No, I am talking about TRANSACTION CONFIRMATION.

Even if it is true that you have confirmed your card with paypal, it still takes six months for a transaction of you sending me money to be confirmed.

Up until six months I can be told oops, sorry, that confirmed card was actually used by a hacker not by the customer we thought we had confirmed, sorry, that transaction is orphan now, you owe us the money back...

With bitcoin, after just six BLOCKS it is very unlikely the transaction will turn out to be an orphan, even if it WAS a hacker. By six MONTHS, good frickin luck getting me to refund your money unless *I CHOOSE* to.

-MarkM-

I do not believe you. It takes six MONTHS to confirm a credit card - and thus as a derivative from that also a paypal payment or dwolla payment - sufficiently to be reasonably sure it is not an orphan transaction / double spend attack (aka "chargeback").

-MarkM-

(In other words, five MONTHS of confirmation from VISA is worth less than 50 minutes of bitcoin confirmations...)

Ahhh, the wiki is at GitHub! Cool. Well yeah for sure since we have a wiki obviously putting info on the wiki is the right thing to do, its what wikis are for, afterall!

-MarkM-

Yeah, I too thought kiba sounded like many another pyramid scheme's spiel.

But its not over. I saw another pyramid scheme start up just the other day. Heck I don't even go looking for them and still I come across them quite often. So no, the game isn't over, far from it. devcoins can still be mined with a CPU fergoshsakes. Namecoins haven't hardly begun even to settle on a decent way to let people actually browse the sites they buy the name of. United Kingdom Britcoin, CZech Bitcash, Canadian Digital Notes, Martian Botcoins etc etc etc have not even let the unwashed masses in on the mining end of the deal yet. WEEDs and BEERcoin are still only just working the bugs out of merged mining. Etc etc etc.

The game is barely afoot yet!

-MarkM-

A devcoin wiki would probably be useful for devcoin wiki

(If there is a devcoin wiki this is the first I've heard of it. If there isn't well hey where should we put one? A freebie on sourceforge or github or something? Or bribe the devcoin community admin to add a wiki there?

Or maybe the software used to make the devcoin community site actually includes a wiki and I haven't noticed that yet?

Thanks for the post, maybe by the time you do post your receiving address it'll be 200,000 DVC bounty you'll be due? (Meaning maybe by then you'll've posted a detailed post for the extra 100,000 bounty...)

By the way jackjack I sent you 200,000 DVC last night, in two transactions of 100,000 each.

-MarkM-

Well quick then, get into devcoin while there are still so few miners that you can mine it with CPUs, then later you too can laugh at latecomers while you swim in your huge stack of coins.

-MarkM-

Wow someone got themself a bargain, though not as nice a one as whoever picked up 10,000 coins at only $6.00 each earlier.

-MarkM-

How much of the huge early-adopter bitcoin-fortunes has been converted to fiat by now?

Have they been converting to fiat in large amounts at all?

I had hoped their plan had been to convert so much to fiat that they would from then on have huge reserves of fiat with which to keep bitcoin prices from ever falling below 1/21000000 of the reserves per coin.

But maybe they have not moved into fiat at all?

Or they have, but are not using that fiat as reserves to stabilise bitcoin?

Or they have, but are investing the fiat in various regulatory moves and licensing of legal banking institutions or purchases of legally licensed banks and such to uphold bitcoin's "legitimacy" more than worrying about its per unit exchange rate?

If it does go down to a dollar that would be awesome if I can actually buy it instead of finding at that point no one on #bitcoin-otc is fool enough to sell at such insanely low price...

-MarkM-

I just checked #bitcoin-market, and I still see a big difference between a bitcoin and a buck. About $6.50 difference in fact.
We should be celebrating still, as we not only are still in the act of breaking the dollar parity barrier but also various other currency's units parity barriers. Which national currencies are worth more than 1 bitcoin per 1 of their main unit currently?

I do agree though that trying to compare with and exchange with fiat is a horrible mess, we should continue equipping as many nations as possible with their own national blockchain-based currency even if there is little to no chance of their government actually thanking us for doing so. At least it will let the speculators speculate between umpteen "national currencies" without having to deal with the crap the fiat system seemingly makes anyone go through who they suspect might be trying to move out of fiat... (oh you are moving out? well don't forget we will be happy to charge that back at any moment for you, thereby screwing those who like you apparently are interested in a non fiat currency...)

-MarkM-

I seem to recall having read elsewhere stuff about how great it is to have one's money go down in price in terms of  other types of money, it is supposed to stimulate people who have those other kinds of money into spending into your economy, apparently because when they think in terms of their currency instead of yours they perceive your economy as a bargain cornucopia in which they can buy everything your merchants are offering at what to them seems low prices.

Is that whole line of bull just a line of bull that tries to pretend there is no such thing as arbitrage?

Or is it basically saying that people who think in some other currency than yours will see the low price of your currency as an arbitrage opportunity so big and/or lucrative that even they the common folk who are not normally into arbitrage will buy your goods thus acting as arbitragers?

(Maybe we are screwing ourselves by being such efficient arbitragers that the outside world doesn't have time to notice our prices have fallen before our shopkeepers raise them?)

