure a small amount is retained in the original address to prevent it later being pruned).

Although your 12coo1 address is not the original it could be now considered "cooler" as it was the first 12coo1 address to receive coins from the original 12coo1 address (of course verifiable via the blockchain).

So now another user generates a 12coo1 address and (for a premium of course) you send coins from your 12coo1 address to theirs. Now the 3rd persons coins can be considered even more valuable as they are the 3rd in an unbroken chain of "cool" transactions to unique "cool" addresses (tracing back to the original usage of a 12coo1 address).

 

(P.S. I really do own the first and so far only used 12coo1 address - added another 0.02 BTC to show it - so am now waiting for offers from other 12coo1 creators)

Indeed the growing size is of concern (and there have been numerous threads about this not that long after Satoshi Dice was launched).

From these other threads I think that the momentum to implement "pruning" of the blockchain (and other scalability solutions) is increasing at an even more rapid rate.

(am certain that this will be sorted out before it becomes such a problem - but as stated before there are other clients that don't require the blockchain)