Maybe he is trying to lure people into believing it's all that he has, who knows?

不是只知道怎么投资，就能理解比特币的。这个世界上太多自以为是的人了。

A good thing about Bitcoin is you can DIY your own duress-proof scheme, suiting your own needs and tastes.

If I am more worried about myself losing my mind and plead my friends to just cooperate with the authority, then about the reliability of the technologies I employed, I can well hide my paper wallet in a certain corner of a forest on a certain continent, where I can not get to until I am free, or just encrypt it and put it into the bittorrent sync so that it won't be lost. Or better still, If I am feeling adventurous, I could just well hide it in the background noise of a porn picture, and in Linus Torvalds' words, let the rest of the world mirror it. The possibilities are endless.

You could also mixing up the schemes a bit, three signatures for the elves-infested forest, seven carved in the hall of stones, nine for your mortal friends,  then one last to rule them all, to find them and in the dark web bind them.

In jurisidictions relying on proper procedures, simply encrypting your password would be enough, as nobody can prove whether the encrypted content is Bitcoin wallet password or something else, thus unable to force you to reveal the password for the decryption.

In jurisidctions which would not hesitate to resort to coercion to open your mouth, Bitcoin can technically still be made much safer from confiscation than pretty much any other asset, by carefully hiding your trails and utilizing brainwallet or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption .

Breaking SHA256 is pretty unlikely, that being said I still think we may change the wallet address hashing into something like SHA256(XOR(PubKey,SHA256(PubKey))), that will make any preimage attack against SHA256 useless.

Yeah, so nobody knows they are yours, until you show a link between them and your real world identity(like they are in your safe or some bank vaults rented by you). Such anonymity is pretty useless in many situations.

Bitcoin, OTOH, provides reasonable pseudononymity/anonymity along with nearly indisputable ownership proof all at the same time.

Anonymous until you want to claim your ownership, in which case Bitcoin is still more anonymous.

Nah, just:
1.They have no such huge gold reserve, otherwise why bother buying it.

2.When you want to diversify from your fiats, PM is not a good option, central bankers still hold much more of them than you, and they know what they should do to keep their jobs(promoting fiats) if PM price skyrockets.

But to be honest I don't know what's with BoE and Gordon Brown.

If it were true, FEDs would not have bought some hundreds of tons of gold right before its price topped.

I thought there wasn't enough freedom of speech, then I checked the alt-coin subforum, and I was like" maybe I am not there yet, better get used to the status quo."

In some senses, that's why need people like the Silk Road guys, though I personally do not endorse drug trading.

We are all too timid to test the robustness of our system, it's these people who actually went to the front-line, attracted some gunfire, making some real world experimental data available to us.

I am curious, what's the message Gox going to show you when the withdrawal cannot be made immediately?

I assure everyone I will "redistribute" some bitcoins once the price is considered high enough, FYI I can withdraw to a Japanese bank account, which has never been a problem , now can we please end this FUD thread?

So Gox USD price broke the 6 month high, right before it is not. And the bitstamp price is offically above $150, during a weekend.

Did the bears finally realize it is not a drill?

If the malicious miner dislikes one transaction in the highest block, just one-up it will only delay, rather than foil his "enemy"'s attempt to send payments, because which transactions get to be included in the blocks afterwards in his alternative chain will still be decided by hashing power, if the malicious miner is willing to spend enough to incentivize all rational miners at every turn to make his enemy unable to send anything, then with such resource he probably should just buy enough hashing power to 51% attack the whole network.

It could be argued that it's also rational behaviour to dislike uncertainty("He is targeting XYZ's payment this time, who will he target next time, maybe me?"), other miners could very well insist on mining at losses of their own effective mining rates to deter rule-breakers, it might also be interesting to see what would happen if a game theory facet is added to the analysis of this attack.

Thank you Adam for the advice.


The function itself is supposed to be public knowledge, but the locations of the tough numbers are not, theoretically anybody can find out but testing every element is an infeasible task, and there should be no easy workaround, much like the situation of prime numbers. But as Adam has pointed out, this scheme has its own problems.

We don't need to listen to what FBI has to say, we can just check for ourselves.

Ha, it seems to me that cryptography was actually established to protect against evil villains, not your Grandma or roommate, who most likely don't even know how to view your files with hidden attributes.


Now back to something more on topic, I wonder if it makes sense to imagine some key-stretching function f, which for different values of x, would take vastly different time to find y=f(x) or y=f(x,s) if we add a salt, like for x1 it would take 1 nanosecond to execute the calculation, but for x2 it would take 1 minute. The disparity in the time of computation must be so large that a small percentage of "tough" numbers will take up most of the computation time. With such a function at hand, and a statistical knowledge of the distribution of the "tough" numbers x_d, I can obtain an estimation of the time it takes to scan across a randomly selected range of numbers to find a "softie" number, which should contain a fair bit of entropy, the total scanning time/initial stretched key generation time should be long enough yet tolerable(like 1 day or so), while the stretched-key creation time with the initial key already known much shorter as the chosen x is a softie. Now for an attacker who has no information whatsoever about the seeding key being used, it will take him an infeasibly long time to brute-force to the number we use, due to those "tough" numbers on his way, as he has to start from zero and scan through a much larger range of numbers than us. I naively assume that if such a function can be created, it could provide us with a reasonable key initialisation time(hours or days), short key reconstruction time with seeding key known(seconds), and infeasibly long brute-forcing time, and relatively benign ket/salt entropy requirement.

Example: Let's say we have 2^64 elements to try, dividing into 2^32 sets, testing all 2^32 elements in one set will take approximately 1 day according to some statistics, with 99% of the time being taken up by testing against just 1% of the tough elements, so that instead of having a brute-forcing/normal enhanced key creation time of about 2^63, we could, hypotehtically make it much longer without increasing password complexity.

You can use Gox JPY price as a meaningful indicator, which is now close to $160.