Stealing Coins

[mizerydearia]

I'm glad that there's guys like Red out there keeping a sharp eye out on things! This thread also makes me appreciative of open source software, since there's so many smart and interested people on this forums that can validate the software and place an additional degree of trust in it. Not sure that Bitcoin could be too successful if it was closed source!

Actually, quite the opposite.  What you read may seem like intelligent conversation that makes sense and makes you feel more trustworthy, confident and excited about Bitcoin, but, like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBp5ag6SJH4 it's just fabricated wording to sound good.</sarcasm>

[1713551738]

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[1713551738]

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[bytemaster]

It would seem to me that the obvious solution to minimize the risk of any potential attack is to make the potential "reward" small.   Thus never keep too many coins in one address.  If the economic value of the "prize" is less than the cost of breaking it then no one will bother trying.  After saying that, I still think that it is best to keep things as hard as possible to crack.

[knightmb]

It would certainly be hard by both luck and CPU/storage power to do this.

If you found a collision and a private key, that would do you no good since you would have to peg an account out of the
541,638,008,296,341,754,635,824,011,376,225,346,986,572,413,939,634,062,667,808,768 possible combinations of people using accounts.

So look at it two-fold. I find a collision in the hash and I find the private key. Now I have to hope my odds are that someone else is using that hash. Since there are more possible hash account numbers than every person every born on this planet and was each using a million addresses, the attack by it's own nature, while interesting, just isn't really feasible on a large scale.

[Anonymous]

It would seem to me that the obvious solution to minimize the risk of any potential attack is to make the potential "reward" small.   Thus never keep too many coins in one address.  If the economic value of the "prize" is less than the cost of breaking it then no one will bother trying.  After saying that, I still think that it is best to keep things as hard as possible to crack.

This might be a good idea to add to an eventual bitcoin backup integration.Not only back the wallet up but create a bitcoin address for each of your coins automatically.Say that you have  1000 bitcoins it should be trivial to create 1000 addresses which means if an address was somehow compromised you only lose 1 btc!A separate process could reassemble your coins in the amount you need to spend.Is this possible?

[FreeMoney]

It would seem to me that the obvious solution to minimize the risk of any potential attack is to make the potential "reward" small.   Thus never keep too many coins in one address.  If the economic value of the "prize" is less than the cost of breaking it then no one will bother trying.  After saying that, I still think that it is best to keep things as hard as possible to crack.

This might be a good idea to add to an eventual bitcoin backup integration.Not only back the wallet up but create a bitcoin address for each of your coins automatically.Say that you have  1000 bitcoins it should be trivial to create 1000 addresses which means if an address was somehow compromised you only lose 1 btc!A separate process could reassemble your coins in the amount you need to spend.Is this possible?

Would the downside be the cost of the "putting back together" transaction once they were in one wallet and you needed to spend a bunch of them together?

[Anonymous]

It would seem to me that the obvious solution to minimize the risk of any potential attack is to make the potential "reward" small.   Thus never keep too many coins in one address.  If the economic value of the "prize" is less than the cost of breaking it then no one will bother trying.  After saying that, I still think that it is best to keep things as hard as possible to crack.

This might be a good idea to add to an eventual bitcoin backup integration.Not only back the wallet up but create a bitcoin address for each of your coins automatically.Say that you have  1000 bitcoins it should be trivial to create 1000 addresses which means if an address was somehow compromised you only lose 1 btc!A separate process could reassemble your coins in the amount you need to spend.Is this possible?

Would the downside be the cost of the "putting back together" transaction once they were in one wallet and you needed to spend a bunch of them together?

Bank fees.....
 

Is there a formula you could use to work that out?I would be interested to know the comparison between the cost of real world bank fees and the reassemble process on different amounts of bitcoins.

[FreeMoney]

It would seem to me that the obvious solution to minimize the risk of any potential attack is to make the potential "reward" small.   Thus never keep too many coins in one address.  If the economic value of the "prize" is less than the cost of breaking it then no one will bother trying.  After saying that, I still think that it is best to keep things as hard as possible to crack.

This might be a good idea to add to an eventual bitcoin backup integration.Not only back the wallet up but create a bitcoin address for each of your coins automatically.Say that you have  1000 bitcoins it should be trivial to create 1000 addresses which means if an address was somehow compromised you only lose 1 btc!A separate process could reassemble your coins in the amount you need to spend.Is this possible?

Would the downside be the cost of the "putting back together" transaction once they were in one wallet and you needed to spend a bunch of them together?

Bank fees.....
 

Is there a formula you could use to work that out?I would be interested to know the comparison between the cost of real world bank fees and the reassemble process on different amounts of bitcoins.

My understanding is that right now you could combine a few in one block for free, then a few more, staying under the limit each time. But... the fee system will eventually become a bunch of competing fee systems as time goes on.