Yeah, the only people who can be considered as legit as possible is jgarzik, gmaxwell, me, gavin, and if satoshi ever returns to us in mortal form, him.
ROFL, you wish. You had your 5 minutes of fame once up on a time, but you dont rank in there at all when it comes to credibility. For me you have none. Zero. Nada. With calling BFL a scam outright, he has lost all credibility as soon as they ship. Not to mention loosing 99% of investors money while managing DMC on GLBSE. Lol, didn't hear about that one. Because it never happened. I already paid back half of what investors already invested. What Puppet (aka nefario's puppet) is not saying is nefario tried to steal DMC's assets by putting up a fake shareholder vote to remove me as CEO of the company, which nefario was then outvoted 9 to 1, keeping me as the CEO. I suspect nefario also knew many farms were selling mining bonds that were not backed by any hardware, all the while claiming he investigated all companies to make sure they were legit. Many people trusted him, and many people were burned by his actions. To claim I only had 5 minutes of fame is pretty lame. I continually contribute to the Bitcoin community as often as I can, and I've been here since the beginning. I claim BFL is a scam because they continually call investors 'customers' and investments 'pre-orders', it does not make a difference if they ship or not. By their claims, they were the first to start working on AISCs (a year before anyone else), yet they have not shipped a product. I am not the only person on this forums who believes there is a low chance of them EVER shipping. Oh, and by the way, DMC is an investor of ASICMINER. Ok, fair enough, and I appreciate you defending yourself and setting the record straight. Nefario did way worse than you, this is for certain. Are you paying back the rest? I just don't like you calling BFL a scam. They aren't a scam if they deliver in the end, they are a scam if they do not. All of the ASIC companies (with exception of ASICMiner) took preorders, and all of them called their preorder customers customers. It doesn't matter if that doesn't fit your definition of a customer - everyone who preordered ASICs are customers. |
|
|
|
|
I tried to find a blockchain lookup alternative... blockexplorer is virtually useless now since most queries just time out. Coinbase is a decent one to use in a pinch though.
|
|
|
|
UPDATE Thank you to all the beta testers and users that helped us improve our site experience, we are still working in some of the improvements of the site, but feel free to leave us feedback. Based on the latest increased of the BTC price, we have decided to lower the ticket price to 0.01 BTC. Everything will be the same, so players will have more fun, for way less money! And pools are incredible high for a price of 0.01 BTC! With these changes with only 1 BTC players will have 110 plays, almost a day of playing! Grand Opening Bonus Tickets & High Rollers Discounts were adjusted accordingly. Pool retain was increased to 50%. Players are still able to choose the numbers in the same way as before, just pick your lucky numbers on decimals in the transaction. 0.01 BTC per ticket? But with the same prizes? Nice! |
|
|
|
Just today I started playing around with Armory (offline and online wallets) and at first glance it seems pretty impressive.
It's great software, I just hate the launch times. First launching the QT client and waiting for that to load, then waiting for Armory to load on top of it... You must not be very concerned about security if a couple of minutes of load time inconveniences you. I used to be worried about keeping my Bitcoins safe, and being able to safely use them at the same time. Since I started using Armory it's no longer a concern. I keep multiple wallets with multiple levels of security and it works wonderfully. Put what you might spend on a more convenient wallet, put the rest in deep savings, offline only. Fund the spending wallet as needed with offline transfers. I keep digital wallet backups in multiple physical locations to protect against disaster. I do value convenience highly. I do not currently have a large BTC balance, but if that changes in the future, I will obviously put more weight into the most secure solutions. I don't really have any spare computers that don't touch the web... that's what you're talking about, right? A spare machine that is always offline, and that you use with armory and a USB key to sign transactions? Maybe I should build one out of spare parts... how much ram is required for an offline only machine? |
|
|
|
Hi everyone,
This was not an attempt to deceive, this is just a segmentation issue. We have a social team who is responsible for handling all of our social media efforts, while I am just the web analytics guy who is also a Bitcoin enthusiast. I'm not in sales, and the series is free, which I tried to emphasize, so I didn't mean any harm.
