1661
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Economy / Currency exchange / Re: Question: BTC with Credit Card
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on: March 15, 2013, 05:44:38 AM
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What reliable website can I use to buy btc with credit card?
About the only options are VirWoX and BTCQuick. For VirWox, you actually buy Second Life Lindens (SLLs) and pay with credit card. Then you convert those SLLs to BTCs and withdraw. - http://www.VirWoX.comFor BTCQuick, it depends on catching them when they have stock: - https://www.btcquick.com/buy/index.php?route=product/category&path=60_63Otherwise, you pretty much are stuck. I did see that Transferwise now accepts Debit card (EUR and GBP). So you could then add funds from TransferWise and transfer those to your exchange account (e.g., if GBP, then convert to EUR and use SEPA withdrawal to BITSTAMP). But cash is really the easier way to buy coins in most areas (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, E.U., and more). In the U.S., cash deposit at BItMe (using Chase bank), BitFloor (using Bank of America), Ziggap (Using Western Union or Moneygram), BitInstant (Moneygram) and more. The other options can be found from this list: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins
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1662
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: buying coins via PayPal
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on: March 15, 2013, 05:37:33 AM
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How can I build trust with someone so that they will accept payment via PayPal? Here's someone else, couldn't even get anyone to do a $2 trade with PayPal. Even after posting a pic of a sad looking puppy. But that same person could find a lender for same, just by offering a usurious interest rate. It's a bizarro world. And I thought posting a pic of puppy would do the trick... Well here's my loan at BTCjam https://btcjam.com/listings/2487 Paypal and phone number verified, ID verification is pending approval. Now go and invest your coins with 100% profit 
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1664
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: bitfloor BTC prices
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on: March 15, 2013, 03:59:27 AM
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relatively quickly? That really is what determines what price you pay. If you simply sit above the current highest bid, eventually someone will hit you because someone will sell at market rate eventually (and that's your bid). What could happen is the exchange rate rises though and you have to stay above the highest bid and you could end up paying more than if you hit the lowest ask right off the bat. So it all depends what you mean by "relatively quickly". Since you don't when a sell order at market will come in that could be hours or more. Or it could be ten minutes.
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1665
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: Cryptocurrency Strategy
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on: March 15, 2013, 03:51:30 AM
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Brand-wise they are very, very vanilla.
Decentralized (proof-of-work based) digital currencies are vulnerable to a 51% attack. Thus to be protected they need a sufficiently high level hurdle to reach 51%. When Bitcoin was small, its hurdle to being 51% attacked was that nobody knew it was anything more than an experiment. There was relatively little value crossing the wires. Today Bitcoin is protected from a 51% attack by the fact that to do so might cost tens of millions of dollars (if attempting just to procure the equipment to do a brute-force 51% attack.) This is not something "very, very vanilla" between Bitcoin and the alternatives.
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1666
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: repost for advice (non tech user)
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on: March 15, 2013, 03:04:09 AM
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so I opened the folder "bitcoin" and typed it in? when I restarted the client another folder was created called bitcoin.-recan I've no idea what you did but there should not be a directory called "bitcoin.-recan" or any new directory. Your wallet.dat contains the private keys necessary to spend. As long as you still have that, you should still have access to spend those funds (once you get a client in sync). At this point you are first simply trying to ascertain that the funds are still there. In the bitcoin client click on Receive. Do your addresses show? If not, you are running the client against an empty wallet.dat. You can stop the client and swap out wallet.dat files (e.g., rename the current one and restore from backup another one) to see if that shows any different. With 4K blocks to go, that means if you did ANY spending with your wallet since January you shouldn't trust the balance that shows until it has sync. Newer versions of the client don't show bogus results when not in sync, so if you had done any spending from your wallet then this is a problem that you see only because you are still on an older client.
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1667
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Physical security of MtGox
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on: March 15, 2013, 02:52:10 AM
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I'm sure wallets and such are backed up. The website itself is hosted remotely. Still, the damage would be immense.
Discussed here: - Does [MtGox] use cold storage (an offline wallet that cannot be accessed should the exchange's service become compromised)
Yes.
- Is there a target as to how much of customer's funds are kept in cold storage? (e.g., percent of total, or perhaps relative to recent withdrawal requirements)?
On average 98% of customer bitcoins are held in cold storage, with possible variations on large bitcoin moves (large deposits or customers asking for large withdrawals).
- Do new deposits go to cold storage? (if the hot wallet is compromised, new deposits made (e.g., automated payouts by mining pools) would still be secure)
No, this wouldn't be practical in terms of number of bitcoin addresses to keep in cold storage. This could change thanks to BIP 0032 which we are working on implementing. It should be noted however that we are using a hardware security module for the hot wallet
- Does the offline wallet where the cold storage resides remain protected due to an "air gap" (no access to it electronically, not connected to the network)?
Offline wallets are generated from an offline system and kept in paper format in three separate locations, using a technology based on raid. It will likely be changed to use Shamir's Secret-Sharing method in the future, and all existing offline wallets will be converted to this.
When the funds for Mt. Gox's current U.S. and Canadian customers are "transitioned" and then handled by Coinlab, that's discussed here: CoinLab's Tiered Security Options:
Medium Security (Hot Wallet) amounts are kept minimal and layered behind clients and firewalls High Security (Cool Wallet Storage) is kept in a physically secure location Ultra High Security (Cold Wallet Storage) is split using Shamir's Secret Sharing Algorithm and distributed physically - http://coinlab.com/storage
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1668
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: I need the current opinion on mining
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on: March 15, 2013, 02:36:40 AM
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But again, with the increased difficulty, should I not even attempt at mining?
