You forgot #3, depleted uranium is less radioactive than the dirt you find it in, and of course, #4, "mass destruction" doesn't mean "reporters don't understand it", it has a specific meaning involving large areas.

Well, first you could check with your router.  It may have a page showing upnp status.

upnpd on linux adds entries to filter.FORWARD and nat.PREROUTING, plus it logs to syslog (mine goes to /var/log/debug).

Another option is to set maxconnections to a number higher than 8.  The client usually tries to maintain at least 8 peers by making new outbound connections.  If you set maxconnections higher, it will accept incoming connections until it reaches that limit.  So, if you see 10 peers in your client, you know that at least 2 of them are incoming, and thus, upnp is working.

No kidding.  When I saw this, freeloader247 became my favorite person.

I still haven't had a chance to read his programs in detail, but he's certainly on the right track.


When you create a new address to accept a payment, stash a copy in your local database, along with whatever identification you need.  This could be as simple as {address,order number} or {address,userid}.  Since the notification system is transaction based, you use something like gettransaction or getrawtransaction with the verbose flag for processing.

If you pair this up with -blocknotify, you can really minimize the number of slow RPC calls you have to make.

Basically, you gettransaction each time -walletnotify triggers until it returns 1 confirmation.  If you want 6 confirmations, you make a note to come back and check again after -blocknotify hits 5 more times.  At that point, gettransaction should read 6 confirmations.  If it doesn't, then congratulations, your system was clever enough to not get fooled by a chain reorg, put it back in the queue to be checked again after X more blocks.

You seem to be confused.  Fraud is a criminal matter, not the product of regulation.  For that matter, contracts are a civil matter, also not part of regulation.

Those that support deregulation are in favor of allowing honest ponzi schemes.  Like if someone says "I'm going to pay you from the money I get from people that join after you, and the people that join too late are screwed."  Most libertarians would be fine with that.  However, if the same guy said "I'm going to invest your money in postage futures." but really paid early investors with money paid in by later investors, that is both fraud (dishonesty) and breach of contract (didn't do what he promised).  Very few people in favor of deregulation are also in favor of legalizing fraud, and only the really extreme guys are in favor of gutting the civil court system.

This is not the same as "unplugged drives don't go bad at all".  Spinning disks are subject to age, as well as wear.  SSDs leak.  A disconnected drive is an unknown drive.  It may be fine when you reconnect it, it might not be.  The only way to find out is to connect it.

In my opinion, the bigger problem is that drives carry executable code, as well as data.  Sadly, Windows isn't the only operating system that tries to execute programs on newly found disks.

I personally use boring old paper.  Cheap, light, easy to store.  Your paper will outlive you, even with mediocre archival practices.  If you are also careful about choosing your encoding system, the paper will not be capable of storing anything but what you can see and verify visually.  You can encrypt the keys stored on it, and you can use multisig too.

In case you were wondering why it didn't trigger on previous calls, the redeemScript isn't needed until signing.  You can stuff arbitrarily named members into that object without a problem.  Those functions only check to make sure they have the parts they need, they don't reject extra stuff, they just ignore it.

Yeah, don't do that unless you are sure that your transaction volume will be extremely low.

You want the process run by -walletnotify to be very fast.  Ideally, it should spit out a line into a pipe (or file or socket) and end promptly.

You should then have a different process, either a daemon or a cron job, read that stream and gather whatever information you need.  You should be checking the confirmation count of the transactions, not the balance of the account.  For that matter, using accounts can get you into trouble.  Make sure you know what you are doing if you are going to use them at all.

-walletnotify will trigger when a transaction is included in a block, but it might also trigger if the transaction shows up over the network as a loose transaction.  So, you should check the confirmation count each time -walletnotify hits, until you see at least one confirmation.  After that, you should check it every time you see a block to make sure the count has reached your threshold.  You could optimize that a bit by skipping the slow RPC calls until <threshold> number of blocks have been seen after the transaction was first included.

