[Deleted post]

Post written in a sarcastic and negative state of mind and was encouraging unproductive dialog. Please move along to another thread that is likely to be more productive.

(note: this is not likely on the main litecoin app, but I think it is on the Scrypt Miner)

So I haven't opened up my bitcoin client in about 2 weeks, and I am on a Mac.

On may 8th I decide to try my hand at litecoin mining.

I installed the normal litecoin app:
https://github.com/downloads/litecoin-project/litecoin/litecoin-0.6.3c-macosx.dmg
but that didn't start mining for me (turns out I just needed to tweak some settings).

I also installed this:
https://github.com/downloads/litecoin-project/litecoin/Scrypt%20Miner%20GUI%20-%20OSX.zip
Which is Scrypt miner.

Both of these are in the download links on the litecoin website.

On may 10th, all of my bitcoins were transfered out of my wallet in this transaction
761ca847529a3087c5d71b24bd93ab242d2a7b64dd96522204cc10d233aeb0fa

Which appears to have ended up at this address
http://blockexplorer.com/address/14j73fVVomPRpfzxb9DmYQQy7sFZj626a8

Which has about $50000 worth of bitcoins on it.

Now it it totally possible that that this wasn't a trojan horse. I do backup my unencrypted wallet in dropbox, and maybe someone in dropbox has compromised it (happened in linode before).

I don't see any other practical ways I was attacked, but the timing with the litecoin thing seems way too close for me, and it could have been the scrypt miner that had the backdoor in it. The miner app crashed immediately after I ran it.

If anyone has the capabilities to test this, it would be really great for the community. I think the best test would be for someone to run the the app on a test machine and see if it makes any network requests that transfer private keys from a wallet. I am out about 20 bitcoins (or about $2000), which totally sucks for me, but it looks like this hacker is raking in a lot more than my little score.

If anyone wants to toss some replacement bitcoins my way, this address is secure:
1F7qFmjtYKCC9joH5FmeALHPNJKLscPLGZ

Thanks,
Rob

There has been a few alternate currencies created so far using the bitcoin protocol. Are there any guides geared toward programmers as to how to create one?

The bitcoin wiki makes it so that to edit content you pay a small fee in bitcoins. I think that would be a great way of confirming accounts. Just make it pay to play (but only a little amount).

This will make it so everyone on this forum has had actual bitcoins in their hands at one point and no one will be talking when they don't know anything. Plus the newbie section will no longer have junk posts.

The price can be something like $1 or $0.5 converted to bitcoins. This will easily support the hosting of the site.

An alternative would make it so it costs you $0.001 (in bitcoins of course) to buy a credit, and credits are spent to post to a thread (5 credits), vote up a thread (1 credits), or post a reply to a thread (2 credits).

http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Bitcoin-Group/

We will be having our next meeting this sunday at a cafe that you can pay for things using bitcoin. We have been having gatherings of 6-20 people every couple weeks, and I set this up to organize them better.

Does anyone have a monthly chart of the USD value of NMC for the last two years? I am curious to see how well it is trending.

So I am looking into what would be required for a simple brain wallet passphrase generator that produced simple to remember passphrases, but ones that would not be able to be feasibly cracked within one's lifetime.

This comic was the starting point for me:



and someone created a generator here:
http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator

Looking at this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68930.0
it is considered that the number of possible bitcoin addresses is 2^96 or 8e28 (8x10^28).

This passphrase generator does 1949^4 = 1.4e13.

If a gigahash is 10^9 hashes per second, than 1 gigahash should be able to generate every possible hash of this in 1.4e4 seconds (or roughly 4 hours).

If I use something like this:
http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/word-list-100000-official-crossword-words-excel-readable
it comes to about 3171 years for a machine producing 1 gigahash per second. (This would have 10^20 different 4 word combinations)

Assumptions made:
* Checking the blockchain for an address match takes no time (good indexing required to make this fast)
* The hashing hardware that is used to solve bitcoin blocks will generate priv/pub keypairs just as fast
(This second one I am very unsure of)

So to me it seems that using a really basic dictionary of about 2000 words does not produce the security required for this type of environment assuming a 4 word passphrase. A ~100000 word dictionary does produce the needed complexity using today's hardware.

