Since it looks like you are bummin' around, Mike, lemme second that.  I saw Todd's original statement as being more self-deprecating than anything.  Many people probably did not, but who gives a fuck?

Relatedly, if we are playing 'spot the NSA' for merriment and diversion, I'd be more inclined to finger Todd than Hearn for reasons associated with the original comment.  As it happens, I kind of doubt that anyone active here is intimately involve with state sponsored intelligence efforts.  I write off the differences I have with the philosophical constructs of Hearn (in particular) as being mostly honest differences in opinion about what is 'good for the world' and what is an actual plausible 'threat' (as opposed to being some paranoid conspiracy theory.)

You've been ganked.  You're in good company here in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Almost everyone who is susceptible to this style of pwnage in the first place will suck it up an move along.  The operators know this.  I'm hard pressed to think of a single TradeFortress-style crook who didn't laugh all the way to the bank and suffer zero consequences, and there have been countless people like you sit around and cry about it here on troll-talk.

My solution is and always been to have Bitcoin fit into a niche where it is, in it's native form, used primarily by people who are less prone to being punked by the likes of TradeFortress.

Allow me to make a slight correction which may or may not impact your thesis:  The idea is not to identify a 'good guy'.  It's more to identify a 'same guy'.

Say it all you like, but it is increasingly less and less true.  This both due to the increasing strain on resources causing segments of the userbase to drop out of the peer arrangement, and to the increasing userbase who add to the denominator (peer/user) and to nothing even modestly 'peer'.  To Multibit's credit it was not even claiming to be P2P when last I looked.

A lot of my interest in Bitcoin has been siphoned off to concern about more basic and trunk level threats (Bitcoin, in my mind, being upward out on a branch somewhere.)

I'm interested in the hardware work that you described.  A few months ago I did a little bit of looking around into open hardware efforts but was generally a bit underwhelmed.  I saw nothing like the device that you are describing, and it is very close to what I was looking for.  The first power-on initialization in particular is an idea which I'd not thought of and is intriguing.  I'd be interested to know if you have links to similar projects and/or plans to continue the work you mentioned.

"Don't run a node for SPV clients to hook up to."

People need to start view the Bitcoin network as it is going to look in the near future (if not already.)

(Actually, I have to wait until midnight my time to watch the presentation for bandwidth reasons, but my take is that this is method to limit the potential for that infrastructure providers to cheat.  Some dirt-poor tribesmen in Africa is not going to be an infrastructure provider.  Nor are you and I for that matter.  We are all just SPV clients.  (But that's OK, 'cuz they're so rich, and we ain't nothin' but a dopeman's bitch! (I'm on a bit of an NWA kick these last few days...)))

Among my many rants on the subject over the years:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334520.msg4691189#msg4691189


Separately, thanks for the feedback on TigerDirect.  I honestly don't have any recollection of why I was not left with high marks for them.  There may not have been any particularly good reason.  Hope not because I do intend to do some of my shopping there (using BTC.)

My approach to the solution would be to have a completely open hardware solution for TPM modules with design, manufacturing, and distribution overseen by a coalition including the likes of the EFF.  These would take the place of government issued passports, and would fit the bill of being relatively cheap, but not so cheap as to allow trivial mass accumulation.

To further gain confidence in the node distribution, employ methods like Kaminisky's 'nOOter' and Eli Ben-Sasson's 'PCPs' as presented at the SJ 2013 conference.

This is pretty cool (...but for the fact that I think such developments will ultimately kill Bitcoin...)

I think I've bought one or two things from TigerDirect in the past and don't remember being overly impressed, but at least they have an inventory which is a bit more to my liking than Overstock.com.  And I am kind of due for a new set of HDD's.  I suppose I should wander over there and shop around a bit.  Or maybe I'll wait and try to fill in the gap after the initial rush.

+1

I think that Todd is ignoring/ignorant of a lot of the forces that are shaping the trajectory of the solution and placing to much emphasis on the actual codebase.  External factors tend to have a much bigger impact on a project's trajectory than code, and there is now a LOT of interest in Bitcoin from a lot of different directions.

Also, I wanted to get an entry in this thread to more conveniently follow it

JPM can just piggy-back on Bitcoin proper.  All it would take would be that they become the tainting authority of choice when the U.S. government mandates that businesses honor one.

How/why this works is something I recently described here:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334520.msg4691189#msg4691189

JPM is very likely to be the U.S. Govt's choice as a tainting authority just like they are for a whole plethora of services.  They'll probably take over the effort the Mellon has started.

Dimon is no fool and in my analysis of Bitcoin's development trajectory I don't doubt that his assertion about the future of Bitcoin is nearly 100% spot on.


 - Edit:  This is Dimon's statement that I was referring to:

Bitcoin is widely acknowledged to be 'an experiment' and 'beta'.  As a first cut it is extraordinarily impressive in a lot of ways.

I believe that at the end of the day, Bitcoin's real contribution will be in calling attention to the aspects of future distributed crypto-currency solutions which need to be focused on.

