I would like to see the 'first bit' concept accepted as a standard. Blockexplorer should use it as well as the clients. Since the clients have a copy of the entire block chain (at least now and for the foresable future) the 'first bit' standard could be universal. And any clients which do not have the entire block chain will rely on a trusted server which does.

A "first bits" unambiguously refers to an address which unambiguously refers to a private key which unambiguously refers to a slice of the transaction history and ownership of bitcoin value.

How did you come across that? Did you run a script? (check out this: http://firstbits.com/1111 )

I won't admit how many of my addresses I've tried... to find one with four characters. I had to settle for one of many five characters.

These'll be vanity identifiers in the future. Soon, there will be a market selling short addresses (along with fraudsters keeping the private key).

I am afraid you will all loose your keys after hardware failure rather than a malicious attack. I symetrically encrypt multiple wallets offline, then commit the encrypted wallets to distributed version control, and replicate the repositories on multiple devices.

I only decrypt one wallet at a time for spending, thus exposing only a subset of bitcoins to the network. I can check my total balances in the block chain. I am protected from both malicious attack and hardware failure. And it's MUCH easier than LiveCD's with encrypted shares that may Ooops! get lost.

There seem to be two schools of thought regarding the Linux vs. Windows security issue. (1) is that Linux is inherently more secure by design vs. (2) Windows has bigger market share and perhaps fewer technical users and is thus an easier, more lucrative target.

I subscribe to both schools, but I think bitcoins presents an interesting test case of these theories. We are a community made of a disproportionately high number of Linux users. Compromising our systems provides a nearly untraceable and immediate benefit to an attacker (namely copying and spending the wallet.dat file).

While it can probably still be said that the Linux users represent a higher technical level, it seems they might represent a bigger market share (do we have statistics on this?). So we may soon have more insight into assertion (1).

I run Linux, but I must admit, I am very concerned. The bitcoin client must implement encryption (unlocking on send only) and offline transaction files. I would not be surprised if we see a successful Linux trojan before Christmas which could do much damage to the general confidence in bitcoin security.

An optimistic moron if you ask me.

Ha! That's great. Though, I think I'll pick up a military grade solar panel. But it does look like oil is an excellent storage of both value and energy. Both of these are charts are evidence to me that the fiat currencies have been revving up for hyperinflation:

http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/crude_oil.html
http://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_10_year_o_usd.png?0.7884277222602255

Has anyone else received an email from "Bitcoin Mining Accelerator"? With the text as follows:

==

Hi there, we'd like to invite you to be a beta tester of our awesome new Bitcoin Mining Accelerator program called "Coin Miner".

We have been keeping it under wraps developing it for the past few months and are ready to get people to test it out.
Basically how it works is that it automatically safely software overclocks your GPU to a stable level for optimum mining performance.
This way you don't have to fiddle with BIOS overclocks, MSI Afterburner or any other overclocking software - this does it automatically on the fly.

We are currently achieving around a 23% increase in Mhash/s mining speed. Some users have seen even higher gains.

The program is in Beta right now so we are offering it for free to anyone that wants to try it out.
If you are interested, check out our site: (a link to a counter, with a bogus website)....

==

This is intuitively correct. I'd like to see a counter-example in human English. If the economy is healthy, production and consumption high, then I understand that commodity prices will necessarily drop, except for scarce resources. As I understand it, the only reason we have inflation along with economic growth is because we increase the money supply in line with the growth rate (and apparently we double the money supply with declining growth). If the money supply remained fixed, then economic growth would see a deflated currency as more products and services are buying relatively fewer monies.

During apocalypse, what has universal and undeniable value? Food, energy. What is a good storage of value? Spam, batteries.

I am seeing this error code in version 0.3.23 Ubuntu 11.04, except not a memory issue.

I stand corrected.

However, your system might penalize winners by discouraging new losers (although also discouraging competition, which you'll probably correctly argue is a bigger fear of a early better) because there is little incentive to bet on a position if it is already taken (whether eventually winning or loosing).

