Man, if you're going to be a racist douchebag, at least have the courtesy to use words like slants, japs, and nips so that confused people can immediately identify you and slowly back away.

Okay, just I locked my bitcoin address. How do I request account activation by email?

Do I email you, PM you, use the contact form on the website, or something else?

Reddit is full of arrogant, know-it-all, trolling pricks who are lazy jackasses that are ten times more inclined to post when it involves tearing something down, bitching, complaining, moaning, blaming others, or otherwise being negative and accusatory. They hate everyone, they hate everything, and they hate themselves with a terrible fire. But that's nothing in comparison to the hate that they spew toward anyone who resembles them and reminds them of their own terrible failures at life. Everyone is to blame but the Reddit user himself. Conspiracy theories and marathon posts containing spewed chunks of bad, unsupported arguments run rampant. It's like usenet in the heyday of AOL, but entirely worthless. Welcome to the uselessnet, where useless people gather to yell at each other in an epic war of shit-throwing monkeys who are caged in a giant zoo of their own design. But they love the cage. The cage, despite being the most foul place on the planet, is comforting. Don't ever leave the cage. Hate everyone inside and outside the cage, but hate, above all, the monkey that escapes the cage. Each new article posted is like throwing a single banana into that cage of rabid monkeys.

The only difference between Reddit and other shit-filled cages on the internet is that Reddit users somehow have better grammar and punctuation. I think it's yet another way for them to feel superior. The most common sentence starter at Reddit is the word, "Actually," followed by telling someone why they're wrong and how they suck.

See, nothing will inspire the wrath of Reddit more than one of these fat, useless nerds who stepped out of his shell for one split second and actually did something productive or interesting. Fear kicks in. All the other fat, useless pseudonerds let their minds churn on how this guy, exactly like them, might be spun to seem like he's actually an asshole. If you doubt me, make two posts with the same inquiry stated two different ways. In one, you ask for help on a computer problem, describing the issue mundanely and accurately. In the second, you describe the same problem but with some additional information: hint at your successes and mention how this problem will help you do something productive. For example, say that the computer that needs repair is in a free clinic that you volunteer at.

Misspell some tech-related words and make a few small but irritating grammatical errors. Include smileys and generally act cheerful and happy with life and yourself. Be sure to accidentally insult several groups of people by declaring the problem is probably too difficult to solve and you might have to ask on another website. Otherwise, open yourself up for personal attacks. You don't even need to include this bait in the post itself, just make a profile with a lot of bait, such as how you're fat but working out and recently lost lots of weight through months of hard work. Post a picture of a hot girlfriend. Don't worry. The internet detectives at Reddit will find this crap in an effort to seek ammo with which to ruin you.

The first post might get one reply: a bored request for clarification and for you to post logs or some shit, but with no actual help provided. The second one will have hundreds of replies, most of them yelling at you like children, but where they actually will have somehow solved your problem because doing so was simply a way for them to prove how dumb you are.

In other words, Reddit is thousands of Me's. Why would I want to deal with thousands of Me's?

What we call it won't matter. Obviously, we're all here not out of some social purpose but because bitcoin is a currency. Miners like using bitcoin to make money. Others like it as a mid-or-long-term investment. Day traders and bot-makers like it because trading here is less complicated and doesn't require $25K while under a strict ruleset that fucks the small guy. Lastly, some like it only to buy stuff or to be hip.

Most people are actually a mix of the above, but very few are using bitcoin for a purpose other than as a currency.

You do have a good point buried in there, however. Namecoin, as a vehicle for speech, might actually be more protected in the US and other free-speech nations than Bitcoin.

If we can sell the idea that bitcoin is money, but money is speech (Hello, occupy wall street), then you've got some protection. Attach Bitcoin to a messaging system and you've got a constitutional conundrum. It would be interesting if bitcoin could piggyback p2p messaging on every transaction. It would be slower than email, but obviously with some advantages.

Bam! Now bitcoin is both a currency and a form of speech. Include the ability to send messages to multiple addresses, and now it's a form of the press (e.g., if I can publish a newsletter by essentially sending small transactions to every subscriber, it's press).

Hell, let's try to hit as many constitutional protections as possible:

1.1 Religion. Quick, someone found a church that uses bitcoin and this new messaging system as the sole means which the church congregates (desseminates religious communication). The principle of semi-anonymous community, wherein one believer is not elevated above others (such as to a priesthood), is actually within the domain of Jesus' teachings.

1.2 Assembly. At this point, twitter itself is probably bulletproof for this reason alone. The equivalency of virtual assembly would be a supreme court decision, but it's one more for the fire. The more that bitcoin could be used for any form of virtual assembly, the better.

1.3 Press (already covered the right to publish).

2. Guns. Uh. Crap. Well, there is a small debate that does exist as to whether newer, stranger forms of arms are covered. For example: hacker tools.

3. Homeowners forcibly housing soldiers. Shit. I don't know.

4. Search and seizure. People pay a lot of attention to the search part of this, but it's also part of the argument against eminent domain being used without judicial involvement or for a third party's advantage, which possibly applies to bitcoin.

5. 6. 7. 8. Rights of the accused, etc. I don't know how this could apply to bitcoin.

9. Other rights may exist and just because they're not in the constitution doesn't mean they can be violated, or something like that. This one is lovely for bitcoin use on the shoulders of such arguments such as freedom of privacy, free movement, biased enforcement of laws, etc.

10. Federalism. Crap. Okay I'm going to give up on this line of insanity right there.

I did those amendments off the top of my head, so they might be off a bit.

