Probably politics - the forums have meant to be moving to a new domain for months now and it's hardly a big secret. If you'd been following #bitcoin-dev on IRC you'd almost certainly have heard about it, probably repeatedly.

Of letting them roam free on an unregulated marketplace that can give completely bogus pricing information and has no rules on how to handle this, anyway.

The problem is that all the problems with obtaining accurate information in general also apply to obtaining accurate information about the bias of news sources. If your source of news falsely tells you that the other news sources are less trustworthy and the people around you agree, how do you know this is wrong? What's more, if they're good they can create social pressure to trust that news source and emotional investment in it to the point that evidence they're unreliable is just rationalised away by their followers. (Usual rationalization: "All the other news organisations must be just as biased, so I may as well stick with the one that's just been proven to lie through their teeth".)

That's one of the evils thing about bigotry: it isn't self-correcting like that. In most circumstances it's not just important to hire someone that's well-qualified but someone who's perceived to be well-qualified by others, so ignoring race and hiring the most well-qualified person is potentially setting yourself up to fail.

Alternatively, Alice could only keep a small, safe amount of money in cash at once and store the rest of her money in an organisation that's capable of securing it more effectively and lets her withdraw it as she needs it. We might call this hypothetical organisation a "bank".

Information can spread very quickly, yes - the trouble is that it's not necessarily accurate or truthful information. Have you ever heard the saying "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"? In order for this to work the way you'd hope, each person would have to have the ability and time to personally verify the information they receive - and even that might not be enough due to social pressure to ignore contradictory facts. Worse still, if someone owns a significant chunk of the media they can and do direct this social pressure.

That's the problem with your idea. It's not doing something immoral that leads to you being penniless, it's crossing the wrong person. Could be that you kicked up too much of a fuss about them scamming you or robbing you or raping you or beating you up. So long as the influential evildoers stick to doing it to people with much less social influence then themselves, they can essentially get away with it - crossing them carries too much risk and those with the influence to damage them have no incentive to do so.

That would require the way people think to change in ways that, frankly, are probably never going to happen. Currently whether someone's seen as having "nothing to offer" is determined by extraneous factors like skin colour, gender, class markers, etc, and while attempts to get some of these factors ignored have met with limited sucess no-one's managed to shake off this kind of thinking.

It might for LOOP_LOG2=0, but it doesn't appear to for LOOP_LOG2=1. I've no idea why it doesn't; perhaps it doesn't know to make that particular optimization.

The timing analyzer was pointing to a long chain of logic, but it did indeed include an unnecessary mux between w0_fb and rx_input[31:0] feeding into the computation of the initial value of t1_part. Replacing that with a direct reference to rx_input[31:0] resulted in it reaching timing closure at 100MHz. (Again: this is all with LOOP_LOG2=1)

Are you sure that's a good idea? Under some circumstances surely it'd be possible to match large incoming transactions with outgoing ones by the fact they have no coins in common. (Edit: In fact, this attack would probably work quite well against flows of smaller transactions too.)

Finally got a set of modifications to the K_next lookup that ISE likes! It reported 100 MHz at LOOP_LOG2=1 on XC6SLX75 and I've sent a pull request to fpgaminer. Looks like it might be a bit hit and miss as to whether it meets timing though, since the next run failed with an actual period of 10.412ns rather than the required 10ns.

Edit: Might help if I actually linked to it. It's in the projects/LX150_makomk_Test dir of the xilinx-better-k-for-merge branch
Edit 2: Now it's consistently getting 10.412ns *sigh*.
Edit 3: Trivial fix for this - in addition to using that branch, find the line:
Amend it to read:
You should now be able to achieve 100MHz (50MHash/sec) on the XC6SLX75, at least in theory. It's late and I need to sleep so this isn't committed anywhere yet.

Yep. Over 90% of the total volume of Bitcoin currency exchange was through Mt Gox, so they were the site to go to if you needed to buy or sell large quantities of bitcoins.