Put simply, look at the following image. For you, up just a little is something bad. Up like this is redonkulously bad.  - http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin-ever.pngAnd that is with not all Avalons that have been paid for being shipped yet, nonetheless how BFL hasn't even started shipping. Either of those happens and there won't be a single remaining GPU miner who can smile (unless, of course, there is a corresponding BTC/USD increase that tracks the difficulty increase).
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1669
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: How to force a rule change by bloating the UTXO set
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on: March 15, 2013, 02:06:54 AM
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you can stick with your old client, and it will reject the "Bitcoin 2.0" blocks, but you can't spend your money without miners, and you can't be a miner without the UTXO set. Sure you can. It just takes one or more miners to mine before transactions are included in a block and eventually confirm. Just like after the hard fork occurred and v0.8 was ten blocks ahead, anyone could still mine on the v0.7 side even though it had just a fraction of the hashing capacity and the v0.8 side had the longest chain. It isn't the miners who decide. It is the economic majority who will buy the miner's coins that decides. If this happened today and the very next block were to be a fork as you describe as 80% of the hashing power ganged up and switched over to a client that followed your protocol change, the decision facing users, merchants and exchanges would be .... do we follow, or do we boycott? Probably what would happen is that payment processing for much of the bitcoin economy would be immediately halted (i.e., there would be no recognition of confirmations on either side of the fork) until some discussions occur. But if those who buy coins (the economic majority) were to boycott the protocol change, it would only be a matter of time (minutes to hours) before individual miners would leave the pools that pulled that stunt and the chain for the original protocol would gain and extend beyond the height for the chain with the changed protocol. [Update: And the difference between your scenario and this weeks' hard-fork was that users, merchants and exchagne were already using software that unknowingly accepted the rule change (no more 10K BDB locks, and reverting to v0.7 was compatible with both v0.7 and v0.8 clients. i.e., it didn't require everyone to have to change their software to something that understood a change to the protocol rules.]
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1675
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: A successful DOUBLE SPEND US$10000 against OKPAY this morning.
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on: March 14, 2013, 09:24:25 PM
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I later manually corrected the issue with another transaction, thus double spend. For post-mortem analysis, would you mind sharing how that raw transaction was broadcast? Through bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind I presume? But was this just connecting to peers or had you actually explicitly connected to a mining pool or well connected node? The question is that most peers would have rejected it because they should already have known of the original transaction (12814b8ad57ce5654ba69eb26a52ddae1bff42093ca20cef3ad96fe7fd85d195) and not relayed your double spend (762443f6373b7c8b3833d4ad23578fc3099cc29b86d1359d0c0565e3c8614f91). With all the nodes reverting to 0.7 and/or starting up with an empty memory pool it is not impossible for your node to have reached one of them with no knowledge of the original transaction and then because your double spend transaction was perfectly valid for that node to relay your transaction got relayed to other new nodes as well. Eventually then there would be a path that would reach the miner who eventually mined 225466 (the block with the double spend) -- BTC Guild [Edit: Yes, confirmed BTC Guild, per the coinbase].
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1676
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: icbit - weird fees and weird fills/logs.
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on: March 14, 2013, 03:12:32 PM
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this is unacceptable, and unheard of. are there any details on how and when this happened?
Here's the thread: We had to close a few profitable positions due to non-paying customers
I'm confused. If it was a profitable position it would add variation margin and thus no payment would be required. About the only thing that would explain a profitable position seeing forced margin selling would be if the margin requirements changed, which if true would be news to me. One person shorted too much, and did not add money in the account to upkeep the position, so account reached negative state. And there are no asks in the order book to cover the short position. So it falls into the "worst case": the system chooses counter parties (longs in the same futures contract in our case) with biggest unrealized profit by itself, and makes a forced trade (buy to cover) between these parties. As a result, the person who was in debt ends up with 0 BTC in account (there were a few emails sent, and waiting time was a few days), and profitable traders positions were reduced (as if they sold them to realize the profit).
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1677
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Month old transactions now unconfirmed upon upgrading from 0.6x to 0.8
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on: March 14, 2013, 02:31:09 PM
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Yet In the overview tab I see "unconfirmed: 0.00142 BTC"
Chances are you've been playing Satoshi DICE (even if that was a month ago). Does the transaction show up in the blockchain (e.g., on Blockchain.info ?) If not, let your client run for a half hour to an hour to ensure there is an attempt to re-broadcast it. Then check blockchain.info again.
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1678
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Continuity of support
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on: March 14, 2013, 01:55:46 PM
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Someday over the rainbow when the last of the 21,000,000 coins is mined then where will the authority come from?
The transaction fees are claimed in the coinbase, so a party refusing to accept a miner's proceeds (by boycotting a corresponding protocol change) means also refusing both the block reward subsidy as well as any transaction fees.
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1680
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Other / Beginners & Help / Re: instawallet.org et Tor
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on: March 14, 2013, 01:10:40 PM
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I just tried and would access it through Tor just fine. Anybody know an another site I could use to mix bitcoin over tor ? (for free, like using instawallet) EasyWallet.org is like Instawallet.
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