I'm trying to come up with a safe way to store my bitcoins where you would need 2-factor to spend the coins. The simple approach I can come up with is to store my private keys in a bank safe, but make sure that the private keys are encrypted with a strong password that only I know. I would then set up a dead man's switch to send that password out in case anything happens to me. This way, you would need to have access to my bank safe and know my password in order to spend the coins. That seems pretty safe to me. Thoughts?

Now the question is, what is a simple way to encrypt my private keys? I need something that's secure but also easy to use to decrypt. Since I have to describe how to decrypt the keys in my dead man's switch email.

I will give 10 BTC bounty for someone to create a pull request to modify bitaddress.org to give me an option to create an encrypted paper wallet using BIP 38. Claimed!

I'd like to start a discussion about pirateat40 and his 2 projects: GPUMax and Bitcoin Savings & Trust. The following is pure speculation on my part, as I have no proof of anything. I just wanted to hear other people's opinion and am not trying to spread FUD.

pirateat40 may be just a very smart person that happened to be working on 2 very ambitious projects, but something just doesn't seem right about him.

Who is buying mining shares for PPS*1.4? Why would anyone do that? Pool hopping is not that profitable anymore, right? Why doesn't pirate disclose the reason for these purchases. How is pirate making >1% a day the money he borrows? If he really is legitimately making so much money, why give 7% interest/week when his closest competitor is giving 3% interest/week. And most banks have money with pirate to be able to pay out that much. There's ton of people waiting to give him money, so wouldn't the right business move be to lower interest rate and make more money? I've learned that if something seems too good to be true, it generally is. Could this be a long con? Or is he actually making honest money with these 2 projects?

Here's what I'm getting at, what if his end game is to kill bitcoin? What if the fed decided that they want to put an end to bitcoin before it becomes a bigger threat. Think about it. If you were trying to kill bitcoin, what would you do? You'd want to do a 51% attack to shatter everyone's confidence and at the same time pull off the biggest bitcoin heist ever. If mining hardware costs $1 per mhash, to match the total network hashrate of 11 thash, you would need to spend $11 million. Wouldn't GPUMax be the cheaper and smarter way to do the 51% attack? You need to convince 51% of the network to use it. PPS*1.4 would do it. And to convince people that it's not malicious, only allow purchases to mine at specific pools. But what's to prevent pirateat40 from one day use all that mining power maliciously? So how much does it cost to pay half the network 40% more on the earnings 1/4 of the time (i'm assuming there's only public work 1/4 of the time)? 7200 btc are mined a day... so 7200 * 1/2 * .4 * 1/4 = 360 btc or just $1800/day. Run that for a year, and it's only $657,000. And that's if he has half the networking hashrate, which hopefully is not close to yet. So this is a lot less than the $11 mil that would be needed to buy mining hardware. Trick bitcoin miners into attack their own network... brilliant!

So now how do you make 360 btc a day? You can either spend your own money or start a HYIP. So build up bitcoin-otc to have people trust you then start lending money at 1% interest a day and use people's deposit to pay the interest and the money needed to keep purchase on GPUMax. Keep growing the total loan amount so you have enough money but keep the growth contained so that you don't pay too much interest. And build up hype by making it hard for people to deposit money with you.

This scam can probably last until he gets 51% of the mining power. Then use whatever money is left in the BTCST accounts and do a 51% attack against mtgox and other exchanges at the same time. Then disappear with all the money. What do people think? Far fetched or possible?

EDIT: previous discussion in newbies forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77457.0

OK guys, so I wanted to post this in the bitcoin discussion forum, but I can only post things here right now.

I'd like to start a discussion about pirateat40 and his 2 projects: GPUMax and Bitcoin Savings & Trust
He may be just a very smart person that happened to be working on 2 very ambitious projects, but something just doesn't seem right about pirateat40.

Who is buying mining shares for PPS*1.4? Why would anyone do that? Pool hopping is not that profitable anymore, right? Why doesn't pirate disclose the reason for these purchases. How is pirate making >1% a day the money he borrows? If he really is legitimately making so much money, why give 7% interest/week when his closest competitor is giving 3% interest/week. And most banks have money with pirate to be able to pay out that much. There's ton of people waiting to give him money, so wouldn't the right business move be to lower interest rate and make more money? I've learned that if something seems too good to be true, it generally is. Could this be a long con? Or is he actually making honest money with these 2 projects?

Here's what I'm getting at, what if his end game is to kill bitcoin? What if the fed decided that they want to put an end to bitcoin before it becomes a bigger threat. Think about it. If you were trying to kill bitcoin, what would you do? You'd want to do a 51% attack to shatter everyone's confidence and at the same time pull off the biggest bitcoin heist ever. If mining hardware costs $1 per mhash, to match the total network hashrate of 11 thash, you would need to spend $11 million. Wouldn't GPUMax be the cheaper and smarter way to do the 51% attack? You need to convince 51% of the network to use it. PPS*1.4 would do it. And to convince people that it's not malicious, only allow purchases to mine at specific pools. But what's to prevent pirateat40 from one day use all that mining power maliciously? So how much does it cost to pay half the network 40% more on the earnings 1/4 of the time (i'm assuming there's only public work 1/4 of the time)? 7200 btc are mined a day... so 7200 * 1/2 * .4 * 1/4 = 360 btc or just $1800/day. Run that for a year, and it's only $657,000. And that's if he has half the networking hashrate, which hopefully is not close to yet. So this is a lot less than the $11 mil that would be needed to buy mining hardware. Trick bitcoin miners into attack their own network... brilliant!

So now how do you make 360 btc a day? You can either spend your own money or start a HYIP. So build up bitcoin-otc to have people trust you then start lending money at 1% interest a day and use people's deposit to pay the interest and the money needed to keep purchase on GPUMax. Keep growing the total loan amount so you have enough money but keep the growth contained so that you don't pay too much interest. And build up hype by making it hard for people to deposit money with you.

This scam can probably last until he gets 51% of the mining power. Then use whatever money is left in the BTST accounts and do a 51% attack against mtgox and other exchanges at the same time. Then disappear with all the money. Will bitcoin survive this?