If you want to run bitcoind as root.  I like to run nothing as root.  Linux dudes can use ipchains to avoid this and BSD guys have similar methods as well.

Of course this does nothing to guard against DPI.  It would be pretty straightforward to differentiate between http and other traffic.

As for port 443, it seems to me that it would be fairly triffling to employ a whitelist of netmasks which would leave 99.9% of customers unaffected.  And those who are can go piss up a rope since they are more trouble to an ISP than they are worth.  Or at least to an ISP who was incorporated under Western law and thus legally obligated to maximize shareholder profits.

ISP's could/would deploy packet filters?!?  That's just tinfoil hat paranoid.  Doh!

No problem.  We'll just switch to some other country like South Africa.  Doh!

Now it is perfectly possible to tunnel just about anything through just about any port even without active support of the system developers...who in Bitcoin-land seem to view packet filters as a fringe theoretical threat which could not possibly be deployed by our benevolent protectors in corp/gov-land.  That's not to say it is trivial, particularly if one wishes to remain undetected in doing so.

As I've always said, I consider the blockchain itself to be safe from attack to a high degree of confidence.  The same cannot be said for the actual protocol.  I structure my Bitcoin activity with the anticipation that it is possible for the system to become unusable, and even potentially dangerous to attempt to use, for protracted periods of time.

You sound so sure about this.  I'm not.  I'm on the outer margins of paranoia about such things and I would not stop using MS in the same way I use it today.  Certain CAD applications which are not ported, for instance.  And porn surfing for which it works well.  For many years I've used Microsoft wares only for things which I don't mind corp/gov knowing about in addition to the garden variety hackers.  I only stopped using it for fairly sensitive stuff recently after a kind of a bizarre hack of my system.  Actually it was Android which seemed to have gotten hacked, but I switched over to using more secure methods and Windows came along for the ride.  Over the years I've never done anything Bitcoin related on Windows or Android except blab on this forum and access one of my spending money on-line wallets which I can afford to lose.  Even there I keep another more secure rendition.

Anyway, I think that very few private citizens have anything the actually need to hide (in contrast to those in government who have sensitive interactions with their lobbyists and so forth.)  So I would expect that a very high percentage of people would perhaps grumble a bit but carry on using MS products (and Apple and Google for that matter) and forking out money to MS just as they do today no matter what sort of malfeasance is uncovered.  And any negative revenue impact can be easily offset with taxpayer funding even if that is a problem.

Not me.  Full-force deflation implies a lot of other extreme financial grief, and the official monetary systems are already on thin ice which would likely crack early in the game.

I was more interested in silver to mitigate against genuine calamities due to operational consideration.  Only when I got that check-box ticked off did my interest shift more to gold.

A slight elevation in the interest and awareness in silver could have tidal-wave effects in the valuations due to supply side differences in the material.  Gold also, but to a lesser extent, and again, it's likely that many Joe Sixpack types would go for silver first for the same types of operational issues that I noted.

That's my call.  I could be wrong...I often am.

Why would someone FUD this?  They want to stop people from using the Internet?!?  It makes no sense.

If I were a control freak, here's is what I would do:

Noticing that everyone uses a modem of some sort, I would design an extension which provided an enhanced wrapper between the modem and the ISP.  A router if not built into the modem could have the same functionality, and it needs to participate in order to provide universal support for end-user devices since it knows the MAC address.

I would also have a selection of bio-metric devices which could bind to the router.  Fingerprint scanners, iris scanners for double amputees, etc.

I would have a little daemon which can be installed on any device which inter-acts with the router/modem.  From time to time a user of any device might get a pop-up to swipe their finger or whatever.  Especially if doing on-line banking and such.  Such a simple piece of code could easily be open-sourced for inclusion into OS's such as Linux for the relatively few geek types who would pitch a bitch.

In my generosity, I would provide all of this gear and technical support to users free of charge.  Most users would be delighted not to have to remember all those passwords, and help society root out terrorists, pedos, and associated boogeymen at the same time.  Win/win!

Such a solution could be rolled out in phases so as not to interfere with business interests or cause un-due alarm and a backlash.

Now I fully expect to hear about how that is impossible because of the extra overhead of the protocol enhancement.  Further, I expect to hear it from the same dopes who state "Moore's Law" as the two word answer to any concern about Bitcoin scalability.

One does not need to use the TPM key to encrypt a HDD, and generally speaking, if one has something on a persistent media worth encrypting at all, it kind of makes sense to do it right.  IIRC, even Microsoft deferred on this for at least one implementation of their disk encryption.  I'm not sure what disk encryption options exist for Windows since I don't use that OS for anything at all valuable, but I have to think that some of them exist.  Whether they are susceptible to side-channel attacks is a question worth exploring.  That goes for FOSS OS's also for that matter.

