Received the game. 5/5 for speed and ease of ordering.

Placed an order for Deus Ex HR with the web page, sent bitcoins and a PM.

I use LastPass in Firefox and it works just fine with Mt.Gox.

I would think the most secure way to handle a lost second factor would be to only allow that user to withdraw the funds on account to a previously setup destination. Once all the funds have been moved out they can remove the second factor and resume trading once the new funds are added.

Adam Barr is just an employee. Mark Karpeles (MagicalTux on the forums and IRC) the owner was busy working on the site.

Each time a buy order was filled it was announced. So you could see the price fall as buy orders got filled. Did the YouTube video show the time stamps on the trades? If I recall correctly every single buy order that got filled had the same time stamp.

If you don't want to use a password manager, write down part of your password but keep a portion of it just in your head.

The sell off was one very very large sell order. The ticker did not update until the order was finished processing. I watched it get processed in real time on http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/time-sales/

The messages you got in between ticker updates were the many buy orders getting filled one by one.

I donated 10 BTC back when they were about $1 each. Given the rise in value since then, if the EFF does not want them, I would prefer to get mine back.

In my case sending the coins back to any of the addresses they came from would accomplish that.

When I first found out about bitcoin I could not get the faucet to work for me. So I do not feel any need to donate to it, and certainly not $120+ worth of bitcoins.

I am fairly sure it was a real order. Some people are reporting getting existing low bids filled. It was one very very large sell order, new orders were not able to be placed until it finished executing.

Edit: On the subject of hacking, I had USD and BTC in my Mt.Gox account and neither was effected.

I have a feeling there may be after shocks from that sale over the course of today.

I was able to place a buy order but it did not end up in the order book till the massive sell off finished.

I saw a trade for over 261,000 bitcoins at 1 cent each. was watching on http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/time-sales/

If the difficulty went that high without much higher prices first the price of bitcoin would go to $0. Because the only way that much computing power would be set to mining at current prices is if the owner of the computing power wanted to kill bitcoin. With enough computing power to drive difficulty that high they would succeed.

The AVERAGE number of shares before a block is solved is equal to the difficulty. It is possible (but VERY unlikely) for a block you are working on to have no solution. However since the block you are working on changes all the time, it is not a problem. Every time a transaction is added to the block or someone else find a block the one you are working on changes.

There is no value to shares but they are a useful thing for pools to track because they can be verified and there is no way to looking for valid shares without looking for a valid block.

There is no duplication of work in mining pools. There is a number in the block that gets changed for every hash, the pool sends out work that start each worker at a different point. This does not give larger pools any noticeable advantage because there are many many possibilities to try and only a tiny fraction are tested before the block changes.

Edit: Also there is no duplication of work between pools or solo miners because the block you are working on contains the address to be paid the block reward.

I assume a lot of people leave a fair number of bitcoins on Mt.Gox so that they can decide to sell without waiting an hour for the bitcoins to confirm after sending them.

It would work just fine. To confirm it has worked you can manually copy the block chain to the offline machine. When you send coins to an address the network becomes aware of it. However the network being aware of an address has no effect on someones ability to create the same address. This is not a problem because there are 1.4*10^59 possible addresses. To give you an idea of how big a number that is there are 1*10^50 atoms in the Earth. So there are 1,400,000,000 times as many possible bitcoin addresses as there are atoms in the Earth.

The only way a VM can help with bitcoin security is if you do everything inside the VM and only use bitcoin outside the VM.

Yes all the wallet.dat file contains is public/private key pairs for all of your bitcoin addresses.

When price is high compared to difficulty more is spent on mining hardware and less on directly on bitcoins. Therefore difficulty increase does have a small and delayed effect on the price of bitcoin.