I knew that this link was going to go out on the official channels on Twitter, FB, and reddit, but I was afraid that it wouldn't hit the places I personally thought that it would be most valuable, in these threads where I tend to be.
I thought that from my posts it was clear that I was involved, but I could have done a better job of making that clear at the beginning, which also would have made it obvious that my posts here were in only a semi-official capacity as a guy who loves Bitcoin and is excited that his company does too.
This is why we have people who do this professionally, and I shouldn't have stepped on their toes, but I assure you that I just wanted to make sure more people saw that we had a free Bitcoin video series.
Mea culpa, but I would still love to see feedback on the actual video content.
Please share how your first post made it "clear that [you] were involved"? Because I fail to see it. Stop beating around the bush. Just admit that you screwed up. This WAS an attempt to deceive (you were trying to make us believe that you were unaffiliated with the content you were advertising) - you attempted to share the videos as a third party when you were not. I am very willing to forgive and forget when the person who screwed up is willing to admit their mistake. But when you refuse to admit your mistake, it just makes you look bad and digs you a deeper hole. |
|
|
|
I tried to get past this, but it just bugs me...
Why the facade?
This being the bitcoin forums where potentially a majority of accounts are sockpuppets of other users, it might be a better question to ask "Why are you so bad at this facade?" instead. Everyone does it. True. I'm still gullible/naive enough to believe that most people don't do self-promotions without labeling them as such. |
|
|
|
I tried to get past this, but it just bugs me... Not sure if this is the right place to put this, but... CBT Nuggets (IT Training video company), has made a series of videos about Bitcoin! There are a bunch up already, and more on the way. I have only watched the first couple, but they are pretty in-depth and cover a wide range of useful topics. http://ittraining.cbtnuggets.com/bitcoin_training/Best part, is that they are free (normally their content is only available with subscription). There is an ask for bitcoin donations, but it looks like that's more a way to measure interest in making more videos in the series.It's a great introduction for new users, and even though I have actually learned some things, I feel like this is one of the best places to start someone who is interested in learning about BTC. How do we use this as a resource for newbies? gweedo, what Mac OS/version of flash are you using? It seems to work for most in Chrome on OS X 10.6-8 with flash version 11.5.31.xxx
We may be able to recode so that it will fallback to HTML5, but I have been leaning hard on the dev team for this already, so I can't promise that's at the top of their list...
@franky: That's exactly what we were going for, something that would be informative enough to get past the "what is it?" point and help users get the most out of Bitcoin. Glad you like it, and feel free to share it anywhere you want.
gweedo and others: We are currently adding HTML5 backup and re-encoding the videos so that they should stream in any browser and on mobile devices.
Why the facade? Why start out pretending that you just stumbled across this resource, when in fact it sounds like you are very involved in its publication? Why didn't you start your first post with, "Hey, we've published these videos geared towards new geeks and developers just discovering Bitcoins, check them out and tell us what you think."? Who receives the Bitcoin donations? |
|
|
|
You've got that the wrong way around. Waiting longer helps keep transaction fees down. The last thing you'd want to do is consolidate them before you actually need to consolidate them.
But I thought TX size played a role as well adn that was the major contributing factor in these situations? If you combined many small outputs into a single one (perhaps many times) then the resulting TX based off the consolidated inputs would be smaller. If it is not a size issue then i am mistaken. Three things play a role: - Number of BTC (higher = lower tx fee) - Age of the coins (older = lower tx fee) - TX size (smaller = lower tx fee) I could be wrong - I don't know what the rules are exactly, but I wouldn't think you would want to erase the age of the coins by combining outputs. We really need an easy Bitcoin fee calculator on the web somewhere. |
|
|
|
I would go 0.75 BTC
Got me beat.  |
|
|
|
|
I'll give you 0.5 BTC for it.
|
|
|
|
May I ask how can I "consolidate some outputs"?