I'll tell you one thing: Alice better watch herself when dealing with Jack Buyer. That dude kicks terrorist ass and can go a full 24 hours without peeing, sleeping, pooping, or eating. Come to think of it, nobody observed him eat a single bite of food for a full 6 years. This leads some to believe that he a cybergenetic human that doesn't need sleep and excretes waste through a simulated sweating process. Also, sometimes he can teleport himself to places so long as nobody is really paying attention. His dad was pretty badass too, having once fought body-snatching aliens. I guess it runs in the family.

Or it could be that he's actually Doctor Who and, in times of trouble, he time-travels and swaps places with his former or future self so that he can take a nap, replenish his ammo, and get a taco to eat. In that case, Alice can just tell him to hop into the TARDIS, go back a few hours and initiate the transfer, and then come back to the present. Then, he can take Alice a day or so into the future, look up the exchange rate on his smartphone, and go back to the present. That way, they won't have issues with a volatile exchange rate.

Heck, he could set up a miner in a bunker somewhere, go forward several decades, put the now-full wallet on a flash drive, and take it back to the present. Sure, this might introduce a block chain paradox, but since when did Doctor Who give two shits about paradoxes?

Damn, Red, that block be crazy, yo. 149789 came up to me a while ago and was all like "Break yourself, fool!" and I was like, "Shiiiiiit!" because he made me fuck up. I was in the middle of hashing, slinging that hash and shit like I'm always doing, and that fucker done made me knock out an orphaned block. Eight-nine just laughed and threw little nonces at me until I stepped up to him. "Son, you better watch yourself, because last I checked I'm higher on the merkle tree than your tiny-hash joke of a block. You fuck with me, you mess with the entire chain, bitch. You ain't even got no transactions but the fifty you stole from your gramma."

That dude, 89, just quietly stepped back from me with his hands up. Then he reaches down, unzips, and whips out his hash function. That fucker wasn't sporting SHA-256. His was at least 384, maybe even 512. Yeah, so, I had to give him a little bit of respect and now we're cool. I bet that guy has to stand up on a stool just to piss without getting wet. Man, I wouldn't mess with him unless you've got quite a bit of MD padding in your pants.

I haven't seen him around in a while, though. I heard a rumor that he might be doing a dime up at Mt. Gox for some shady double-spending scheme.

Anyone who uses terms like "World Wide Web" in what's supposed to be a serious piece of journalism is either:

A) Not really a journalist.
B) Doing some sort of parody article, making fun of sensationalist journalism.
C) Secretly trying to tell everyone about Silk Road by "exposing" it and pretending it's bad, full knowing that his audience of college students will be able to read between the lines.
D) Actually a bot, writing articles based on markov chains and a cleverbot-style repository of Bitcoin chatter and regurgitated news articles and op-eds.
E) A time-traveler sent from the future, only he doesn't quite know current trends except what he learned in his Middle American History class, so he uses terms like "World Wide Web," wears Technicolor T-shirts, and says "Cowabunga" a lot. Also, in the future Bitcoin is somehow involved in a robotic alien apocalypse, hence the need for the article.
F) Trolling for attention. The author, I assume, is fully knowledgeable that the only way to get exposure for your articles in a shitty student paper is to either be staggeringly good at researching and writing on a topic that's altogether new to media (such that it might be adopted mainstream) or to be incendiary and biased such that non-student readers come to you out of disagreement and hatred.

If I was the author, would have done the latter but at least included some hidden text within the article, such as an acrostic or having the first word of every sentence combine to form a limerick. But, as long as this guy is writing Bitcoin fan fiction, I don't see how you can fail to author a tender moment of lovemaking between Bruce Wagner and Mark Karpeles. The name "Cerulean Tower," where Mt. Gox is located is so perfect a location for this romantic affair that it sounds like I made it up. Or at least this guy should have included the local effects of bitcoin, such as how the new currency might possibly impact the epic civil war between campus squirrels, potentially harming the acorn-based economy of the industrial North Campus Red-Backs.

I know what you mean, man. I couldn't buy any local food with bitcoins and I don't have any dollars, so I tried to eat some home-made bitcoin hobo soup today but it wasn't filling at all. And now I'm just shitting ones and zeroes all over the bathroom every few minutes and it all smells like sulfur. Man, I knew I should have eaten namecoins instead. I hear those taste like chicken. Bitcoins are worthless.

Pfft. You guys actually pay for third world labor? How quaint. Me, I just help folks get a work visa, cover their travel costs, and throw a few bucks to their families. Then I "ask" them to work for me for free. Since it seems they're under some strange misunderstanding that not working for me involves worse exploitation or other punishment, they tend to stick around. What a deal! All the while, the promise of their debt being "repayed" and them being allowed to leave freely is held out like a carrot in front of a mule. But, really, my initial costs are recouped in less than a week. After that, I can sell their "labor" to others, usually netting me $25k/year per person.

Since my employees are generally doing illegal things and separated by a few degrees from me, I can always threaten to call the cops on my own operations and let them all take the fall and be jailed or deported. The real trick, however, is to "hire" people in pairs. Then, when they get to my country, the pair is separated. If one of them acts up or attempts to leave, they are kept in line with knowledge that their family member might not have the funnest time after they're gone. Finally, I have everyone write happy letters to their families back home about how great things are. This often includes a little cash to act as seed money. Then, their families are inclined to assist their other friends and family members to come join and work for me. It's kind of like an Amway pyramid scheme in that way.