Anyway, a TPM has a lot of very interesting and useful features, and certain of them could be integrated into the design of a robust P2P framework.  There are a lot of chip-makers doing TPM work.  I hope that one of them will do an implementation which is verifiable open with mechanisms to facilitate high trust levels for certain operations.  Having a group such as the EFF oversee private key emplacement would be one example.

I can see legitimate arguments for controlling random commentary on a foundation specific forum.  OTOH, the principles of transparency apply as much for the BFC as they do for government.  Even more in fact.

Does the BFC provide adequate (meaning near 100%) transparency?  I don't know but find it doubtful.  I gave up hope on them a while ago and have not paid much attention since.  The best I hope for at this point is that their actions create an opportunity for me to capitalize on Bitcoin in a monetary sense.  I probably should pay more attention to their goings-on just to look for flags which would make this outcome more likely via timings of certain actions but have been busy with other things of interest.

I sure am glad to hear that predictions made about the internet expire if they go 10 years without realization.  I'll surely sleep much better at night now that I know that.

+1

Let me make another bold 'tinfoil hat' prediction here.  I bet that we will find that TEMPEST and related side-channel attacks are more possible and more widely used than currently recognized.  Also that in some cases certain chips are even more noisy then they actually need to be and that intelligence agencies possess 'descriptions' of the emanation which make them more useful.

Unfortunately I fear that an 'active, intelligent, informed, educated, highly interconnected community' is not very likely in the volumes needed to be effective and defensible.  If it does develop, and I think it is a goal worth working towards, then they will be called by a different name.  Probably something like 'techno-terrorists' or whatever the scariest name that the marketing folks can come up with happens to be.  I do hope I am wrong about this.  Such a thing might develop, but probably only as a backlash resulting from a protracted episode of blatant abuse under a tyrannical totalitarian form of government.

Sure.  We can tear a page from Gavin's book;  Call it a paranoid fantasy on par with those who believe that the moon landing are fake, then go back to sleep and not worry about it.

Seriously, I project that in a matter of time, and possibly not that much time, one will need to positively identify themselves before accessing the global internet at all.  Possibly via a mass produced bio-metric sensing device.  That's what I would implement if I both had the reigns of power and propensity to be a totalitarian (and a large fraction of our respective leaderships seem to fit that description well.)  I'd also extend the some protocols to encapsulate transmitted data in an identifying wrapper.  This would make it pretty straightforward to filter.

For your viewing pleasure, here's a step along that path:

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2013/08/21/ditch-your-passwords-us-gov-to-issue-secure-online-ids/

I had to go to town today and chatted with my personal banker with whom I have a good relationship.  We had talked about Bitcoin and MSB's and such before.  Neither she nor any of her co-workers had even heard of Bitcoin which surprised me a bit, but then it is a small town.

My banker assured me that there is nothing untoward about random people dumping cash into one's account.  She did suggest that I open a different account so that I don't need to give out my account number so freely though.  I'm close to done with my current sales plan for now, but if/when I use this Bitcoin Brokers again I'll probably do that.

In total, my own experience with Bitcoin Brokers as a seller has been fantastic, and I hope that they let me back in as a seller when I wish to do another batch.  I was normally pretty prompt in noticing and taking action on sales, so hopefully the buyers of my BTC had a good experience as well.

I met with a lot of derision (sort of) when putting money into Bitcoin (and losing it) several years ago.  Everyone thought it was risky.  Well, no shit.  I did to.  I was prepared to lose it all and had confidence in my analysis about the potential so I never let my actions and the reactions of others bother me.  On my visit today the banker herself commented that whatever the case, Bitcoin bought me a pretty nice excavator.  That was my feelings as well.  In short, if you are a buyer and feel that you've done adequate due diligence and have the capacity to absorb risk and potential loss, don't be embarrassed about doing 'unusual' stuff.  We are forced into this scenario by people who want to control our own money and by extension our own lives else most of us would do things in a bit less of an unusual way.

Bernard,

Of course I share your concerns about the potential for tyranny made possible by the surveillance system.  I do not think that mass use of cryptography is even a partial answer though.  Among the reasons, it could relatively easily and relatively effectively be banned.  Another is that it is completely true that most people, and particularly most people who are not power-players really do have nothing to hide.  So any inconvenience at all is a usually a show-stopper.

