Looks like one of my comments made to this thread was deleted.
looks like a valuable contribution to the topic. |
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How do you want to approach shops? Would you need a representative in Chile?  |
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There is a terrifying amount of misunderstanding of cryptography on this thread.
Brainwallet.org needs to be shut down, yesterday. The title of the thread is correct because the very fact that the site exists is a security breach.
Justus is telling the truth here. You cannot invent or memorise a private key, it isn't possible unless you are the kind of person who competes in international memorisation competitions for fun. And maybe not even then. This isn't about stupid users or smart users, there is absolutely nothing stopping someone from just generating a larger and larger rainbow table every day and that is quite obviously what is happening.
Please tell us which wallet app you imported the key into do we can ask the developers to put a warning in the ui about it. The community clearly needs to sound the alarm about this stupid concept much louder than we have done.
I totally agree that more noobs like the OP will lose their money which would be evitable if brainwallets were known only as a concept on well documented blogs and not easily accessible to noobs through sites like brainwallet.org. Still I can't see why it shouldn't be possible to memorize secure passwords. What is your estimate how long it would take for a sentence long, yet memorizable like this one to end up in a rainbowtable? With a mutation like every second word later? Without ever mentioning the sentence on the internet? I ever only made one Brainwallet for a friend with one Bitcoin. She is of the non-smartphone-and-better-non-computer type, so I promised her to give her the bitcoin to "this piece of paper". I made her think up five long words that are mutually unrelated. She wrote them down and I consider this a safe password until I hear of more serious brain wallets being breached than stfu! (five closely related symbols) Whatyourhowittakealong,memorizablethistoupaisestimatelongwouldforsentenceyetlikeoneendinrainbowtable <- memorizable password as of above |
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If you are not a criminal, it's not called money laundering. If all your money sources are legit and taxed, you can't or will want to launder the money, you will just use it and nobody will have any problems with it. Earning money and not paying tax on it, while still living in the country that needs those taxes and using the services it provides for those taxes is a crime though.
Anonymizing the coin is to bring back fungibility which is lost in cases like high profile users (Satoshi and his $100.000.000 in bitcoins) and stolen money. I don't want my money be confiscated just because I sold my music anonymously to pirate@40. If I were Satoshi even after paying taxes on my fortune I might not want to reveal who I am. Very unlikely this info wouldn't leak even if he made efforts to secretly pay taxes. |
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I guess mycelium wallet is a commercial project?
I guess so, too but the client is open source with an easy-ish API, so you could make some server fit to it. The client does not connect to standard nodes yet and the mycelium people don't intend to implement such a part. |
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as little as I appreciate these societies and less the OP's hypothesis, an endorsement by them, the pirate parties, the think tanks, the presidents, the universities, the Alexa-high-ranks, the … whatever has influence to its direct associates and beyond can only be good for bitcoin, so go for it.
Personally I consider it better to have people that are considered intelligent to consider bitcoin a good idea than to sell the idea of bitcoin to people that themselves consider themselves intelligent more than anybody else.
Do we want Bitcoin to be something only used by drug dealers, prostitutes and conspiracy theorists? The goal should be to attract all the brightest people on the planet to the Bitcoin source. It's for marketing but also because it's better for the world if we get really high IQ people to actually l think about Bitcoin. Guess you didn't get my point. Maybe as a non-native speaker I shouldn't try to make complicated sentences, so here again in simple English: I don't care how smart somebody thinks he is. I like when important people like Bitcoin. I like when people tell others about Bitcoin. I don't understand your unemployment part. |
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as little as I appreciate these societies and less the OP's hypothesis, an endorsement by them, the pirate parties, the think tanks, the presidents, the universities, the Alexa-high-ranks, the … whatever has influence to its direct associates and beyond can only be good for bitcoin, so go for it.
Personally I consider it better to have people that are considered intelligent to consider bitcoin a good idea than to sell the idea of bitcoin to people that themselves consider themselves intelligent more than anybody else.
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I still think this thread is very useful - I know you feel people who are new and not tech savvy deserve to lose their bitcoins, but that is not an attitude that will lead to widespread adoption. I would be okay changing it to: "If you use Brainwallet.org - MUST READ! - Security Risk!" if you think that is more accurate. My post was not meant to be libel in anyway, it seemed like a security breach to me at the time and it is a vulnerability with brain wallets more people need to be made aware.
