Once again, what you are describing could not go unnoticed. Sorry, but the troll has failed. Try again some other time.

You cannot transfer them without the private key. The best an attack as described can do is double spend coins they are in control of. Your coins will always be yours (assuming there are many confirmations on them).

Even if you had 80% of the network, you'd have a hard time making 6 block in a row on demand in order to dupe people. There is no profit in a scheme like this, you would only damage bitcoins name, wrecking your investment.

No it isn't legit. People would have noticed. It could be traced in the block explorer. There is no way this has been going on. Someone would come forward who has had a transaction that was verified, become unverified or disappear. This simply isn't happening.

Nice thoughts. I'm pretty sure most of us have the same reservations. But it is early and we are moving forward. By the way, are you at betco.in for poker? They've been steadily improving their site and there are more and more regular players.

Please visit

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/232

To see what the developers are doing about encryption. The developers are already very far along. Any discussion should be held there.

A bitcoin walks into a bar. The bartender says, "why the long face?" The bitcoin sighs and replies, "I lost my key." The bartender say, "maybe someone will find it."

Trillions of years later, no one has.

I think the margin system you proposed sounds like it could work, but you must be careful that you always keep enough in escrow. I don't think you should ever have to reach step two (exchange on Gox USD for BTC until you are above water) if you are doing things right. If you add in a few extra steps in your scenario above we can get some interesting positions. If you are careful it could work, for example.


What happens in this scenario if you then write 6 more calls? Would you actually put $100 in escrow for the sixth and final? It seems like you have to or you risk a bankruptcy. Would I get warned that writing that 6th call would lock up $100. I suppose this could work and give more flexibility, as long as you lock up the money when they count on exercising. Now, after that, lets say I buy a call with a strike of only $30. You would need to release $70 of the $100 you locked up since I can now exercise a cheaper contract. But lets say I want to sell the contract that exercises at $30 (selling isn't an option now, but it needs to be soon). When I put in an ask, you would have to once again lock up an extra $70, and I shouldn't be allowed to place the ask unless I have $70.

This could lead to some very confusing situation if I have very many contract and am counting on the ability to exercise them. For example, lets say I bought 5 calls at $15, 5 at $20, 5 at $25, 2 at $50, 1 at $100, and 1 at $150. I've got no bitcoins in my account but a whole lot of USD, $275. Enough to exercise all the options except the $100 and $150 one. I have no bitcoins, but if I want to write some calls, some of the USD can be put in escrow. So I write 17 calls, which puts all my money in escrow to exercise the contracts if needed. The calls are a long shot so I didn't get paid much for it, we can ignore that money.

Now someone puts in a really good bid for my $15 options, and I want to sell them (I'm assuming selling in possible) and lock in my profits. so I try to sell two of my $15 dollar options. Then the system should run the calculations, realize that I need enough USD in escrow to exercise 17 options which would require $495 if I sold two $15 options. I've only got $275 in escrow so the system asks for another $220 USD. All just to sell contracts I already own. This could be confusing, especially so if everything got even more tangled. I could see someone accidentally grid-locking his funds, unable to profit in a good situation or cut losses in a bad one. I suppose that is the danger of this leverage. Also, take into account that I could be doing this on the USD side of things as well with puts and it really starts frying the brain.

Not to mention, what I really want to do in the very first scenario is pass on the contracts I wrote to someone along with $2 (aka paying someone to take the risk of the contract I wrote... is there a term for this? selling? passing?), this way all 5 bitcoins in escrow can be freed.


EDIT

One thing I'd really like to be implemented is this:

Say I place an ask on a put. $5 for a $10 strike. Right now, $10 USD will get put into escrow. I would prefer it if only $5.05 got put into escrow, and when the contract get filled, the $4.95 ($5 - commission) that I just earned gets moved to escrow to guarantee that I can supply $10 if exercised.

Actually, going a step further, I'd like nothing to go into escrow unless the contract is made. And I'd like the ask to be removed if my balance falls below $5.05. You know what, I really need to put together a comprehensive flow chart. We could be allowed to do a lot more with zero risk to you, if we just nailed down the details of the system.

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Couldn't I theoretically switch to pay-per-share any time my pool has taken a long time to generate a block to get a little extra BTC? It seems like the value of my shares goes down when we're working on a block with a lot of previous shares. If I switched to PPS for any block that had more than 110% the number of expected shares and then switched back to proportional, I could make more than expected.

What do pools do to combat this abuse? I know deepbit delays publishing the found blocks for an hour, but couldn't I get that information on block explorer? I suppose they could use a different address for each block, then I wouldn't know for sure that the block belonged to my pool. But in that case I could still switch to proportional anytime there has been a lull in the entire network's block production. It wouldn't make as much, but still some.

Has anyone tried doing this? And would you consider it abuse of the system? Is the difference I could make not really worth it? It feels to me that I could raise my earnings 20% or so, but I might be overestimating.

You can see my post on this earlier http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=17318

The last few does don't actually look rally-ish. Just looks like it'll hold in the $18-20 zone (after the weekend of course).

I vote for an alpaca. Awesome.

Now that we know the attack vector, can we search for bitcoin related websites that were taking advantage of it?

Judging by the price spike, no one sold, they bought.

I liked where the prices were earlier today.

If you are into white hat hacking, you might as well take their bitcoins and give them back in a week. It would drive the point home better. Most people with vulnerabilities aren't going to be browsing security websites. Hell, that a 1% "tip" yourself. I kid.

Yes, I suppose that makes it easier, but I still have to be paranoid. I think the forums should disable hotlinking for a while.

I have to right click the link, and copy link location, then paste it to be sure. For example:

www.cnn.com]
I have to right click the link, and copy link location, then paste it to be sure. For example:

www.cnn.com

The link above goes to slashdot. If you don't understand this you are at risk.

We should really get some protection on the forums about posting links and such. With the recent trojan worries I'm paranoid everything.

All of the super computers on that list are multicore, so they also have to work in parallel. So in the end, they too are just networks working on slightly different problems.