Yes I understand I was just pointing you that any system where you give the private to the merchant and hope for the best is likely doomed.  Chip & Pin is completely different IF the entire transaction signing can be done in chip.  Having worked w/ smart cards that is somewhat difficult.  Still not sold on the advnatage of a chip+pin system vs smartphone especially as smartphones gain NFC.

If a merchant steals my checking account # I am not liable.  The bank is.  A check is reversible tx for exactly that reason.  Bad analogies don't improve the futility of a system involving trusting a merchant.

I used my credit card about 12 times today maybe 100 times in the last week.  Under a system where I gave my private key to all those merchants,  say the "money just disappears".  Who took it?  The risk is not just the merchant but also ever disgruntled employee, every modified terminal with a skimmer, etc.     It basically comes down to "trust the entire world" to not rob you despite the fact that they can do so trivially and anonymously at any point in the future.

POS system where customers card produced signed tx = valuable, maybe the killer app for Bitcoin
POS system where customer blindly and stupidly hands private key to entire world = useless.

Combining the two things causes the weak solution to undermine the security of the strong solution.

That is a bad analogy. 


I have $1000 cash. I pay merchant for hotdog with a $5 bill my max loss is limited $5 - value of hot dog.
If I pay with cash I only need to trust the merchant until I get change.

I have 200 BTC on my card.  I pay a merchant for hotdog  and my max loss is the entire wallet.  Not just the current wallet value but any value it may have at any point in the future.
If I give merchant my private key I must trust him FOREVER.   Hell Merchant could just record private keys as a rainyday fund.  When he runs into financial trouble he robs 10,000 customers instantly.  Due to the nature of Bitcoin once 2+ parties have the private key proving who made a tx becomes impossible. 

Wait what?  Why use a smartcard then?  If both the pin and private key will be given to the merchant then the merchant can create any tx they like.

Buy a 0.3 BTC hotdog get home and find out 500 BTC tx was made emptying your wallet.   Oops.

Yes he did and quickly.  I would shoot him another email. 

I wouldn't like the idea of massive amount of unrelated information being dumped into the blockchain.  Now w/ merged mining and an alt-chain containing encrypted backups that might be interesting.

Bandwidth would be a problem.

Bitcoin miners use very little bandwidth because they hash the same header 4 billion times (one with a different nonce).

If BFL Single (800 MH/s) was performing password cracking 1.6 billions passwords per second to supply raw blocks (which would be the most compatible w/ Bitcoin algorithm) would require 1.6 * 1000^3 * 512 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 6.4 terrabits per second.  (or ~ 50x bandwidth of 16 lane PCIe 3.0 adapter).  Now that is a BFL Single (65nm FPGA).  If an ASIC can acheive up to 200x higher performance you are looking at bandwidth requirements of ~ 1 pbs (petabit per second).

Bitcoin only uses a small amount of bandwidth because it works like this

block header sent to miner
hash block header w/ nonce 0
hash block header w/ nonce 1
....
hash block header w/ nonce 4294967295
new block header sent to miner

That doesn't apply to password cracking.  You likely "could" design a chip which did both but the compromises would mean it would be a less than optimal bitcoin miner.   The need for single pass mining, lower throughput, and higher bandwidth design would mean it hash higher cost, higher energy consumption and produces less hashes.  I doubt anyone will do that.  SHA-256 cracking is pretty niche so the "dual use" likely isn't worth more than the loss of performance costs.

The longest was 19 days and the shortest 13 days when it cleared.  I just did a five figure wire tx for the remaining balance so we will see if they can get this one down in < 2 weeks.  I had considered getting lvl 3 verification so my limits would be raised to $100K but front what I have heard lvl 3 doesn't make funds clear any faster.  The same multi-week delays exist.  I guess I should use Gox less instead.

Usually these suck but this was pretty good.

+1 on the "we should have bought some cascascius coins to store in the bunker"  LOLZ

Looks like you are right, reading fail on my part.

On my account he set it up the same day.  You only need to send account info once.  There is no automated way to request a withdrawal you need to email support.  You don't need to send account info on each request though.  Low tech but it works and response time has been fantastic. 

I was concerned about security and asked for a public key to encrypt the account details.  He sent me his openSSL public key which I have no idea how to use.  I asked him if he could provide a PGP key instead and he did within minutes. 

TL/DR
shtylman is a pro!

Wait WTF?  
How did a unit ordered on 4/24 already ship when there are about 80+ units ahead of it in line which haven't?  Hell there are units from March which haven't shipped yet.

As I found out no.  They won't.  Still if someone trusts you (or trusts escrow) then can pay for your spot, BFL ships, you ship to them.

That is how I auctioned my spot.  Of course I figured it would have shipped two weeks ago.  Roughly 100+ units on the list went out of the course of 2 weeks.  Then when I am <10 units from the top of the list.  Nothing.  The guy who bought my spot is kinda pissed but has been pretty understanding about it all. 

If you auction them make sure you make it clear that there is no way to know/guarantee when the units will actually ship. 

I generally don't give a flying crap what Bruce says but it is something I have observed.

If you goal is to cashout (not play a bunch of trading games) you can sell @ Gox and get 1% to 3% higher price but then get stuck for 14-21 days.  Or you can sell on the smaller exchanges and get 1% to 3% less but can actually cashout in a timely manner.

The only thing that explains higher prices on Gox is the imbalance of buyers and sellers relative to other exchanges.  I would agree the fair market price is likely ~2% lower than what is listed as "MtGox last".

Well all 3 of my pending withdrawals all cleared today.  So guess I won't break that 21 day record ... this time.

So what is the problem with not including a fee to ensure your transaction is in the next block?  Just want people to do more work for less so you can keep more coins?  Or is a fraction of a penny a problem for you?

Well if you feel paying a penny to send up to millions of dollars of value anonymously, securely, irreversibly and nearly instantly "too much" well there really is no point in further discussion.  Still the nice thing about Bitcoin is even if you are an illogical cheap ass you can be just don't expect first class service for free.


Hugely complex, untested, will require significant amount of resources to implement and solves a "problem" which doesn't exist.

Still Bitcoin is open source so implement it and fork the block chain and if enough people follow you then it will happen.   Still I get the impression it isn't your intention to actually code this but rather convince other people to code it for you when they neither see the value nor the problem it solves.  Right?

9 days we would consider 9 days to be a luxury.   I am on 18 days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Neither of those pics are 7990 per the article and the slides.

The nice thing is that estimated tx volume (blockchain best guess to remove "change") is also solidly on the rise:
http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=