Could it be then that these blockchain-based wagering services are being used widely for mixing coins?
I think this would be a stupid idea. All the transactions are publicly shown on the satoshidice website, so it is very easy to create a script which connects the transactions. And the rewards are returned to the same bitcoin addresses you send from, so it doesn't add any anonymity. If we think that somebody wants to track the transaction, they can easily incorporate satoshidice transactions to their tracking system. I'd have to think that there is a limit to how much of a log the site keeps A player never needs to visit the site, so the logs don't provide much information that the blockchain doesn't. And the blockchain holds the information forever. |
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That's weird and confusing
Especially to an outsider looking at the transaction. The outsider doesn't know which Is the output that was change back to you versus the output that went for your purchase. This helps to maintain anonymity. Some other clients allow you to choose which address to use as an output. The Blockchain.info/wallet allows this, for example. This would allow you to have to change go right back to the address where the payment came from. - http://Blockchain.info/wallet |
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Please add that this is relevant only for 0-conf transactions which were never considered to be secure, otherwise it is very alarmist.
And that they didn't follow the basic recommendation: - No incoming traffic (e.g., no port forwarding to the client, and no UPnP) - Explicit connections to well-known nodes (e.g., large pool miners). Their results would not have been the same. |
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Here are some totals for these addresses:
Wager BTC Trxs
lessthan 1 8 2768
lessthan 2 0 104
lessthan 4 1 1126
lessthan 8 1 56
lessthan 16 1 82
lessthan 32 1 44
lessthan 64 5 160
lessthan 128 40 260
lessthan 256 3 42
lessthan 512 9 278
lessthan 1000 8 248
lessthan 1500 3 64
lessthan 2000 10 152
lessthan 3000 14 98
lessthan 4000 10 142
lessthan 6000 20 266
lessthan 8000 41 570
lessthan 12000 69 478
lessthan 16000 157 1458
lessthan 24000 719 1602
lessthan 32000 537 3897
lessthan 32768 1,018 4004
lessthan 48000 468 2387
lessthan 64000 245 790
Total BTCs wagered: 3,387 BTC
Total number of wagers (transactions): 21,076
Total transactions on the blockchain: 42,152
Average wager: 0.16 BTC
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it wouldn't hurt to have a few USDs, GBPs, or whatever sitting ready to be put to use if a weekend dip does occur though.
And, interestingly enough, last weekend a dip did occur and buying during the weekend saw gains a few days later of three to four percent, if the buying was done at the low and the selling done at current levels. This upcoming weekend is the first in over a month where conditions indicate we might get a weekend dip. The last time this indicator held true was March 22 - March 25 and the resulting gain (from having a lower cost basis) after buying back were from 5% to 8%.  - http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10zig6-hourzczsg2012-04-18zeg2012-05-04ztgSzm1g10zm2g25The high in the past 7 day was about $5.20ish. The high in the 7 day period prior to that though was $5.45ish. So this situation has historically been followed with a dip over the weekend. The weekend dip strategy then suggests to sell bitcoins heading into this weekend and to then buy them back if a selloff occurs. The time to buy back will vary. If there is a quick selloff, then the rally back might be quick as well (usually thanks to arbitrage). If the selloff is gradual, then the time to buy back is when the price starts to head back up, maybe after a bottom seems to have formed and the exchange rate comes up a third off that low. Oftentimes, Saturday evening (west) and Sunday morning (east) is about the time to start looking closely at a re-entry point. But sometimes the selloff continues through Sunday and into Monday even. Know that other times, a rally happens and this strategy causes you to lose money after buying back so keep that in mind as well. There is one factor that is unique for this weekend. Mt. Gox has not been processing international bank wires all week due to Golden Week in Japan. This means there are three things to consider. Firstly, on Sunday evening (west) / Monday morning (east) there will be a lot of new money being made available once Mt. Gox starts processing the pending wires. So a ramp up could be sharp -- it seems that those sending new, incoming funds are oftentimes impatient and as soon as the funds are available, bitcoins get