Geeze guys, you really suck at exploitation.

Keyur, can you tell us about how you store your wallets and such? By that, I mean that in any given day you probably only need 10% liquidity. So a good practice would be to have your active, server-accessible wallets separate from wallets containing the remainder of reserves. That major wallet should be elsewhere, such as on a computer not on your network and this computer is only turned on for 5 minutes a day in order to refill the active wallets. Also, it should be in a cage with several rabid monkeys who can only be tamed by a secret routine, such as reading them a bedtime story and giving out sedative-laden fruits. And this cage should be in a van that moves around a city 24/7. This is like that Burn Notice episode where a package was kept perpetually moving by a series of motorcycle couriers.

The computer in question should be backed up by a flash drive the size of a pill, which you repeatedly eat every few days in order to keep it in your body. The timing is perfect, I've found, to allow the backup to be only occasionally accessible depending on your regularity. If you need it in an emergency, then just eat a lot of prune juice or, in a really major emergency, find a Winogradsky column and drink it.

Then, if your site does get hacked, everyone's risk is minimized. See, I don't think many people take solace in prevention measures at exchanges any more. The more important question involves what hackers or rogue employees could obtain if given access. Please name one of the monkeys after me.

How to get rich off of Bitcoin in 4 easy steps:

1. Set up an exchange with timing that coincides with a large amount of distrust in your competition and desperation for alternatives. Name it something reminiscent of the hit 1970's British sci-fi show, Blake's 7 and the 1960 film, The Magnificent Seven.

2. Convince people of your legitimacy by pointing to other businesses you might run and/or by soliciting endorsements.

3. Set up a pyramid referral scheme and have people spam their referral codes all over.

4. "Apologize" for the referral spam and do some half-assed rectification, but only after this advertising for your exchange has thoroughly saturated the market.

5. Wait until your exchange wallets seem to have reached their maximum and then plateaued.

6. Have someone you know "hack" the website and steal the money. Politely sidestep the huge security issue of having all the money in wallets that are internet-accessible (Any exchange should only need like 10% of funds in a readily-available wallet).

7. Say, "Oh no we've been hacked. Welp, we're going out of business. We'll give you whatever money we have left, if we feel like it or are legally forced too somehow. Good luck with recovering your funds legally, suckers, as we're in Slovakia or some shit."

8. Move around the "stolen" BTC a bunch of times, then sell it on another exchange. Wait a minute, actually do that a few steps back, so you can exchange the BTC before your announcement lowers the exchange rate or other exchanges catch on and start looking for suspicious exchanges.

9. High fives all around. Hooker and blow. Pancakes and whipped cream. Ice cream fights. Getting serviced so often by high-price prostitutes that you actually say, for the first time in your life, the uncanny phrase, "Man, I'm really getting tired of all these blowjobs."

10. Buy a zeppelin, a top hat, a gold cane, a pocket watch, a monocle, and a rare, purebred yappy dog named "Captain Flufflebunny III". Travel the world. Use the words "orient," "dark continent," "savages," and "colonies" when speaking of your travels.

11. Moon base.

I lied about how many steps this would take. Lying is very advantageous in getting rich off of this scheme.

I confess. I was going to do this. I had a program written, as bencoder put it, intended for "trying to find a collision by brute force generating bitcoin addresses." But then a friend of mine calculated the odds and said that the time and hardware investment was worse than regular old bitcoin mining. Then he arrogantly tried to insult me further by declaring that, moreso, this brute force thing was actually less profitable than if I built my own physical mining equipment and set out to mine platinum from the icy south pole.

Now, you all should know that I'm not for doing things the easy way. Sure, you could mine platinum elsewhere, but I'll be damned if anyone's going to think that I took the easy way out by sitting on my ass doing virtual mining for bitcoins or by mining precious metals near the comfort of my own house. Do I look lazy to you guys?

I thought this Antarctic mining proposal was a great idea and was taking it as a personal challenge. I bought tons of scrap metal, welding equipment, and various used engine and hydraulic gear and built myself a real god damn miner. It was a giant machine made for doing only one thing: fucking up the earth like the bitch owed me money and then sluicing out the precious metals, again, like the bitch owed me money. I called it "Earth-Humper 4000" but then changed the name to "Jim". See, Jim was 200 tons and I have a fat friend named Jim who weighs about 2000 quarter-pounders with cheese. Jim also took dumps like a truck, what what. Yeah, that man has a cavernous colon.

I sold my house and bought a crappy old soviet icebreaker boat. By "bought," I actually mean that I paid some grizzled old portmaster to look the other way while the recently-mothballed boat somehow disappeared from the scrapyard. I also got a nice dog from the pound, because every ship needs a dog to bark at seagulls, growl at whales, and spontaneously bite the crew for my own entertainment. I didn't want no cute puppy thing or some fluffy ball-fetching wimp, so I picked the dog that all the other dogs looked at nervously, like he was going to shank them at any time with a sharpened dog bone. If you want a dog like this, the key thing to look for is a bunch of dogs packed into a kennel, and then another equally-large kennel with one isolated motherfucker in it. This mofo wasn't even barking like all the other yippy mutts. He just sat in the corner and looked at me as if to say "Hey, pal, maybe we partner up and go fuck some shit up together? You spring me out of here and we could break this town." In my mind, he has a Brooklyn accent.

