Floating point numbers are not recommended for storing currency.

For calculations, if your float can not store 123456123456789, you probably are not using enough precision.

Yes, but I expect to know about it if it happens.

I suppose they could re-key the lock to match my copy of the safe-deposit key.

If my Bitcoins get spent in the course of a police investigation, I'll be sure to bring it up.

Same here, I now have over $0.05 USD... and I keep it in my bank pending its conversion to bitcoin.

I'm Linux/BSD nerd. I just use SSH for remotely logging into my machine. You can even do X forwarding with the 'XC' flags (X forwarding+compression). Unfortunately, I don't currently have my computers set up 'just so', so no bitcoin.

By "off-site" I mean: will survive building destruction by being somewhere else. At the risk of being accused of money laundering, I plan on using a safe-deposit box.

I know that was in response to a question, but that deserves the Triple-facepalm picture you were asking for.

The real problem is that bitcoin infrastructure is immature and, due to the underlying immaturity of the computer industry, may remain so for decades. In particular, the "default" bitcoin client is largely a proof-of-concept. In order to use it securely, you need to understand at a fundamental level how your computer works. You need to not only guard against hardware failure with verified, off-site backups. You also need to make sure that any attacker compromising your day-to-day wallet is not also able to compromise your offline wallet (that may have been transiently written to the disk during creation).

The most secure way of generating a savings wallet is to generate bitcoin keypairs offline, then printing the result, then wiping the disk (or RAM if disk was not written to), then sending the coins to the public address from an Internet-connected computer. Secure storage of paper is a known problem that people understand well. However the are a few caviats to keep in mind: (1) You need a good quality, trusted random number generator, (2) any copy of the private key is equally valid, (3) AFAIK the 'default' client can not import such keypairs for spending.

If you are the average user who has not taken extreme measures to secure their computer, using an online service as your day-to-day wallet may be a reasonable way to limit the damage if your day-to-day wallet gets comprised. One difficulty is that the value of bitcoin has increased dramaticly over the past two years. What was once "spending money" may suddenly represent a substantial sum of money. Until the "default" client, or a third-party client that becomes trusted supports multiple wallets in a secure way; doing this separation on your home computer will be difficult and error-prone.

I think infrastructure is going to be a diffcult issue. If Bitcoin adpotion increases exponentially, I would expect transaction volume to also increase exponentially. The Asian-Pacific region is expected to run out of IP addresses by the end of the year, but few (north american) ISPs have made the transition to IPv6. Asside from the addressing issue is the fact that the Terms of Service attached to most consumer Internet connections prohibit hosting servers; or using more bandwidth than some arbitrary limit. If we don't carefully plan ahead, the bitcoin network will become even more centralized. I also feel that bitcoin nodes should be using hardware and software from diverse suppliers. I think the bitcoin community may run more diverse hardware and software than most.

Well todu apparently checked every one of those results for a guest appearance from RMS .

Don't people have a their own coding style that is hard to shake? Somebody should compare EMACS source code to Bitcoin source code.

The lack of GPL license is a compelling argument against the theory, but RMS has used more liberal licenses in the past: when he feels it is to his advantage (such as the LGPL for libraries). If Shatoshi is really RMS, that may explain the annonymity though: he would not want to admit he found a case where the MIT license is more pragmatic.

I would not run that code without knowing what it does. I don't have much interest in your algorithm, and if I decoded the compiled code, I probably wouldn't disclose it (unless it does something nefarious). Even if I did decode it, there is no guarantee the "real" code that is willing to trade with real money would be exactly the same.

I specifically asked what "intellectual property" you were claiming. Your only answer was to post the code I looked at, which says (in extended ASCII; appears to be IBM codepage 850 or Latin-1):"Copyright © Maria"  12 bytes into the file.  From that, I assumed you were mainly asserting copyright.

That may not be as bad as it sounds: the file is less than 100kB. It may be possible to figure out what it does before the demo expires on October 7, 2011.

That file did answer one of my questions: The "Intellectual property" maria claims on the software is "copyright."