Anyone with a better grasp of this stuff want to take a look and see if I am wildly off?

I am looking to develop some sites that would end up relying on the APIs provided on blockexplorer.com or blockchain.info.

Specifically, I will need access to their services to get transactions related to specific addresses.

Rather than relying on their services though, I would like to have my own internal site that does the same - or just a version of bitcoind that has indexed all addresses and will allow me to query for the raw transactions for any address stored in the blockchain.

Does anyone know how these sites set up a system to arbitrarily query different addresses? Does anyone know of an open source build of something that I can use to reach what I am looking for?

Heck, a tool that would be able to scan the blk data files of bitcoind and dump results into mysql would even work.

It looks like a http://printcoins.com bill has been through quite a bit and is up on ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ten-10-Bitcoins-Physical-Authentic-Bitcoin-Check-10-BTC-Fast-Shipping-/111017984345?pt=US_World_Coins&hash=item19d9300159

Scanning the QR code, it looks like it never was funded, but the ad says it will be funded before shipping.

This is meant as a simple message to send to merchants to introduce the concept of bitcoins to them and provide information on how to get setup. If you see any ways to improve this message, feel free to edit it here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Email_pitch_to_merchants

This was originally written to convince a person who sells alternative medicine, and I left that text in as an example. It should be modified to suit your target audience.


------


You might want to consider Bitcoin as a payment option for your website. It is a decentralized digital currency.

The video here helps explain how it works:

http://www.weusecoins.com/

If you chose to accept bitcoins on your site, you can use this as a payment processor:

https://bitpay.com/

and they automatically convert bitcoins into USD and deposit in your bank account. There are other payment processors on this page:

http://www.weusecoins.com/merchant-tools.php

The benefit to your business is that there are a lot of people with bitcoins that like to support businesses that use bitcoins. This means basically tapping into a niche market of people that are into a fringe alternate currency that might also be open to alternative medical products. [NOTE: modify the message here to relate to whatever the business is]

If you do start accepting them, let me know, and provide me a little press release. I will make sure it ends up on the bitcoin forums.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. And in case you are wondering, I am not tied to any of the businesses or services listed above. I am just an advocate of bitcoin, and I like to see businesses accepting them.

Someone wrote me about a bill they printed from http://print.printcoins.com, and couldn't recover their private key from it. I figured I would post it here since so many people are printing these bills now, and it might become a common problem.

Hi,
Hate to be a bother,
Have downloaded source and gotten help getting it setup.
now i've done something stupid,
loaded a bill, then smeared the #@$#$%ing private key QR (on a ronpaul note with no manual priv key in human chars)

Is there a way i can retrieve it, or a location where the pdf may be saved in the files somewhere?

Thank you much for any help you can give,
Byron

I am sorry to say that the code does not store any data, so there is no way to recover the private key from the server. If you downloaded a PDF and printed your bills from that, then you can always go back to the pdf, and just scan the QR from that. Maybe check browser caches, trash, etc. (These all should be cleared after print bills, but if you didn't, they are good places to look)

If all that fails, you can photocopy or scan your bill and maybe reconstruct the qr code by either using a pen to color in the qr code squares or use the scanned image in photoshop to manually try and fix it by eye. QR codes have error checking built in, so if you can get about 75% of the pattern reconstructed, you might be able to recover the private key.

Finally if all else fails, at least you can take solace in the fact that you increased the value of everyone else's bitcoins.

In the future, cotton paper does a pretty good job of holding printer ink, even in the wash. You can make this even tougher by putting scotch tape or clear packaging tape on the private key of the bill (both sides of the paper).

----

If anyone wants to order printcoin.com bills, note that both sides have a protective tamper evident hologram who's glue seems to hold up very well in the wash.  They are printed on 32lb 100% cotton paper for durability.

On the newbie forum there was a thread about how to safely stash bitcoins for long term storage. I wrote a response, and realized that hoarding is a big deal for bitcoin users, and this might be worth its own thread:

----
Simplest way to stash bitcoin - don't do it!

