Oh, I missed that you were using private keys. Never mind that, then.
Given all but a few bytes of an ECDSA private key, I would not be surprised if there was some way of getting the remaining bytes without a full brute-force.
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It would take less than a second to find the code, since all of the used Bitcoin addresses are known. You could just search Bitcoin Block Explorer for the known part.
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My account works, though I had no BTC there.
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I noticed a number of factual errors. For example, transactions are not guaranteed to be free, and MagicalTux didn't start MtGox.
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You missed "a generation ago". He's talking about university (mostly) computer systems running Unix, with users connected from terminals.
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The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible. A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what. It's time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless. One of the fundamental building blocks for such a system is digital signatures. A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership. It works well to secure ownership, but leaves one big problem unsolved: double-spending. Any owner could try to re-spend an already spent coin by signing it again to another owner. The usual solution is for a trusted company with a central database to check for double-spending, but that just gets back to the trust model. In its central position, the company can override the users, and the fees needed to support the company make micropayments impractical. Bitcoin's solution is to use a peer-to-peer network to check for double-spending. In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. For details on how it works, see the design paper at http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdfThe result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending.
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Classical or psytrance, usually.
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Just curious... a block chain alone could never really be "tampered" with right? I mean if it was anything other than the official block chain, the client wouldn't recognize anything... right?
No, there's a lot an attacker could do. They could give you a gigantic chain that isn't really valid, and then feed you fake transactions, for example.
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People downloading this should be warned that Bitcoin does not verify blocks gotten in this way.
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Run Bitcoin with the -debug switch, double-click the transaction, and post the transaction dump here.
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Thanks to rasengan and coderrr of MtGox Live for hosting the mirror. It is available directly at http://109.123.116.245 . Tell me if you see any bugs unique to the mirror.
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So you are essencially admitting that such an attack would render the system useless, as long as the attack is sustained.
Yes, but only for as long as the attack is sustained. It would be a DoS attack, not the End Of Bitcoin.
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To create 1000 old blocks, you need to do an average of 5923676160960014000 hashes at the current difficulty. Plus, to actually replace them you need to constantly fight against the existing network. To negate all legitimate blocks takes a hash speed equal to the current network hash speed (~12 Thash/s at the moment).
So you need 12 Thash/s plus about 6 billion billion hashes to rewrite 1000 blocks. If you want to replace the blocks within a week, you need a total of ~22 Thash/s.
Let's say a 6870 does 300 Mhash/s (I don't how true this is). You need ~41285 6870s to get 50% of the network plus ~32646 more to create 1000 blocks at current difficulty within a week. That's at the very least $10 million.
And once the attacker gets sick of wasting so much money, everything can be fixed without much loss by blacklisting their chain.
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Cool coin! I'll probably buy one. It's a very neat idea but please, pretty please, this is supposed to be a world-wide usable coin, not just in the US. This means we definitely can't use the Thai baht symbol.
I mean, seriously: do you imagine a bitcoin-coin with a "$" symbol on it? Do you imagine reading/writing "$4.5" meaning 4.5 bitcoins? Wouldn't that be confusing? Then you know why the ฿ sign doesn't work either.
We're seeking for a fair economy system, and we can't even start being fair choosing the very symbol of the currency. That's depressing.
The symbols are different. The Bitcoin symbol has two strokes, and they don't go through the middle of the B. No one who actually uses the Thai Baht symbol would be confused. Compare: ฿
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Reversing 1000 future blocks takes a week with 52%.
This is certainly wrong, and your other numbers are probably wrong, too. If you control 52% of the network, you must use one of your blocks to negate a legitimate block 48% of the time. So 48% of the network is producing legitimate blocks, 48% of the network is negating those blocks, and only 4% is left producing new blocks. The network would only produce 5.76 blocks per day.
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And the other two?
Well, #1 would be saying nonsensical things like "could of" or "all of the sudden". It's also extremely annoying when people correct me when I use "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. This is a perfectly valid usage of the word, and it looks much better than "he/she" or "they".
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It can be done but it require 1)a backup of the old blockchain 2)enough miners that know what to do
Bitcoin never deletes blocks, so everyone will still have copies. The pools can be updated in no time, and they represent almost all of the network's hashing power.
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