Only if they know where it is and have access to it--access being:
1.) Remote, through insecure SSH configuration, lax network share permissions, etc..
2.) Local, via an insecure account (bad password/lax permissions)
3.) Local, by taking the physical hard drive from the machine.

(1) can be avoided by keeping the machine you store your key on off of your local network and the internet, or by keeping your wallet on a removable disk/drive (and never allowing the file to touch other drives). (2) can be avoided by keeping your local user accounts secure, or by keeping the wallet on a removable(...). (3) can be avoided by keeping the file on a secure media in a secure place as with (1) and (2). (1), (2), and (3) can all be mitigated by encryption, but if a thief has your wallet (even if it's encrypted) then he only needs to crack the encryption (which will take a while) and he has your coin.

To prevent a thief who has somehow procured your ("secure") bank wallet from getting your coin, you may choose to make a new secure wallet every now and then (and transfer the funds from the old wallet to the new one). With encryption, that should be enough to prevent a thief from getting anything before you can say "Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". It's up to you how long between new wallets you want to go, but I don't think you need to do it too often.

The most important point to remember is that if your (encrypted or not) wallet is ever on a non-encrypted storage medium, then it's data will remain there for anyone to scrape if they have physical access to the drive (and sometimes even without), until that data is replaced (which may take a while, unless you shred it, but it still may be there depending on the filesystem you're using). So if you can keep the wallet encrypted throughout it's entire lifetime, that would be best (particularly if it's also on a fully encrypted volume), and if you can keep it from touching your hard-drive until it can be encrypted that's good too.

If you're worried about those writing to your sd-card, then you can set it to read-only when you don't need to write to it. If you're worried about it reading data on the card...any virus could do that already (so if you're infected, you're SOL). If you have one of those on your computer, then you're in pretty bad shape already and I don't know how to help you. 

Techwtf mentioned longpolling was slow in the pool's thread; I guess that could have been part of the problem.

For mad props! 

Nah, because the GPU I have right now can't do it, and I wanted to test the waters.

Seems to be alternating between "Long poll received" and "New block detected" messages now; first the poll message, then the other, sometimes with a second or less between the messages. Here's a sample:


I'm on commit 4bb13bda68fca91a8f96ec3c17cf6f99ecf70342

Edit: before 6:46 I was only getting this message: "LONGPOLL detected new block, flushing work queue", now I'm not getting it at all.

I seem to be getting a higher hashrate--at least, more consistently higher--with 4way than with sse2_64 (which I think it odd, but...)

Is there any reason to use sse2 despite the lower hashrate?

If you're getting this fairly often:
Does that mean you should reduce the scan time? If it's not too often, is it okay to just leave it be?

I'm on slush's pool, which I think doesn't support longpolling, so seeing the message doesn't surprise me.

It's like a subsidy (paying miners to do something that would otherwise be unprofitable): They're giving incentive for miners to join until they get enough miners to start discovering blocks. Once they get past that point they can stop offering the extra incentive and hopefully the idea of the pool itself will be enough to get people to join.

Ah, yeah, didn't think about that.

As you can probably tell, I've not GPU mined before.

As HappyGuy said, Ubuntu is really easy to set up. It's also more cutting-edge (if you use the latest version) than some other distributions, but usually more stable. There are other distributions that you could use which are more cutting-edge than Ubuntu, but aren't as easy to set up or are less stable, then there are distributions which are more stable than Ubuntu but less cutting edge (and may or may not be easier to set up).

I think Ubuntu is a good middle-ground distribution, that most people could easily learn; although I'm not sure I agree with every direction it is going.

I won't discuss it's merits or faults in relation to other distributions; I'd rather not start a fight, and I'm really not the best person to discuss those points with, anyway. Suffice to say, you should try different distributions yourself (in a virtual machine, if possible; although it may not perform as well as if you had installed it to disk) and see which ones you like. I'd spend a minimum of about a week getting to know one distribution. After that, you can try others and probably determine whether you like them or not in about two or three days (although longer is better).

Can't say whether Windows 7 is better or worse than Ubuntu; Haven't used it. It seems like an okay operating system, though.

Re: "terminal stuff"... GUIMiner works on Ubuntu, IIRC.

(I use fedora, btw)

Why? Until you put any bitcoins into it, the wallet is worthless, so losing it won't be a problem. It's no different from the livecd approach, except that instead of running a whole OS in RAM, you're just storing a folder in RAM.

If you ever need to use the wallet, just keep a copy on whatever medium you used to back it up, and copy it back to your ramdisk. where you make whatever changes you need to make. I don't know if you even need to overwrite the old copy with the changed one, since all the transactions are tracked/confirmed by the network.

Edit: If you thought I was suggesting not to keep a back-up on a physical medium, that is definitely not what I was saying. It's always a good idea to keep a back-up. Thought I'd clear that up, just in case.

You have to run bitcoind with some settings for a username and password, and set your miner to connect to localhost (or 127.0.0.1) with that username and password.

Alternatively, you can run bitcoin or bitcoind with a flag telling it to mine coins itself, but I don't know how efficient it is.

I think there are more detailed instructions on the bitcoin wiki, but I can't remember where, at the moment. You could try running bitcoin with the --help (or possibly /help, if you're on Windows) flag in a terminal/command prompt, and it should tell you all the options and what they're for.

Nope, I've been connected for about 18 hours now with no errors (using cgminer), and the only reason I disconnected was to update my miner.

Instead of booting a live cd, you could also mount a ramdisk (or make a folder in /dev/shm) and create a symlink from it to ~/.bitcoin, then create your wallet, addresses, backup etc.. This, of course, assuming you're already running some Linux distribution. Then the files will only have ever resided in RAM; unmount the ramdisk (or delete the folder you created in /dev/shm), and the symlink to it, and it'll be almost as if the files were never there.

Just don't forget to make the backup, since otherwise--because it is in RAM--once you shut down it'll be gone forever.

Man, the reply button couldn't be much harder to find. 

I'm Ben, but you can call me Nobu (since there are so many Ben's...it's all about us, ya know?).

I like puzzles, strategy and RPGs (not the gun  ), and cats. I like programming a little, but I never really finish something I start; maybe if I had someone to work with.... I know a bit about C and C++, but never really learned enough of the languages to write anything substantial. Python is where it's at, but most of what I've written in Python could be considered a toy by above-average programmers.

I'm shy, don't talk much. Don't really have much to talk about. I write a lot, don't ask why. Sometimes I talk or write too much. I guess now would be a good opportunity to stop.