[A small city in Europe: What would happen if...]

A small city in Europe: What would happen if...

...you took 50000 casascius physical bitcoins and threw them all out of an airplane above the city?

Max Keiser (http://maxkeiser.com) just tweeted:

I'll be speaking at bitcoin conference in Prague November making the case why #occupy protests need to embrace global pirate parties

awesome, I love the guy.

[Can I deposit or withdraw in Bitcoins?]

Just to let people know, because I made the assumption one could withdraw Bitcoins from bitcoinica using Mt. Gox redeemable codes. YOU CANNOT! Only USD withdrawals are possible.

In an email I was referred to their FAQ for details.

I looked at the FAQ before I trusted my Bitcoins to bitcoinica, of course. It lacks details and is unclear on the subject. I hope this is not intentional:

Can I deposit or withdraw in Bitcoins?
Unfortunately, no. We don't deliver actual Bitcoins. But you can always deposit or withdraw instantly using Mt. Gox redeemable codes."

(emphasis mine)

"We do not deliver actual bitcoins". Well, it's fair to assume then, that you deliver bitcoins via Mt. Gox redeemable codes, right? You even state this in the sentence that follows.

If this was intentionally misleading, I consider this a ripoff. I was forced to trade my precious BTC for USD to get my funds out, then trade them back on mtgox at a loss.

Thoughts?

[What happened?]

First: thanks to phantomcircuit and jarpiain for helping me out with #mtgox irc chatlogs!


What happened?

On September 11th,  2011, some weird trades showed up on MtGox' ticker. They seemingly executed way out of spread, as can still be seen here: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5zig5-minzvztgSzm1g10zm2g25


MtGox' explanation

MtGox' explanation (https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20433652-resolved-outage-11804-unexecuted-trades) talks about possibly compromised accounts in relation to the CosbyCoin-hack on this forum.

As a result of this event, some of the Bitcoin Forum users` accounts may have been compromised.  Subsequently, some of the information have been used to conduct unauthorized orders, resulting in unusually high trade activities. 

The Press Release, if I may call it that, then goes on to talk about these "unusual activities" and says that staff has nullified these trades. It then educates us users about password security and states

Please be advised that trades can now be conducted in full confidence.

This explanation is not satisfactory for me.

So I came up with a highly speculative explanation myself.


What I speculate really happened

I'm largely basing my speculation on things that were said in #mtgox irc channel and quoting from that, not sure about the timezones in the quotes, since the logs are from different sources.

9/11 - 18:32 <MagicalTux> molecular, I blocked ~2000 accounts created most likely for the purpose of killing bitcoin on 9/11

Now let me introduce you to a bug that was found Aug 14th 2011 (short description: orders (can) get temporarily disabled when being partly filled):

01:15 < molecular> weird, the following order did not get filled: 9bd49edb-2073-44e3-8f68-34971a1a4d45  bid    4.835     9.73    - 1 open, although the price just dropped to 9.72 by this trade: 00:14:00    6.93168 for   9.72    ask
01:15 < molecular> that order has existed for a whle
01:17 <@neofutur> an older order could have been filled before
01:17 < molecular> at what price?
01:18 < molecular> price dropped from 9.8 to 9.72 and my order at 9.73 did not get filled
01:19 < molecular> part of it got filled before:  00:10:12    5.165   for   9.73    ask
 
01:24 < deego> The only explanation I could think of is a queuing issue: If your older, though pre-existing to it, was in fact newer to the executing engine - that is, the engine executes them in the order they arrive to it. And, the engine saw a 9.72 first, and your 9.73 arrived later to the engine.
01:25 < molecular> but 9.73 is higher than 9.72, it surely should fill higher bids first, right?
01:25 < molecular> deego, that bid existed for at least 10 minutes
01:26 < deego> I see.