If you have no problem lying to people, implicitly calling others that set up services like brainwallet fraudsters, leave it as is. If honesty counts in your value system, maybe change it to the truth. This is not about saying that you didn't deserve better. |
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i had over 100 trillion dollars delivered to my door today, no joke!
it's so sick! these bills sell for 7-40€ now! I want one to show how fiat turns worthless and now for this stupid fact they gain in value! Damn, the most worthless bill in the world is getting expensive because everybody wants to have one of these! Noooooo! Please stop buying these to brag with your wealth and leave them to people that want to make an actual point with them! |
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OP: mind changing the topic? I find it quite offensive to the guy who runs brainwallet.org despite the above mentioned reservations.
You only make a fool of yourself if you use a weak password like you did and then blame the service of stealing your money.
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The owner of that site needs to shut it down. This kind of thing was inevitable and we warned about it from the start. Someone has calculated a rainbow table and the passphrase you chose is in it.
Which wallet software did you import the key into? Do we need to put a warning about this site into wallet apps? We need to find some way to kill this stupid and dangerous site asap.
The owner of that site should at least warn that "correct horse battery staple" is a particularly bad password. The fact that barely any bitcoins flow through this one tells me that there is no significant amount of noobs using the site. With mass adoption I bet at least 1% of all users would be thankful for this "random" suggestion and go with it. Brainwallet instead should give the user feedback on how secure his key is, although this might make them feel safe where they shouldn't, it can tell them when they are not safe where they feel safe. Else it should suggest to actually use it to use the github version and verify that the signature of these 4 persons confirms the version to not be tampered with. How could be compromised a brainwallet ?
Breaking known algorithms should we exclude because that would affect all kind of wallets.
You have a javascript brainwallet like brainwallet.org or bitaddress.org or namecoinia.org.
1. It has a connection to the internet and transmitting your private keys.
You can avoid this if you save the page on your computer and switch off the internet connection when you are generating the keypairs.
Alternatively you can do it in a virtualbox container which has no internet connection.
2. You are generating a random keypair however it isn't random in the reality, but follows a deterministic or stored pattern known to the brainwallet creator.
The source is known (javascript) but it is obfuscated and difficult to check it. In this case it doesn't matter if you are offline or online.
Best if you generate deterministic wallet with a passphrase which is random and long enough but you choose it and your computer is offline.
In this case I cannot imagine how could the brainwallet creator know the private keys.
Of course they are other attack possibilities also but they are not brainwallet specific.
If you downloaded from a pishing site, you have some trojans on your computer or you have written the passphrase on a paper and let on the table on your bureau.
If the minimized/obfuscated code reduces the entropy by doing something like changing this privkey_hex = sha256(keyphrase).hexdigest() to this: privkey_hex = sha256("evilhackersalt" + sha256(keyphrase)[:3]).hexdigest() you would get "totally random" keys with every change to your input, but the attacker would actually be the only one to know your private key in a trivial list of a million keys. You would only notice this once you try to use your password on a non-poisoned brainwallet. Good luck finding your money if you didn't also backup your priv key, just in case this attacker needs time to swipe your money. |
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Yes, but you can't turn "Zerocoin Bitcoins" back into real Bitcoin unless you find someone willing to exchange them. I fail to see why would anyone be willing to do that? What's the idea behind of turning real anonymous cash into pseudo anonymous one? For a Zerocoin in its current implementation you would pay for 40kB of storage and one second of computation for adding it and for one second of computation for spending it. Imagine how long loading the blockchain will take if the millions of transactions we have so far, are monsters like that. A node could verify 1 transaction per second, not thousands. The blockchain would be 320GB, not 8GB. Imagine how nobody would mine your transaction for 1ct. We would already compete for space in the block chain and certainly the fees would be at least $1 per transaction. Maybe rather $10. Zerocoin is a tool to launder money. To plausibly deny knowing about all the other coins in your wallet. People would move their coins to zero once they are worried about this and pull them back out one by one. They would send the reviewed coin to a new address to be able to claim they just got tipped and only then spend them. Zerocoin is needed for bitcoin to make the coins fungible. A money without fungibility is no money. I guess Satoshi relies on this to happen at some point. And so do those hackers that have closely watched wallets. Mike do you know if the current protocol deals with DOS attacks? If it takes 1s to find out that my zerocoin transaction is invalid, I could bring the node to a halt. Would I have to pay a fee to make the mining node even try? |
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ZeroCoin is not merge-able not because it would create a much harder time staying decentralised. It's unmerge-able because the performance is so poor it would break things completely.