purchased. Another other impact of this means that if certain prospective sellers have been holding off on their selling this week, preferring to wait until just before funds could be wired out, then any downtrend could prompt those sellers to try to beat the crowd and all together trigger a selloff (one that is unusually steep even as the first to sell gets the higher exchange rates in a selloff). Oftentimes lately there have been plenty of traders with funds at the ready to catch a sharp selloff, particularly ones fueled by forced margin selling at Bitcoinica. But this weekend comes following this Golden Week wire transfer stoppage, so it could be possible that traders are just fresh out of funds to place bids. Thus a selloff this weekend would be unusually sharp. Nobody knows as this is the first year that this Golden Week work stoppage occurred with Mt. Gox. As of this writing, Friday 6:44pm PDT (1:44am UTC) the last trades are at $5.084 so let's see if this is yet one more time where following the weekend dip strategy pays off. |
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Here were recommendations for merchants not considered by these researchers: A merchant can lessen the risk of being defrauded in a race attack (on 0/unconfirmed) by:
- Using an explicit list of peers to connect to (with most of the known IP addresses of miners)
- Not allowing incoming connections (turn off uPnP)
this still leaves the merchant vulnerable to a 51% attack that all transactions below 6 confirmations are subject to but also to the Finney attack and another type of attack even where 2 confirmations is required - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2622#2625The method used in the research paper relied on the ability to know the IP address for the vendor and to directly connect to that vendor's node. (which presumes that the vendor's firewall has UPnP enabled and/or the port for Bitcoin is accessible from the outside, such as when the network's firewall has port forwarding enabled and is routing that traffic to the host that the Bitcoin node runs from.) And shock of all shocks, a race attack was successful in nearly every attempt. |
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Here were recommendations for merchants not considered by these researchers: A merchant can lessen the risk of being defrauded in a race attack (on 0/unconfirmed) by:
- Using an explicit list of peers to connect to (with most of the known IP addresses of miners)
- Not allowing incoming connections (turn off uPnP)
this still leaves the merchant vulnerable to a 51% attack that all transactions below 6 confirmations are subject to but also to the Finney attack and another type of attack even where 2 confirmations is required - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2622#2625 |
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I'm still reading it but it was already a recommendation that the merchant not allow incoming network traffic (and disable UPnP) and to explicitly connect only to well-known nodes, preferably the mining pools.
I don't see anything in the report yet that indicates they tested using this configuration.
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Shouldn't it follow that if our Bitcoins are worth more we can all imporve our Bitcoin services thereby improving it's reach and appeal
What you are describing is the hope that gains on the speculation of the exchange rate will allow a bitcoin business to self-fund (bootstrap). While there might have been a handful of bitcoin businesses that benefited greatly from the rise from a BTC/USD below $1 to it being in double digits, it is likely those gains have probably since been spent and additionally, is a move that likely will not repeat at least not to that degree nor over such a short period of time. So Bitcoin now faces the real world, where many businesses get built and launched with the help of seed funding (e..g, CoinLab, BitInstant, etc.) or loans (few of which share publicly that they have borrowed) and to some smaller but growing extent equity gained from IPOs (e..g, on GLBSE and MPEx). At the same time there still are many ideas that individuals can build and run solo or as a team with cofounders where only bootstrapped funds are necessary. But the days where a few hundred dollars worth of BTCs turned into an amount that was sufficient to self-fund a bitcoin-related business are probably long gone. And there was only a relatively few number where that had been the case of what happened anyway. |
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There's no gui in the official client to do this I suppose?
In the bottom left is a button: Add recipient  I'm open to other features.
