Hello guys,

This is my first post outside of the Newbies board, so I hope I'm not proposing something stupid, like addressing a non-existing issue.

From what I read about Bitcoin, I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard to track coins going from one address to another (with many addresses in-between, that is). This basically means that if a friend sends me coins to an address, he can then monitor where I spend that money. Similarly, the police could use Bitcoin trackability to create links between people trading money at Mtgox and using it to buy drugs on Silk Road.

What I propose, then, is to create a service that anyone could operate (thus it would be harder to stop them if someone wanted to). The service would work like this:

It has a single public address to which people can send BTC. But before someone sends it BTC, they tell the service the source address, the amount of BTC, and the destination address to send fresh coins to. The service remembers this, and once it has enough coins from different clients, it sends the destination addresses the coins, but mixing the sources. After that, the service immediately forgets about all requests.

The more people using the service, the more anonymous the coins become.

Weaknesses include services being monitored (i.e. not forgetting about requested transactions), and probably other stuff, but I have to go now. I'd like to know your opinions when I come back

Let me know what you think.

Guys, I just started seeing this warning on Chrome regarding the HTTPS connection to bitcointalk.org:

http://www.picamatic.com/view/8116068_bitcointalk_ssl_problem/

What could this be? Is anyone else also having the problem?

-- If a moderator sees this, could this be moved to a more appropriate board? --

Guys, I just had the most insane, but also most exciting idea of my life. I figure other people have also thought about that, and discussed it in some other threads, but I'm really considering to put this into practice.

My key ideas for the game:

• Monsters should have a chance of dropping BTC.
• When you acquire BTC in-game, it is automatically transferred to your wallet.
• The BTC that monsters drop can come from different sources, such as monthly payments, items sold by NPC's, in-game fees over maintaining guilds, entering special areas, etc.
• Money for keeping the server up can come from BTC in the game itself, unless the market is suffering a crash and BTC aren't worth much; in this case, the server would have to be kept up only by monthly payments and donations.
• People should get mad at bots, since they're effectively stealing their money (not their wallets, but the money they put into the game, which makes up for monster drops, etc.). The community could elect and pay game masters to keep the servers free from bots.

The catch is that I'm sharing this idea with you, but this is still a personal project. I'm going to make this in a programming language called Chii I'm developing myself, and the game style is going to be your usual Korean cute shit like Ragnarok.

If you can draw, paint, model in 3D, or is a developer insane enough to trust somebody who says is making a new programming language and would like to help, or simply keep in touch, let me know. I generally can't move things forward if I don't have somebody to discuss. Also, I can't do art yet, so I would need somebody to do that for me.

Otherwise you may think the idea is good but I'm overengineering with this Chii thing, or you simply hate anime and would like to make something like World of Warcraft, we can still help each other in defining the limits, pitfalls, and difficulties of developing an online game economy based on BTC. I think there's room for more than one game

By the way, before you get started with the usual "but you have no idea how hard it is to make an online game", yes, I do have. I have developed my first online game when I was 10, and I did not use any synchronization framework like RakNet to do that. I really did it all by hand using a standard TCP/IP library It obviously wouldn't scale (I didn't even know what this meant back then), but it did work, and I'm sure I can do better today (although I would *probably* use a synchronization framework today).

Hello, fellow coin owners.

I'm very new into this Bitcoins thingy (in fact, I heard about it yesterday; shameful!) and have been reading some discussions regarding wallet security, especially on Windows, and an idea occurred me. I'd like to know what you think.

Encrypting your wallets is the default way to protect them, but as some people pointed out, once you enter the password so that the Bitcoin client can get it, malware can also always get in unless you use Linux and have some other mechanism to ensure that only the real Bitcoin client can access the encrypted file. I'm pretty sure this is even harder on Windows (if not impossible, considering how usual it is for privilege escalation exploits to appear on this OS; correct me if I'm outdated).

So I thought people serious about their wallets' security wouldn't bother buying some (pretty cheap) specialized hardware.

The beasty would be a small, very cheap processor running a special Bitcoin client aided by an FPGA to do the public key mathematics (doing this using a processor would probably be less cheap; not sure). It would have an USB port used to connect it to a computer.

Two devices would flow through this USB port: an API for controlling the Bitcoin client and a read-only USB mass storage containing an app used as a front-end to this API. So you would put your USB Wallet inside your actual wallet because you dawg that's so amazing, and when you wanted to make transactions you would just plug the USB Wallet on a computer, run the front-end app, tell who you wanted to send money and enter the password on the USB Wallet itself (avoids any kind of logging).

This would allow you to use your wallet even on shared Windows computers infested with viruses.

The USB Wallet would be fully "open hardware" (you could build it home), obviously. There are a bunch of open crypto cores for FPGA's at http://opencores.org/projects. Dunno if they're enough to implement the Bitcoin client.

I would estimate the USB Wallet would cost less than $50, but sure we'd have to research more. I just want to hear your opinion first. What do you think?