1) Vertrauen in Sandoz :-)
2) Official release post im englischen Forum: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16553.0
"Priority for next version:  wallet encryption"

Unfortunately we are at a point where a single laptop has virtually no chance against the professional mining rigs and you will probably spend more money in electricity than you will get back from mining.
Another problem is that for some reason the mining on Apple computers has a way lower efficiency than under other operating systems.

If you are determined to try though, google for "DiabloMiner". It works on MacOS and uses your GPU. Depending on how comfortable you are with installing linux on that laptop, you may want to run DiabloMiner from there in order to harvest some more coins.

Please, people, don't whine when the same thing will happen to tradehill or britcoin or mybitcoin or dropbox... we are talking about money. Real money.

A good hacker has way more motivation in hacking those sites than he ever had before. A few years ago all he could possibly have gained from hacking were some files difficult to resell anonymously: classified documents, email addresses. Now he can have millions of dollars.

So keep your money wherever you want, but don't complain if someone else loses it for you.

I always wondered how many people really thought a site called Mt. Gox would offer them more protection than a site from a big company like Sony.

Die Entwickler haben angekündigt Verschlüsselung sei die Priorität für das nächste release.

A developer stated this actually would be their priority for the next version

This is exactly the thing I was looking for. A simple but trustworthy Linux LiveCD.

I you want this to work for computer illiterates however, you need at least wifi working.

Personally I wouldn't care if it is bigger than 300 mb, as long as it fits onto a CD and can be trusted. The amnesic Linux is my current choice, it has some good stuff like tor, ram erasure as soon as you remove the boot medium and other stuff. And it is extremely simple to use. Unfortunately it lacks Bitcoin and has a lot of other unrelated software (openoffice etc)

I wonder why so many people trust "online wallets", especially after the whole Sony mess.

I advise everyone to keep their bitcoins on their own computer. At least there is no one else to blame if they are stolen. You have it in your hands to protect your wallet...

Yes, but those who stole bitcoins are less attached to them. I doubt someone steals to hoard...

It's ok, you got your bitcoins... and it's probably too late for the original owner to get them back.

Now that you have them, don't sell them for dollars, use them to buy physical stuff. That way you legitimize bitcoins, attract new businesses and make your remaining bitcoins more valuable.

If you sell them, you just get less.

Also ich habe bei RealMusicShop meine ersten bitcoins ausgegeben, und es hat alles wirklich prima geklappt:

- Ich habe die Bestellung via PM hier im forum aufgegeben da der web-shop offiziell keinen Versand in die Schweiz unterstützt. Hat bestens geklappt.
- RealMusicShop hat mich kontaktiert und einen Preis in bitcoin + eine addresse geschickt.
- Ich habe die bitcoins geschickt (und zur sicherheit noch einen Link zu blockexplorer per email)
- Nach einer Woche habe ich alles erhalten.

Der web-shop ist vielleicht nicht so komplett wie Thomann, aber die Bedienung ist umso freundlicher und schneller.
Leider hat der Schweizer Zoll sich noch ein paar Spässe erlaubt und mir ein bisschen echtes Geld abverlangt (11.45 CHF Schweizer Mehrwertsteuer + 18.00 CHF "Vereinfachte Verzollung" (das ungefragte öffnen und Neuverpacken des Pakets!!!!)). Aber das wäre auch bei anderen Bestellungen von Onlineshops im Ausland passiert.

Alles in allem bin ich mit RealMusicShop sehr zufrieden!

Und... ich muss sagen... es ist schon ein spezielles Gefühl etwas mit bitcoins bezahlt zu haben

While I admire the ideas bitcoin gave the community, I am honestly confuse by the "coin" put everywhere. I associate it with a currency, with coins. I guess this is why I had some trouble understanding namecoin..

Wouldn't bitname, bitvote, bitgame, bitwhatever be more clear?

Nobody mentioned this option:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

It basically allows you to share n parts of the key. You just need some of those (not all) to decrypt the wallet, which means you could give different parts of the key to lawyers, family members etc. If a few are lost, the wallet could still be decrypted!

+1

It would be HUGE if we can get bitcoins accepted in all major shopping-cart tools without requiring any additional efforts from the vendors. He would just receive dollars and not worry about understanding how bitcoins work.

Bitcoin acceptance would grow instantly (and after some time vendors would start keeping bitcoins instead of activating the automatic dollar conversion)

While reading through these forums an Idea came up.

The idea is about a hypothetical program for the paranoid amongst us: it could generate plausible but randomised files simulating:
- Wallet files
- GPG encrypted wallets
- Bitcoin encrypted wallets (as of next bitcoin version)

This could go even further in that through some modules it could generate some web traffic (randomised google searches, invalid but apparent bittorrent traffic).

That would induce so much noise that hackers and governments would not be able to discern valid wallets / files / traffic from invalid and random one.

If you encrypt your wallet with GPG (as proposed in another thread) you could plausibly argue that you actually don't have an encrypted wallet but the noise software must have generated it...

Use an on-screen keyboard to get around hardware keyloggers. Cumbersome but quite safe...

That's actually a good idea. But I don't like the idea of someone tampering with the VM image. It would need to be read only.

I will look into LUKS, I guess TAILS linux is the most trustworthy live CD...

Hi,

I want to get away from all these price discussions and try to understand whether someone has a good answer to this:
is there some kind of good encryption (file or volume) that is usually supported out of the box on linux/unix LiveCD's? Maybe some command line tool usually available?

I would love to use bitcoin from a random LiveCD (fear of keyloggers) and know I could decrypt my wallet (delivered via USB stick or downloaded from a server) without the need to burn my own customised LiveCD.

Truecrypt is not an option for instance, as most LiveCD's don't ship with it preinstalled.
Booting from USB is not an option as I want a relatively tamperproof CD.

(And, the less bloated the linux distro, the better)

I hope you can help me, in fact I am sure there are plenty of linux/unix experts on this forum!!

Ich habe soeben meine erste Bestellung mit bitcoins bei RealMusicShop gemacht. Direkt via email anstatt über den web-shop.

Ein sehr freundlicher und speditiver Service, alles in allem hat er mich positiv überrascht. Und es ist schon ein spezielles Gefühl in bitcoins zu zahlen!!

Ich habe die Ware noch nicht erhalten, werde aber bei erhalt noch einmal ausführlicher kommentieren!

Step 2 is true in the sense that money needs to come from somewhere, true. But if people start selling and mailing wallets, you cut a link and the simple fact that someone put some money onto a an account and there are no visible transactions does not mean he is still the owner anymore. It also appears dead while it might still be used (for instance using many atomic 1 BC wallets).

What I just want to say is that plausibly the transactions are not traceable as before. One could buy drugs by sending around a couple of wallets and the money would suddently appear somewhere else. And the person could always say his wallet was somehow stolen when he was using bitcoin in an internet café in some weird country.

Step 3 - Mail the wallet: first of all less transaction fees, secondly less traces around. Mailing cash takes ages.. and if the customs open it it might seem weird. You could send many encrypted CD's, one will eventually reach the addressee. And if some bad guys are intercepting the mail? Well, you can still get your money back as you still have access to the wallet too.

Believe me, it has some advantages....

I guess you could put an encrypted wallet on a public server (or bittorrent) and distribute a printed password on a paper.

The issue is that as soon as you exchange that piece of paper the recipient must scan the password, decrypt the file, validate the contents and change the password so that nobody can just pick up the bill and decrypt the same wallet.

This means that your bill would become worthless after use (or somehow supports changing passwords)