Whatever makes you think that a US Dollar transfer would go nowhere near a US bank?  For a brief description of how international wire transfers work, see this post on the Bitcoin Foundation's blog:

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=63

It's a fiat currency after all, so it only exists because because the US says it does.  And only US banks (or US branches of foreign banks) have access to the Federal Reserve system.  This isn't unique to the US and the US Dollar, BTW - it's just how fiat currency works.

roy

It's been low-level bugging me for a while why the 20 chip board is not spec'd to be exactly twice the speed of the 10 chip board.  It just struck me today - is it a typo?

2.28/5.56 Gh/s would make perfect sense...

roy

Hey, I run cgminer on an original EEEPC 701 running Ubuntu.  Works just fine...

roy

True... I don't keep any funds in exchanges, which means I can't trade - but then I'm not much of a trader.  I prefer to just buy and hold, so Gox and wire transfers work for me.

roy

Get verified on Gox.  Pay by wire transfer.  Or for smaller amounts, if you're in Europe, and prepared to take the risk of going via Gox's Polish account, pay be SEPA.

Yeah, OK, if you're not in Europe you don't have the SEPA option, but really, I don't see what the problem is.   For people investing in BTC they can probably live with the fees.  Sure, the bank fees aren't much use for people who only want to buy a few dollars worth to spend, and we need better options... but the people buying a few dollars don't have any affect on the price.

roy

They display or print out a QR code for you to send funds to.  Doesn't really matter how you do it, as long as the transaction is broadcast immediately.  They say it worked well with the Android Bitcoin Wallet in their tests.

http://www.individualpubs.co.uk/bitcoin.html

Personally I trust couriers like DHL or Fedex above EMS - but that's not based on any particular rational evidence, I'll admit - just gut feeling.  (And I have *zero* knowledge about shipping to/from countries outside of Western Europe and North America)

EMS is the Express Mail Service - a cooperative owned by national postal services.  The normal process would be that the package will be handled by the sending country's postal service, then handed over to the EMS cooperative for internaional shipment, and finally handed over to the national postal service in the destination country.

With a service like DHL you'd normally expect the package would remain with DHL from collection to delivery (although in China, who knows).

Since EMS shipments actually involve three organisations (EMS plus two national postal services) it will depend to a large part on how good (or bad) the national postal services are in sending and receiving countries; so Avalon EMS experiences may well vary widely depending on the country of the recipient.

roy

Armory supports multiple wallets (indeed, this is a pretty common use case - one online wallet, and one watching-only wallet for cold storage).

roy

See I said said BTC was stable at $120 :-)  It's just that it's stable in a trading range of $50-$140 LOL

roy

True, and I'll avoid getting into speculating about price, beyond saying that I accept I may well be being over optimistic about the short term price.

Bitcoin itself is still experimental.  The supporting infrastructure is still nascent.  So yes, it's ultimately all speculation.  Most of Bitcoin's current value (if it has value - and I believe it has) comes not from the current utility of Bitcoin, but from the possibility/probability that Bitcoin will become a significant component of the global payments infrastructure years from now.

It's a speculative bet that Bitcoin will succeed.  I happen to think that there is a reasonable chance that it will, but you're right, it's speculation.  We probably won't get true price stability until Bitcoin has truly succeeded.

roy

Ok, looks like we're still broadly in the $100-$120 trading range, with brief excursions outside it.  I was perhaps a bit premature in seeing $115 as a new stable price though.

Ok, you were right.  I clearly spoke too soon

roy

Well, it's all relative, but it's been trading in the range $100-120 for the last 14 hours or so, and tending towards the top end of that range ($115-120) in recent hours; and volume has settled down to more manageable levels, too.  That's certainly relatively stable compared to the wild swings we've seen over the last few days.  Market depth also looks much healthier.

Of course, none of us know what the future will bring, but things seem to be settling down, IMO.

roy

[EDIT: I'm basing my analysis on Mt.Gox prices, as displayed by bitcoincharts.com]

The Bitcoin price seems to have stabilized around $115-120.  Assuming this price holds, then this 4-day correction has only given back the previous 7 days' gains. Think about this - Bitcoin is currently still up on the month of April.

If you consider the 7 day mini-bubble that lasted from 3rd-9th April to be an aberration, then we are pretty much where we should be if you just extend the late-March trendline.  Sure, people who managed to call the top will be sitting on a nice profit (and people who bought into the mini-bubble will be nursing heavy losses) but otherwise I suggest you just erase the last 11 days from your mind.

Imagine we're back at 2nd April, and Bitcoin has just notched up another new high just shy of $120.  What's changed since then?  Nothing much, as far as I can see...  I imagine we'll get back to $260 one day.  But this time we'll have to go the long way round.

I think this is really a very positive sign, that even after this manic price action we are still just back on the trendline.  This was a correction, not a crash; people still have faith in Bitcoin's long term value, it would appear...

[Edited slightly]

roy

With mainstream media coverage of Bitcoin pretty universally crediting the rise in value of Bitcoin to the crisis in Cyprus, I'm interested to know what Bitcoiners think?   Is it a primary factor in the recent appreciation of the value of BTC, or just a random coincidence that has been picked up by the media and assumed the status of fact?

roy

Exactly what I used to install my offline machine :-)

As does ext3/ext4 with data=ordered, of course, but I assume we were talking about Windows - at least, I assume you're not advocating the use of FAT32 on Linux systems :-P

roy

Interesting comment.  I was always under the impression that NTFS did data journalling, which of course makes secure deletion problematic (particularly given a very large default journal size).  But all the references I can find now suggest NTFS only does metadata journalling, at least by default.  Did this change at some point, do you know?  Or is there some other reason why secure deletion isn't possible under NTFS that I'm missing?

Also, if you have the RAM for it, you might want to consider not having a swap partition/pagefile.

roy

Actually, what I'll probably do - on further thought - is simply run the script with the current directory being in a ramfs filesystem :-)

But I don't know if things are quite as straightforward for Windows users - and it would be good to make it hard for people to shoot themselves in the foot.  ETA: although I fully realise this is a stop-gap - and a very welcome one too!  Thank you again!

Incidentally, do you document any guidelines for setting up an offline system?  If you don't already I'd suggest you should recommend FDE as a mitigation for private keys getting written to swap - particularly on Windows which AIUI doesn't have a fully reliable mechanism for locking pages in RAM.

roy

Excellent work.  I've just started using Armory and I will certainly be setting up n-of-m soon.

My one criticism is that frag_wallet.py seems to insist on saving all the fragments in the current directory, immediately and without explicit prompting - which is the moral equivalent of writing the private keys to disk.  Yes, with appropriate care (full disk encryption, secure erase, etc) this can be mitigated - but it's providing a gun for people to shoot themselves in the foot.

If I'm going to go to all this trouble in the first place then I'd much rather save each fragment directly onto its own individual USB stick (which I'd store alongside the corresponding hand-transcribed paper copy of its contents).  My FDE is there to protect me from mistakes, such as unencrypted keys getting written to swap, etc.  But my aim is never to deliberately write keys to hard disk in the first place.

If the unfrag_wallet.py script was similarly modified, then I could still do a test unfrag from my stack of USB sticks, with the unencrypted keys unlikely to ever hit disk.

I'm sure I can easily modify the python scripts to do that when I get round to setting up n-of-m backups, but just my 2 bitcents.

roy

Haven't seen this posted elsewhere, but Mt.Gox have confirmed they're under DDos

https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/319563995759652864

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Ah, OK, Zooey beat me to it in another thread

roy