Hi Cardcomm

yeah, a noob question it is but those are the most valuable for the devs as most noobs don't dare to ask and so the service ends up only being used by the experience users that flood the devs with more expert features making the noob experience even worse although more and more features get accomplished, so thanks again. We were all noobs at some point.

(terms made up by me. people please correct me if there are better names for these types of exchanges)
There are floating exchanges (the exchange allows you to make arbitrary buy and sell offers and the exchange matches them, having all the coins and $$ under their control. MtGox is one of them), market maker exchanges (the exchange is basically just one big market maker that offers a buy and a sell price that it adjusts much slower than some floating exchange, so you can buy and sell at a price at display) and there are "social" exchanges that facilitate the process of other people willing to exchange, but that don't actually hold your money. Most prominent example historically would be the OTC IRC where the first "exchange" established. These exchanges keep track of the reputation of traders and help you find out who you can trade with based on the payment methods available to you. Localbitcoins opted to target more for the in person exchange where you deal with cash but due to demand, now all the classical methods that you mentioned are offered by its users as well. Localbitcoins is agnostic to the payment option though. It only distinguishes between cash and electronic in that cash is advertised to your proximity and electronic to all within your currency independent of distance. Therefore Localbitcoins has no core interest in providing fee infos as neither can it know all the details of MPesa, Chinese wire transfer, Australian food tokens or whatnot people decide to use, nor the fees the advertiser is willing to cover. Therefore you have to read the single advertisements and judge for yourself if that trader is trustworthy and if you like the payment method. It is much more heterogeneous than MtGox for example but therefore also has a strength.

well, if he got it from an ATM, chances are 100% his identity can be pinned to one of 3 persons with only the timestamp of the bitcoin transaction and some thinking of when and how things happened. Sure, the ATM was a cover up to hide the fake bills but if I were him I wouldn't have gone near the ATM as banks and ATMs are full of cameras and with your card in the machine, your ID should be checked.

I doubt he was careless enough to even walk in front of that camera. If he was, you would get his identity this way. Fingerprints on the bill? Not sure if police would check for fingerprints but in a criminal case, he would have bad luck after actually using the ATM.

Sweeping addresses has some slightly distinct use. Imagine you receive a bit-bill and want to make sure, nobody else receives it. You would scan it, but never actively use the address after receiving what was in it this moment. An advanced option would be, to also in the future sweep what is received with it, instantly, but that would surely not be a free service.

Huh??? How does a system that is based on meeting with others to forge a mix have anything to do with ZeroCoin? ZeroCoin allows you to add a coin to the mix at any time and pull it out later without the two events being connected by knowable links.

well, bitmit has competition. I'm pretty sure most of these DDOS attacks MtGox or bitmit or any bitcoin business receives come from either within the community from directly competing services as I guess is the case with all the pools having DDOS all the time, or from outside as a more general currency-competitor doesn't like the bitcoin economy to grow.

So, is it likely I have some key logger with my wallet copied to some evil guy? I run a rather freshly installed debian.

Yeah, I tell all my friends with their Windows problems that there are no Linux-Viruses but with my bitcoins at stake I feel a bit paranoid.

hmm, apparently I just bumped into some ongoing progress as the 103 likes bitcoin got, are all from the last 30 days, so filtered by last 30 days bitcoin is a clear winner already.

also alternativeto.net is most likely far less popular than bitcoin and I like the idea, so maybe we can give this platform as a whole some love?

Alternativeto.net in theory is a great tool. Of cours like all web-votings it is biased not towards the best apps but to the oldest and best established apps which bothers me with my other project FluxCards. For Bitcoin it looks better thogh. Some 30 votes needed to get on top of PayPal:
http://alternativeto.net/software/bitcoin/

Bump: Hargnah, why doesn't this thread get more attention? It should be linked everywhere but instead there is silence.

I was expecting something like that but still I hope you see how users are nervous. Please update us about your cold storage strategy and about the ownership of the service.
Unfortunately there is no competition that I would consider worthy a try but transparency helps trust a service.

Lol, great strategy. Buy every viable service and ripp off the customers. Most likely this can destroy Bitcoin for free.