It's worth reading the original paper very carefully before forming any opinions on ZeroCoin. When I read it I discovered a serious error in their analysis but it was too late for the paper to be fixed. Namely that they thought that because blocks are created every 10 minutes, if it takes 10 minutes to verify a block then that's ok. Not correct! You need to be able to verify a block within seconds, not minutes. Otherwise the whole consensus algorithm just fails.
The maths behind ZeroCoin is fascinating, but unless they made dramatic improvements we're getting way ahead of ourselves talking about alt coins and implementations. This isn't some kind of finely nuanced tradeoff on which reasonable people can disagree. ZeroCoin is just not usable in its current form in any coin, alt or no.
And that's ignoring the issue of how you initialise the system in a trustworthy manner, which is still an open research problem. If you don't solve that then you're back to having a central banker which rather defeats the point of crypto-currencies.
Mike thank you for this info. As you can see in my sig, I'm totally fascinated by ZeroCoin. The idea, not this concrete implementation. I'm sure we will find a way and I'm not too sad if it doesn't work yet tomorrow. |
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/sub
I used Brainwallet for a friend half a year ago on an offline pc with the code from github. The money is still there. I wouldn't trust the version that happens to be on any website but for now I do trust github to not mess with repos. I wish there was some signing involved though. If reputable dev would confirm to have seen nothing fishy about version [hash], I would pick up the changelog (if any) from there and decide if I use the signed version or the updated version. I picked the most recent version as it was old already, so I assumed it was reviewed by quite some people but I guess git's feature to mess with the history would allow to forge an old-looking head easily.
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@Trolls: I have an ignore button and I will not hesitate to use it @Troll-feeders: I have an ignore button and if you keep bringing bullshit from trolls out of the ignored posts into my stream, I will use it. i would prefer to have a checkbox "ignore replies to trolls" though. It's all my perception and of course really crazy events aren't included in this scenario, but even with a ban in some countrys it's value won't be zero though. I agree. Bitcoin is resilient to law. It is not resilient from technology. Any of the largest governments, and even some of the large banks, if they wanted Bitcoin gone, could 51% it. They could 90% it. We are a mote. No mistaking it, we can go to zero. I am optimistic, I think this will not happen, but I also recognize that it might. I'm not so sure that would work. After a 51% we would essentially have two chains. An accidental 51% is complicated because everyone has to choose sides or be left out. Here they would assume control of their chain, but no one would want to catch up to that fork. We will all remain in our new btc-2 chain, and ignore the gov' controlled one. At least that's how I understand it would go, but I'm no expert. Any blockchain guru out there can confirm? Yeah, an attack would be easy for some random smallish bank. In fact there is little we can do to find out if it's already happening. Any evil party investing in ASIC makes it less attractive for good players to invest in it, as presumably enough people protect the net already. An attacker's block would not be distinguishable from a good node's block. The attacker could soak up all mining profits and leave the rest with just stale blocks until they all give up. At this point the attacker could arbitrarily mess with the block chain and block random transactions. One day all that have an "e" as third letter, the other day all with even fees. Good luck "picking a chain". The problem I see is that any miner who is profitable, will be more profitable with more equipment so I think it is inevitable that some day some miner will just accidentally have 60% of the hashing power, unless people people begin to understand "mining" as a service and maybe start calling it "securing". Are you mining? Are you securing? The latter would not imply profits and only not for profit securing of the network will keep the consolidation of the mining industry under control. This accidentally successful 60% miner could now play around and check if people notice if just causes 10% stale blocks with his competition. As this would be not for free for him, neither, he would loose 8% to stale blocks, too, but end up doing 2% more profit (than the others who loose 10%, and that's all that counts in mining) at the cost of the others who will now be more likely to give up mining. Slippery slope is slippery. Better call it "securing". |
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The reference about their payment methods is behind a login wall!?!? WTF? TOS walled? That's a good sign for any service.
I checked on Wikipedia (de) and there they stated that flattr still takes 10% but didn't process much yet.