'We' supposedly said no to 'carnivour' back in the early 2000's.  The powers that be said 'ah, OK', and turned around and did exactly what they planned on doing vis-a-vis 'total information awareness.'  So, legislation banning surveillance of innocent people is a proven loser.  Counterproductive, in fact, as it cause the 'good guys' to take their eyes off the ball.

To me the answer lies in a high level of transparancy.  We may (or may not) be able to make true transparency fly.  And an extra level of transparency as it relates to our corp/gov minders might even be possible.  The reason for this is that almost anyone with a warm breath is aware of the problems associated with influence peddling in our government.

It is completely legitimate and logical that individuals should be able to query themselves.  The various types of data and identity theft make it quite easy to me mis-tagged, and the ramification of ending up on the wrong list are genuinely scary.  For these reason it may be possible to induce greater transparency into the data base that has already been collected.

The argument that the 'terrorist' will know our surveillance methods was always bunk, but is not completely off the table thanks in large part to Snowden.  There is really no compelling argument to keep secret data on innocent people so it may be possible to change that.  Changing it by throwing away the dossiers is probably not the way to go since it is unlikely that they will be discarded, and entirely unlikely that deletion could be verified.  Changing it by making the secret dossiers non-secret has a chance of working.

The end result of my idea of providing a much higher level of transparency, and particularly when it comes to people who earn a livelihood off the backs of the taxpayers, is that either less information is hoovered up or the genuine miscreants who abuse our society are discovered.  I'll take either one.

People living hand-to-mouth are typically going to be at a dis-advantage in any financial endeavor.  People who are not can take advantage of extra opportunities.  Sometimes this advantage is even codified into law.  e.g., long term capital gains tax rates.

I would not necessarily characterize merchants as 'smart money', but rather that their business model puts them at a dis-advantage and can box them out of advantageous exchange rate situations.

Point of potential interest:

I got an under $1K deposit from spooksville, USA on the East coast a few days ago.  Actually, it's also where Dulles Intl Airport is, and where plenty of non-spooks live as well to be fair.  But anyway...

I got a phone call from customer service at about 20:30 Pacific time with the lady asking me if I was satisfied with Wells Fargo's service related to my deposit in that location.  Somehow it did not 'feel' like an ordinary call-center type thing, but maybe I'm just paranoid.  I told the lady straight up that it wasn't me, and I sold something to someone via a broker so I have no idea who deposited the money.  But the money is in the bank so I'm happy with their service.

I went on to ask her about the legality and mentioned that everything I have found indicates that it is perfectly legal to deposit cash in someone else's account.  She said "I don' know anything about that." and more or less hung up on me.

Between this unusual cash deposit pattern and the eventual wire from Mt. Gox which I hope makes it to my account before the earth stops cooling I figure I'll be lucky to retain an account with Wells.  And if the various banks communicate, I might end up being one of the more well-to-do 'unbanked' persons around.  We'll see.  It would be hilarious if I got kicked out of the banking system just in time for the Cyprus style 'bail in' which is, from what I read, now in vogue amongst the corp/gov planners as a means of re-capitalizing Western banks when the run into trouble after rehypothecating my savings and losing it in highly leveraged derivatives bets.

I don't know if Karpeles is up to the task or not, but I'll bet that he at least had something of an NSA-lite (and particularly rich) trove of data on a lot of people.  Most are likely garden variety crooks, but not all.  I think a lot of people have played in the Bitcoin market over the years, and some of them are likely in the 'protected class'.  If Mark can and does play that card he can likely end up situated wherever he likes as the Bitcoin ecosystem moves forward.

Oh ya, from what I can glean (and/or invent in my paranoid fantasy world) the real Bitcoin activity happens in dark pools and generally opaque systems.  So you are right to characterize Mt. Gox activity as 'a few thousand speculators circle jerking nickels of each other.'  But partaking in these circle-jerk sessions from time to time is probably a useful (if messy) means to achieve certain objectives for a lot of the real players.  Or at least has been at an earlier time in the formation of the ecosystem.

I'm hoping that Greenwald stays careful and deliberate.  Being emotional or in a hurry tends to lead to mistakes, and any mis-step in the game they are playing could be fatal.  Literally.

Snowden seems to me to have a mission to inform his fellow citizens about how their governments are operating and the steps he has taken are directed at doing so most efficiently.  Greenwald/Poitras also seems to have shown a lot of restraint in the timings and choices of what is released.  Every time the government and media shills take some bogus defense or produce some talking point, info is released which shoots it down.  And the frequency of the releases seems to be keeping people interested but not overloading them so they have time to think about the issues.  If these guys jump the gun or act out of anger or spite I would expect that their performance will suffer.