Mathematical algorithms are traditionally not considered "intellectual Property." That term is vague. Are your claiming copyright (protecting the creative expression of ideas from wholesale copying (for a 'limited' period of time)), a patent (limited time monopoly on a novel invention (this would be a business method patent)), or something else, like a trade secret (there are penalties for disclosing those without permission). I think trade secret most closely matches your attitude. A patent would be publicly available, since that is the whole point of patents.

You are not teaching anybody to make money (thread title): you are asking them to turn their money over to you and let you manage it.

Are you talking about how authentication on the Internet is broken?

Hackers May Have Nabbed Over 200 SSL Certificates
Dutch Government Revokes Diginotar Certificates
Rogue SSL Certs Issued For CIA, MI6, Mossad
(Possible) Diginotar Hacker Comes Forward

I personally think the shitty foundation is consumer computers designed to betray the user, but whatever.

You stole my question!

It is possible that Maria just wanted to invest $200,000, and was just telling us why the market was acting wierd (or something).

The Guiness Book of world records lost all credibility to me when they started allowing geographically-distributed records such as "x people walking at the same time." I suppose any Folding@home or Bitcoin record would be similar. The Internet has acces to more FLOPS than any individual project .

My point is records for doing things everybody else is many other people are doing anyway don't really mean much.

During the last spectrum auction in Canada, the incumbent cell phone carriers spent about $4 billion CAD, doubling their amortized infrastructure costs in the process. The cell phone carriers expect to recouperate that cost by charging the average cell phone user $40/month. As I said, spectrum is a shared resource. You proposal seems to assume only a handful of users with everybody else acting as relays.


With a shared medium like air, it is easier to get routing loops.


That is a big can of worms. You should be familiar with the Network Neutrality debate before proposing Internet pricing schemes.

In my prefered scheme, everybody buys guaranteed bandwidth near the cost of provisioning the wholesale bandwidth. We are talking 64kbps chunks for consumer use: enough to transfer about 16GB in a month if the connection is saturated. The ISP would honor any priority flags on your packets up to that bandwidth. Once you exceed you guaranteed bandwidth, your data would only get through on a best-effort basis (like the current Internet for the most part). You would not be charged per packet or GB untill you exceed your guaranteed bandwidth allocation: other users are able to use your provisioned bandwidth when you aren't transmitting anything. Put another way, for every 64kpbs channel, 16GB of data transfer is already paid for. On top of all of that, you would pay a connection fee to maintain a relatively high speed, burstable connection. The connection cost should be about the same, regardless of the actual burstable speed.

The reason my sheme is so complex is that I wanted to derive a fair way for users to get priority traffic. In my scheme, if your only priority traffic is VOIP, you may buy only 1 or 2 64kps channels. If you are hosting a mulitplayer game server with voice chat, you may want 24 channels (1.5Mbps) or more. By paying for the bandwidth you actually use, you also give the ISP an incentive to actually upgrade their infrastructure instead of complaining that you are using it too much. Another important point: unlike with traditional bandwidth caps, my scheme is not punative. In my fantasy world, overages would be charged on the order of pennies per GB rather than dollars per GB.

There is some interest in mesh networking, but your proposal looks overly complex. Why are there so many tiers? IMO, you sould let people use whatever protocols they want, within reason.

One obstacle I see to this is that most users have terms and conditions from their ISP that state they are not allowed to resell the connection. A connection you are allowed to resell probably easily costs about $300-$400/month. The cartels providing the Internet backbone are a secretive lot, and probably will do everything they can to disrupt an upstart network that makes them obsolete (much like we assume the banks won't like bitcoin). They are probably also worried about being named in a (or many) copyright infringement lawsuit(s). That is my guess why "real" Internet is so expensive, almost regardless of bandwidth. If you can afford $400/mo for Internet, you can probably afford a lawyer or two. At $400/mo your upstream ISP can consult a lawyer without blowing the profitability of your connection for the next 2 years.

Cell phone access is expensive because towers are placed everywhere. Not only that, the company maintaining the tower pays the property owner rent for the tower's footprint and utilities. If you go to the same building owner and ask them to put up your mesh networking antenna, they will probably say "no" unless you can offer a deal similar to the cellphone tower rental.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that wired is better: you don't have to share bandwidth unless you want to. Many cities will have loops of dark fibre that can likely be leveraged in a wireless mesh network. For immediate neighbours, powerline networking may be able to act as a bridge as well. If you have a newer "home theater", you may be using a powerline ethernet bridge already. Look for a small box that plugs into the wall and has a single RJ45 (ethernet) jack.

