I would not argue against that.  I finally got a friend of mine to mess around with it.  Even at this early stage, one needs a pretty decent computer...at least for the initial block download which he gave up on after a few days.  How it would be in steady-state, I don't know.

There was really not much choice but to either forget about Bitcoin or just go ahead and have someone else hold his wallet which is, I feel, a much less reliable way of holding value than just using a mainstream bank and USD (currently.)  On top of that, getting BTC in the first place is kind of an expensive hassle which opens one up to massive surveillance unless one is very careful and knowledgeable.

To me Bitcoin is a hugely interesting and important experiment, but it's not real applicable as an every day currency.  The only practical way to obtain them is in bulk due to overhead, but then one must trust other parties with significant value and/or deal with huge volatility.

I feel as strongly as ever that Bitcoin's main hope in terms gaining traction for general use is for it's competition to fail which would make it more compelling in a relative sense.

Agree, and put my money where my mouth was (withdrew all that I had won but a token amount), but I'll produce a couple of counter-arguments for the fun of it.

1) A forex-style market such as Bitcoinica probably did have some legitimate and valuable uses to those wishing to undertake certain financial activities in the nascent Bitcoin economy.  I think I remember a few people at least claiming to use the service in this way...amid the thousand using it as a simple gaming platform.

2) The site was surprisingly functional for some time, and Mr. Tong showed an impressive aptitude for fairness and professionalism over a decent amount of time.

My defenses aside, I was also a bit taken aback at the amount of money that people trusted (and lost) to the platform.

To me, Mega and Bitcoin are similar insofar as the design puts control squarely in the domain of the individual.  https is nice and a big step forward, but the endpoint risk is a huge weakness.

Hopefully entities like bitcointalk.org as an example will be able to requisition services from the likes of Mega for sensitive aspects of their service such as PMs.  This would lend a lot of credibility to such a solution and make me feel more comfortable using it for more critical uses.

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If someone can figure out how to do virtual private computing in a way that I can feel comfortable that I have the same complete control of all data as I do with Mega, I may start to run Bitcoin again.  I'm not sure that such a thing is possible though.  Certainly it would be a big challenge.

I've not seen you for a while proudhon.  Probably just missed you is all I suppose.  It'll be interesting to note whether you are still a reliable contra-indicator.

One person who will not 'start unloading' is me.

Going below $10 would be fine.  Even much lower would also to give newer users a better chance to get in...if they would take it...like some of us did at the correction to $2-ish.

I was following things back in the 'dark days' pretty closely.  Part of it was incidental and related to general interests, but another part was that I was looking for the various psychological phases of a bubble.  Namely the 'despair' phase.

I was planning to double down one last time in the mid $1.xx range, but we never got there.  A drop into the $0.xx range probably would have tipped me into the 'dispair' phase due to the simple arithmatic of things.

My interest tapered off once the price rise happened and I've not bought any BTC since.  The current up-leg is severe enough to keep even stoic old me coming back to check the charts (and spam the forum) more often than is healthy.  Oh well.

I think that what got a lot of us going was that by it's very title of the thread is about gold collapsing.  A lot of us thought it unlikely and continue to feel it unlikely a year later.  As long as it doesn't happen it makes for a long-running thread, and one of my favorites on the forum since it has touched so many subjects.

In my case, and probably most of the other readers who also have a BTC stash, your picking up for silverbox updates showing awesome Bitcoin figures are delightful.  I should dig back in the thread and figure out how to do another year-over-year analysis if I were not so lazy.

An interesting artifact which is currently a little mis-leading but good propaganda would also be a Jan-1 data-point plot of USD/BTC values.  It should show a pretty clean rise in BTC values since it, by happenstance, avoids the 2011 bubble.  I expect that to be leveragable for mainstream purposes going forward, though it is unclear to me even when/if I will ever be (again) excited about Bitcoin cast before the public eye.  The 'casting pearls before swine' concept is only a small part of my reluctance to hope for this.

If you have the bandwidth to do x86 stuff and think you can make something worthwhile of it, I'd be happy to send you one (other than the fact that I hate screwing with mail.)  It would be just the board.  No case.  I missed a shot at getting a lot of cases for the boards unfortunately since they came up before I got the boards.  Anyway, if pentium-class and 128MB is sufficient, they are nice because they use about as much energy as a night-light and have 3 NICs.  PM me.

Wow!  Trivial passwords are easy to crack.  Who'd ah thunk it???

The author of this Ars (who I generally respect) article didn't really delve into why the hashed password might or might not need to be in the initial e-mail, but did seem to blithely compare Mega to other services where the vendor has all of the user's data in clear text without analyzing whether that might be a factor.  Kinda questionable.

To paraphrase the old guy in the first star wars movie, 'The FUD is strong with this one.'  That observation itself lends strength to my gut feeling that Mega may have started work on a trail to something pretty big.  We can hope.

