USA gov censorship in action again, blocking innocent domains:

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As far as i understand, the receiving addresses are generated pseudo-randomly based on private keys which are generated when the bitcoin client is first run.

So,

1. Is it possible (however veeeeery unlikely / low probability) for 2 clients to generate the same adress ?
2. If yes, then what will happen if somebody sends bitcoins to that address ? Will both people receive the coins, none of them or some other weird thing will happen ?

Heyy,

I just wandered into the sourceforge site, and it seems there is tarball for 3.20 avaiable while there is only 3.19 on the main site ?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/

So which version should I call the newest stable version - the bitcoin.org one or SF one ?

I was wondering - why is the site and the forum are sooooo sloooooooow.

The answer is here - we are being slashdotted. Again.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity

Well, I guess this is both good and bad.

[low]

So i guess gold will be backed by Bitcoin some day after all...

http://www.daily.pk/fake-gold-bars-in-bank-of-england-and-fort-knox-14477/

It’s one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.

But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.

A recent discovery — in October of 2009 — has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the “big money” brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox — the US Treasury gold — that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an “m”) of gold bars are fake!

This also would explain too highlow prices of gold.
They are not doing that since yesterday, it was probably going on for decades...

I have another proposition:

There should be a site, like https://www.bitcoin.org/signatures where there are SHA1/MD5/SHA256 signatures of every file that is avaiable for download on bitcoin.org.
This way, there will be a 100% cracker-resistant way to know that one is downloading unmodified/unhacked files.

For now, the only way to know we have a "clean" bitcoin is to download the source, pull changes from github and review them yourself, which is probably not very good for starters/noobs.
After all, latest events concerning Facebook & Tunisia government, show that it's not very hard to imagine governments or ISPs modifying bitcoin binaries to place trojan horses in them.

What do you think ? This shouldn't be verry hard to do - i mean how hard it is to setup a single static HTML page on HTTPS ?

I propose something that has been discussed many times on the forums - implementing connection encryption to the bitcoin protocol.

Details:
- Like SSH, people will be able to connect to each other securely, using cryptographic keys / identities they need to exchange first.
- As in SSH, each host will generate its fingerprint, and set of private/public keys. So nodes connecting will be able to verify each other
- Some nodes (like banks) will be able to publish their keys/fingerprints somewhere (like on their site), so that everybody can confirm who they are when connecting to their bitcoin clients
- When key/fingerprint of remote node changes, user will be warned & asked if he wants to connect anyway (like in SSH).

- To make things easier, one could use openssl library present in every major operating system to implement this.

Possible benefits:
- Possibility of having almost 100% anonymity for each node. (if some random traffic generator will be also implemented) A third party no longer will be able to tell who is who and which transaction is which by sniffing the traffic coming in/out of a node.
- Real security & more anonymity when connecting through TOR (right now the exit nodes can easily sniff/intercept all traffic, so using bitcoin on TOR is somewhat dangerous).
- Eleminate man-in-the-middle attacks.
- People will be able to create "semi-certificate authorities", which will store each node's fingerprints and show them publicly, so nodes of the network can be verified.
- Clients (like banks) could choose to connect only to trusted, SSL-verified nodes, and ignore the rest.

Possible disadvantages:
- Possibility of centralization of the network ?

"Two weeks ago, MasterCard felt the wrath of Anonymous Operation Payback-style DDoS attacks after refusing to process payments that were intended to fund WikiLeaks, the website which began leaking confidential US diplomatic cables last month. Now, the company is preparing to head down another controversial path by pledging to deny transactions which support websites that host pirated movies, music, games, or other copyrighted content. MasterCard lobbyists have also been in talks with entertainment industry trade groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and have made it clear that the company will support the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), sources close to the talks have said."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/22/2113241/RIAA-MPAA-Recruit-MasterCard-As-Internet-Police

So mastercard will block payments to sites MAFIAA tell him to, WITHOUT a court order.
What's next ? They randomly block accounts of people with a hair color they don't like ?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/12/0647203/WikiLeaks-Money-and-Ron-Paul

So the war has started.
We should prepare defenses, it may get "interesting" soon. Unfortunately it may be too soon.

[USA has finally shown its true fascist face. I wonder if bitcoin domains will be on the list...]

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/
http://www.osnews.com/story/24074/US_Government_Censors_70_Websites

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

(...)

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.
“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Beginnings of censorship ?
USA has finally shown its true fascist face. I wonder if bitcoin domains will be on the list...

Discuss.

I will just leave this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-KU7MD_3Hk

There is something weird going on in the BTC market:



The volume constantly decreases, while the price remains unchanged...
What does it mean ? Are we seeing market stagnation ? Or is the bitcoin overpriced perhaps ? Or maybe large speculators wants to fool us into thnking so ?

Can somebody with knowledge of currency markets put this in perspective ?

[LWN.NET is read by some important figures in the geek world]

https://lwn.net/Articles/414452/

Somebody of us should go there and answer questions/resolve issues asked in the comments below the article.
LWN.NET is read by some important figures in the geek world, so it would be probably good for Bitcoin PR if we do that.