A configurable auto-refresh perhaps (or a long poll or websocket maybe even so that each time there is an update the new data is shown?)? Perhaps a filter condition for the amount? |
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I've been perplexed as to why there is so much activity for the recently launched SatoshiDice.com betting site. Certainly, there are many, many options for wagering using bitcoins, as Mem's list shows: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75883.0. So why is this two-week-old site pulling in a thousand wagers or more each day now? The reason I am so curious is that the number of transactions on the blockchain each day have skyrocketed recently: - http://bit.ly/JgmqmCAnd it appears much of the growth can be attributed to wagers placed with SatoshiDice.com: - http://SatoshiDice.comThe Recent bets table shown on the site shows the 200 most recent bets made but now that consistently shows four to six hours worth before hitting 200 rows. So that means between 800 to 1,200 wagers are placed on the site in a day (this may be off as I haven't measured each of the addresses to determine a full day's betting volume, but 800 looks to be safe to use as the lower bound.) Each player making a wager sends a payment to an address for one of the bet types shown on the site. The service then runs a calculation and returns either a transaction to the winner that includes the appropriate payout or it returns a transaction to the loser that includes a tiny fraction of bitcoins as a consolation prize. The only way the player knows if the bet won or not is based on the return transaction. So there are two transactions on the blockchain for each wager. If there were 800 wagers for the day then there were 1,600 transactions on the blockchain. With the total per-day activity to the blockchain exceeding 10,000 transactions recently, SatoshiDice wagering represents at least 15% of all blockchain traffic in a day. In trying to come up with reasons why this site might be growing so fast, one of the suggestions offered to me was that it worked as a great mixing service. That explanation didn't register with me at first, as the spend transaction is returned instantly, so there is a direct connection between the payment sent to SatishiDice and the transaction that is returned. A mixing service not only mixes coins but also has a time factor. Coins can be returned a little at a time to different addresses which makes tracing more difficult. With SatoshiDice.com returning on average more than 99% of the wager amounts then a mixing strategy might be to send coins through multiple times. Some earlier passes will be winners and payouts with "clean" funds are sent on the return transactions. The coins used for wagers that lose get chewed up and only a tiny morsel is returned. After a few passes the makeup of the wallet at the end would be coins that look significantly different from the coins that were held before the wagering. Could it be then that these blockchain-based wagering services are being used widely for mixing coins? |
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At current levels, that represents 10% of all transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Um... I'm going to retract that because it was wrong. The reason it is wrong is because each wager causes there to be two transactions on the blockchain, not one. So if there are 1,000 wagers a day on SatoshiDice.com, there are 2,000 transactions on the blockchain as the result. Aye carumba. |
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What does this message from the bitcoin client mean?
"You can still send it for a fee of 9999.9999 BTC"
Hopefully that 9999.9999 was your edit and the number it actually showed was like 0.0005 or 0.001 BTC. - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_feewhat is the transaction size limit?
how do i avoid the fee?
Generally, if you either recently received coins, or you mine or do something else where you receive tiny fractions of a bitcoin then your payments will incur a fee. If the fee is needed because the coins were recently received, waiting a day or so might allow the transaction to be sent without a fee. But the fee is generally an amount worth less than a penny. who are the "nodes" and how do i become one?
The nodes that process transactions are mining nodes. |
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What would normally take exchanger to dwolla 2 hours to confirm is now 3-4 days.....
Dwolla account-to-account transactions are instantaneous. There is no "confirm". Are you possibly indicating instead a delay where the exchange (such as Mt. Gox) is hitting systematic limits with Dwolla and therefore is not able to send the money for 3-4 days? |
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I'm having MAJOR issue with them right now and just getting a run around
Used Tor to access the site perhaps and now need to show identity? Or delays withdrawing using Dwolla? Those are the two most common issues affecting Mt. Gox accounts. (Well, this week being the exception where they are not processing International wire transfers.) |
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if you are mining BTC and leave it as BTC it is not taxable because it is unrealized income. It only becomes taxable when you convert it to fiat (or trade it for something). So let's say year 1 the miner (operating as a business) invests $2,000 CAD into hardware, and by the end of the year has 200 BTC and electric consumption of $600 CAD to generate those BTCs. Then in year 2 the BTCs are sold (not sure of Canada has the distinction of short-term vs. long-term capital gain, assume all BTCs were held 1 year after mined). Would electricity be deducted in year 1? If so those BTCs would need to sit on the books as an asset somewhere then, right? Heh, ... inventory? |
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"Chrome will overtake Internet Explorer in May 2012 on StatCounter" - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=366I remember creating a bet something like this while ago but don't remember seeing it launch. I've PMed you your complete transaction history. Let me know if there is anything fishy. Probably there was an error and your submission never registered. I see what happened. The bet statement I had ultimately submitted was for iOS marketshare and it did appear: - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=358And mine isn't even the using same market share reporting service, so wow -- sorry, for the false alarm. |
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