I've spent years variously hoping that Krapeles was a crook and watching for evidence of such.  Early on when I was actually buying it would have served me well if Mt. Gox had pulled a mybitcoin.  More recently I've proposed that the reason Mt. Gox was largely unmolested by the powers that be while much of the competition was shut down was (potentially) because they were actively cooperating in a honey-pot operation.  The notable harassment vis-a-vis Mutum Sigmum (or whatever-the-hell it's called) and the other banking hassled did a huge amount to bolster my confidence in Mt. Gox.

To answer your question, I 'go there' because I manage my cash-flow needs such that a month or two (or even infinity) of waiting for my fiat is not going to kill me.  I actually only now started to draw down my BTC stash, and only because I depleted my fiat reserves with a largish purchase.  I hedged my bets; half is (hopefully) coming via an international wire from Mt. Gox, and the other half is coming in through bitcoin-brokers.  The latter is just about done and it's been less than a week.  Not only that, but I paid no fees or commission, and as best I can tell everything is legal.  Both Mt. Gox and Bitcoin Brokers could have their operations locked up, or they could vanish with my BTC.  It's a chance that one takes in this business so I always look for ways to hedge and have options.  But I do feel that if Mark was prone to do a 'Tom Williams', he would have done it years ago.

The detention of David Miranda by the Brits is an interesting observation.  They held him right up to the 9 hour limit and made chit-chat to kill time.  One can only guess that they were still working on the encryption that he was using and didn't get it in the 9 hours they had.  One suspects that a significant percentage of the processing power of probably all of the 'five-eyes' was likely working on the problem.  Or at least the US and UK since it seems possible to me that AU, CA, and NZ defer putting much money into such systems and outsource to the US and UK when there is a pressing need for code cracking.  In fact, it could be the case by this time that the UK themselves simply serves as a US tool for specialized task and also lack the big guns (in a compute resource sense.)

Anyway, if my conjecture is accurate, I would say it's a safe bet that the Greenwald side has some competent technical talent at their disposal by now.

I've started using bitcoin-brokers in seller mode.  I know I authorized several sales, and have no reason to believe that the BTC were not released.  Usually the same day a fiat deposit is made unless I have reason to wait for the deposit to go out of 'pending' mode in which case it would be early the next business day.

I thought about localbitcoins, but something was wonky with their certs (on my browser and machine), I live in a rural part of the country where there is not much interest, and for the hassle, I want to be doing volumes that are atypical on the high side.

I cannot vouch for Bitcoin Brokers, but will say that they seems responsive, active, and competent so far and things are working well for me.  Over half of the BTC I had up for sale has been converted into fiat in my bank account, and so far I have not been ripped off...or arrested...but it's been less than a week.

I also looked around to make sure that there was nothing illegal about depositing cash into someone else's bank account and it does not appear to be so.  Nor is Bitcoin in and of itself illegal, and in fact it's been pretty good to a lot of people who speculated in it over the years, and I take some amount of pride in having done so.  It's anyone's guess about how much longer a channel such as this will remain open.  I'm damn sure going to pay my taxes, and do keep accurate records for this purpose since I suspect that tax evasion would be the attack mode against people who are not doing money laundering or other illegal activities.

The main thread for the broker thingy is on 'services' as I recall.  It gets several conversations per day so it should be on the first page.  My main complaint at this point is that the operator(s) have not responded to my queries about escrowing their identity with a reliable agent such as John K. who seems pretty thorough about this sort of thing.  This failure imposes a limit on how much value I would be willing to risk with them at one time.

Oh ya...unfortunately for the buyer, I (and I think most other sellers) ask based on Mt. Gox prices plus or minus some percentage.  Buyers would likely prefer just about any other exchange be used as a basis at this point I would expect.  But it is possible to convert cash to Bitcoin in a pretty short span of time, especially if everyone happens to be checking their mail at the right time and there is no indication of fraud.

For my part, I'm bullish and excited about the potential of Bitcoin and distributed crypto-currencies generally.  For this reason it is especially valuable to attempt to take a jaded view of things since it is easy to lose balance about things one is excited about.   In my case there are a lot of things about Bitcoin that I genuinely would prefer to see evolve differently, and I'm not prone to holding back on my opinions.  Especially on a forum on the Internet.

Not sure what proudhon's trip is.  Nagle I've always felt believes he is doing at least something toward manipulating the market (and is trying to capitalize on it of course.)  He's probably wrong.  I don't think that almost any of the random jerk-offs (including myself) who populate this forum have much influence on almost anything.