Then me and Jim (the machine, not the fatass) sailed down to Antarctica with the dog who I had named "Dog." The ship and Jim were fueled by diesel that my crew of zodiac-riding pirates (AKA unpaid interns) stole from rich pleasure-cruisers along the way. Not one to sit around on a boat like some cocksucker, I turned a third of the boat into a marijuana grow-op. I don't smoke the shit. I need to keep my mind sharp at all times, knife at the ready. The only things I smoke are cigars and rifle barrels. I sold the yield on Silk Road for bitcoins.

I turned another third of the boat into one of the first and largest mobile distilleries in the world. Why? Because I'll damned if I'm going to go down to where this fucking planet keeps its stock of ice and not have copious volumes of whiskey at the ready. None of that surface ice, either. Jim was going to dig me down hundreds of feet to that crystal-clear prehistoric ice. This was ice from the time of the last snowball earth. I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my whiskey on "new" ice that was made during this modern age of morons and fuckwads. Ice is better if it came from when men were hairy cro-magnons who killed twelve-ton hairy mammoths just so they could eat a fresh steak, carve a big-breasted woman from a hunk of tusk, and let the rest of the meat rot as a warning to other species that in the next few millenia humans were about to fuck their shit up.

The other third of the ship was decorated like the interior of the ship from the 1986 movie, Flight of the Navigator starring Paul Reubens.

We pushed through the coastal ice to McMurdo station. Antarctica at last. I sold whiskey and pot and made friends with many bearded men and a few bearded women. I lost the ship in a game of poker, however. Deep down, that was my subconscious intention. Manly men tend to succeed when there's no easy way out, and I consider myself to be at least 2/3rds manly. But McMurdo wasn't the real Antarctic. It was on some shitty island named after that pussy, Ross, from Friends. I'll be damned if I'm going to strike it rich near there. Thus Jim was warmed up, fueled up, and fired up. His engines were loud enough to scare away all wildlife, giving me the side benefit of fucking over the hippy cetologists who were busy jerking off to the nearby whales. It was hard to leave, because this 200 ton monster could have torn apart McMurdo like Godzilla, but Jim lumbered over the ice sheet to the mainland and began the long trek to the South Pole research station.

Driving Jim on glacial ice was like steering a hot dick through butter. I can't think of another analogy, but Jim's weight and heat carved a small valley all the way from the coast to the pole, which has all sorts of sexual innuendo. I had to drive Jim fast to avoid melting myself into an inescapable hole. Two hundred tons of murderous steel flew along in the desert cold with a driver who couldn't see a damn thing and was hungry for the sweet platinum ores that awaited him. Jim, being forged for the singular purpose of earth-raping, had just one thick-paned plexiglass window, so I navigated mainly by GPS for all 833 miles. If I accidentally hit a snow-mountain, Jim's massive inertia would turn it instantly into a white cloud, like a meteor had struck the snow. This occasional demonstration of epic power kept me and my crew entertained for the trip.

Finally, I pulled into the the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. By "pulled into" I mean that I just happened to notice Jim turning abandoned buildings on the outskirts of the station into splinters. The station residents were rather surprised to see me and the crew, to say the least, and had lots of questions and complaints about Jim hulking up the place. I told them I didn't have time for their south pole shenanigans. So, after some of my crew abandoned me out of, as they put it, "terror", I found a nice spot outside of town and stopped Jim. On the dashboard was a red button under a glass case. I rechecked my geology maps to see if I was in a good spot, and then flipped up the case and hit the button.

Jim was angry. He began chewing through the ice beneath us. Pulverized ice was thrown around us in a circle and Jim began a slow, noisy descent into the earth. He dug a long, slanted tunnel over the course of several days, but I had still not seen ground. Where was the ore? The ore was still beneath us. On the third day, Jim reached a mile of depth. He began sputtering from the extreme cold and the lack of fresh air at the bottom of the hole. Jim was made for surface mining, his engines sucking in air and pumping out smoke while I counted the money. We were well below the surface and deeper than I had planned. Jim died that day.

Now, in hind-sight, I see that I made a simple mistake: I didn't consult Wikipedia. I wasn't about to let "facts" ruin my expedition. Hell, I was there to piss all over the "facts" that were declared by my friend about the odds of my striking it rich. Facts ruin everything. It turns out that one of these so-called "facts" on Wikipedia is that the ice at the South pole is over 9000 feet thick. I'm not making a limp-dicked meme reference here, it really is slightly over 9000 feet deep. Damn you, facts!

I was trapped at the bottom of a massive hole and, mentally, made up several jokes about the deepness of the hole being akin to someone's mother's vagina, but there was nobody left to insult. The crew of interns had died at various times along the way and for various reasons, from freezing to death, getting mauled by Jim or Dog, suicide, or in an act of mutiny that I, Jim, and Dog just couldn't let go unpunished. None were left alive, but don't quote me on that because it's not like I looked around before leaving.

How did I leave? Well, it turns out that Jim was pregnant with a little Jimlet. He carried a small emergency ice tractor, and I didn't tell anyone for fear that they'd want to use it. Also, even though Jim was a big machine, I felt that him having a Jimlet somehow made him less manly. Dog and I crawled into the Jimlet and made our way back to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. As we arrived, there was a bit of a frenzy. One of the scientists had had a stroke.

Now, all of my crew of interns had been wimpy dudes. They were idiots without breasts or vaginas or anything interesting for me to look at or care about. But I'll be damned if someone lets a woman die on my watch, and this was a woman scientist! So there she was, stricken (or whatever the past tense of stroke is) and at the South Pole. Raytheon and the National Science Foundation, who are the big swinging dicks who run the show, decided that, despite the declaration of medical doctors at the site, this wasn't a medical emergency.