-MarkM-

I am not really clear on why grandma wants to put $300,000 into bitcoins in the first place, really.

If it is to purchase a house or something maybe she might be able to convince the real-estate agent to accept dollars instead of bitcoin, purely as an exception just for her of course being as how she somehow fails to grasp exactly how to give the poor chap bitcoins instead.

It might be better to target fund managers who manage many many gramma's $300,000 investment portfolios or something, as if those chaps are too handicapped to manage to run a wallet they probably should be fired.

-MarkM-

Is pop3 so obsolete that despite all the constant updates to Linux distributions of even obscure things many might imagine to be obsolete such a major security hole as brute-forcing still is not fixed?

That seems outright weird if it extends to whatever the latest thing is if even IMAP is that obsolete already too.

I hope it is at least fixed in the getty/login/telnet/ssh type things?

-MarkM-

Brute force the password of someone's gmail or yahoo or hotmail etc ("email") account?

I naively imagined somehow that part of how gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc became so popular was they they were huge enough and rich enough to somehow resist such attacks better than smaller players in the field might be able to afford to?

-MarkM-

How "standardised" are such stones?

That is, do they tend to vary wildly in price from stone to stone or is one one-carat type-X stone pretty much like any other one-carat type-X stone?

I am wondering because in for example Crossfire RPG a diamond is a diamond, they are generic, as are emeralds, as are "diamonds of exceptional beauty" as are "diamonds of great value" and so on.

So I am wondering how feasible it might be to do similarly with actual stones; to be able to keep sending out for example the same three types of stone you already showed, over and over again, without much chance of anyone complaining "the one you sent me is utterly incomparable to the one you sent my sister" kind of thing...

(I guess another way of looking at it is could one say like "great, I like that third one, send me a thousand of those!")

-MarkM-

You could also consider just revealing selected private keys instead of "sending".

For things like retail shopping, where people who use cash routinely trust the sales clerk to give them any change resulting from the denominations handed over adding up to more than the amount owed, that could work fine, though its convenience could be improved by doing some shuffling around behind some curtain somewhere to get nice memorable denominations to give out.

-MarkM-

Even my quite old machines are not having any problems running multiple *coind instances all at once and all on the same user account. (bitcoind  botcoind  britcoind  cdnbitcoind  czbitcoind  devcoind  gmcbitcoind  grfbitcoind  groupcoind  multicoind  namecoind  unbitcoind ...)

-MarkM-

Maybe the title should be "Not enough about online wallets...", since the upshot seems to be we need to solve the problem of making sure grandma's bitcoins will be safe even if she uploads them to an online wallet service instead of entrusting them to a bonded executor who will use secured systems to secure her bitcoins for her and pay her tab at the grill regularly for her and suchlike chores.

Would such an executor be any different if such an executor used a website to receive gramma's instructions as to what to do with her bitcoins? Hmm this question seems to come down to how insecure is an online wallet's confirmation of gramma's identity and rightness of mind and secureness of keyboard and mouse channels compared to the confirmations such an executor would use? (Would such an executor even consider trusting some possibly hacked keyboard and mouse, or would they insist on a "verbal turing test with voice stress analysis" channel?)

How do we go about "bonding" an online wallet executor, and for how many aggregate bitcoins and fiat can we bond them per bitcoin or fiat of potential profit we'd have to take out of their operation in order to be able to execute the "bonding" (aka in order to bail out those bonded wallet services' customers that screw up / those bonded wallet services that screw up)?

-MarkM-

If you cannot trust your keyboard and mouse inputs how can anyone but you know whether it is the organic peripheral (you) or the comm link used to communicate with the organic peripheral (the keyboard and mouse channels) that are untrustworthy?

Nice point, it starts to become clear maybe why anyone other than that organic peripheral might prefer to trust "a reputable, well-backed online service that will make good even if some particular organic peripheral or its keyboard or mouse screws up" over any particular organic peripheral, mouse or keyboard...

-MarkM-

I saw your list of things to do on the new thread you created asking for help.

Since this is about yet another thing to do I brought it here as I am not ready to help with this one yet.

You mentioned paper wallet type stuff so I thought I'd add that whenever you think of importing data from someone you take into account the possibility that they already knew one of your addresses and thus were able to encrypt data intended for you so that if a mugger mugged them on the way to you the mugger would not be able to spend it or even know whether it was any kind of spendable data even without being in possession of the private key of the address of yours that the data was intended for.

Once being able to do that, another nice feature would be to be able to tell the mugger "okay, you claim to be this customer of ours, I see that you have this customer's coin certificate but how do I know you are that customer not some mugger who mugged them on the way to the shop?"

I am heading currently more toward the other end of this problem, that is, the ability to create a certificate to bring to the shop...

-MarkM- (So back to Open Transactions to try to figure how to plug in the "right" crypt routines supposedly not in there yet...)

Apparently so. For those of us still trying to learn how best to construct our conspiracies though this is all very educational. For example I had hitherto not really looked into the possibility of basing my conspiracies in Nevis. Currently my own conspiracy is not even limited liability, thus maybe is not a very secure conspiracy...

-MarkM-