Just to make sure there is no confusion, I have no funds on deposit @ Dank Bank.  
I was just providing some clarification on terminology (i.e. a debtor shouldn't use the term donation just as a charity shouldn't use the term deposit).

The good news is US securities laws will change in "January 2013 ? don't quote me on the date " and will allow crowd funding by investors who are not "accredited" (i.e. us normal shlubs).  Probably the only decent piece of legislation Obama has passed.

njw the mods are serious about the "Linking to illegal sites is forbidden. If you bypass this censorship, you will be banned" warning.  It is one of the very few things which will get you banned.  Even scamming (normally) won't get you banned.   That entire domain and similar sites are off limits.

An expensive but comprehensive solution would be to operate a remailer service (possibly funded by bitcoins) from a country which still protects privacy.  The postal mail equivalent of a VPN proxy.

The address contains a 32 bit checksum.  So a typo will most likely result in a bad checksum.  Node compute the checksum to ensure the address is valid so "most" typos will simply produce an invalid address which will be rejected by your client, other nodes, and miners.  In theory you could create a sequence of typos that also produces a valid but incorrect address but the odds are roughly 1 in 4 billion.


Technically the address isn't signed.  A message is signed by the private key.  The signature can be verified by the public key.  The signature contains the public key.  The address can be verified by recreating it from the public key.

Sounds like an untapped market.

Yes but that is just the formatting.  The address is still a 160 bit hash of the public key (plus some version info & checksums) expressed as a modified Base58 string.

The odds in colliding with a specific address is 1 in 2^160.

If there are a billion users and each have one million active addresses (1 quadrillion funded addresses in the blockchain) the odds in colliding with any address would be roughly 1 in 2^110 (1*10^33).

Vanitygen can produce 20 million keypairs per second.  Lets say you build a super ASIC on 12nm (4 generations ahead of current tech) process that could create, validate, and steal one trillion keypairs per second (1 TK/s). That would be about 50,000x more powerful than faster GPU today.  Lets also say you built a thousand of them and ran them continually with no downtime 24/7/365.   In 1 year you could brute force 3*10^28 possible addresses.  

If there are 1 quadrillion funded addresses you would still have a ~1% chance of colliding with a random funded address in the next 1,000 years.

TL/DR Vlad's answer works.

They still affect supply and thus price.

Lost coins do reduce supply and that (everything else being equal) raises the price because bitcoins are finite. Still your two statements are in conflict.

If coins are being lost at a slow rate then we would expect the price to rise at a slow rate.  If the price is skyrocketing due to lost coins it would be coins are being lost at a very high rate.  Right?

I think the dollar (or "new dollar") will be around in 80 years so maybe I am a pessimist.

Not in our lifetimes.  The USD may be inflated all to hell where $1USD has the purchasing power of less than a penny and the banknotes are $500 USD, $5,000 USD, $10,000 USD, and $50,000 USD but the USD will outlive all of us.

"mining companies do."

semantics.  gold mining COMPANIES don't have 100% of the wealth in the world and they didn't even when all money was precious metals.

Minting =/= wealth generation.  A concept that you seem to find completely baffling.

Strippers have acquired bitcoins and they didn't do it by mining.  If they can figure it out so can you.

Oh yeah.  Forgot about the difficulty lag.

Ok agenda for this morning:
1) get some coffee.
2) do some real work.

It is gonna be tough.

Liar.  It would take at least 4.167 days (give or take some luck).

On edit:
DUH.  Forgot difficult won't adjust until the next 2016 block increment so it would be possible.

That would be tough as Bitcoin is the offshore for offshore. 

From a Bitcoin perspective it would be like onshoring your wealth.   

I don't think Pirate is smart.  He left a lot of trails both digital and physical.  I also don't think this started as a ponzi (a scam maybe but not a ponzi).  Just a sociopath borrowing more than he could handle at insane interest rates.

I agree a pro would prefer Bitcoins. A couple hundred thousand BTC would go a long way especially if they keep appreciating.  A pro also wouldn't be getting lawyers involved and keep coming back to the "scene of the crime".  A pro wouldn't involve another business entity (GPUMAX) which has other partners that can implicate him. A pro wouldn't do this under the online profile where he has real world contacts (Pirate sold GPU face to face with other members years ago).

If it was a pro there wouldn't even be an announcement of closing.  All contact would simply cease and there would be no trails to follow.  Hosting paid by gift card, IP addresses turn out to be VPN/TOR.  Nothing but a lot of missing Bitcoins.

Then again you might be right, I don't think it really matters anymore.
He won't be affected the market in any material way in either direction.

Update:

Speaking with MtGox employees by email their system can't handle exceptions so the cancellation will count against the AML limit.  They have however agreed to put a warning on the cancellation page to indicate that cancellations will be considered a deposit and will count against AML limit.

While it isn't a resolution I like (going to suck that 20% of my trading volume for the next 30 days is blown on a technicality) the warning is an acceptable compromise.

Update:
Wire received today in the proper amount.   I do give credit for owners of CryptoXChange for accepting responsibility and resolving the issue.  My understanding is they had some of the staff out of town (something as a small biz owner I can understand) and they had a new employee who made mistakes on the wire resulting in it being returned.  The bank account is a business account which may have led to the error.

I would point out that prompt communication and response to trouble tickets could have resolved this without the need to  post it publicly and with less stress on my part.