By sending yourself some transactions. For example if a bitcoin address has 100 0.001 BTC outputs you could send yourself one 0.1 BTC transaction to combine the 100 outputs into one. The problem is it may end up costing more in transaction fees than the inputs are worth. Would it be possible to implement some sort of warning similar to how git warns you that you need to do a 'git gc'? "WARNING: Your wallet is amassing a large number of small values outputs. You should consolidate them ASAP or it may end up costing more in transaction fees than the inputs are worth." Obviously you would need to indicate that in itself would cost fees, but maybe it would help people from getting too far into the mess? You've got that the wrong way around. Waiting longer helps keep transaction fees down. The last thing you'd want to do is consolidate them before you actually need to consolidate them. |
|
|
|
Yeah, the only people who can be considered as legit as possible is jgarzik, gmaxwell, me, gavin, and if satoshi ever returns to us in mortal form, him.
ROFL, you wish. You had your 5 minutes of fame once up on a time, but you dont rank in there at all when it comes to credibility. For me you have none. Zero. Nada. With calling BFL a scam outright, he has lost all credibility as soon as they ship. Not to mention loosing 99% of investors money while managing DMC on GLBSE. Lol, didn't hear about that one. |
|
|
|
Yeah, the only people who can be considered as legit as possible is jgarzik, gmaxwell, me, gavin, and if satoshi ever returns to us in mortal form, him.
ROFL, you wish. You had your 5 minutes of fame once up on a time, but you dont rank in there at all when it comes to credibility. For me you have none. Zero. Nada. With calling BFL a scam outright, he has lost all credibility as soon as they ship. |
|
|
|
How is the encryption? Are we talking 100's of universes of time to crack an 11-digit PW, or should I go with something even longer?
I wouldn't be worried about the encryption being cracked. I'd be far more concerned with creating a password that won't be cracked. If your eleven digit password is 11111111111, I'd expect it to get cracked. If you use an eleven character password , but only use lowercase characters (such as "mysecurepwd"), I'd still expect it to be cracked. Add in some numbers and symbols, and now you are improving your chances of having a secure password. If you really want it secure, use a completely random set of capital letter, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols/punctuation, and make sure that there aren't any "words". Under those conditions, I'd expect an eleven character password to be beyond any current technology of cracking in your lifetime. Want to be more sure? Make it even longer. Of course, the problem with such a password is it can be difficult to remember it if you haven't used it in a while. This tends to people writing the password down. If you are going to put the password on paper, you might as well consider paper wallets, since either way you are subject to the same risks and benefits. Thanks. The password certainly isn't something that will be cracked by anything but a non-pattern brute-forcer, but it's still short enough to be easily remembered. I feel good about my chances then. Just today I started playing around with Armory (offline and online wallets) and at first glance it seems pretty impressive.
Disclaimer: I am not exactly a technophobe, but compared to most others on this forum I'm quite close. So if anyone knows of any potential pitfalls with Armory, I'd like to hear about them.
It's great software, I just hate the launch times. First launching the QT client and waiting for that to load, then waiting for Armory to load on top of it... I have a fresh install of Linux Mint on a Laptop that rarely touches the Net.
I use Armory and have a watch only Armory wallet on my Windows 8 machine.
I have multiple backups of my wallet in Truecrytpt containers... some in the cloud, some on a USB stick.
I feel pretty safe.
I wouldn't want bits of paper knocking around unless I had a fireproof safe.
Paper isn't even THAT safe inside a fire safe either. Safer, but an intense house fire without intervention could have it brown to the point of unreadability. |
|
|
|
The government builds a new blockchain and releases it. Suddenly, months of transactions are reversed. People realize the problem, and put a plan into action. A new QT client is released with a hardcoded block checkpoint of the last legitimate block mined. Half of everyone using Bitcoin quickly switches to it, the other half slowly switches over.