To all: if you want to sell your service, sell it for at least twice the amount of Bitcoins in the wallet.
I hope for micro transaction channels or something similar. Bitmit should not need to control its customers money.

The first Austrian (no kangaroos) state radio Ö1 had a feature about Bitcoin today.

http://oe1.orf.at/programm/343012

There is also an audio version that is quite long.

Very positive but kind of pushes people to look into mining (?) and had a skeptical end like the title suggests (Bitcoin: economic field trial with uncertain Outcome)

I doubt it depends greatly on the value offered. Imagine some of your friends asked you to take his flupcoin. Would you? I mean either I have a strong opinion (I would loudly refuse to take ripples or litecoin) or I would wonder why this not so close friend is giving away free money or I would refuse to take a money gift from a real friend. Therefore I guess making it more would have to be so much more that the "friend"'s moral gets overruled. Yeah, I would take ripple if it was worth $10,000 if I'm allowed to instantly sell them.

This changer.php-thing either is not functional or resists to a simple wget. Hope somebody can find out what the threat is or was two days ago.

Here is what I get with changer.php. Redirects to really fishy stuff and then dies, right?

ok, so I was at listentobitcoins.com 2 days ago. what should I expect?

I got to go to bed now but is this bad? According to my analysis of this first some lines It does:
eval("") which looks like the really interesting part is in http://www.justice research institute.org/changer.php

(I first tried to just understand this munged part but then decided to debug it after removing the eval part that I had figured out pretty quickly. At my first attempt my box was online, what I highly regret. Kids, don't do that at home. It's playing with fire. Wish I had a separate box that runs off a CD without HD or something for analyzing Viruses.)

"If you keep a plain text copy of your wallet, you can recover your bitcoins even if you forget your pass phrase!"
   -- Captain Obvious

I like it.
Two things about the http://bitcoinhome.zapto.org/en/choose-your-wallet though:
1) The hosted wallets deserve a warning. All of them. The way it is now you hover over the first and get warned and with later ones you feel like "oh, so these are safe?". Especially when you don't really read the warning. Why not put the warning just a bit out of the way once you confirmed it? Extend the block and push the red warning up so it stays sticky?
2) Spacing! blockchain.info and coinbase appearing twice is really confusing the way it is now. Make clear that the icons belong to the colons above, please. Preferably even stronger than in my "screenshot":



Edit: I kind of got used to the voodoo-guy but yeah, really, you might consider replacing him, too. He's not "well connected", he's a walking TV antenna or a voodoo doll.

If you've lost your key, don't throw away you wallet. I read more than once here on the forum that somebody did so and years later desperately searched for it. Put it into your regular backup and forget about it after writing down all you know about it. Most likely you picked a weak password anyway but you have an edge over attackers by having the wallet and knowing something, be it the way you generated it, the length, the vocabulary, so when the day comes that the value in that wallet would be worth to brute force it, pay somebody to brute force it. There will come the day when the wallet password security is a joke compared to the by then feasible brute-forcing of actual private keys. The day when bitcoin long has migrated to a new algo

If the key has coins in it, I guess the corner cases of people having access to the key without the app knowing about it, are rare enough to insist in exporting the key. On the other hand I would make a screen with red font letting the user confirm twice that he has a backup, even if the app thinks he can't.

Are you sure you want to delete key 1xcvz... with 1034.2234Ƀ?
[Export key first]
[Cancel]

[Delete! I want to loose these 1034.2234Ƀ] -> [Really really delete it now!]


(I hate installing Linux to hard drives I just bought. In the one screen they ask you, which disk to install to: Samsung 250GB, Hitatchi 80GB. You know you just bought this neat little SSD of 250GB and click A. 3 Screens later it asks you "Are you sure you want to completely erase hd0,0. This can not be undone." Every single time in this screen I want to click "back" to check if I picked the right disc cause there is no "Samsung" and no "250GB" which was what I based my choice on before. Many products have these silly security screens where a modal window that covers your selection asks you, if you want to delete the selected item. Please be explicit when you have security questions. Thanx. )