I don't think government involvement is the solution.  We just need more competition in the form of more pools.  Personally I think there should be around 10 public pools. That way no pool even gets close to the 50% mark.  This would take effort from individuals willing to set up pools as well as willingness of miners to diversify more and embrace newer, smaller pools.

Yes, the miner who includes your transaction gets it. It's payment for keeping the blockchain secure, and provides an incentive for miners to keep 'mining' in the future when bitcoins are no longer being generated.

This is not necessary a bitcoin-specific question, but it is certainly an important issue for bitcoin users, especially in light of recent disclosure of hashed passwords from mtgox.

What is the best way to keep your passwords secure? I have long believed in memorizing passwords and not writing them down or storing them anywhere. However these days with so many different logins to keep track of, it doesn't seem practical anymore to try to keep a variety of passwords memorized. I can make my passwords much longer and more secure if I don't have to memorize them.

I've looked at password management tools such as keepass, but I can't help but feel nervous about having all of my passwords stored in one place, even if it is encrypted. And even then, the question becomes, where to store that file? If I store it on my PC, it could be vulnerable to malware which copies it offsite somewhere where it can be brute-forced. If I store it on a thumbdrive, I risk losing access to everything if I ever lose the thumbdrive. If I store it "in the cloud", I risk security issues such as the issue with Dropbox yesterday (where you could log in to any account without a password for 4 hours).

I'm genuinely interested in how people are dealing with this. There doesn't seem to be a clear best solution.

You're being pedantic. You've taken a casual statement and trying to turn it into a legally binding offer. If you really wanted to take him up on that, the intelligent thing to do would be to ask him to confirm the sincerity of the offer. His "offer" lacked any specifics whatsoever so it is hard to take it seriously as "legally binding". You didn't bet anything in return. You just jumped on it and said "Gotcha! Pay up!".


The lottery owner can take the money at any time, if he chooses to be dishonest. But that has nothing to do with buying tickets. You continue to try to tie buying tickets with cheating. The lottery owner, if he chooses to buy tickets, has no advantage over other ticket buyers, since the block explorer makes all bets public and the method for choosing a winner is pre-determined and verifiable.

If the owner of Mt. Gox wanted to run off with all of the money and bitcoins he has been entrusted with, he could do so at any time.  If the operator of any of the public mining pools wanted to suddenly stop paying out and run off with the mined bitcoins, he could do so at any time. It would be criminal, and it would be obvious.

Thank you for confirming that you did not win the supposed bet.


First of all, you are the one making an accusation that he "may have" bought 130 tickets, it is your job to prove your claim, not anyone else's job to disprove it. Block explorer is out there for anyone to view. Why don't you go and look at all of the bets that were made last month and try to connect some of them together?

Second, suppose he did. Out of 131 tickets, he bought 130. That would mean only one other person spent any bitcoins. So he paid himself 130 bitcoins to win 1 bitcoin. Even if you accept that this is cheating, in this scenario he has only cheating *one* person out of *one* bitcoin.

What you are suggesting is that a lottery operator could bet 130 bitcoins in order to win 1 bitcoin. While it may be possible, it would be a very dumb bet.  Nor does it seem like a scenario worth worrying about.  I'd be much more concerned about the pool operators and exchange operators, who are dealing with much larger sums of money, and don't need to outpay their customers 99 to 1 in order to pull off a fraud.
 

First of all, bitlotto didn't make a bet. He made a casual statement, which you then took as if it was a binding bet with you, without asking for confirmation and without even making any counter bet. You can't expect him to pay up on something so one-sided as "I'm betting everything against someone who's not betting anything".

Second of all, you didn't win the bet. You keep describing the possibility of the lotto operator buying tickets in the lotto as cheating, when it is nothing of the sort. If someone wants to buy 1 million lotto tickets and stack the odds in their favor, they have every right to do so, even if they are also the operator of the lotto. That's not cheating, that's just aggressive betting. Anyone can do it, whether they run the lotto or not.

Finally you tie together the idea that if he buys 99% of the lotto tickets and then someone in the remaining 1% wins, he could run off with the money. This breaks the very premise of his original statement because it would be very obvious that he was doing so. Everyone would know it, so it would not be undetectable and therefore this method of cheating (simply taking the money and running) doesn't meet the criteria he set forth (that there is no *undetectable* way for him to take money). You are trying to obscure this fact by tying it in with some concept that buying a lot of tickets is cheating, which it is not.

Any bitcoin transactions runs the risk of one party 'taking the money and running'. It's not a weakness of the lotto.

If you look on the 6th chart on that link you can see the difficulty went down in April.

Sure, it's possible for someone to do that.  But in that scenario, who owns the coins?  Mining is a way to distribute coins to the people who invest in securing the network. But if all of the coins are owned by whoever created the chain, I'm not sure why anyone other than that one person would embrace it.

I don't think (solo) mining itself would be considered taxable income. You are not receiving the bitcoins from someone else, you are creating them yourself. Income is something you receive from another person/business/entity in return for something.  If you make furniture, the creation of the furniture is not a taxable event, the sale of it is. So I would argue that mining bitcoins doesn't generate income or any taxable event, until you sell the bitcoins, or use them to buy something (in which case the transaction would be treated as a barter).

Now if you are in a pool, that is potentially a different story. It probably could be interpreted that you are offering your services to the pool and they are paying you in bitcoins, in which case any payment you receive from the pool would be taxable income based on the FMV of the bitcoins you receive.

I'm got experience with finding ways to get better performance out of LAMP platforms. This could be a mysql performance issue or a web server issue. Either way there are probably steps you can take to delay the need for more hardware.  If a forum admin wants to contact me send me a PM, I can probably help.

I'm a Linux sysadmin with over 15 years of experience.  Core competencies include scalability & automation, performance issues, mysql & memcached, and Amazon web services. I can provide a full resume on request.