The last legitimate block is already gone. But here's the question: If the government could build a new blockchain for months and release it, then they must have more hashpower than the rest of the network combined. What is stopping them from messing with the legitimate blockchain from the hardcoded checkpoint on forward? If the checkpoint is block 240,000, how would a miner know whether block 240,001 came from the government or came from a legitimate miner?
If it's only possible to rollback 288 blocks, I know for sure that my payment is 100% safe after 288 blocks. If they release new blocks into the existing blockchain, there is no reason to don't accept the blocks from them. Ok, new scenario. I'm a new Bitcoin client. I broadcast to the network to gather the blockchain. I get the government IP responding. Suddenly, I have a blockchain that doesn't match anyone else's. It can't be "reversed" so I can get on the proper blockchain because the fork was earlier than 288 blocks ago. What do I do? How do I even know I'm on a different blockchain? |
|
|
|
Exactly this is a non-trivial problem. If it was trivial there would be no 51% attack. Another issue becomes what happens when part of the network believes X chain is correct and part believe Y chain is correct. Of course some people have legit transactions on X and some have legit transactions on Y and there is a double spend by the attacker on both (thus someone always loses) how are you going to convince everyone that "X" (or "Y") is the correct chain and everyone should jump to it.
This doesn't mean it is impossible but if your first thought is "oh this is easy just do ..." then you are likely wrong.
This isn't to protect against double spends. It's for protecting against a government building a new blockchain for months and release it, killing Bitcoin. Ok, let's build off of that scenario. The government builds a new blockchain and releases it. Suddenly, months of transactions are reversed. People realize the problem, and put a plan into action. A new QT client is released with a hardcoded block checkpoint of the last legitimate block mined. Half of everyone using Bitcoin quickly switches to it, the other half slowly switches over. But here's the question: If the government could build a new blockchain for months and release it, then they must have more hashpower than the rest of the network combined. What is stopping them from messing with the legitimate blockchain from the hardcoded checkpoint on forward? If the checkpoint is block 240,000, how would a miner know whether block 240,001 came from the government or came from a legitimate miner? |
|
|
|
I believe the problems with limiting (automatic) rollback to 120 blocks is smaller than the possible problem with a government building a lot of ASICs, making blocks in the dark and release them to the network after a long time. This could kill Bitcoin.
Say you limit rollback. Say about half the network watched chain X unfold and it's the longest chain. And say half the network is on chain Y and would need a rollback past the limit to get to chain X. Isn't it true that both chains are now equally correct by the rules? I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to introduce path dependence to a network that can't even remotely guarantee that all nodes take the same path. I agree, if you ever need a rollback passed a sensible limit, you're kind of screwed. But it seems to me that you're screwed whether or not you limit the rollback. You can now have two perfectly functioning clients with the same information who disagree on the which set of blocks is valid. I would say it makes sense to detect that a very large rollback would normally occur. But as for what you do in that case, I can't see not rolling back as being right. Perhaps prevent further operation until humans can decide what to do. So let's find the sensible limit and use that. If we set the limit at 288 blocks, we would have about 96 hours to merge the network again if there was a 50 / 50 split. I don't think we ever will have a network split larger than 96 hours with exactly 50 / 50 share on both sides. If the network merged again after 96 hours, and one side have made more blocks than the other side, miners would jump to the largest blockchain and the small one will die.Isn't this the very definition of a "rollback"? Miners always jump to the longest chain. If they manually need to jump to the longest chain, if it's more than x number of blocks to roll back, we are much better protected against a hostile attack. How would mining software know which chain is legitimate and which chain is not? How would mining software look at a brand new block and say "oh, hey, this one's not legit!"? That's the whole reason for automatically choosing the longest chain in the first place - it is assumed that the longest chain is the legitimate chain. If not the longest, then how does your mining software determine which chain to mine on? A human will know it. How will a human know it? |
|
|
|
I'd like to bring this thread back to the QT client specifically, rather than focusing on paper wallets. I understand paper wallets have their merits, I would just like to better understand the risks of the QT client and how those risks can be mitigated.