01:27 < molecular> deego, also it was partly filled before:  "00:10:12    5.165   for   9.73    ask"
01:27 < deego> ^ Ah.
01:27 < molecular> maybe... ah!
01:27 < molecular> I think I have an explanation:
01:27 < molecular> maybe when an order is partly filled, a new one is created in "pending" status
01:27 < deego> heh, just what I was thinking
01:28 < molecular> then the other bid at 9.72 got filled while my order was still pending
01:28 < deego> and, it's requeued..
01:28 < molecular> so an order goes to pending when part of it is filled...? that shouldn't be the case and would be a bug, right?
01:28 < deego> shouldn't it ideally retain its position in the que, somehow?
01:29 < molecular> the position in the queue is secondary. it should, however, stay in status "open" alle the time (while I don't know exactly what that means)
01:29 < deego> IIUC, Pending should be equivalent to: "waiting to get queued."
01:30 < molecular> deego, I don't know any details of the trade matching engine... but I think we might've figured out what's happening roughly
01:30 < deego> agreed.
01:36 < deego> I think, in principle, the requeuing should be considered a bug - because then I can, in principle,  negate others' orders - I can move anyone's orders "into the future" by filling 0.001% of them; and I can get my own fill at the currently lower price.

So far for the bug and possible analysis of how it works.

Now deego and me come up with some evil ways to exploit this bug:

01:38 < molecular> if you put your order at the same price, you jump the queue
01:39 < molecular> even worse: you can even buy at a lower price if you time it just right. should be very hard to do, but theoretically possible, because it takes some time to requeue the "disabled" order
01:39 < deego> or ever lower price: If I negate every order at 9.73 (like yours), so that the first thing engine sees is 9.72..
01:39 < deego> exactly.
01:39 < molecular> yeah
01:40 < molecular> wow, didn't think of doing it to multiple orders successively

And this is exactly what I think happened: this bug got exploitet by use of a botnet (or similar) creating 2000 accounts on mtgox and "disabling" orders successively in order to get an order filled way out of spread.

MtGox then hastily nullified these orders and tried to calm people down talking about compromised accounts and CosbyCoin, maybe in order to avoid having to shut down trading to fix the bug.


Why am I publishing these wild speculations?

While this speculation might be accurate to some extent, I don't think it is.

By publishing this, however, I hope to put some more pressure on MtGox to explain what happened on 9/11 in more detail, because I think this should be made transparent.


Why does MtGox not transparently publish more detailed information?

There might be legitimate reasons not to do this at this point. In case there are, I apologize to MtGox for trying to put pressure on them to do so.

Following excerpt might shed some light on this (this was on September 12th):

[09:05:50] <molecular> What the hell? Just read: https://support.mtgox.com/home. no mention of a bug or anything. How can a user with a compromised account make deals much higher/lower than the market? No explanation for that is given, why not?
[09:06:59] <MagicalTux> molecular: it's a known bug, we are still tracking it
[09:07:19] <molecular> ok, but why try to "cover it up" talking about compromized accounts?
[09:07:36] <MagicalTux> because right now to cause this bug to happen, you need to trade unholy amounts of coins
[09:07:58] <phantomcircuit> wat
[09:08:13] <molecular> Hmm, ok. Still: why not explain that in the news-release?
[09:08:20] <MagicalTux> more exactly, you need to have your large trades be disabled in the system
[09:08:57] <molecular> what does that mean? "have large trades disabled"?
[09:08:58] <MagicalTux> molecular: because most people wouldn't understand what this means. Also we cannot put too much info in the public until we finish our declarations to the MET

So maybe the "legitimate reason" is that there are some ongoing investigations and MtGox is not allowed to give us info.

Maybe it's just that he doesn't want to, using "people wouldn't understand" as an excuse.

What do you guys think?

Looking at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ I'm not seeing any signs of massive mining power outflux.

Many predicted a lot of miners would leave around $5, some quitting completely, some resorting to buying BTC at the lower prices.

It doesn't seem to me any of this is happening (yet?). The price has been around $5 for 2 days now.

Thoughts?

[MysteryMiner]

While playing with some queries about coin age using bitcoin-abe (thanks John Toby) for this thread Satoshi Nakamoto - 1,5 million Bitcoins - We need answers, I noticed a weird spike of "non-moved coins" in calendar week 9 of year 2011:

like this? even 0.01 BTC help continue cool queries/charts: 1SQL2R5ijCn2ZiBG8aDYpCiecNPuxzMJJ

Then someone popped into my mind (drumroll): the MysteryMiner!

Remember him? If this was before your time, here's a little explanation: In the beginning of March 2011, a huge increase in hashrate happened, it didn't last very long (about a week?) If I remember correctly, it was determined the blocks came from a single ip, not sure, though. Someone on #bitcoin-dev coined the name "mysteryminer" for the person/group behind that.