Bitcoins are ment to be spent! All this hoarding does nothing for the bitcoin economy.

If everyone just stashed bitcoins away forever, do you know what bitcoins would be worth once you did take them out again - squat.

You may be dead in 10 years - and all that investment in bitcoin will vanish with your squishy brain wallet.

Buy some alpaca socks and enjoy your bitcoins today.

One day, when a super-quantum computer cracks the encryption to all of the bitcoin addresses in 5 minutes, and everyone cries about their lost coins, you will have warm and comfy feet.

This advise applies to hoarding of all monies - including precious metals (I heard that there is enough gold in the earth's core to cover the earth with 1 meter deep of gold (probably exaggeration)).

 Happiness is the only thing you should hoard.

I am thinking that it should be implemented in such a way that it would respond in the same ways as the bitcoind interface so that web services would use the same libraries for accessing them. I would drop the account feature though as it doesn't seem needed.

Top commands that need to be created:

getbalance, getnewaddress, getreceivedbyaddress, sendmany, settxfee

ideally this would all be done in a simple class that others could add too. minconf needs to be implemented as well since the use case of this is web services. The JSON-RPC system should be set up by default to be locally accessible only, and basic password security to prevent being hacked.

If anyone has the chops to just build it themselves, I am putting up a 5 BTC bounty on the first to complete a fully working version. The project should be open source so that the community can continue to grow it.

Feel free to ask any questions before developing if what I wrote needs clarification.

This bounty expires after 30 days.

If multiple people work on it, just have a lead that can divide up the bounty appropriately.

Anyone else want to kick into this bounty?

Bounty Balance:
RobKohr: 5BTC
....

----------------
5 BTC

Ok, so I have no idea what is going on, but who is this pirate guy and what did he do? Also, why is it so important?

Bitcoind is a hog on resources - memory, hard disk, and cpu. Especially if you are running on a little vps.

Does anyone have another suggestion as to something they actually use as an alternative to this.

I am looking for something:
* That can be easily interfaced with php
* doesn't require much if anything of the entire blockchain to be downloaded (something under 50 Meg would be great)
* Will not suck up much more memory than my apache server.
* Can still create new keys for itself and doesn't rely on some outside server to hold my private keys.
* Is easily set up from the command line in linux.
* Is fast and responsive.
* Is not something someone abandoned development on long ago.

I followed these instructions to install bitcoind on a debian linux box:

http://bealers.com/2012/01/installing-bitcoin-on-debian-squeeze/

And this ended up being version 0.3.24 of bitcoind. Is bitcoin on debian that far behind the main release of bitcoin, or is it just that bitcoind by itself is at a different version number than bitcoin-qt?

Does bitaddress.org use the same method to create a brain wallet as electrum (if you provide the same seed to both, do you get the same addresses?)

Also, I was considering modifying bitaddress's brain wallet generation function to create an arbitrary sized wallet rather than a single address.

So brainWallet(seed) -> address right now

I was considering doing something like:
brainWallet(seed + '2') -> address2
brainWallet(seed + '3') -> address3
brainWallet(seed + '4') -> address4
...
brainWallet(seed + 'n') -> addressn

To generate any number of addresses based on a seed. You would be able to set the starting index as well as the number of addresses you would like. The starting index is so that you can use the batches of addresses on different services that you run, but still have a single brain wallet.

Does anyone see a problem with the above scheme? Does anyone know how electrum does it?

I think there should be a wanted section in the marketplace. I want something that no one is currently offering, and I don't see anywhere to put that type of post.

I am looking for a very small bitcoin sticker for my cell phone. I plan on sticking it on the corner of my phone so people see it when I am talking on the phone. I'll pay $1 (in mtgox price in bitcoins) for you to get it to me.

You can now print your own bitcoin bills similar to PrintCoins.com bills:



Simply go to http://print.printcoins.com

The bills come out in PDF form so that they can be printed and will match up in size to USA dollars, and have cut marks on them for easy cutting.

The source code is also available so you can run the code yourself, and of course if you want to improve the bills in any way, feel free to submit changes to the github repository.