Thx for the pointer.  I'll be keeping my eye on this work!

I don't have any RasPI stuff.  I've got a boatload of old Soekris 4801's that I got off e-bay some time ago with some vague intent of using them for Bitcoin related work.  I used to run bitcoind off my router and it worked beautifully but that was back in the old days when it was still a P2P solution.  Suffice it to say, I've given up on hoping for a peer to be much less than a state-of-the-art server class piece of equipment as time goes by.  Probably even IF blockchain pruning proves to be workable. </snark>


I've never been able to download my sub-MB .png after multiple attempts.

I started downloading your image, then went outdoors to do some other stuff.  When I got back the download screen reports 100% and 581.2 Kbps, but I cannot find the file anywhere on my system.

I am on Viasat/Exede satellite which may have something to do with my generally poor results.  High latency connections tend to be poorly tested by developers and network engineers and put extra strain on load balancers and that sort of thing.  My other option is a modem.  I'm pretty used to sucking hind teat out here in the boonies.  Just thankful that I can work at all in the rare instances when I feel inclined to do so.

Another hypothesis is that the evil government is fucking with my network connection.  Fun to ponder, but I kinda doubt it.

You da man!  I am dying to see what Avalon used for a chipset and am quite interested in a fully auditable OS and flexible mining image in case I (or someone more competent) wish to undertake work along these lines.

I guess I should look at your link real quick...yup, looking good.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink" so they say.

If Mega were terribly interested in subverting their advertised inability to access user's files, or were in cahoots with other parties who had such an interest, a) this is not the most reliable way to do it, and b) we've got other more significant things to worry about.

That said, the appropriate way to deal with any security issue is always to assume the worst as a starting point.  It well could be that Dotcom has copped a plea to get him off the hook on his past indiscretions and has agreed to run a monster honey-pot or something of that nature.  Again, that should be assumed to be the case by anyone playing with the service.  As time goes by, evidence supporting or going against this hypothesis will crop up.

I might mention to anyone thinking about creating a Mega account to put more thought than normal into the password.  It is not just a typical web-site access thing (like bitcointalk.org, for instance.)

The password one chooses becomes an integral part of how access to all files that one stores.  I read somewhere that there is some protection against guessing attacks, but I don't know how it works and I am pretty sure that if one choose 'test123' that would render one's files readable by many many parties.

Currently the ability to change passwords is not implemented.  What one chooses one is stuck with.  I usually default to a non-trivial and unique password for anything I sign up for and did in this case, but had I realized how critical it was I would have been much more careful in choosing the Mega one.

That said, until the service becomes vaguely usable it's a bit of a moot point (unless one is silly enough to upload critical or important data in this early period where there are so many questions swirling around.)

Good clarification.

I would also add that Mega did not send the link.  I did.  The decryption key (again, NOT public/private keypair or 'asymetric' crypto) was generated by me on my own computer using javascript code which Mega delivered to me when I logged on.  Part of the input that this code needed was my password.  Mega could not have generated that key because they don't know my password.

So far, I have not been able to even download the file.  I either get the temporarily unavailable message, or things seemingly start and never complete.

I have played with things enough to figure out how folder sharing seems to work.  It seems that in order to share a hierarchy of files, one needs to input the recipient's e-mail addy (which, presumably, means the recipient needs a Mega account.)  I had hoped that there was some magic by which this was not necessary (like, say, encrypting all files within with a 'folder key' or something along those lines.)  Oh well.

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I do share Hazek's pessimism that these guys will be attacked on all fronts by the state(s) who will and always have gone to great lengths to make sure that they at least can monitor all of their subjects.  The US has bumped 'can' up to the level of 'do' much much more than I am compfortable with.

I find it noteworthy that Mega has chosen as a centerpiece of their efforts a universal statement of human rights, and one that I believe in fiercely.

Cribbed from Mega's web page:  'Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12'

  "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference."

Bitcoin would do well to lean on this more than they already do IMHO.  Bitcoin, and crypto-currencies generally, are as much a moral thing to me as anything else.  To be honest, I was almost completely unaware of this 'universal declaration' thing until the Mega goings-on brought it to my attention but generally it is one of those things that one can just sense in their bones is 'right'.  Or at least it is to me.

The critiques I've seen so far strike me as mainly FUD and bunk.  If someone hacks into Mega's servers they can do a lot less damage than to almost anyone else's systems.  If people can attack https via mitm attacks and such, a lot of institutions have some big problems.  As for delivering javascript, seems to me that if this turns into a big problem Mega will be able to publish certified checksums or have some trusted third party do it which will make such an attack that much more difficult.

I personally am looking forward to accessing the service sans browser and javascript at all and as best I can deduce so far, this should be quite doable.  IOW, I think (hope) that delivery of the javascript in real-time is more of a convenience thing than a necessary function and the code could be implemented in a more simple, static, and auditable form.  I never had any confidence in browser plugins (for no particularly well researched reason though.)