• Is this a coincidence?
• If so: Why else the extreme spike in "kept coins" in week 9?
• If not: Did MM keep all these coins througout the price rallying to $30?
• If so, why?
• Did he loose them?

Any explanation is welcome ^^

EDIT: Any speculation also welcome

[no wallet]

I'm sure a lot of you know of this, but let me explain a method for storing your savings that is quite secure and hard to screw up:

The idea is to use no wallet. All you need to "store" bitcoins is an address. To use these coins, you need the associated private key.

So why not do away with all the wallet.dat securing and fiddling with swapping wallets, securely deleting plaintext versions and all that and just generate a key using vanitygen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0)?

#> ./vanitygen 1
Address: 1JBhAaDAFHRuUjyVrjte6XwSwXpTmGsCSt
Privkey: 5HyBZhJu2UgjA2nUVSF9infL8KMEeCgSguEz8FXoP2FZGG76NiW

Now simply send your savings to that Address (1JBhAaDAFHRuUjyVrjte6XwSwXpTmGsCSt)

All you need to store is the Privkey (5HyBZhJu2UgjA2nUVSF9infL8KMEeCgSguEz8FXoP2FZGG76NiW). You need to do this securely, of course (print it out, write down, encrypt and mail to friends, put on super-secret usb-drive, or use some other method)

Now when you want to get at your savings later (or verify it's working), you can import the key into any wallet.dat using either the importprivkey rpc command of the bitcoin client (currently still sipa:showwallet patch necessary) or using pywallet.

Additional measure for enhanced security: generate the address(es) on a secure machine with no network connection, known to be non-infiltrated.

Any problems with that approach?

I just remebered all the people warning that the bitcoin bubble would burst and wondered what's up with that.

What do you think? (don't be fooled, above chart has log scale)

Hi,

I will be travelling to Korea for vacation in Mid-September. I'm looking to buy local currency for bitcoin. Buying local currency for bitcoin would be awesome for travellers.

Any korean bitcoiners?

cheers,
molecular

[https://github.com/molecular/traidor]

I made a simple trading client for the mtgox trading api a while back: https://github.com/molecular/traidor

I gave it an overhaul and I thought I'd share it, maybe someone likes it. Features:

• display market depth and recent trades
• display mtgox balances (BTC, USD)
• manage own orders (view, buy, sell, cancel)

To get started, first checkout the code:

#> git clone git://github.com/molecular/traidor.git
#> cd traidor

then prepare config-file and start traidor:

#> cp traidor.conf.sample traidor.conf
#> edit traidor.conf
#> python traidor.py

The most important commands:

-----------command-------------	----------action------------
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx	xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
a	toggle auto-update on/off
b <amount> <price>	enter order to buy <amount> btc at <price>
s <amount> <price>	enter order to sell <amount> btc at <price>
o	view your order book
d <index>	delete order at <index> from orderbook

Note: you must use a decimal point (".") when entering the <price> of an order. If you dont, <price> is interpreted as an index in the depth table (1st column "[IDX]") and the order is placed just above/below the price at that index.

^{If you use and like it, consider a small donation to 1Ct1vCN6idU1hKrRcmR96G4NgAgrswPiCn}

Just thought I'd let people know that http://tradebitcoin.com is back in working condition. It's a google mashup you can use to find local bitcoin exchangers.

I've been pegging the author for a while and he just got the problems fixed in 15 minutes .

Should the map not show on first load, try shift-reloading.


I know the "exchange crisis" is over for now, but as a last resort, having local people to meet and exchange local currency for bitcoins or vice-versa still seems important to me.

I've entered myself a while back and 4 people contacted me via skype. I sold bitcoins to two of them. It was fun (meet at starbucks, send coins using ssh through starbucks wifi, cash on table).

One cool thing (in my view) of trading "cash 4 cash" locally in real life is that it's compeletely invisible to outsiders, because both transactions are pseudonymous/anonymous to the outside and only the trading parties know of the exchange even happening.

So, if you like, go ahead and enter your info on the site or find someone to trade with if you want to buy/sell some BTC.

verstehe ich was falsch oder hat hier einer vom anderen abgeschrieben:

http://www.tageblatt.lu/wirtschaft/story/18120071 (Quelle: angeblich dpa)

und

http://www.20min.ch/finance/news/story/Der-gefaehrliche-Cyber-Dollar-15423297 (Autor angeblich Gérard Moinat)

sind fast identisch (bis auf Absatz über schweizer Stromkosten)

oder wie läuft das denn mit dpa? hat der Gérard Moinat sein Ding über dpa laufen lassen? Weiss einer wie das tickt?

