I've worked with AI systems that can self-modify based on particular goals with very high realtime performance in a very lightweight application. If I wanted to, I could combine a selection of attack vectors as primitive actions in the goal system, code a set of rules for finding pool-like sites in browser history and wallet-like files and give it the goal of "obtain as many bitcoins as possible". Such a system would be capable of getting an enormous number of coins through a worm attack in a very short amount of time.

The thing is though, i'm not a worm author - this would require a specific overlap of "worm author", "bitcoin user" and "AI knowledgeable" that is very very rare.

Much more likely is a local compromise - occam's razor would tell us to ignore the unrequired entity of an external anonymous party on the internet to explain this theft. I'd look at coworkers and the staff of the remote backup services myself.

I think anyone would buy at that price - but selling? really?

But you presumably will if you get customers.
Customers will buy your BTC, they will pay to paypal - you send the BTC.
You lose your BTC.

Next, paypal freezes your account.

You lose the fiat you sold that BTC for.

Encrypt wallet, decrypt only when the user wants to send coins - interesting idea.

That's precisely what i've done for years personally (but for far less sensitive data - a MySQL dump of a website with 20k users including private messages - the "private" bit being what's sensitive).
Basically I encrypt the SQL dump with a stupidly long key and a passphrase made up of random letters and numbers only I know and send it to a bunch of reasonably trustworthy individuals to store.

For a bitcoin wallet backup, personally I ain't letting anyone else have physical possession even with incredibly strong crypto - any crypto system other than a one-time pad can fall eventually, and it only takes one smart and patient attacker to wait out the years/decades before cracking a bunch of wallet files and using them. I could get rich in BTC only to lose it all due to a silly mistake years ago.

One thing that I would advise for anyone with a large amount of BTC though is to split it up across multiple wallets, the majority of them completely offline and stored in physically secure locations. If I had something in the 6 figure range i'd definitely be paranoid about it.

Paypal will freeze your account as soon as they find out what you're trading, at that point you will lose all funds in the account.

It sucks that paypal have this rule, but the TOS is a contract which you willingly enter into by opening an account and you should therefore abide by it.

The thing is, they're claiming it violates the rules due to copyright on game characters - that makes no sense at all. Most likely they're applying the same rules as they would for WoW gold and there's a very slim chance someone could get ebay to change their mind.

I've now setup a deal with a sole investor as may be read here:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16472.0

If there was a means to invalidate the thieves coins or to reclaim them then the same could be done to a legitimate user.
Bitcoin is a secure system only so long as you keep your wallet secured - and sadly it seems you were not able to adequately do so.

This isn't a reason to abandon bitcoin completely or to dismiss it as flawed, but of course it's understandable that you wouldn't want to reinvest after having lost so much.

Keep an eye on that address in block explorer and you might find transactions that end up at some publicly-identifiable address, that might give you some chance of identifying the thief.

Hi everyone

I'd like to announce that my proposed venture for fast mtgox payments for which I was seeking investors now has a confirmed investor and business partner with which I will be joining forces to build the product.
Due to his past experience in startups of this nature, his connections, valuable insight during discussions and offer to get involved more intimately with the product development itself as opposed to simply putting up capital I have
selected Yankee as sole investor for the time being.

We have negotiated a basic deal and begun preliminary work on the service itself and I am pleased to announce that our new service BitInstant will soon be up and running. We intend to start with a simple method
for fast payments into MTGox as detailed in my original proposal and to then scale out from there into areas such as fast inter-exchange BTC transfers. Our role essentially will be one of making your transfers in the bitcoin economy as
fast and smooth as possible.

I would like to thank everyone who displayed interest in investing in this venture and will keep you all in mind for future needs as we scale out.

Looking forward to showing you all the end product now that the true fun part can begin.


For those wondering, my original proposal was here - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16134.0

Can you define "none windows computer" - What specific OS?
Was it your own machine or one owned physically by another party?
Where was it?
How did you transfer the money/wallet to it?

Chicken
Egg

I was doing some fiddling recently, should be fixed now.
Thanks for letting me know about the missing index issue, I recently migrated that site from apache to nginx and missed that.

As for the "unknown" applet problem, the idea is to ask users to voluntarily open a new tab with the applet running - my users trust me enough not to screw them with malware, and so I don't.

I'd definitely be interested in joining up as a developer compensated in BTC with rates etc open to negotiation. Same for sysadmin work (though i'll suggest that you may want to have 2 tiers of sysadmin - some with access to the sensitive assets such as wallet.dat and some with access to less valuable assets).

Some thoughts on your business model:
1 - give retailers the option of multiple exchanges or just having BTC alone
2 - fees "may" be collected? no - fees WILL be collected or you make no profit at all
3 - people with money to pledge and people with the best sysadmin skills may not be overlapping groups
4 - offer a "wallet service" as a separate paid service but with value-add such as rapid USD cashout, accounting/reports etc - otherwise let retailers maintain their own bitcoin client
5 - though I may sound a hypocrite, don't build your business around mtgox's API - make it modular (in my defence, my own plan is similar - just starting out with mtgox)

Also, before you get serious interest from people with quality skills, it may help to prove you've evaluated the market:
Who are your main competitors (yes, you have some already) and where will you beat them?

One competitor i'll give away: mtgox themselves offer a merchant API.

I'll look over the FSA rules again and seek proper legal advice on whether this may be an issue, but I truly believe it will not be.

Some background:
Previously when I was running a small virtual world hosting provider (think Second Life) I investigated the issue of currency and determined that a license would be required to handle any paying out of my service into a bank account but none is required for currencies that are purely virtual. My service at that time was accepting USD for providing hosting services paid in advance, users would hold a balance with my company and there was a conversion rate of $1USD to 0.25C (C for "credit"). Credits could be traded with other users who could only use them for funding further hosting, giving the currency value by backing it with the ability to host servers.

Now, in the case of "Fast MTGox" (working title for this new idea) I will not even be holding deposits but simply accepting money for a virtual currency (the mtgox USD - this is not "real" USD as mtgox is not a bank). I therefore believe the law to be on my side.

Of course I may be incorrect in my interpretation of the law, in which case i'd be grateful to anyone who points out my error.

This could be possible, but I believe it's wise to start small and then to scale out. I'm thinking of a first launch with liberty reserve as it would be quite simple to fund mtgox from the same LR account and the target market (mtgox userbase) tends to already be familiar with liberty reserve.

As for CV, i've responded to your PM.

I'm based in the UK.
What i've read up on the matter seems to suggest that I don't need a license unless i'm transmitting money into people's bank accounts.

Good to see some level of interest in faster mtgox payments
I'm writing the code for this site right now, but it really does need investors to work.

Right now the fastest way is probably to send bitcoin and sell it for a high price, but that is what i'm trying to change with the site i'm setting up.

Some can (and do), but of course that's even slower due to the delays in bank processing (average of 3-5 working days for UK banks).