I think it is pretty clear in this context that the judge is right.  It is hard to imagine any judge applying the Howey test getting hung up on a narrow definition of money.

It is important to keep in mind that the judge is merely confirming what everyone already knows, namely that bitcoin is used as money.  In this case, he's deciding whether or not an "investment of money" was offered.  The law in question is about regulating "investment of money", not about money itself.

I wouldn't read a whole lot into this.  The judge isn't saying that bitcoin itself is a security subject to regulation under the Securities Act, just that contracts which would otherwise be covered by that act aren't excluded just because the money used isn't the dollar.

Posted in a different thread, but I see a lot of the same questions here, so cross posting...

Black's defines money as anything used as money, and currency as the subset of money that has been authorized by law.  The is different from conventional usage which holds the two terms to be synonyms, only weakly defined.

The judge in this case is clearly using the two words interchangeably, consistent with conversational English, and clearly also in the very broad definition that Black held for money.


If BTCST had traded in gold coins I would expect pretty much the same ruling.  For that matter, if there was a community that used sheep as money, and he had run this scam on them, I'd fully expect the judge to interpret the "investment of money" fork of the Howey test through the victim's eyes and issue the same ruling.

Lawyers have an ethical duty to try every possible defense, so this question was inevitable.  Of course, the answer was just as inevitable, as some of us have been saying for the last few years now.  Courts mostly operate on value, and most of the value that they see is not granted by the decree of some authority, but by the perceptions of the parties involved.

Let all of the scammers be on notice.  Your defense is now solely in your ability to keep your scams small enough that it isn't worth hunting you down.  Your claims that it wasn't really theft/fraud/whatever because bitcoins aren't issued by the government will fall on deaf ears, and some of you are going to end up in prison.

For me, this is the most interesting part of the story.  In fact, it is downright amazing.  Quite a few people have been, for at least a month, trying everything from tickets and email through smoke signals and spiritual mediums in efforts to contact Avalon.  As far as I can tell, none of us have heard back so much as a "fuck you" in reply.

Please, please let us know how you established actual contact.

I think some people missed this, or don't understand how mmap works, or don't understand how unix systems account for memory usage.

Free memory is wasted memory.  Allocating memory is all about updating table entries, and it takes no more time to change a page from "buffer cache" to "heap" than it does to change it from "free" to "heap".

Only if you aren't the one holding it when it all goes to shit.  Bitcoin securities are always a game of hot potato.  None of them have a 3 year track record yet.

At a flat 30% yield, not compounded, it will take 172 weeks to break even.

How confident are you that they will be around in 3+ years?  How confident are you that they can maintain that yield?

I believe I have found the source of the problem.

The proof of work function needs special properties.  So far, the only class of functions that have the properties we need are cryptographic hashes.  Among the few cryptographic hashes available and trusted at the time of release, SHA2-256 provides the best tradeoff between dynamic range and length of output.  Others could have been chosen, and can be chosen in the future, if some pressing need arises.  But don't fool yourself into thinking that there is some function out there that does useful work at the same time.  That would be the holy grail of proof-of-work systems, and lots of people are looking without results.

Then, there are fundamental constants.  These were arbitrary (within a broad range) at the time the system was started.  Why is 600 seconds the goal for the average block time instead of 500 or 700?  Why was the initial subsidy 50 BTC rather than 10 or 100?  No particular reason.  But, once we started using bitcoin, these arbitrary constants stopped being arbitrary.  Now we maintain them because we all agreed to them, and no one has the power to force a change.

And last, there are implementation values.  These are the ones that are, in your words, "being modified by the select few that own the bitcoin.org domain".*  Things like the fee for relay values, etc.  These influence how nodes interact with each other, but don't change the fundamental rules of the system.