That was over a month ago, and it's still not considered a medical emergency. Now, I don't know Raytheon's definition of "medical emergency" but if I had a stroke and was, say, in Seattle, it would be considered a medical emergency approximately as urgent as being shot through the eye socket with a crossbow. This urgency would exist even long after the actual stroke. See, the brain tends to flip off the rest of the body after a stroke and just gets fatter and fatter, swelling up like my friend Jim (the human). Then it explodes or something, but the point is that the emergency doesn't just go away. The problem doesn't disappear even if you suggest dark ages medicine such as bloodletting and skull-drilling surgeries with rusty South pole tools.

Any minute now, I expect to hear a large cracking noise from when her cranial pressure, which has been increasing this past month, finally breaks through her skull and Raytheon realizes that maybe this is a life-threatening medical emergency. Hell, they have the ability, the rescue plan, the weather is fine, and the cost of a rescue is expensive, but is built into the cost of doing business at the south pole and getting paid shittons of federal grant money to run the place.

That's where the story ends, poorly. The last part is real. There really is a woman who had a stroke and is stuck at the South Pole because of bureaucracy and greed, waiting patiently either for her brain to swell up and kill her or for this to actually be classified as a medical emergency.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/stroke_victim_not_evacuated_fr.php
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/kw9uc/a_friend_of_a_friend_who_is_a_scientist_in/

Oh well. It's not like a massive military contractor ever gave a flying fuck about people's lives when money is to be had.

I bought a blowjob in Nevada with Bitcoins, but then the exchange rate dropped off a cliff by the time I received my services and she only gave me half a blowjob. Trust me on this, fellas, when I say that half of a blowjob is pretty much pointless. I'd have preferred it if she gave me the latter half of the blowjob, even though it seems chronologically improbable. It is, of course, common knowledge in the blowjob industry that the latter half of the blowjob is what you're really paying for. In fact, most of us who pay for blowjobs would rate, in consideration of benefit, utility, and quality, the last 10 seconds of the blowjob to feature 90% of the value. For example, a 10 BTC blowjob, if offered to potential blowjob recipients in fractions, would only sell equivalently to the full blowjob if a first-half blowjob was offered at a rate of just under 0.5 BTC.

So, doing the math on this, my bitcoin-to-blowjob purchasing power actually dropped 95% during one transaction. I paid for a complete blowjob, but lost 95% of the value. If I was thinking at the time, I would have done the math and instead downgraded the service to a handjob. A full handjob has a much higher value than half of a blowjob.

As much as I like Bitcoin, I think that in cases where sexual services are being bartered you should use a hedging escrow account of some sort. This would essentially bring such services back to being dollar denominated. Yes, this is bad for Bitcoin, but when I'm losing 95% of the value of a service in the time it takes to merely perform the transaction, something is very wrong with the currency.

Also, sitting around in a seedy hotel room waiting for transaction confirmations and making small talk with a hooker is rather uncomfortable, mainly because they just won't shut up about Battlestar Galactica. In my experience, hookers who take bitcoins absolutely love Battlestar Galactica.

Furthermore, if this hooker had charged me for the total time involved (transaction time plus sexual service), and refused to be pre-paid for an "estimated" total, then I could feasibly pay an infinite sum of bitcoins. Say I'm paying for 60 minutes of services with 10 BTC and she needs 3 confirmations minimum before proceeding. On average, by the time 3 confirmations occur, 30 minutes will have passed. Now, if I still want 60 minutes of sex, I need to pay 5 more BTC. Then 30 more minutes would pass and I would pay another 5 BTC. At this rate, I'll never be able to actually have sex but would merely keep paying money for the time it takes just to process the money that I keep paying.

If, however, she charged for the transaction time but took "estimates" in advance and refunded the excess, I would still be paying, essentially, 50% more than those paying with dollar bills. That is a premium that I just cannot accept.

Mt. Gox, and any site, should be used for coins you plan on exchanging within, say, a 48 hour period. It baffles me that people are using a cryptocurrency with its benefits of security and control while throwing away those very benefits by letting someone else hold their bitcoins. That's like investing all your money in gold and then storing it in your gym locker. Damn. That's a horrible analogy and I apologize. It's actually more your accountant's gym locker. Or, screw it, the trunk of his car. Yeah, it's an old VW bug where the trunk is in the front. So, if your accountant slams on his brakes, all that heavy gold of yours will go flying out into traffic. Get this, guys: in this analogy, your accountant lives in south central LA. It's a hot day, too. So hot that you could light a crack pipe off the sidewalk, so your accountant's oil-cooled engine is overheating and he had to turn on the heater, which made him dizzy and that's how he got into this mess of losing your hard-earned gold. And he's in this messy divorce, which is why he's an accountant who works out of this shitty car rather than his office, because, man, you break one wine glass out of anger and yell at the Shih Tzu to quit pissing diarrhea all over your white carpet and your soon-to-be-ex-wife has a fantastic excuse to restraining-order your ass out of town.

Anyway, our accountant nearly passes out and then he comes-to just in time to see a baby crawling across the street. Babies crawling out in traffic on hot summer days is very common in south central LA. I read it on Drudge. He swerves and slams on his brakes and your gold flies out of the trunk into--get this--the only White Pride outpost in all of LA. This place is heavily guarded with asshole skinheads. Months ago, they saw it as their mission from god to buy a building in what they determined to be the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in all the land, with all the problems of the world blamed directly on non-pale people who they were intent on battling. They recently turned their one little plot of land deep in gang-country into a spearhead for their terrible cause.