Assuming that you don't have any old unencrypted copies of the wallet.dat sitting around anywhere, it sounds like you already understand it pretty well. To steal/spend your bitcoins a potential thief would need both the encrypted private keys from your wallet.dat file and your password. Electronically this can be done with a key logger. I suppose it would also be possible to install a hidden camera that would record your keyboard to get the password. Someone with that sort of access to your computer would probably be able to physically access your wallet.dat as well. Same thing with looking over your shoulder while you type your password. If we are talking really high tech, I suppose it might be possible to remotely record the sound of you tapping on the keyboard (laser picking up sound vibrations from your window?). Using the rhythm, volume, and timing of your keystrokes, perhaps it would be possible to reduce the number of possible combinations to something that could be brute-forced? If we want to think of this like a spy movie, I suppose someone could sneak in and clean all fingerprints off your keyboard just before you enter the room to send some bitcoins somewhere. Then as soon as you leave they can identify which keys you hit by looking at the fingerprints? A gun to your head might do the trick as well. Thanks for the confirmation. I'm not too worried about someone physically surveying me, but you never know. If that's the case, I probably have much larger problems than my meager BTC holdings.  How is the encryption? Are we talking 100's of universes of time to crack an 11-digit PW, or should I go with something even longer? |
|
|
|
I believe the problems with limiting (automatic) rollback to 120 blocks is smaller than the possible problem with a government building a lot of ASICs, making blocks in the dark and release them to the network after a long time. This could kill Bitcoin.
Say you limit rollback. Say about half the network watched chain X unfold and it's the longest chain. And say half the network is on chain Y and would need a rollback past the limit to get to chain X. Isn't it true that both chains are now equally correct by the rules? I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to introduce path dependence to a network that can't even remotely guarantee that all nodes take the same path. I agree, if you ever need a rollback passed a sensible limit, you're kind of screwed. But it seems to me that you're screwed whether or not you limit the rollback. You can now have two perfectly functioning clients with the same information who disagree on the which set of blocks is valid. I would say it makes sense to detect that a very large rollback would normally occur. But as for what you do in that case, I can't see not rolling back as being right. Perhaps prevent further operation until humans can decide what to do. So let's find the sensible limit and use that. If we set the limit at 288 blocks, we would have about 96 hours to merge the network again if there was a 50 / 50 split. I don't think we ever will have a network split larger than 96 hours with exactly 50 / 50 share on both sides. If the network merged again after 96 hours, and one side have made more blocks than the other side, miners would jump to the largest blockchain and the small one will die.Isn't this the very definition of a "rollback"? Miners always jump to the longest chain. If they manually need to jump to the longest chain, if it's more than x number of blocks to roll back, we are much better protected against a hostile attack. How would mining software know which chain is legitimate and which chain is not? How would mining software look at a brand new block and say "oh, hey, this one's not legit!"? That's the whole reason for automatically choosing the longest chain in the first place - it is assumed that the longest chain is the legitimate chain. If not the longest, then how does your mining software determine which chain to mine on? |
|
|
|
To answer what did I do to get people interested in investigating me? I deal in paypal that is how I sell my coins on ebay and facebook and that is how i have bought my coins from the few suppliers I have. I am having to set up multiple accounts to get btc it is a real pain in the ass. I have set up a dwolla and mt gox and now a okpay. I always have pp and that is what i use. I know people dont like it, but i do have sellers that sell to me for PP and need more. When you say PP the community is so paranoid about everyone assumes you are a scammer. I sell for pay pal all day every day when I have coins. I have a system and dont get charged back or I guess i should say that i almost never get charged backed.
So you're a buyer of Bitcoins using multiple Paypal accounts? |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
