I've said it once and will repeat: there's no fairer way to deal with a bank failure than a bail-in:

• Current bank owners (shareholders) should lose everything.
• Creditors should lose the necessary amount to save the bank, starting by those who accepted more risks (like bondholders) until those who did not accept much risk (depositors). Ideally, depositors should not lose anything or very little - but if the hole was too huge, they might end up with a significant cut.
• These same creditors should be rewarded with ownership of the bank. For example, if you lost 10K, and in total 10G were needed to save the bank, you now must own a millionth part of the bank in shares.

I can see no way to make it fairer than this. Tax victims should not have to spend a dime - that's externalizing a cost to people that had nothing to do it (imposed negative externality, moral hazard, private profit public losses etc). Only those involved with the failed bank should. Federal/national insurances of bank deposits are unfair by definition and should never have been created in the first place.

• This is not secret.
• It will not de-anonymize Bitcoin.
• Can you provide a better way to protect against address replacement attacks?

I recognize there are critics that can be made. I, for one, never really liked the idea of a "Bitcoin Foundation". But what you just wrote is not pertinent.

Garzik, every totalitarian government acts totally in the scope of its laws too. Remarkably, the more totalitarian, the vaguer the laws tend to be.

I read somewhere that before 1929 and the Great Depression that number was at least an order of magnitude higher.

You're confusing bitcoin keys with the certificate and key used for the address verification protocol. They are not the same. You'd still generate the bitcoin seed yourself.

The virus can just put itself in the middle of the communication. It sends the attacker's key to the exchange, but display your own to you.

If the exchange uses a second channel (like SMS) to confirm the public key, then perhaps it might work safely enough, as we can consider it unlikely for the attacker to control both channels.


We're always assuming the user's system is under control of an attacker, so yeah, the attacker is in control of your account in the exchange as well.

But what would be a correct signature? How would the exchange know that the address really belongs to you? The signature could be provided by the virus, using the attacker's private key.

The virus could send his own signature to the exchange. You would confirm something on Trezor but its signature would never even reach the exchange.

A certificate per device is probably the best way to counter such risk indeed. But I'd prefer if it were something more reusable, not something bound to a single exchange. Your device's certificate could have your name or a pseudonymous you choose the moment you buy it. This way it could be useful not only when buying coins from exchanges, but when doing person-to-person transfers as well.
I'm only wondering if it doesn't pose a problem privacy-wise. You'd sign all your addresses with the same certificate. This certificate should never end up on the blockchain so theoretically your privacy is not vulnerable to a random observer. But those who had previously sent you money will recognize you if they ever send something again.... I guess that's a reasonable trade-off, if I'm not missing anything.

This is awesome. Transparent acrylic card with holograms, buttons, LEDs and NFC tag. How futurist is that?

$5 as cost seems too much for people to pass it around as they do with cash/coins, though. It's probably higher as amount than a significant number of all cash transactions done in the world.
But it's still great as a gift card, or if anything, as a cool way to show people how real Bitcoin is getting.

I want one.

This article is brilliant.

(This is not exactly a press article, rather a blog post, so if it's not OK to be here, please mods move it. Thanks)

http://athousandnations.com/2013/06/13/bitcoin-and-unbreakable-law/

Important to note: they are resisting by forbidding their individual clients to wire money to MtGox.

This is an unprecedented attack. Previous attacks targeted the exchanges themselves.

Yeah, but the whole idea of using escrows also depend on trust. You must trust your escrow won't collude with the other party.
And btw, it seems in the example above Betty was both the person holding the encrypted data and the BTC-seller. It doesn't need to be the same person, there can be a second intermediary.

It's hard to completely eliminate the need of trust, but you can make it much safer nevertheless. And eventually you could even have automated p2p exchanges (if your bank provide you an API to handle your fiat), what could be quite cool. Payment processors, for instance, could shift part or even all of their exchanges to this p2p system.

Plus, I don't think classic exchanges would disappear. They would keep operating, and arbitrage would guarantee no significant price difference would last long.

You might want to watch this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173220.0

Just an example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173108.msg2425367#msg2425367

Wow.... they simply deny you the right to spend your money, shamelessly.

This is serious. It's the most aggressive bankster attack on Bitcoin so far. Previous attacks focused the exchanges, this is targeting individuals.

I suppose Israeli people may continue using solutions as localbitcoin to counter such attack. But I wonder how easy it would be for Israelis to use this solution to bring and send bitcoins internationally. If it's not simple, that might provoke price differences.

What a disgusting jerk...

Leaving your car open with the keys on the contact are no justification for theft. Walking with short skirts on a shady neighborhood is no justification for rape. Reacting to an armed robbery is no justification for murder. And leaving your wallet unencrypted is no justification for destroying it.

The person in the wrong is always the one that commits the crime. The one that did not see it coming (even if according to your rushed judgment, "was so obvious")  is the victim.


Pure brute-forcing only works against very weak passwords. You should attempt at least a dictionary attack first. There's no much point in trying totally random strings.

It's not just "not funny". That's the equivalent of breaking into pieces a $500 TV or something.
But anyway, I don't know how close the person is to you (your child, perhaps?) so I'll no longer say anything. It's your life.

My advice: try to make the prankster remember the most he can about the password. Length, some characters, what words were in it etc. With enough information you can try to break it.

Unless he's lying, he was the victim of vandalism. Stop blaming the victim, this is disgusting.