So there's your gold bars, sitting on the other side of a cyclone fence with a horde of armed, tattooed white dudes thinking that Jesus just paid them royalties and endorsed their mission. Oh, but your accountant is not a white dude. He's/she's actually a transvestite cross-dressing sudanese-american with body dysmorphic disorder, vitiligo, multiple personalities, and wearing a half-burqua (not for religious reasons, but for the fashion). Also, he's an atheist with Richard Dawkins books covering the passenger seat of the VW. The VW exterior is covered with prominant stickers touting all kinds of liberal groups: NAACP, Planned Parenthood, Earth Share, Rainbow PUSH, The Southern Poverty Law Center, Greenpeace, GLAD, World Wildlife Fund, La Raza, PETA, NARAL, The Brady Center, NOW and the ACLU. Also, there's an AARP sticker for some reason and a sticker of a T-rex eating a shark eating the Jesus fish.

Furthermore, the baby your accountant nearly hit is a Crip. (Baby Crips are a thing now. I read it on Drudge). So his li'l buddies are about to jump all over this situation. He's throwing up little tiny gang signs at the accountant, just to see if he's about to cap any gang affiliate before all hell breaks loose.

Oh man, I'd say your gold bars are as good as gone, and your accountant is in the shit as well. So, for god's sake, why did you give your gold to a VW-driving traveling accountant in south central LA? WHY? This was a terrible idea and, frankly, you deserve to lose all that money. But now, through your own stupidity, you've helped spark and fund some kind of race war. Oh man you are such a racist and I'm ashamed of you.

I'm glad to see this release, only I wish it was made a week ago. Hopefully it'll put to bed at least some of the conspiracy theories and accusations.

I'm wondering why they couldn't have be more forthright, however. Was there an NDA or gag order involved, or did they just want to be sure to have fully investigated and sealed the security holes before informing us?

An NDA might make sense, as many website and software sales that involve residual payments also have a holding period during which the previous owner is somewhat liable for certain issues (Previous patent claims, undisclosed legal or security issues, etc). Revealing anything about the residuals and the former owner's involvement post-sale might have been in their contract, which would ostensibly include talking too much about the hacked account.

(I'm not a lawyer. I only know some of this because my stepbrother just sold his software company)

I agree. A pissing match is no good for anyone.

Massive edit: I'm elaborating greatly on my above response.

So, okay. Here's my essay on why this pissing match is not good.

On first impression, it gives me little confidence in any exchange. Trust and confidence are
really important for people handling your money, as evidenced by the sheer number of
renouncing folks who have either switched from Mt. Gox or stopped trading altogether.
You can see both of these effects in the greatly-diminished post-rollback volume at Mt. Gox.

Actually, volume between all exchanges, in total, is terribly low. The confidence of those
buying into your exchange is a massive issue. Although Bitcoin is worldwide, it still
often strikes me as a small community. What happened at Mt. Gox, while in the short term
undeniably benefited other exchanges, is bad past that near-sightedness. A lot of new or
timid people were taking Mt. Gox's rollback to indicate that bitcoin as an enterprise wasn't
holistically ready for their money yet, no matter the exchange.

On examination, it appears that what affects one exchange affects all exchanges.

Well, this is bad for business on all sides. What worries me further is that I don't see enough
business acumen in anyone to realize what is good for their own companies. MagicalTux
obviously needs to hire someone to handle PR and communication, because silence,
rumors, and dubious quotes from IRC are not good for business. You don't want the
indivduals handling your money to appear shadowy.

Now, while Tradehill and Bitcoin 7 are trying to capitalize on diminished faith in Mt.
Gox, Bitcoin7 being relatively strangers to bitcoin does them no good. On top of that,
this whole referral scheme, while it probably introduced a lot of people to the site, is
horrible PR. You know what else gets good initial results with little effort? Door to door sales,
infomercials, telemarketing, spam, pyramid schemes, MLMs, and HYIPs. But if you plan on
staying around as a company for more than a few months, you're shooting yourselves in your dicks.

Phew. Where was I? Oh yeah. Professionalism. I am the least professional person I know
of and I can't believe that I'm having to tell money-handlers this: This pissing match--as it is
so unprofessional and money handling is nothing of not about professionalism--makes me question
the owners' ethics and, more importantly, their ability to stay afloat while they hold my money.

In truth, what prompted me to write this extensive elaboration on my initial, single
sentence comment was that I was getting flashbacks of the early days of several MMORPGs. Banking
industries were developing and competitive strife resulted in a massive amount of drama bullshit
that inevitably erupted on forums and in-game. And usually this kind of thing just prompted a more
supreme authority to smack everyone down, which is the kind of scenario that Bitcoin doesn't need.

Allright.
Let's get specific:

Look, Bitcoin7, if it's taking you so long to respond to a cut-and-dried issue such as you
borrowing, stealing or inadvertently copying text, then why the hell should I trust that, if
users like me had an issue, you would respond to it promptly, if at all? If you're
leveling blame on outsourced copywriters, what else might you blame others for in the future?
Lo, are you under the impression that the whole "blaming the contractor" thing worked out
so well for Mt. Gox's security breach? It makes you look incompetent. It makes you look
heartily unresponsive to what should be an reasonable request. It makes you look like
idiots for, in the face of being called on these issues and doing anything but saying "Oh gosh.
Truly a mistake. We're very sorry."