Doh!  I'm really on the hook now   I'm tied up with non-computer projects this week and need to do a week of real work the week following.  I planned to take some time and put some real study into things once the ASIC fiasco had calmed and produced some more clarity...partially to decide if I wish to own one.  As a side effect of that, I hoped to be able to elaborate on my conjectures about the possible futures of Bitcoin.  I don't think I have any extra-ordinary insights into Bitcoin and my grasp of the technical aspects is exceeded by many in the community, but I'll try to remember to PM you (or ping at least ping this thread) if/when I produce anything I feel may be vaguely worth reading.  Or if I see someone else capturing what I feel to be particularly comprehensive and well written concepts which mirror my own thoughts.

Not really all that new though.  The magic will (hopefully) be making it easy, solid, and most importantly, default.  There was something of a push to try to get people to encrypt their mail and such when the big PGP brew-ha was going in the 90's.  It was to cumbersome and only a few people do it.  Alas, although encryption did take hold a long time later (and fairly recently) it did so in a way that was not protecting uses fully...and the US government is spending many billions of my tax dollars to exploit the situation.

I am really excited by the mega.co.nz thing insofar as it seems to be a model for how encryption should work...in a general sense.  If they can prove that it is workable it may be difficult for the competition to not follow suite.  I think that more and more people are getting a little bit fed up and suspicious about just how much they are being spied on these days and are starting to ask questions about why, exactly, it is so goddamned important to the powers that be that they are so anxious to be able to do this.

Test/Update.  Things are working better today.  A long way from usable, but better.

If anyone is interested, here is a URL to an image with the key embeded.  Optionally, up to the bang could be given and the remainder (the decryption key part) could be sent via e-mail (or, say, single sideband radio for instance.)

https://mega.co.nz/#!Z8tQgbpC!Nv3Hlnxlh6p7tl3jGPU5Rlgsw4w7Cl4OOPdsMnkjDOQ

At the risk of (further) spamming the forum, I just want to see if I could make this an image:



edit: another test:

https://mega.co.nz/#!Z8tQgbpC!Nv3Hlnxlh6p7tl3jGPU5Rlgsw4w7Cl4OOPdsMnkjDOQ

I mean, I may have bought a few BTC off e-bay or bitmarket.eu for North of $16, but it was about here that I got comfortable wiring money to Tradehill and really started tanking up.  So, even my early purchases which were horribly under-water for so long are now in the black.  I think we both continued to tank up all the way until the low point and thus got our average cost basis down into the $6 range.  Would have been better to be an early adopter and mined a bunch, but I'll take second best if I can get it.

To bad for the folks who didn't listen to us (and mainly you) when we were arguing that Bitcoin was not necessarily dead.  Or at least it currently seems to be the case...don't want to jinx anything ya know.

Hey Cyph.  I am, for all intents and purposes, now at break even on my early BTC purchases.  IIRC you are similar.  Worth the wait and abuse, eh?  As always, the cost to me was zero since I had no alternate plans for the USD I had kicking around.  Same with PM's in my case.

It would actually surprise me if we didn't see a drop which would negate my good fortunes for a time...and possibly indefinitely.  I still have no expectation of needing the USD for some time, and still feel that there is nowhere I'd rather be than sitting on a mix of Bitcoin secret keys safely tucked away and PM's similarly protected.  I continue to have my BTC speculation dwarfed by my PM savings but with enough of both to capitalized on any future upswings.  And more importantly, to protect against more mainstream failures.

I continue to make no apologies for bias toward PM's.  It is calculated base on my own personal 'risk analytics', and I have enough BTC to make sure I have a great big grin on my face every time the price moves upwards.

Update on Mega:  Tonight, from my satellite connection (and BSD box with chrome built from source) I got logged in after about 1/2 and hour.  This time I managed to get a 44 byte file uploaded.  Took about a minute at 1 byte per second.  So, it's 'working'.  Sorta.

If this thing:

 - starts to work better after the initial teething and sizing problems
 - proves secure on competent analysis
 - python or C API's are forthcoming (filesystem mounts that work) so I can shit-can the browser
 - nothing demonstratable better (in philosophical terms) comes around

I imagine I'll be mostly ditching my current user-level cloud solution and switching to it.  I may even pay, but it would be mostly as a token of my appreciation since I can hardly imagine needing the capacity in my use-case.  If I can use BTC for payment or donation, all the better.

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If Dotcom really did have a paradigm shift after being spied on (in addition to the other obscene abuse) and shifts some focus away from video games and cars and toward humanitarian efforts I might develop a man-crush on the guy.  This whole thing reminds me a bit of Larry Flynt getting sued and shot.  He kept on making porn, but also put a lot of money and effort into making society a generally better place by standing up for our (the US's) first amendment rights...and fingering the hypocrites in our political circles.