[Thread is temporarily used for Bitcoin Meetup during 29C3 27th thru 30th December 2012]

Thread is temporarily used for Bitcoin Meetup during 29C3 27th thru 30th December 2012

Wer in Hamburg wohnt und Lust hat, sich mal mit anderen Bitcoinern zwan- und planlos in 'ner Kneipe zu treffen, hier die Infos zum ersten Treffen:

• Ort: Grüner Jäger, Hamburg
• Zeit: 12.6.2011, 19:00

Anmeldung ist nicht nötig, einfach kommen und nach einem Tisch mit Nerds suchen, bis denn.

I've been a long-time critic of the dictum, that economies must always grow (and I'm not alone).

I think this paradigm is a remnant of older ages, when the spanish, portugese, british and whoever where in the process of colonializing the world and a little younger times, when nation-state's economies started competing on a global scale.

Taking a global view, an ever-growing economy cannot work in the long run because of earth's limited resources. I actually think we (at least the "western" people) should scale our consumption (and therefore our non-exporting economies?) down. I think if we don't, this will bite us in the ass big time some day. Also: we are still to a certain extent a role-model for people in developing countries... imagine all the world having energy and resource consumption of a US citizen => doesn't work.

Do we really need all the consumer products we buy en masse each day and throw away the next? Does it make us happier? I'm seeing many articles about studies suggesting otherwise.

So why am I telling you this?

Because I think it's a very nice answer to the many people saying "a deflationary currency cannot work as the main global currency, because it just wont support economic growth".

Is it (a good answer)?

[Bitcoin als Währung]

Hi Leute,

Es wäre nett zu wissen wie das Finanzamt zu Bitcoins steht, bzw. wie Bitcoins im deutschen Steuerrecht behandelt werden.

Wenn Bitcoin als Währung betrachtet wird und man sich gegen EUR bitcoins gekauft hat, dann wird bestimmt Kapitalertragssteuer fällig wenn man die Gewinne "realisiert", richtig?

Allerdings, wenn Bitcoin eine Währung sein sollte, was ist dann mining? Herstellung von Geldnoten?

Bitcoin als Rohstoff: Wenn ich eine "Bergbauoperation" gestartet habe, und diese Bitcoins (Rohstoff) abwirft, dann muss sicherlich nach Veräusserung der Erlös als Gewinn versteuert werden (EkSt), nicht wahr?

Muss ich dann beim Verkauf der Bitcoins etwa Märchensteuer abführen?

Bleibt in beiden Fällen die Frage: was ist mit Bitcoins, welche ich nicht veräussere sondern beispielsweise gegen Waren eintausche oder einfach behalte? Muss ich die in den Büchern führen und in EUR bewerten?

Ich denke, sich in einem reinen Bitcoin-Kreislauf zu bewegen ist momentan die beste Lösung, allerdings bewegt man sich bei völligem verschweigen seines Bitcoin-Bestandes meiner Meinung nach evtl. in einer rechtlichen Grauzone? Ausserdem möchte man ja evtl. mal ein paar Euros haben. Wenn das Finanzamt dann auf dem Konto ne Überweisung von einer dubiosen finnischen Firma sieht, dann werden die garantiert nachfragen, ob das wohl ein Gewinn sein könnte.

Hat hier jemand Ahnung? Kennt jemand nen Steuerberater oder sonst jemanden der sich auskennt und das evtl. beurteilen könnte?

Couple days ago, I had the idea to make BitPoll, so I hacked up a prototype (http://bitpoll.dyndns.org), here's a screenshot:

BitPoll combines donations with voting.

The idea is that anyone can cast a poll by making a list of poll items that can be voted for by transferring Bitcoins to the given address. Usually the poll creator will generate fresh addresses for each of the items.

BitPoll uses blockexplorer to determine the amount of Bitcoins that have been transferred to each poll item's address. The poll items each have a desired amount, when the total balance of an item reaches 100% of this amount, that item is considered to be fullfilled and the address is not shown any more.

Currenlty polls stay open indefinitely. I plan to implement different modes to define when a poll is considered to be finished (winner takes it all, close idividual items, ...)

