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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bump when you're guilty
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on: July 08, 2011, 01:37:00 PM
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Don't they have order confirmation screen after order submit?
They don't. In any case, Confirmation Dialogs are considered by many to be a nuisance only. They are usually just clicked away by experienced users.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bump when you're guilty
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on: July 08, 2011, 10:44:58 AM
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Consider yourself lucky you weren't typing a large catch order. Imagine someone wanting to type "Buy 8000 BTC if price falls to 8" and actually inputting "Sell 8000 BTC limit 8".
Where on MtGox do you type using syntax like you are using above ("Buy 8000 BTC if price falls to 8")? I only know the Trade Section where you have fields for the amount of BTC and the price. Or are you using their JSON interface from your own client? I agree though that their GUI could improve a lot. It could also be more helpful to pre-calculate fields. Say you have $1000 to invest and want to buy BTC for not more than 14.0. You currently have to calculate yourself that you want to buy 71.44 BTC. There could also be a warning if the price is *way off* the going price both when buying and selling
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9
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Someone Random Trademarked "bitcoin" : Now we can't use the term?
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on: July 07, 2011, 07:33:25 AM
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Aye, very true for the US trademark, but what for the others that use a 'first to file' rule, as he sates?
First file doesn't actually guarantee success when the use of the non-filer GREATLY exceeds the use of the filer. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion, and courts frequently go by that, rather than technicality. A first-file rule basically covers what happens if two same-sized entities had the dispute -- it's either first file, or first use. It's a whole other matter when, to 99% of people, "bitcoin" has a specific meaning, and this guy is claiming, "Oh, but my 1% of customers are the ones who are right." The purpose of a trademark is so that you can't walk into, say, a car dealership, ask about an Impala, and be sold something made by Volvo instead of Chevy. (And if I just fucked up the brand reference, pardon -- I know little about cars, I can't actually drive because of a vision defect.) He may have filed first, but thousands of people were using the term already. Even if he was first, thousands of people compared to him and one fictitious client ... That all makes sense, but do you say that because you know, or because you *hope*, that this will be the courts' stance in 'file first' countries?
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10
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin amount limit
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on: July 05, 2011, 05:42:39 PM
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One thing that bothers me about the choice of the 21M top is that if you expect the whole world population to use bitcoins, then only very few people will be able to own even 1 BTC. It would be better to right shift the decimal point right now, rather than when/if Bitcoine becomes more mainstream.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Why IS the bitcoin limited to 21 million?
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on: June 28, 2011, 12:36:20 PM
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I also don't understand the reasoning. If you're serious about a currency becoming a major player in the world, you'd at least try to keep the expected single unit value in the same order of magnitude as existing currencies. That's also what was done with the €. Once it exists it will lead its own life and establish natural exchange rate levels, but 21M can never do that.
In any case, we can always correct it. Just create a new currency, which is not minable, but only obtainable by exchanging BTC. The BTC that is exchanged will be lost from the Bitcoin circuit.
You could think of multiple coexisting virtual currencies, each based on its own economical model.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: ALL of my bitcoins stolen (Around 60) . What the F*CK.
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on: June 27, 2011, 07:54:42 AM
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Encryption cannot protect wallets in use, because your legitimate client has to decrypt it anyway. Encryption is good for backups only.
Yep you're right. Even if the client encrypted the wallet when not in use it eventually has to decrypt it when you want to spend from it. AT that moment it is vulnerable to key logger attack and to any nasty viruses that could are residing in memory (waiting for the opportunity to strike). Someone on a different thread (forget which one) suggested that the client implement a unix style permissions system. Maybe also running the client in it's own chroot (something equivalent in windows) would be a good idea. But in the end it's still quite hard to avoid all avenues of attack. My point is that still the more security measures you can implement the lower the odds that some unclever hacker is easily able to steal your coins. While it is true that at some point the data in the wallet needs to be decrypted in memory the level of security are orders of magnitude higher. To start with it is much easier to copy a file with a known name and location from your file system than decrypting it, *only in the instant that it is needed which is only while signing a transaction" in an unknown memory location. Then you have segmented memory protection which keeps memory segments isolated to the process that owns it. Any existing Trojan or virus can easily be upgraded to copy the wallet.dat file from a know location and transfer it elsewhere, but copying decrypted keys from a memory location within thew time frame they exist is a none trivial task. Wallet Encryption will add much more security if it is done right.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Do Bitcoin a favor: Let's support MtGox
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on: June 26, 2011, 08:33:05 PM
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I just submitted 16.20 BTC to my MtGox account. Not a lot, but hey, it's a vote of confidence. The heavy traffic will ease overnight. All will be ok tomorrow and BTC will be back to $30 real soon now. Let's start trading normally. Do Bitcoin a favor.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Goxed - 15:30 open
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on: June 26, 2011, 05:17:40 PM
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You can only really use several servers for the website itself. The actual order matching need to be done on a single processor detached from the front end. They could at least detach the entering of orders into the database and the actual order processing. Also load balancing for the frontend (which is terribly slow) and for MySQL (which seems to crash frequently) should be a must-have. I doubt they have any of this... MySQL. Jeez, isn't that really the end of the discussion? What else did they use, FrontPage? There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do this well with MySQL. Like most web sites most database access is read only, and MySQL is actually quite good at that. Any other competent technical folks want to get together and discuss putting an exchange together? Not too impressed with the options we have right now.
I have been thinking about it. But there's more to a successful company than just setting up a couple of web services.
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Goxed - 15:30 open
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on: June 26, 2011, 04:57:34 PM
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I'm not tech savvy guy, but wasn't there a way to prevent this mess???
Like several servers or anything?
You can only really use several servers for the website itself. The actual order matching need to be done on a single processor detached from the front end. I've no idea how MTGox is run, but it's more than likely that adding more servers is not a trivial task due to the inherriant single nature task of order matching.... particularly if they've done some terrible job of integrating the order entry code (php most likely) with the order matching code (more php... lets hope not....). That is of course assuming that the order matching is being done properly. As other people have commented about other exchanges, there are some wildly bizzare (and unfair / darn right illegal) order matching algorithms being used, so it might be in the case for MTGox that they could just add extra servers and hope that no two buys hit the same sell (or vice versa). How many orders do they have to match so that it becomes the bottleneck in their service? I think the MySQL errors we saw in the first hour are just from too many MySQL connections from people accessing PHP pages which query the Database. A load balancing system would have been able to cope with this, even if you servers are in your aunts basement.
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