Depending on a bet, there are likely more loosing positions than winning positions, so everyone should want an inflated market as long as at no moment is there a position of greater than 50% assurance. If you close the bet well in advance of the moment-of-reckoning, I think your winners would have appreciated more volume. Obviously if you allow betting until the moment-of-reckoning (with no winners loosing) then all bets will accelerate toward the winning position, thus deflating the early winning bids.

I write this forty hours before the close. I've got coins burning in my wallet, but can not rationally choose a position that comes close to the risk (though, I admit the market has shown abnormally low volatility the last three days). On second thought...

It does nothing to de-anonymize, but perhaps de-mystify, which can only be good for mass bitcoin adoption. As FreeMoney points out FirstBits.com is completely voluntary and takes absolutely no different action whether you participate or not. It's results present facts. The 'first bits' just are. The fact that you have a height in meters and or feet makes no additional assertion upon your identity because there is nothing connecting the scalar to the identity. Just as '1' uniquely identifies an address in the genesis block against all other transaction before it (in this case none). Whether FirstBits.com existed or not does not change this fact that no other address has this property.

Yeah, I was thinking payment would be enough, but sure if someone payed 1.0 bitcoins and you returned 0.9 (and kept 0.1), then you and the real owner would get 'paid' for the DoS-type attack. But it's certainly less administration/interface just to confirm upon receipt from the address in question.

I think it is a flaw in the bitcoin client that we can not easily (1) extract keys from our wallets and/or (2) send from specific addresses. It's supposed to be an 'anonymous' currency but all these simultaneous splitting/merging transactions blows any cover or even just managing 'accounts'. I have a dozen wallets for these types of manipulation... but I digress.

I was perhaps quick to jump on this comment. Yes, I misunderstood the 'first in chain' rather than 'first to register' or 'minimal unambiguous'. But the thrust of my comment was against the disregard for unavoidable dangers to naive users.

The minimal precedence is not immediately obvious and should be explained. I meant no attack on the site, only the previous comment, blaming the user's ignorance.


Yes, I grok it now. The 'ah ha' moment came to me when someone mentioned firstBit=1 as the Genesis block. I first thought, 'oh how quaint', then realized it was a first-in-minimal-out queue. I expect explaining that in ten words or less might take as much effort as coding it.

I think you do need explanation. But the URL will help a lot. I expect people will add their first/shortest URL to their signatures, etc, so subsequent first time users won't likely hit the site 'raw'. Then you can mention "Test your address here for the shortest unambiguous or earliest minimum." (that wording needs work, but one sentence should do it).

As TTBit mentions, I think someone could claim an address with a short message "Netrin lives here" and you can easily and anonymously verify ownership upon receipt of a precise payment from that same address within 24 hours.

yeponlyone, I'm glad you are neither the developer nor the OP. Otherwise, I'd ask what UX or software company you work for so I can short it.

I happened to have a 1+7 (Base58) sub-string and I trust that FirstBits.com came up with the correct address, but at 1+4 (Base58 - 1B2oH) it was incorrect and does not indicate that it may be incorrect/collision. This is a serious user experience flaw and in my opinion unreliable and thus unusable for money until that is fixed. At some point in the future 1+7 might not be likely unique. Who knows? Certainly FirstBits.com is not warning me!

As for 'bits' in quotes or otherwise, since this is the topic, let's be accurate. 4 base58 characters are roughly 24 'bits'. And as of today, I wouldn't trust FirstBits until well after 40 'bits'.

Otherwise, to the OP, this is a great endeavor. I think this is superior to address shorteners, though it would be nice to use the first-bits in a url such as http://firstbits.com/1xxxxx. I could foresee using this in the future (as soon as the collision is indicated). Best of luck to you.

It would be nice if our wallets were separated individually into the addresses and the private keys in digital form. The OP is engraving the private key (minimal wallet), hidden under tamper-evident gunk, with a lovely address line in plaintext and luxurious QR.

(I pondered similar ideas for Father's Day, but...)

Why?

Cost to change the world?
http://player.vimeo.com/video/25412550

Cost to change the world?
http://player.vimeo.com/video/25412550