Unfortunately, he thought it was his elbow.

If your taxes are a "small fee" then you're either doing it wrong or doing it very, very right.

+1. I'm not sure that this is a scam but if it is, I suspect that the devs/other employees at BFL will be among the victims.

Sound reasoning there.

Bitstick?

That's no moom, that's a spicestation!

Interesting idea. Is there a thread where you expand on this?

Consider making it completely unwriteable from the main USB interface. Or at the very least require setting it in a special mode from the built-in controls.

What would be somewhat cool would be to have some flash on there and have the PC software be on it as a read-only USB drive. Though that is a little more complex than what you are suggesting and might open some attach channels itself.

Though personally, I don't see much real need beyond the mobile apps that are around right now. But good luck.

Also, if you could get the hardware, consider an e-ink display. You could have the balance and the address (maybe as a QR code) even with the device unplugged.

Also consider having multiple wallets. Just transfer funds between as needed.

Here's a possible way to think of it I guess. Consider gold right now. Valuable for the known reasons. Now imagine there's an island discovered in the middle of the pacific that consists of 2-3 times the quantity of gold currently in circulation in trivially mineable form, all you need is a boat to get there. What does this do to the cost of gold? To the cost of boats? Is it worth buying a boat?

Actually, it's a crap analogy since the rate of bitcoins mined is a constant and you'd have to make assumptions about people not being able to monopolize access. Maybe someone could knock it into shape?

But it is the number I use on my luggage.

If you believe the conspiracy theories about Jews and banking, it might be appropriate

Do we really though or do we just need "enough"? I would suspect that the number of nodes required probably goes as something of the square-root of number of users. As more users get on board, it might be possible to have the client back-off on how much work it actually does. Make it somewhat configurable maybe since some of us are happy to donate CPU time where others may not be so much. Admitedly it's early days to be getting to that level of sophistication but otherwise, most people will just end up on lightweight clients anyway.

Plus, excuse me but I'm not that deep into things yet. I currently run the client and the miner. Bitcoins assigned as transaction costs go to the mining side of things, correct (Though I'm thinking the pool operators probably keep that)? If running the client is essential for the functioning of the network, should there not be some kind of reward assigned there (other than the nice warm glow inside of course)?

I would not touch an online wallet except for special circumstances for very small sums. There are plenty of better alternatives.

But how can I trust you? Or that the owners of this site haven't modified your post?

Perhaps key-signing parties need to become part of the Bitcoin deal.

Probably should have these files torrented too for the decentralization. Would that decrease or increase security? Possibly neither I suspect.

Or they could just turn up and shoot em dead. Then a year later botch a raid on a church to distract media attention.

But guns would be better created with relatively cheap machine tools.

Of course, the assumption is that 3D printing will become ubiquitous.

Print the wallet on a t-shirt and stand in the background at a famous event so you can be the basis for a blockbuster movie-from-a-book a couple of centuries from now.

Seriously though, make sure to have offsite backups. That is, in multiple places. That likely multiplies the risk of attack so encryption is no doubt essential. As to archiving, paper is good but has issues. Anybody offering laser-punched titanium foil sheets?

That depends on other factors though. Bitcoin was only a small part of buying my GPU so ROI should be relatively quick (especially if I remember to get that rebate form in).

I'm fairly new to this, admittedly but it seems like buying specialized hardware for mining may be marginal at best at this point. Unless you're just doing it for altruistic reasons, you might be better off investing your money in Bitcoins up front and waiting for the value to go up (or not).

As to this company in particular, the fact that they have a convicted scammer in there (allegedly) is a big, big red flag to me. Even if I was optimistic about the technology, I'd probably be looking for it elsewhere.

I've started closing down SSH as much as possible. The one time I got hacked, it was via a temporary account with a stupidly simple password and a privilege escalation. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, nothing substantial happened but with the world as it is at the moment, leaving the port open to the world when I only ever occasionally need to access it from the internet and then for only short periods of time seems unwise.

The way to do it would be to have risk pools. High risk pools = high interest rate (essentially those shitty payday loan places). As you prove your reliability and trustworthiness, you move to lower risk and lower interest.

Of course, there will be deadbeats and scammers, possibly some playing the long game. But as long as enough people pay back to cover losses plus a profit, you could still make bank. Not something I would want to put my money in though.