Perhaps it should be even Satoshi himself or Gavin Andresen, because they have the best understanding of the Bitcoin algorithms.

Founded by Jonathan Corbet and Elizabeth Coolbaugh and published since January 1998,[2] LWN was originally a free site devoted to collecting Linux news, published weekly.

At the end of May 2002, LWN announced a redesigned site.[3] Among the changes was a facility for readers to post comments about stories.

On July 25, 2002, LWN announced that due to its inability to raise enough funds through donations, the following issue would be its last.[4][5]

(...)

LWN caters to a more technical audience than other Linux/free software publications. It is often praised for its in-depth coverage of Linux kernel internals.[1]

The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News. However, that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content.

I have noticed that there was large traffic increase on the forums lately.

I was wondering - is it just caused by naturally increasing popularity of Bitcoin, or did we get some large press/blog/reddit/digg coverage again ?

BTW,
Can somebody confirm or deny that the forum has increased traffic in last 3 days ?

Since the idea of motivating local stores to accept bitcoin is IMHO pointless, i have another proposition which could work in the close future (1 year):

Motivating big currency exchangers in centres of major cities to accept internet currencies: Bitcoin, Liberty Reserve, Pecunix and such.
Because those companies are already into "currency buisness", they may be much easier to motivate to use electronic currencies, than local stores.

After people could exchange money for bitcoin on their street, perhaps it will be much much easier to motivate markets/supermarkets/shops to accept bitcoin.

Lately there have been major technological breakthroughs, such as memristors, graphene-based transistors and so which will probably greatly increase processing power of computers yet to come.

So i propose a (relatively simple ?) change which would make bitcoin prepared for a 10-fold or more increase in computers' speed in the close future. Change hashing algorithm from SHA-256 to SHA-512 from block 200.000 or 250.000. This would raise the bar of difficulty of attacking the network.

Bitcoin is gaining popularity fast, so we should be prepared for the worst. IMHO it's better to be safe than sorry. Also, the more serious we get about network security, the more seriously will companies & other "serious" entities look at bitcoin resulting in wider adoption.

I see that bitcoinmarket registrations are still closed, so I'm proposing a solution which should fix the paypal, moneybookers & other "soft" currencies scam problem, so the site can be opened immediately:

1. Allow trading in "hard", non-drawbackable currencies (such as Pecunix, LibertyReserve, Wester Union etc.) to everybody.

2. Allow trading in "soft" currencies only for users which are trusted. Trusted means:
a) Are registered for 3 months or longer, or are registered & trusted now
b) Have traded at least X BTC minimum and have perfect trade history without any scams or other problems
c) Have verified their credentials through some mechanism - credit card, mail verify code delivery or personal digital signature.
The solution can be composed of all a) b) and c) or their combinations.

3. Force all Paypal & Moneybookers transfers to wait at least 5 days before they can be finalized. This should solve the stolen credit cards reversal problem.

4. Allow paying with paysafecard and such.

[I also hope for some help from the author (puddinpop)]

Hello,

I'm starting this thread to maintain my Gentoo bitcoin ebuilds for CUDA version of bitcoin.
I will start a github repo later, so for now, ebuilds, patches and full sources are avaiable here:

http://tinyurl.com/2ujagcw

These are simply patches from puddinpop, adjusted for the newest version and with makefiles & dependencies added.
I also hope for some help from the author (puddinpop), because i don't think i can maintain this on my own for long, as I am not a C/C++ programmer, I am just good with patching & diffing.

I tested it on my 64Bit Gentoo, and they compile fine, but some paths are adjusted for 64bit Gentoo, so the ebuilds may not work without small adjustments of makefile (in net-p2p/bitcoin/files/Makefile.gentoo.cuda). So if it does not compile for You on 32bit, then try adjusting these paths in the makefile:

Code:

CUDALIBPATHS= \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/lib64 \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/sdk/shared/lib \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/sdk/shared/lib/linux \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/sdk/C/lib \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/sdk/C/common/lib/linux/ \
 -L$(CUDAROOT)/open64/lib

Any donations to make my effort worthwhile are welcome.
1NLWBAD7ZD82fJDDawKfp5RAKSR8YWWYd3

Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have: payment title.

Perhaps it should be possible to include short (<=512 bytes) message for each transaction.
The message could be encrypted with public/private keys so only the receiver can see its contents.

What do You think ?

PS.
I might be wrong, but the messages could also be used to increase randomness of hashing process by the way, couldn't they ? If not, never mind.

[saves the current state, so it can continue just where it left last time]

Hey,

As I understand, the client is doing the hashing in an organized manner, based on some counter. I mean that when i close the client, it saves the current state, so it can continue just where it left last time. Am i right ?

I was wondering how often is the client doing backup of current state in its database, because in an event on sudden power failure, they client could forget where it was and waste some amount of time doing the same work twice when it is turned on later. Is that the case ? Or is the counter saved in real time ?

So If I hard-reset my computer or kill the client with -9 parameter and then restart the client, will it pick up hashing exactly where it left, or will it start some stage from the beginning ?

I hope i made myself clear enough, because my english surely isn't perfect.