In short, you have no ammo to criticize others with. So, in political advisement terms, the only
foresightful way to settle the issue is to do as requested and very plainly, bluntly and
yearnfully apologize. Here's an example: A politician cheats on his wife, and a few journalists pick up
on hints of the story. The politician can either try to keep the cat in the bag for an
unendurable while (which, granted, is sometimes the best move if the fallout
can be delayed until after an election) or he can announce his cheating. For the latter option,
a smart politician would say very plainly that he's ashamed, that his marriage is
narbacular and rocky, and they've been keeping up appearances for the sake of their public image,
reasons such as kids and family, etc. In the first option, there would be rumors for an
exhaustingly long time, then news stories, then an investigation, and the politician will
actively downplay everything until more investigations make him look silly. Then he finally would
defeatedly admit his guilt, but only with excuses and defensive attacks against the motives of
those who dug up the story.

However, in the second option, there would be a shitstorm for a few days, but then the story would stop.
It has been spent. There is nothing new that could be said. It becomes a non-issue. Hell, for
some of his constituents, the politician has actually won favor by suddenly
appearing human and bluntly honest. After that, if pressed with further attacks by his
conniving opponents, they look like bullies attacking a flawed and already-beaten man.
Really, their only move then is to stop and let third parties (media and voters) do the rest of the talking.

Okay. So, by firing back or presenting more excuse, Bitcoin7, you're only prolonging a battle that
simply will only cause you to lose by greater and greater margins.

Tradehill, here's what I think:

I don't see how you could really give an honest shit about your text being copied. Why? Because everyone
completely knows it's yours, it makes Bitcoin7 look terrible, you can't make them
possibly look any worse by attacking them further, and actually forcing them to do anything through
official, legal means is quite laughable. Doing anything but making continuous, polite,
sane requests just makes you look amateurish.

Through the proper response, you could have appeared as a larger, more professional exchange.
Think about what something like this statement would say about you guys: "We're very flattered
here that a new upstart exchange, Bitcoin7, has used our text and some design
elements on their website. We've been assured by them that it was a rookie mistake, apparently the
work of an incompetent outside contractor, and that the it will be corrected soon.
Otherwise, we just wanted to inform our users that, despite the similarities, Bitcoin7 is not a
related business enterprise to Tradehill. However, we welcome the competition and the
dependability and access that more and varied exchanges bring to Bitcoin."

So, while a bit rough, if I had read that statement, it would give me these impressions:
1) Heads above, you are a much more established exchange (worthy of being copied)
2) Even more important: You are gracious and calm in the face of problems.
3) It seems that you are Bitcoin supporters--You're not new to the community or in it
solely for profit, which also hints at bitcoin7 developers' relative newness to the community.
4) Although welcoming the competition, you don't think that they're worthy of
much complaining on your part because they're small fries. See, if you were to attack them more
overtly, you would give this new company credence and put them on level ground. That would
really make me think that you perceive them as the real deal.

On the point of being gracious, that doesn't mean your complaint is invalid. What I'm saying,
now, is that saying much of anything combative makes you look bad. And
it's unnecessary in this community because, in case you couldn't tell, assholes and
nincompoops like me will freely find and take up any valid cause. There are plenty of vocal
Tradehill supporters on these forums. When dealing with new or "lesser competition", your only
honest move is to make repeated, boring, polite inquiries until their noncooperation is
evident and someone other than you points this out. Right now, as that plagiarized
text still exists in some form, they look like total plagiarizing dicks, but only so long as you
have a cool head.

Right. Or, to couch this point in political terms, the well-established incumbent cannot himself, in
effect, make accusations against his competitor, even if he had something as damning as
a bestiality sex tape featuring the town's prized horse mascot.

Dirt only works in your favor in close races, and it permanently paints you as a mudslinger.

On another note, quoting your TOS is hilarious. Yeah, that worked out real well for MagicalTux, who
kindly made a thread about how his Force Majeure clause exempts Mt. Gox from liability. Even if he's
accurate, quoting a TOS as anything more than a list of helpful suggestions is hilarious,
yet especially to this highly-technical audience.

The rest of this just delves into complete gibberish. You can skip it if you want.

The crappy referral idea, which is neither itself original nor a good idea, makes me think that you don't plan on being around for very long (as I explained in some now-distant above paragraph). But mentioning this as something stolen is pretty laughable. It's akin to a business complaining about the ethics of their cleavage tattoo advertisement initiative being cooped by another company. I can't think of a better analogy, so I'll stick with that crappy one and let's all pretend that it was really witty and move on, okay? Cool.

Tradehill guys, I'm picking on you a bit more because I think your problems are  more obscure and need more explaining, while Bitcoin7's flaws are pretty readily apparent.

Here's one final point for both new exchanges: You're not exclusive competitors. There's another exchange coming soon with better features than everyone and they, get this, actually did an open testing period using funny money rather than just throwing their hats into the ring, unprepared. Also, Mt. Gox, reopened, is still the volume leader. This is despite the dual confluences of unsolicited referral spam piss streams that cover the forums and anywhere that bitcoin is mentioned (See, for example, comments sections on some news articles).

The final option that customers have is not to be a customer of any exchange at all. It seems that, post-rollback, many having chosen this route. Bitcoin is perceived to be risky enough as it is, but add to that the risk that one might lose it all, not to a tanking investment but to issues at an exchange, and that's enough for a lot of people to stop trading on exchanges.