Tell me what you think, or even donate on the site if you like the idea ;)

EDIT: changed urls from https to http

[Problem is this: after running bitoind for a while, I see "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC, data: None" messages on the miner.]

I'm describing the problem here from my personal perspective, bitcoind running on my desktop, which has a slow atom cpu and is frequently under various other load conditions), poclbm running on dedicated miner with a 5970.

Problem is this: after running bitoind for a while, I see "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC, data: None" messages on the miner. The freuqency of these increases over time (presumably with size of bitcoind's transaction cache). Getwork interval is at 5s.

It has been suggested to used git-version with -limitfreerelay=1. I tried that and it might have taken some pressure, but the problem still occurs.

After a couple of hours my miner doesn't do any work any more, because getwork continuously fails.

I'm quoting from #bitcoin-dev to elaborate the problem and possible workarounds and/or solutions:

<molecular> ArtForz, am running into slight getwork troubles at 66 tx cache size already? does that make sense?
<ArtForz> nope
<tcatm> molecular: what's the trouble? getwork taking long time to return?
<ArtForz> do you have a really slow disk or high I/O load?
<molecular> yes
<molecular> getwork takes several seconds
<molecular> at some point it takes longer the my getwork interval (currently 5s)
<molecular> I have slowish cpu (atom)
<ArtForz> yeah, that might do it
<molecular> which is also under load from other shit since it's my desktop

this made sense to me, ArtForz kept analysing:

<ArtForz> can you check if it's actually pegging the CPU?
<ArtForz> because here it seemed to be more I/O than CPU bound
<molecular> I can't see it using cpu in htop. trying to verify that
<molecular> there's some iotop app? what's it called?
<ArtForz> iotop ?

I'm emerging iotop on my desktop, while the chatter continues:

<ArtForz> what stalls getwork is CreateNewBlock
<ArtForz> and I suspect *that* is more I/O than cpu bound
<ArtForz> I don't really know why though, it doesnt *look* like it does lots of I/O
<molecular> CreateNewBlock is in O(n) with n == <number of tx in cache>?
<ArtForz> yes
<molecular> ArtForz, why do you think IO might be the problem?
<molecular> it's all in RAM

<ArtForz> yes, it does a fopen/fseek/fread/fclose for blk0001.dat
<tcatm> so that's probably what slows it down
<ArtForz> (if the input is from a tx thats already in a block)
<ArtForz> and it does a lookup in blkindex DB for every call, too
<molecular> "if (!txPrev.ReadFromDisk(txdb, txin.prevout, txindex))" <- you mean this, tcatm?
<tcatm> molecular: yep
<ArtForz> yeah, that sounds like it might cause slowdowns, especially if you dont have enough free memory to keep blk0001 cached
<tcatm> how does that code find the transaction in blk0001.dat? is there an index for txhash -> blkhash?
<ArtForz> yes
<ArtForz> blkindex.dat for txhash->offset

<ArtForz> urrr... why the F are we not caching that stuff?
<molecular> slush, workaround will relieve the pain, but in the end we should fix stuff in bitcoin
<ArtForz> it's not like tx can magically appear in blocks while no new block comes along
<molecular> I think ArtForz might've just identified the root of the problem?
<ArtForz> could be...
<ArtForz> can't think of a elegant way to work around it though
<ArtForz> thats... really weird

<ArtForz> well, we do 2 things really with that prev tx
<ArtForz> 1. check if it's in a block (can be cached between block updates)
<ArtForz> 2. if it is, get the value of the output referred to (same thing)

I'm stopping here and backposting link to #bitcoin-dev...

I wrote a little bash a while back, because I'm on a dynamic ip connection and bitcoin doesn't behave so nicely with changing IPs. (see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues#issue/48 for more info (while the gui still displays connections, the node may in fact be disconnected)).
Since I still wanted to mine solo, I wrote this script.

I've been using it for 6 weeks now, have been mining solo using it for 2 weeks now without problem and I thought it's ripe for sharing:

http://pastebin.com/tFJwFwns

It works by comparing an "official blockcount" (e.g. from blockexplorer.com) with the local one from rpc interface.

To use it, you should check/edit some variables at the beginning of the script: BITCOIN_BIN, PING_HOST and OFFICIAL_URL
Then just go ahead and run it.
If you want, you can also adjust some timing variables.

Feedback is welcome, also symbolic (0.01 BTC or so) donations to the address in my signature are of course appreciated and also good for your karma