Hi!

Is there any wallet software which guarantees that private keys are always committed to disk (using appropriate kernel primitives - there must be no chance that the key is still waiting in a write-behind cache) before being used on the network?

Thanks!

One thing that impresses me about bitcoin is that by now, I see it as a superior model for a modern democracy. Real-world democracies often suffer from a huge (and ever-growing) pile of laws, while still having a hard time to achieve some balance throughout the society (which is what I would regard as the goal of democratic models). Bitcoin, on the other hand, works in an almost anarchical way by having the crowd building a consensus and building interesting innovations upon it. But at the point where it would not serve the majority in some way, it would collapse because those which are discontent with how it works could bring it down using a 51% attack.

Now, I discovered something which pretty much opposes what I find valuable in a democratic society. Modern societies have some means of law enforcement, and they have profit-driven businesses which push forward innovation. But (and unfortunately, because of their disinformation policy towards their customers until now, I'm not sure if it was their business decision from the first place, or if they fell into this because of liquidity problems) the still largest bitcoin exchange has attempted to fill both roles - a profitable police (ultimately leading to this miserable situation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80562.0)? An example for why this must fail is their policy of accepting all deposits which their regard as "illegal" for some reason, even allowing trades using these deposits, and just freezing the accounts on withdrawal. From a business perspective, this is reasonable as it allows them to still make profits from the "illegal" money streams. But as AML regulations are cited as the reason for freezing on withdrawal, this becomes almost amusing. If you ever researched how large crime organizations launder money on commodity markets, it becomes clear: money laundering is still facilitated, and profited from, and the account freezing becomes just a red herring. In the end, no one is served well, neither law enforcement nor the company's customers.

I hope people will learn from this incident, making more from this great democratic basework we have. There is still much room for doing innovative business, and for working with governments in order to have them learn how to cope with this new technology. But trying to fit both needs is only a recipe to get your fingers burnt...

I started this topic on this forum rather than https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=8.0 to make sure the right people will read it. As of now, the "Trading" forum seems to be mostly about speculation rather than actual bitcoin business.

I found it necessary to write this because there are still many business owners who use bitcoins to have other currencies transferred to them, by adapting the bitcoin prices to the USD-BTC exchange rates. This is bad for the bitcoin economy as it destabilizes the exchange rates.

It is very understandable that new bitcoin adopters wish to reduce the risk posed by the exchange rates while bitcoin is relatively new. But it is important to do it in a way that does stabilize the bitcoin currency.

So I am sharing my strategy for expanding my business to bitcoin, in the hope that more businesses will adopt this approach or even improve it:

When having a working business, the idea is to do a fraction of the complete business volume using bitcoin, but with stable bitcoin prices (of course, prices change over time, but ideally, BTC prices should not be more volatile than prices in other currencies). The business owner should decide the level of involvement he is comfortable with. It should be in a range where it is feasible to store the bitcoins for a relatively long time in order to find the right time to exchange it back to the local currency. Or even better, to use it to buy other services using bitcoins. 10% might be a good starting point.

This way, bitcoin businesses can even make profit from low BTC exchange rates because new bitcoiners can get the services cheaper. This creates a new momentum of buying bitcoins, thereby driving the exchange rates up (allowing to pull out the profit into other currencies if necessary).

Please let me know your thoughts.

[inside]

The forum description reads as if it was about doing business inside the bitcoin economy. But the current topics are mostly about trading bitcoin for other currencies. Maybe it would be good to do a forum cleanup and move most threads to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=57.0

I can provide consulting and development services, focusing on (but not limited to) C++, Common LISP, SQL, XML, high performance networking, cryptography and Linux.

I trade in BTC, USD and EUR currencies, and unlike many others, I actually do so (no "oh well, the exchange rate has changed, so you have to pay more" when doing business with me).

Feel free to contact me via PM for discussing collaboration opportunities.

I accidently created a negative balance in one account of my wallet as I sent the complete balance using "sendfrom" and a transaction fee was charged unexpectedly. As I found the transaction would not be processed, I found this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5909.msg358186 and came to the conclusion that I should make the balance positive again by moving funds from other accounts. I did this (having a balance of 0 now on the account where I sent from), but at this point (nearly 2 days later) the transaction is still unconfirmed. Can I still get the transaction processed somehow, or at least recover the funds?

It gets more and more hard to mine without a pool, at least if you're unwilling to put long-term dedication into bitcoin. However, by joining a pool, miners risk to give up their responsibility for participating in the transaction fee market.

I wonder if there is an overview about the different transaction processing policies the different pools use, so miners could decide which pool most closely matches what they agree with.

The Mt. Gox hack and the $500.000 USD wallet steal have gained quite some media attention. And for sure they had some educational effect on the community, regarding the responsibility of maintaining information security when running your own financial infrastructure (which is probably a key point of what bitcoin enables us to do).

But both incidents were attacks on computing infrastructure outside the bitcoin network. So I do wonder: Who has already noticed attacks on the bitcoin network itself? And if so, what were the countermeasures and how well did they work? If not: Is it really realistic that there are no such attempts? Or should the bitcoin software somehow alert the user, or at least those users who choose to get involved in the technical side?

(Just trying to figure out how well bitcoin is prepared for attempts to subvert the network)

Hi!

I'm trying to get started with bitcoin at the moment. So I tried to get a tiny bitcoin value for testing from http://faucet.bitcoin.st/ (bitcoin faucet). However, it doesn't work for me, I always get a "We cannot connect to your Bitcoin Client, Please Open Your Firewall so port 8333 forwards to your computer" error message. Technically, I doubt this is the case. The machine running bitcoind is directly connected to the internet, with no firewall in between, and I can connect to port 8333 on it. So is there anything else I could be doing wrong? Also, does this mean that the bitcoin client must be running and connected to the internet in order for one of my bitcoin addresses to receive coins?

I put a bitcoin address in my signature, just in case anyone has some bitcoin fraction left and wants to test, or just help me out getting started...