1) what was the bug? what do you mean by "interface"?
2) what are you doing to prevent such bugs from occurring again?
3) do you know of anyone's coins being stolen?

Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of his words. He might not have *all* of the coins or maybe they aren't "just sitting around", but he might have a lot of them.

Thanks, that's fascinating! And very eloquent, for someone who at other times seems to struggle with his grammar.

The section titled "Change in BTCST ToS" is somewhat curious... is a copy of the ToS publicly available?

Also, has this bet concluded?

Could you link or quote what you're referring to, please? I'm still catching up on a lot of this stuff...

So I don't have a bone in BTCST or any of the bets around it, but I have a bit of time and a little bit of a mathematics background (undergrad degree in math), and am really curious to figure out exactly how many BTC were invested with pirateat40... has anyone linked (or could anyone share) the transactions of their investments with him?

I heard the claim that he's the owner of the largest bitcoin account account [1]. Does anyone know of evidence to support it?

1. https://blockchain.info/address/1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM

Got it, thanks again!

Sweet, thanks!

Feel free to send it to 1D2qX2bu7uxKbCbTBvGRrx5ctfwrXYFdDM

Ah, OK, I actually hadn't gotten a chance to read up on the threads behind that name. Now that I have (and did a bit more Googling), everything does seem to add up. I almost feel bad for him - I hope this is a temporary delay and doesn't end up in court.

There is also the possibility that whoever's behind pirateat40 is impersonating Trendon, but that does seem somewhat unlikely.

That's stupid. It's a multi-million dollar ponzi scheme, not a middle eastern revolution

I found myself wondering the exact same thing as I was reading the original post. To put it bluntly, bitlane is acting way too dumb for someone who supposedly has $25k to throw around on adventures like this. If I were pulling off a scam of this proportion (I heard pirate had 500k BTC?), I'd definitely have quite a few sock puppets set up to cause as much doubt/confusion, false hope, and general trolling as possible starting right about now. The scammer would definitely want to be in control of the dialogue.

Also, if it's a ~$5 million scam, I imagine he's preparing for more than a few private investigators (and perhaps even law enforcement) to start looking for him, so I imagine he's put quite a bit of effort into making sure he's as anonymous as possible, setting up false trails, etc.

gpumax.com, which is linked from his profile, is registered to:

Don Shrents
5100 Eldorado Pkwy
Mckinney, Texas 75070

Which seems to be a fake name at a strip mall (http://goo.gl/maps/i3iPA). Why would someone register a domain under a fake name instead of just anonymizing it like most people do? Maybe he wanted to save a few $, or maybe he wanted to remain anonymous in case of a legal inquiry with the registrar.

Several of his investors claim to know his "his name, birthdate, current city, and a previous city he lived in", saying it's "publicly available to anyone who cares enough to thoroughly research it" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50822.400). I'm no PI, but I found nothing of the sort, and I imagine I'm not the only one who was curious. If this is a scam, I'd hypothesize they are puppets, as well.

His OTC ratings might be a good place to figure out how "real" he is, also... would any of the people who claimed to trade with him over PayPal be willing to reveal the email he used? Are they real people, or part of the ruse?

I definitely don't have the time/skills to dive deeply into this, but it does make me wish I'd decided to be an investigative reporter

Say you want to send bitcoins to someone on a forum like reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or by e-mail, and they don't have a bitcoin address. I propose a public service which will accept bitcoins on behalf of someone, reaches out to verify their ownership of the recipient account, and allows them to clam the bitcoins and set up an address to forward their bitcoins to in the future.

Would this be useful? What are the downsides?

Ah, that was because I got a little too eager deleting code from lib/bitcoinjs. Should be fixed with 0.1.6. I'll go through it (and other parts) more carefully to cut down the size of the package.

Oops, didn't realize I needed to hit "Publish changes" in the developer dashboard for it to go live. Should be upgrading to 0.1.5 now, where it's fixed.

The jake script which builds lib/bitcoinjs/build/bitcoinjs-min.js depends on it, although the extension doesn't use anything it lib/bitcoinjs except that file. I'll remove it when I make the package, but I'll keep it in github, since I want people to be able to see the code they're running.

I've released a fix to the Options page, so that should be all better now.

45 seconds! It's only once, but still, that's stretching it... I'll look into speeding up the SHA256 implementation I'm using, but can't promise anything.

The screenshot helped a ton, thanks! It's the window width: Twitter bootstrap (the UI library I'm using) tries to render a different layout below width 980px that I didn't test, and it breaks everything!

Thanks again for all of the feedback!

Thanks!

I'm saw the Options page show up blank once as well when testing on my older laptop (with SC2 running in the background for slowness). Not sure what's causing it, but I'll refactor the JS on the Options page to fix it ASAP.

The initial stretching doesn't include generation of the addresses (which is relatively quick). It's applying SHA256 to the seed 100k times to get the master private key (which is used to generate the private keys of addresses). I think this is slower because Python uses SHA256 implemented in a C library, whereas the extension uses a JS implementation. I don't think there's anything I can do to speed it up, since I want to be compatible with the Electrum client, so I tried to make the UI as clear as possible. Since this only needs to be done once when a wallet is set up, I think I'm satisfied with the current implementation.

Thanks!


If you right-click on the extension icon and click "Options", it should open up a tab that addresses these. Perhaps I should also add a way of opening the Options page from the popup?


The initial randomness (the seed) is crypto-random, and optionally encrypted with AES using a passphrase, so yes, you need both the characters you see and the password (you can see them again in the Seed tab of the Options page).

Hi all,

I've published an initial release of a Chrome Extension to manage a bitcoin wallet in most ways similar to the Electrum client. So far I've been the only one testing it, so I'd appreciate some initial feedback. The extension is available here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hfdeddmpdncodjalbadbanlcombfeoll/

The code is on github here: https://github.com/andreyf/electrum-wallet-chrome-extension. I haven't decided on a license, but it'll probably be GPLv3.

I would appreciate any criticism/feedback you might have. Feel free to reply here or e-mail me at anfedorov@gmail.com.

Cheers,
Andrey

D'oh! Story of my life.

It would really help if it were possible to recover those protocol docs (the link you posted on another thread is still down). What is libbitcoin? It seems like it might help to document the different kinds of servers, as well...

That makes sense. Thanks for the thorough explanations.

I realize it's a bit of a hack, but do you see any practical drawbacks or issues in using tx_id fields for sorting transactions when their timestamp fields are equal? That seems to work well in addressing my UX concerns.