Also, there is a fourth class, protocol constants.  These are really a subset of the implementation values, which is why I don't mind putting them after the "last" thing.  These are things that would require wide adoption to work, but don't really change the rules of the game.  For example, If we ever find that 8 places of precision aren't enough, we can make a new transaction version with a wider field and/or a different scaling factor.  This would hard fork old versions off, but wouldn't change the rules of the system.

*  Just for the record, that totally isn't how it works.  The developers can make changes to the software, but they can't make anyone actually use it, so their power to change these values is limited by the public's willingness to accept their changes.  And the software is totally open and free, so any person or group that doesn't like something can fork their own version.

Someone should patch the satoshi client to accept encrypted WIFs.  That would greatly simplify things by cutting out a bunch of steps.

Not surprising.  He can't be reached for customer support either.

I can't imagine where this idea would come from.  I have posted several times saying the exact opposite.  The stuff that people use as money, is money.  And the model that explains where it comes from is very simple, banks create it.  By an amazing stroke of luck, my model just happens to be what really happens every day, all around the world.


You can suppose what you want, but gold is nowhere used as money, and the rules governing gold very explicitly do not apply any more.


When goldsmiths invented FRB, they didn't do so by physically handing out gold, they did so by handing out claims for gold.  These claims circulated as money, and thus, in my view, they were money.  Not that it matters a whole lot any more.  The stuff we use as money isn't a claim on anything in particular, it is just a claim in general.


His scheme is indeed useful as a warning.

Hey Peter, long time no see.

You are wasting your time here.  I'll do my best to be charitable towards johnyj and attempt to describe the point of impasse in the most neutral terms possible.  I look at it like the fork in linguistics.  On one side, you have descriptive linguists that attempt to describe how language is actually used by real humans.  On the other side, you have proscriptive linguists that try to write rules about how language should be used.

In the same way, you and I are descriptive.  We view money as being that which is used as money and try to understand where it comes from and where it goes.*

Johnyj seems to be proscriptive.  He defines money as being a peculiar thing that no one actually encounters in real life, and has constructed a model to explain how it can appear to be in several places at once.  When money does things other than what he thinks it should do, he sees theft and fraud.

I have attempted to explain several times how the narrow view of money is simply not useful for understanding reality.  In short, even if it were true that there was "one true money", the world does not act as if it were true.  If I sell the same property twice, I'm committing fraud, but the second buyer is just shit out of luck, he doesn't have any claim to it because it isn't mine to sell after the first sale.  Money doesn't act this way (in reality).  Courts do not trace money back to the original title and tell everyone else to fuck off.**

As a side note, johnyj seems to be very heavily invested in the fiction that banks are constrained by reserves.  I made an error by posting the M1 chart before, when it would have been wiser to post the MB chart.  I remedy that error here, and this is just a bonus.  Sadly, I don't think they will help.  Understanding these charts requires an understanding of the mechanics of banking as it really works, but I do look forward to hearing what epicycles have been invented to shoehorn them into the proscriptive view.

*  I hope that I'm not oversimplifying your view here.  I know that you are an actual trained economist, and have a more nuanced view of money than what I'm describing.  But, based on our conversations at and around the conference, I feel fairly confident which side of this particular spectrum you are on.

**  If courts did this, the entire system would collapse into a puff of smoke the first time it happened.

If you desire to study the stuff that does not circulate and that no one uses as money, I've already given my blessing.

I would strongly disagree though on which of us is interested in what really happens.  We all live in the illusion.  The illusion is how the world really works.  By restricting your view to only the part that doesn't matter*, you miss out on the show.


Sigh.  No, you have this backwards and inside-out.  The bank lends 10 dollars out of thin air, and then borrows one FED-dollar from the federal reserve.  That FED-dollar sits in an account at the federal reserve.

You keep mixing up cause and effect because you refuse to learn how the system actually works.  The "reserve" in "federal reserve" is a metaphor.  It isn't actually a stockpile of something that people dip into.  It is an accounting fiction that tracks what has already happened.

*  The exact degree to which central bank money is unimportant in reality can be seen here