I wondered about their relevance when I read that by september last year they processed a total of just 1 million micro transactions with the average user flattring 4.5€ per month. I mean I might be wrong but that means that in the best case one million users would all have clicked just one distinct flattr button and all in the last month, that would total to a maximum of 4.5million € / "month" with one million artists reaced. 4.5M€ is MtGox volume of a day and a million users is half of what we already have.
Worst case is the 1000 users clicking one of the same 100 flattr buttons per month and user numbers actually declining with the million transactions having happened over 10 months. Then you would be at 4500€/month with some 1000 users reached.
Well, 1000 users reached is not bad for a single event but it wouldn't make me feel bullish for bitcoin in general.
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An admin in the play store is the worst case I could think of, and on the long run I guess it's very likely to have all such wallets get wiped out in some incident. The reward is just too huge to not do it.
For now, the best you can do is have your keys on a paper wallet. We will further improve usability when spending from paper wallets. Well, the second best is to compile mycelium on my own box, so it doesn't get updated itself. An admin taking a different app to attack would need to infect many more phones. I think you will see more product offerings from Mycelium in the future that eliminate even these threats.
I'm eagerly waiting for the bitcoincard to come real and count me in to buy one if the conditions are ok (security without third party risk but with backup?, price below $40, usability, etc). To big surprise a friend told me it already is!?!? He told me he saw a map of many of these cards being active in some area!?!? I couldn't find such a map. |
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Argentine here.
I'm gonna be painfully honest, but I've seen the "btc saviour of the 3rd world" used a lot and though I'd love nothing more than to agree with it, I've sadly come to the realization it is completely false.
Yes, at first BTC sounds ideal to countries like ours with devaluating currencies and hyperinflating economies, but the awful truth is there is no easy way for us to get BTC and no way to get it at market price. But even before that, we cannot get USD. We even got a black market for that, USD is expensive. If you get your USD as an Argentinian, you'll soon find out there is no way for you to inject it into one of the exchanges, they all require you to link a US or EU/Sepa bank, or a us payment system (dwolla,etc) or maybe use some retail moneypacks (which you guessed.. don't exist here). International bank wire from Arg have prohibitive costs.
Another sad truth is the fact we Argentinian's (and lots of other 3rd world countries) rely heavily solely on Paypal and CC's to buy internationally. We all know that's not happening for BTC, at least not on a regular basis, but truth be told, the BTC I was able to acquire at market price or closest to it I got them through Paypal, thanks to people who trusted me.
If we go through all this, and our btc investments do well, good luck getting those dollars back on the Argentine system. If you're a long bull like myself, that shouldn't matter for now at least..
Even if you disregard everything cost and acquisition related, another harsh truth is there's nothing I can do here in Argentina with my BTC other than use it as a (volatile) store of value. Again, sadly, over the last year I've also realized that bitcoin has placed all it's energies in building rich financial systems and infrastructure (very much like the ones we try to replace and prone to the same heavy abuse), all the while ignoring the development of a real economy and everyday commerce tools.
It's easy for big fish in the US or EU to buy huge loads of btc, and manipulate the market.
It's hard for small 3rd world guys to do 800 pesos = 90 usd = 1 btc, with fees all along and market markup.
The M-Pesa news sounds like a great step in the right direction, I'll take that.
At the moment though, and it hurts to say, btc is still almost exclusively a financial platform, a very speculative one at that. Not nearly ready to go helping the 3rd world.
Come on, don't whine. make the best of it. I live in Chile and it's already hard to get bitcoins here. 5% markup is a good deal but nobody (really almost nobody) here is dealing in bitcoins. But in Argentine you must be ready to help people out that come there and need pesos. Be flexible, be responsive at localbitcoins.com and the foreigners travelling to Argentine will be happy to make a good deal with their bitcoins. As mentioned before, work for bitcoin. If they are so horribly overpriced, don't buy them but mine (well, sorry if that's some months too late now) them, work for them or when you buy them, be the market maker. You will get MtGox rate even in Argentine if you are the market maker. Even people in Iran manage to get bitcoins not despite the hassle they have getting dollars but thanks to the borderless nature of Bitcoin. Mohammad Rafigh is a musician and producer and he is quite happy with what he can earn thanks to bitcoin. |
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