IMO, any "trusted nodes" on the network are going to need to be able to encrypt data at wire speeds. This is required to prevent evestroughing or manipulation of the data in flight. This will either take a lot of CPU or dedicated encryption hardware. I estimate that the Pentium 90 I want to use as a router can only encrypt at about 300kbps: my burstable Internet speed is 10 times that.
 

You are allowed to say just about anything you want about a matter before the court (unless you are a politician where that may be construed as influencing the court's decision). It is just generally not a good idea because anything you say in public can and will be used against you in court. If you are saying one thing, but your lawyers are agruing another, it may hurt your case.

INNAL, don't pretend to be one on TV.

PS: I brought up Canadian law because that is the only law I started reading from the perspective of a potential bitcoin user.

The only stat that matters is transaction volume. Oddly that is not listed on blockexplorer.com or bitcoincharts.org.

By "transaction volume", I mean the number of transactions. The way bitcoin works, every spend of a newly minted coin looks like 50BTC (even if it is 1BTC, 49BTC change).

Excrement hits air moving device: Bitcoin in France: first legal decision directly related to Bitcoin?

There may exist coins minted/created in (split/merging) transactions since before the checkpoint. You can only prune coin obliterated by a split/merge.

I am going to have to get around writing that letter to Fintrac, asking for clarification of their guidlines in light of Bitcoin.


"money" is defined as "a medium of exchange." Something can be money without being a "virtual currency", which is often issued by a specific issuer, pegged to a specific currency, and redeamable for goods/services at the issuer. A "virtual currency" is essentially a coupon.

The difficulty is that even if bitcoin is just considered money, it is still a regulatory pain. For example, if just relaying transactions makes you a Money services businesses (in Canada), the Guideline 6C: Record Keeping and Client Identification for Money Services Businesses is impossible for a bitcoin node to meet. Specifically, section 3.7 Records about certain funds remitted or transmitted
Essentially, no Electronic Funds Transfers involving an annoymized, public transaction record.
Edit: (I think it may be possible to convince FINTRAC to leave bitcoin alone by burying them in paper following the letter of their guidelines)(bold in original)(Possible loophole: does FINTRAC follow RFC 2119 when they use the word "should"?)

I think this "security theater" needs to end. We should declare that the Terrorists won the "War on Terror" by convincing the worlds largest supserpower to strangle its economy with dangerous and pointless "security" measures. Since September 11, 2001, I don't believe it anymore when I am told something is done for "security reasons". Since August 6, 2006 (temporary liquid ban is obviously not temporary), I don't want to fly anymore. Since Mahar Arrar (a Canadian citizen) was arrested  (on a stop-over in the states) and deported ot Siria for torture, I don't want to set foot in or overfly the US anymore. Since an innoncent electrician was shot in the head by police following the London Underground Bombings, I have been more concerned about being killed in police action than terrorist activity.

Thinking about it, I think we can get away without the flash: It would make it slightly easier to use the DIMM for things other than bitcoin. On the other hand, waking up from sleep/suspend/off mode would be a lot simpler if things got loaded from flash automatically.

In either case, you need the boards to be able to identify their make/model for bitstream updates.

You can email me at: bitcoin@example.com, where example.com is the domain of my personal website. My OpenPGP fingerprint is CBDE CFB6 BB6A 2BB5 FDE1 01C5 3CF6 0C5E 1CFD A27B (SHA-1, June 28 2012 expiry). My public key is also on my website; I posted the fingerprint here in case my ISP, webhost or your ISP tries to pull a fast one (You access this site using HTTPS, right?).

I took a two year electronics course, which included a final project using the Motorolla (now Freescale) MC68HC11E1 Microprocessor. I ended up going through my code line-by-line to check for software errors: I had hardware errors as well . I don't really have any specific electronic work experience though. I have been trying to keep up my soldering skills though.