The flip-side is that it could be incentive for the powers that be to tie up some loose ends in the global internet.  Or try to.  It is a distinct problem to a lot of people that in it's current implementation the internet allows a relatively high degree of freedom of association among the plebs.  The technology exists to rectify this 'deficiency' but it's not clear what the most effective way to roll these in will be.

See a few posts above:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334520.msg4691189#msg4691189

Anyone the U.S. government chooses.  My guess is that it will be these guys:

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/

OK above two posters, lemme ask you this:

Say you live happily in Bumfuckistan.  I can pay you in two different things:

 - BTC which can be used to buy trinkets from Amazon. (no taint.)

 - BTC which cannot be used to buy trinkets from Amazon.  (tainted.)

Remember that if you accept the BTC, you will also be asking the same question of whoever you are trying to pay the BTC to so it's not a matter of whether you yourself intend to buy trinkets from Amazon or not.

Unless you are full of shit, your answer will be that you would prefer the non-tainted coins.

Now we have a situation where tainted coins are not only useless for buying trinkets from Amazon, but are also devalued by everyone else no matter where they are or what their plans are.  This further damages BTC which are tainted.  It is a bit of a vicious cycle.  The tainted BTC will have some real-world value, but it will be less than the non-tainted BTC.  Perhaps much less.

Tainting BTC in this manner does not require the participation of the Bitcoin developers.  Mostly just that they do nothing significant to protect against taint.  (This is one of the most significant defects of Bitcoin's architecture in my opinion.)  As it happens, it seems that for whatever reason the Bitcoin Foundation is more likely to help tainting authorities than to hinder them.

Effective tainting also requires that at least one semi-major player honors the output of a tainting authority to get the ball rolling, but this is trivial when a US or International corporation gets involved.  Just threaten to put the CEO in jail which seems to be exactly what happened with Yahoo! and why they joined PRISM and handed bulk customer data over to the NSA.

I planned from the start to cash out about 1/2 of my holdings if we got to 100x my initial outlay.  We did and I am.  And slowly, but that's honestly not so much in an effort to be 'responsible', but more because I want to maximize my take in case the price goes up in the near future.

My calculus is that if things crash and burn I'll walk away with something in my pocket (and a fair bit.)  If the price continues to go up, I'll capitalize on that to.  I do like win/win situations, but as often as not one needs to engineer them rather than have them fall into one's lap.

Even though it is not the primary driver in my sales plans I will say that I see some pretty significant risks both to the value of Bitcoin, and to the way I value it as a positive tool for society (which are not necessarily the same thing.)  In a word, it is 'coin blacklisting'.  I think that it could be done effectively even in a completely external manner (which is what Mellon's company seems to be attempting) and all it would take to be successful would be for the dev team to stand by and do nothing to thwart it.  As it happens, it looks like the Bitcoin Foundation and several of the key developers are, if anything, more prone to actively work toward making coin blacklisting successful than to work against it.

Now the success of coin blacklisting (loss of fungibility) will not kill Bitcoin in terms of valuations and thus as a way for me to get rich...in part because my coins are clean and I don't care that much if I am identified since I intend to carefully pay my taxes.  At least it will not kill Bitcoin immediately.  It will, however, kill completely my interest in the solution as something positive and/or unique.

Mine was rejected twice.  Why?  Because my drivers license contains a P.O. box address in addition to a street address.

I would gladly have just not used Mt. Gox at all at that point, but I had already given them the sensitive information which I'm sure they keep kicking around even from rejections (and which will likely get stolen/sold at some point.)  I'd been resisting sending in these documents for years for that reason.  After the second rejection I flipped out and sent them a rather harsh note.  This induced them to see the error of their ways and they verified me.

Literally within hours of being verified I requested they send me all my USD via international wire.  That was back in August, and I've not gotten the money yet.

If they had just been honest and said that they cannot process international wires to US banks and will advise when they are able, it would have been perfectly acceptable to me and saved a lot of hard feelings.  Why they choose to and continue lie about this is and claim that they are close to a banking breakthrough is a mystery to me.  It simply does nobody any good.  I had had a lot of respect for their performance in their many struggles over the years.  Now I couldn't give a shit about what happens to Mark and his shit company and hope that he does get jacked by some combination of the Feds and Vessenes for the $10M.

Of course he will.  Gavin is the guy who leaked the docs detailing the coin blacklisting discussions taking place within the Bitcoin Foundation, right?  No?  Er...maybe not so much.

Which is another way of saying 'We're totally fucked!' considering that you've been doing the same shtick since 2011.  Or it would be if you were telling the truth.

But, but...isn't BIPS a Bitcoin Foundation member?  (...like 'tradefortress' and his Inputs.io?)

IIRC, BIPS is yet another provider that had an unfortunate 'theft' happen to them recently and 'lost' a cool $1M or so.

  http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-payment-processor-bips-attacked-1m-stolen/

To bad the Bitcoin Foundation is so focused on the scourge of 'child exploitation' and discussions about coin blacklisting that they cannot afford the resources to vet those who pay them off.