If they go pick a package up at a post office they can't claim it was mailed to them without their knowledge in case the cops are also at the post office.
True, but the risk would seem pretty low to me unless you're buying something that warrants the police staking the post office out for two weeks or however long they hold unclaimed parcels. |
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And your assumption of government intervention is based on what?
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I'm confused, you're making this all sound so complex. What's to stop someone from using, say, poste restante for deliveries?
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True. I just feel like everything in the bitcoin world should be 'free' free bitcoin transactions, free products and services. But I guess there is not really way of going around it, the appropriate people need to be awarded one way or another.
What's the point of a currency if everything is free? |
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Bought and received Deus Ex: Human Revolution from Tecshare, good deal for me as it would cost more here.
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As of about 20 minutes ago, there's been a slew of small trades on mt Gox, which seems to have ceased just as I'm writing this.
Basically, there were lots of 0.01-0.02 BTC trades going back and forth, in the 10.92-10.97 USD/BTC range. You can see it as a dense knot on mtgoxlive.com, for example. Has anyone seen this kind of thing happen before. Is it common?
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The anonymous nature of bitcoin is most helpful to criminals and scammers who are able to steal and scam with little to no risk at all of consequence. Cut out the kids, and cut out the criminals and then you would have a winner.
How would one go about doing that? |
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No web wallet can ever be as safe as a properly administered private one. On the other hand, a poorly administered private wallet can easily be far less secure than a good web wallet. The problem is, how do you know if a wallet service is good and trustworthy or not...
IMO such a service does not, and almost can not exist now. It's too early. No-one in the on-line wallet business has enough of a track record to be considered trustworthy. Maybe if some existing company started offering wallet services they could be trusted, but as things are, I for one will not be using a web wallet for at least a few years, simply because it takes time to build trust.
Ease of use is a big issue for Bitcoin adoption, but I'm not sure trusted third parties are the way to go in the immediate short term. Some issues with Bitcoin are technical, and these can be fixed by throwing resources at them. Others are social, and these can only be worked out with time.
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Well, assuming you've told us everything there is to know, then someone has picked the wrong address to send to. Have you given the Bitcoin address that's receiving the funds to anyone?
Theoretically, you could have an address collision, where two people manage to generate the same address, but that's astronomically unlikely.
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Simple to track the addresses/generated money. Just black list the coins that are generated via botnets -- pretty simple actually.
How would you detect coins generated by botnets? And if you could do that, how would you detect them fast enough to blacklist them before they get sold off to someone completely unrelated to the botnet operation? |
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Is there a point to this thread? There's nothing you can do to stop people from making viruses either targeting wallets or running botnet mining ops.
If I'm wrong and you have come up with something you can do to stop this, please speak up. Otherwise, this seems like useless ranting to me.
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Offer closed
I'm going to London tomorrow for a week, am interested in exchanging up to 50 BTC for GBP in cash while there. Either spot price, or perhaps Mt. Gox weighted average. Will have to meet in person somewhere with WIFI, probably have a coffee or beer while the confirmations roll in. If interested, let me know about how you'd like to go about it. I'd prefer thursday or friday, the weekend will be a bit difficult for me in terms of time unless it's well before noon, and if it's after that I'm probably not going to need as much cash as I would if I can get this done this week.
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I don't think the Bitcoin economy is anywhere near large enough to sustain serious money laundering. Any operation worth considering would end up being many times the size of the rest of the economy. That's not what you want if you're looking to launder money.
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If you're talking about an EMP taking down large parts of the Bitcoin network, well, let's just say you'll have more pressing concerns if that happens. Most likely that would be the result of a global nuclear conflict, in which case you want to be asking yourself whether you have food, water and shelter to hold out for several months. If you survive that, you then want to ask yourself how you're going to survive in the post-nuclear wasteland the Earth has become. By this point you'll likely have forgotten all about Bitcoins.
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I received my sample, shipped to the EU, promptly. It's good, too, burns well and has a mild, pleasant aroma to it. No more burning my fingers lighting my pipe!
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If you find yourself in need of plastic prototypes, I may be able to help. I have a Makerbot, an extruder-type 3d printer.
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I won't try to predict when, if ever, they might do so, but I do think it's entirely possible they will if the market becomes big enough. There's been some sentiment here that Bitcoin is a direct competitor of Paypal, but I don't think that's really the case. Paypal is in the business of making it easier for people to send money to other people. Bitcoin does that too, to an extent, but as we've seen, keeping your wallet secure is a big task for many users, and if PayPal were to offer an Bitcoin wallet service, they could get a lot of users for that. Whether people would be willing to pay enough for the service for them to want to consider it is a different matter, but really I think PayPal would be just like any other on-line wallet service, only huge.
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This is more or less what I've figured all along (although it's interesting to hear that the admin account could just grant himself arbitrary bitcoins; I reckoned instead that somebody had used an admin account to collect bitcoins together from other accounts). Those are quite possibly the same thing. The blurb is, perhaps intentionally, unclear on the exact details. Where it says "was able to arbitrarily assign himself a large number of Bitcoins" it could be that that large number is the total number of Bitcoins in the system, which would effectively be a pooling of all user balances (not necessarily zeroing out user balances, just a sum/view). You quoted part of where they explained it, the full quote being: We would like to note that the Bitcoins sold were not taken from other users’ accounts—they were simply numbers with no wallet backing. For a brief period, the number of Bitcoins in the Mt. Gox exchange vastly outnumbered the Bitcoins in our wallet. Which to me says pretty clearly the attacker assigned themselves coins out of thin air. |
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