This is an anonymous forum where anyone can join. We have no way of telling whether you are a troll.

FUD posts like this one should automatically be considered trolling. Until proven otherwise.

I'm am not saying that you definitely are are troll, but give us some proof, or a least plausibility, that you know those "sources", or stop polluting this forum with FUD posts.

There is one more plausible explanation that the author hasn't considered:

mtgox regularly moves coins from ancient mining addresses to newer ones.

Yes, bitcoin is still very much experimental. Those people are taking a big risk, and hoping to pick up BTC at bargain prices, before bitcoin is more proven and institutional investors like you start to move in.


Because that doesn't achieve shit when most users are running bitcoin on leaky, malware-infested Windows machines.  Security in the client isn't the weak link that needs to be fixed. It's security in the OS, and developers have simply lacked the resources so far. Remember they are all volunteers.



They can promise you a lot of things. Will they actually deliver if the shit hits the fan? All you have is their word.  With bitcoin, you don't need to trust a person, because you can trust the mathematics.


Nobody is promising or guaranteeing you anything. Everything is open.

99.99% of people in the USA perhaps. Please remember that USA != World and that Americans may be a large minority, but a minority nonetheless among Bitcoin users.

Today, many countries in the world face the threat of a currency crisis, including America.  This isn't some crackhead dystopian fantasy. This is a real threat. How do I know this? Because even big corporations' CFOs are taking steps to be prepared for a possible collapse of the EUR for instance. Money doesn't lie.

I have experienced a currency crisis first hand when I was a child, where people lost more than half of their cash savings overnight.  It is a traumatic experience that scars people for life.  Those kind of people are emotionally attracted to a currency that can't be manipulated.  Currency crises happened as recently as 2001 in Argentina and 1998 in Russia. Those aren't exactly small countries.

Americans perhaps don't feel that way because they live in a bubble.  They feel that just because something has never happened it will never happen. If (when?) a currency crisis hits the US, it will take everyone by surprise, and it will be ugly, and then ordinary people will come flocking to alternative currencies.

We need a user-friendly preconfigured live-USB Drive, and we need to make it clear to users that running bitcoin from inside their windows or mac OS is unsafe.  This liveUSB needs to be made availble right at the bitcoin.org front page.

For-profit hackers are going to find more and more sophisticated ways of getting into people's systems. The average Windows/Mac user simply does not stand a chance against an attack targeted at stealing her/his wallets, no matter how many firewalls and antiviruses she/he installs.  Also, it is unreasonable of us to expect them to be security experts.

If that doesn't happen soon, there will be thousands of cases of wallet theft and even more bad press.

EDIT: Even a liveUSB is only going to hold off the hacker storm temporarily, because it doesn't protect against rootkit, MBR, and BIOS attacks.  In the long term the only satisfactory solution for the average joe user is a dedicated piece of hardware just for bitcoin (perhaps based on a cheap smartphone).

Bad idea. In all likelihood, Paperback will be defunct and forgotten 30-40 years from now.  Good luck retrieving the information from the bitmap then!

See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm

To be safe, you would have to tattoo the entire source code (or at least pseudocode) of Paperback in addition to the bitmap. 


A much better idea is to convert the wallet keypair to a QR code and tattoo that code in UV ink.

QR codes are ISO-standardized, so even if they become obsolete, you will always be able to find the old technical papers that tell you how to convert them back to the keypair.

Your idea is nothing new. It is not bitcoin 2.0. It is e-gold 299.0

Security can't  be simple. I've never seen an online banking site that was simple to use. And for good reason.

Who cares? It's all about perception.

You are being just as lurid about the problems facing bitcoin right now as the media you are criticizing.

Step back a little.  Tabloid journalists are going to sling mud at bitcoin, no matter what. There is little we can do about that.   Technologies that challenge people's perception of the status quo always tend to provoke that kind of reaction, initially.  

Remember all the bad press and ridicule that Wikipedia faced just after it gained mainstream attention?  

What we can do is increase the amount of positive coverage in media consumed by the decision makers in our societies.  Luckily, coverage has been more positive in those media so far (specifically The Economist and Der Spiegel)

Bitcoin is facing challenges, but it won't die if we don't let it die. It grew a little bit too fast initially.  The bare bones infrastructure (the bitcoin protocol) seems to be solid now. The next step will be to build user-friendly tools (eg. wallet security software) that will unleash the power of that infrastructure. But that takes time.

Or how about this?  Exchange opens every second Tuesday of each month between 9:15 am and 9:45 am, and every third Thursday between 4:00 pm and 4:30 pm (Tokyo time). Closed for vacation in the months of July and August.


This was the equivalent of your local supermarket running out of beer on a Saturday evening, because somebody threw a huge party and bought up the entire stock.   That doesn't mean there won't be any beer on Monday or that you can't find beer in the neighbouring town's supermarket (for the normal market price).

If bitcoin traders are too stupid to grasp this then quite frankly I've lost faith in humanity and think that humanity doesn't deserve bitcoin.

Corruption = abuse of power by an authority that has been granted this power by the people it represents.   An authority that acts in its own best interest rather than in the interest of the people it represents.

In the bitcoin community there is no authority.  There is no representation. There are no "social contracts", implicit or explicit. Nobody is in charge.

So by definition, there is no corruption.

Sure, the distribution of power is not equal among community members, and some powerful members may be acting in their own best interest rather than in the interest of the community at large. But that isn't corruption.

And there certainly is equal opportunity for power.

Everybody, please realize this important truth about Bitcoin:

You only own what you control.  You lose ownership of your Bitcoins the minute you cede control over them to somebody else.  Simple as that.

I'm not saying this is a good thing or bad thing. I'm not saying that this is how it should be. All I'm saying is that this is how it is.  That is the way bitcoin is designed to work.  Don't treat them like credit or physical property because they are not.

From nowhere. We have just witnessed the unintentional creation of the first fractional reserve bitcoin bank.  

Asking for them back is reasonable, considering they don't want them.

What is not reasonable is expecting to get them back. But asking never hurts.

Obviously you don't hire a team just for yourself.  You join a managed investment fund.

This is what most investors are already doing for almost any commodity apart from bitcoin.

There are other solutions apart from shutting down the market, which can't be done anyhow. If one exchange closes during the weekend a competitor will happily step in and grab the customers who do want to trade while the other exchange is closed.

The most obvious solution is to hire a professional team of traders to do the trading for you while you are sleeping

That would be a lottery. I bet that as soon as it reopens the site will be overwhelmed and the majority of orders will end up in the queue for at least 10 minutes before being executed.

The few people who actually manage to buy BTC for almost zero will be the ones who placed the order just in the right microsecond. 

I for one, am going to be clicking the refresh button like mad starting from 3 minutes before opening time.

No offense, but your web design looks sooooo 2000's.

After thinking about this a little bit more, I have reconsidered ... this is a very bad idea.

During bitcoin's more innocent times, I kept my wallet.dat files unencrypted on my main laptop. I use this laptop to try out new stuff and browse the web with plugins activated, so it has a huge attack surface.

I have long since moved all my bitcoins to offline savings wallets and a spending wallet on a dedicated netbook.

But those old wallet files with zero balance in them should be considered tainted.  Even if I move them offline and format my HD it's too late.  I am making the assumption that they have been harvested by hackers already.  The problem is, my EFF donation happened such a long time ago that it came from one of those wallets.

The last thing we need right now is EFF donations being reclaimed by hackers!