Not to mention that half of the people who don't want to use someone's referral are just plain disinclined to join at all because you've effectively given a biased discount. It's like when you pick up an item in a retail store and notice that it was formerly on sale. That's a great way to instantly reduce your perceived value. Or, in a more common example: After you graduate and stop getting student discounts, you generally stop patronizing those formerly-discounted places because it's almost like the price increased, but only for you. If ever the crappy referral free-ipod-pyramid-scheme ends, future customers are going to be very aware of their "overpayment." So the least harmful solution is to stop the referral program and then give the same discount to all new customers.

However, nobody really bets money on a vicious fight for second place. It's interesting drama, sure, but they'll usually just bypass the fight entirely and go straight to the number one company. In fact, by ignoring the other second place contestants, you can often become second place just by acting the part:



Avis was not the second-biggest rental car company, by a long shot, when they started that campaign. But they were at the end of that campaign. You can easily become how customers perceive you. That can be a good or a bad thing.

Jesus, this post wasn't even slightly funny. What have you guys done to me?

This and other articles on bitcoin remind me of some journalism rule of thumb that I can't quite remember. It's something like this: If someone can respond to the headline with a one-sentence answer and be 90% correct, it's either not newsworthy, you work for a tabloid, or you should be fired.

The 10k passwords/sec seems is a bit off. I've seen that on a few different forums. I think that was for cracking zip files or something.

A single 5870 can do 4.2 MD5 ghash/sec in whitepixel. A 5970 probably like 7 (in an x4 rig, they got 28.6 Ghash/sec).

At 40 bits that would be:

2^40/7000000000/60/2 = 1.3 minutes on average.

At 50 bits:

2^50/7000000000/60/60/2 = 22.3 hours on average.

Okay that can't be right. Would somebody please tell me what I'm assuming that is wrong? (Whitepixel data)

I'm sorry. When I wrote that, I purposely chose my words carefully because I didn't want to make a windows or linux comparison. My poorly-established analogy was not about the OS wars, but that people shouldn't put their trust in the innate security of Macs and let their guards down. They shouldn't trust any OS without doing their own due diligence and keeping up their part of the equation in providing their own maximum security for the OS.

That said, I'm a three OS user so I'm not trying to piss on macs (thereby pissing on myself), just say that the prevalent thought among the ditzier users seems to be, "Oh I don't need to do anything for security. It's a mac! Tee hee!" I want you to imagine that the person saying that was frolicking through a field of tulips with a bunch of kittens trailing behind them. Relatedly, there's hasn't been much of an evolutionary arms race between mac malware and security products.

Windows, on the other hand, is like living in a ghetto neighborhood. Your house has been attemptedly robbed a few times and once someone mugged you on the way home from the 7-11, but you're doing your best to help yourself by putting bars on your windows, getting a dog, packing a gun, garaging your car, and starting a neighborhood watch. There's a crack den across the street, but rather than fix it up, the frustrated landlord just decided to burn it down and reinstall another house (Which seems to be becoming another crack den). Also, you've become a racist purely out of fear and mistrust, and you get all your packages delivered to your Dad's house so that they won't get stolen.

Macs are like living in close-gated communities with security guards, but where users tend to leave their doors unlocked, their windows open, and put notes on the door that they're on vacation and that UPS packages should be left on the back porch. They have alarm systems, but never seem to use them because they're "too complicated." Also, they wear sweater vests and the only dogs they might have are yippy little things with pink bows in their hair, acting more as decorative accessories than agents of security.

Linux, Unix and BSD operating systems are, I don't know, like living on a barge in the middle of the ocean, but where the user always wears camouflage, has built a custom sniper tower and extensive camera and alarm network, put up a high-voltage fence around the perimeter, and has trained sharks to patrol the nearby waters. This is not just one species of shark, but a variety because each has their own specialty. One, for example, is good at throwing knives. Also, the owner has a rottweiler that has been trained to bark commands to the sharks in the event that you might be indisposed during an attack. Otherwise, the house on the barge is identical to the suburban mac one.

Also, fuck it because it's my analogy, there's a harpoon gun because you never know when the whales are going to turn on us. They've been plotting for a while now, but it has been taking some time (Whales are very slow conversationalists). There is also a close-knit community of other barge-livers who share details of their paranoia, such as how you are a complete utter moron if you don't have a 7 year food supply, no less than 3 reverse osmosis water filters, and not just several crates of ammo stored with dessicants, but your own ammo press and materials. There's a subforum specifically for maintaining weapons in a saltwater environment. People have written extensive tutorials on how to train and feed their perimeter sharks. If you tell the community "Pfft. My barge isn't very safe. Barges suck. I can't seem to figure out how to grow a lawn, and this never was a problem in my windows house!" Then you'll get 15 different replies that insult you and your old ghetto windows house, but also giving detailed instructions on how to grow a barge lawn. One guy even posts pictures of an extensive hydroponic vegetable-growing operation and then everyone oohs and ahhs about how cool it is for the rest of the thread.

Okay. Where was I?

People aren't doing their own due diligence in checking out the security of these other exchanges. I don't mean by probing them, necessarily, but by asking the right questions. They are black holes. At least Camp BX did a security audit and seems to be open to community assistance. Mt. Gox, prior to the attack, had spent something like 2000 BTC in security bounties. But they've done a lousy job at communicating this and what else they might have done.

I don't know how anyone can make an assumption about the security of their money at any exchange without more information.

Can you please elaborate on this? I'm trying to wrap my head around you thinking that calling spammers spammers is being a troll.