Now suppose Mallory manages to get her hands on Alice's online banking credentials (either by phishing or by actively installing malicious software on Alice's computer) and sends Alice's money to a little company called Mt Gox without authorisation, then exchanges it for easily-laundered Bitcoins. This isn't an entirely hypothetical scenario; it's one of the reasons that Mt Gox's EU bank account was cancelled and they've been having problems accepting SEPA transfers.

Edit: If German bank transactions really are non-reversible that partly explains why there was such pressure to kick Mt Gox out, though their bank was in France and there are some interesting interactions with SEPA rules in that case. I suspect there's something important we're missing though.

Compare Bruce's argument that all they'd have to do would be to publish an e-mail they'd sent to Tradehill informing them about the transaction reversals with (a) their initial statement that they can't release details about specific customers or transactions and (b) Bruce's second e-mail to them. (It's revealing that they haven't quoted any concrete policy of informing customers about reversed transactions but unsurprising that they won't publish private e-mails.)

Finally managed to find the actual article Bruce was referring to - that was a bit of a pain.

Edit:
It matters because Tradehill were offering a service that had the equivalent of a big neon sign on it reading "ideal for laundering stolen money". Of course, they should've reacted by refusing to do business with Bitcoin marketplaces from the start.

The riskier fraud is and the harder it is to make money on it, the less likely it is to happen.

From what I can tell they've been in business about 3 months longer than Dwolla - Dwolla launched December 1st 2010 and I can't find any reference to Paxum older than September 2010 (their Alexa stats seem to pretty much confirm this). The company registration and website registration date to 2007 but they haven't been doing anything during that time that I can spot.

In theory, though the US justice system has a reputation for bias towards US businesses. Tradehill wouldn't be the most sympathetic plaintiff either: a shady-looking foreign company that's been profiting from laundering stolen money suing to try and push the losses from that stolen money being taken back onto someone else?

Ah. If you look at the list of LUTs it couldn't place, you'll almost certainly find that they're adders with carry chains: there aren't enough suitable sites with fast carry hardware to place all of the 32-bit-wide adders contiguously. I got the same error trying to fit a fully unrolled engine onto a XC6SLX75.

They're not reversable if you, as the owner of the account being transferred from, gave a correct account number and name. They are reversable with certain restrictions if the original transfer request itself was made fraudulently, even after the funds have supposedly cleared. Mt Gox's problem was that phishers were carrying out fraudulent transfers from other people's accounts to Mt Gox.


They can't do anything about it. Normally there'd either be a delivery of a product that's traceable or no way for someone to make large amounts of money from this and thus no incentive to do it, but due to the nature of Tradehill's business neither is true.

There's actually no reason the banks couldn't create a system where transactions really are irreversable. The trouble is that no-one would want to use it: either they'd have to require all transactions to be made at branches after presenting proof of ID and paying a fee to cover the associated costs, or customers would have to accept that their account could be emptied out by crooks at any time for reasons beyond their control. There's no way they could swallow the cost of fraud otherwise.

It turns out that it's cheaper for everyone involved if they skip the really expensive security measures and just include a way to reverse transactions.

Exactly - if you start on http, all the links are to the http version, and if you start on https all the links are https. Which has a more subtle but nasty security issue: even if you consistently view the forum over https, an active attacker that can modify your network requests can inject content into the next http page you view so that it causes a http request to the forum (for example an img tag referencing http://forum.bitcoin.org) and obtain your unencrypted cookie from that request. This is well within the capabilities of some Tor exit node owners.

Aha - cunning!

In two words: less mysogyny.

The former, due to both the communication effort required for the 6 billion people to organise themselves and to information asymmetry. If there's some critical information required to make a decision, each of the 6 billion people either has to discover it themselves or trust someone else, and the latter hands power over to those they trust. The man with 5 billion dollars only has to discover it once, and can pay people to assist him which incentivises them to behave in a trustworthy fashion. It's the same reason that the SEC restricts some forms of investments to "accredited investors".


That's quite simple really. The market would ensure that those unable to support themselves financially would be unable to obtain food and would starve to death. (Of course, in practice this wouldn't work and state intervention would be required, but that's true of the market in general anyway.)