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https://bitcointalk.org/index.... Provably ZERO merit to this comment!

Here's a link to Jon's link.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.... [bitcointalk.org]

..and [this link] is as imaginary as the coins.

Here's a link to Jon's link.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2521307.0

Apparently the Amish are trying to takeover bitcoins. https://bitcointalk.org/index....

This guy did the same thing in 2011:
https://bitcointalk.org/index....

Did you even read the summary?

Yes. More importantly, I read them when they were released here:

1) some other user published them,

Thats right

2) the original recipient of the emails said they are real.

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

Yes, both of them could be lying, but isn't the recipient/participant in the conversation saying they're real verification for these purposes?

Vitalik Buterin is a puppet they fly around to do interviews while claiming he's the developer.
He's not. It's developed by a farm of Indian's working, ultimately, for Goldman Sachs.

Ethereum is an IPO alt-coin (meaning it's a scam). The initial volume was fake (pre-arranged) in order to pump up value, as per usual.

I get that you see someone making a claim on the internet and your instinct is to assume it's bullshit. But what I don't get is why you spent time to Google "Ethereum" so you can throw out a challenge using "Vitalik Buterin" and not also spend the time to actually read about it.

If you had, you'd know that the clown behind Ethereum is Anthony Di Iorio - https://www.linkedin.com/in/an... .

If you actually care, so a search for his name or read this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.... .

Do you have any source for the original design increasing the block size?

Googling shows:

"It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

My understanding is that the opposite is true. Fees are built into the system which will take over as mining rewards decrease. Fees are now just starting down the path of taking over, as per the original design.

No. The upcoming block halving has not occurred yet (well that was redundant). The fees being currently discussed are for a different purpose, to turn people away from using Bitcoin. To get below the limit by getting people to use Bitcoin less. Turning people away does not sound like the original plan. It sounds like a desperate kludge. Largely relying on fees is something for when Bitcoin is well established, not during its early adoption phase.

It's not too hard to find the post that the IRS agent found:

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com

In fact, it the post was simply there. It didn't have to be preserved in another poster's response.

I leave that as an exercise to the reader to find the posts where altoid (Ulbricht) promoted the Slik Road.

But never mind the facts; I'm sure the FBI just faked the post...

Good thing I saw this post in time! I'll have the $100k I was going to send Snowden for his insight wired to you instead as the first person to ever consider data modification as a solution to the fermi paradox. Please send me your account numbers and passwords. ...Or should I send it to this guy?

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

It's obvious that if you want to be able to have more transactions/minute, the block size limit will have to go up. Everyone knew it had to happen sometime.

Check out this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322748.0

Back then, 2013, large block sizes (granted, occuring once in a few weeks - not much considering there's one block every 10 minutes or so) reached 900k and even 990k. We're two years later, adoption goes up, and two core maintainers think it's about time we raise that limit.

Why not? Why wait for the problems - in the form of high processing fees and higher waiting time for transaction approval? Now's as good as it's ever gonna be.

Mycelium entropy released a offline hardware based paper wallet generator which allows you to generate secure single wallets or Shamir’s 2-of-3 Secret Sharing Scheme wallets with a single click and even use your own seed if you are especially paranoid

The unit was 40 dollars - https://mycelium.com/entropy https://mycelium.com/assets/en...

or you could just get one of many hardware wallets - https://bitcointalk.org/index....

Better link (it doesn't appear your paper's authors actually got a double-spend): https://bitcointalk.org/index....
Note that this happened during a time of transition for the main blockchain, when there were public warnings against trusting transactions too much.

Consider these Mt. Gox loses:

• - June 2011: seller's administrator account was hacked by an unknown process. The priveleges were then abused to generate humungous quantities of BTC. None of the BTC, however, was backed by Mt. Gox. The attackers sold the BTC generated, driving Mt. Gox BTC prices down to cents. They then purchased the cheap BTC with their own accounts and withdrew the money. ... Many customers claim they have lost money from this reversion, but Mt. Gox claims it has reimbursed all customers fully for this theft. After the incident, Mt. Gox shut down for several days.
• - June 2011: Users with weak passwords on MyBitcoin who used the same password on Mt. Gox were in for a surprise after the June 2011 Mt. Gox Incident allowed weakly-salted hashes of all Mt. Gox user passwords to be leaked. These passwords were then hacked on MyBitcoin and a significant amount of money lost.
• - October 2011: Mt. Gox accidentally destroyed 2609.36304319 bitcoins.
• - July 2012: A hacker infiltrated the Mt. Gox account used by Bitcoin Syndicate, sold off the USD owned, and withdrew all balances.
• - July 2012: On July 13, 2012, a thief compromised the Bitcoinica Mt. Gox account. The thief made off with around 30% of Bitcoinica's bitcoin assets.

But for any programmer, none of this is a surprise given he hacked up an ssh server in PHP, then deployed it on a production server.

There are posts on Bitcoin Talk demanding Mr Nakamoto carry out signed Bitcoin transactions to prove that he was the currency's originator.

That is irrational demand because he doesn't claim to be.

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

Here's the thread on bicointalk where Mt Gox announced their first attempts at providing some operational/financial data to the bitcoin marketplace.

Surprise! They never followed through with their commitment. :-(

It's been known and well documented since 2011. It's in the wiki. What programmer does not study the API documentation when implementing a multi-million dollar service?

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

An incompetent one. The transaction id is an id of that specific transaction. If another transaction is created with the same inputs and outputs is a new transaction, thus a new transaction id.

(A better id to use if you want to track actual transfers is a hash over the sorted input and output adresses)

Links? Go an read bitcointalk. This guy is a real scum.

From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64962.0:

As to your last point: there do seem to be a significant number of scammers floating about, so I can easily understand the "assume everyone's a scammer" attitude, I imagine it works well in a majority of cases. However Mircea Popescu is both well known and well respected in the bitcoin community and beyond, so this'd be one case of the minority.

LOL! Dude, you are an idiot. This crap is written by MPOE-PR aka the village idiot in bitcointalks.
Only idiot who respect him, is that same PR clown (some say it is Mircea) and probably few confused idiots.
Get a life and stop sucking up to scum like Mircea Popescu.

Links? Go an read bitcointalk. This guy is a real scum.

From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64962.0:

As to your last point: there do seem to be a significant number of scammers floating about, so I can easily understand the "assume everyone's a scammer" attitude, I imagine it works well in a majority of cases. However Mircea Popescu is both well known and well respected in the bitcoin community and beyond, so this'd be one case of the minority.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=350103.0

You have to trust some exchange. Otherwise where are you going to get your BTC, and how are you going to spend it? Mining today is not for common people. On the spending side, there are a few businesses that take BTC - but they rarely sell what you need (usually it's services that cost very little to provide, like hosting.)

Trusting the exchange means that you need to send your country's currency to a faraway country. The exchange there operates without any oversight, and it is only due to goodness of their heart that they send some BTC into your wallet. The same happens in the opposite direction: you send them your BTC, and in return, at some later time (soon or not so soon) they will send you the national currency - that you may have to explain to your country's tax authorities.

The exchanges are not immune from more common financial difficulties - here is one story as an example. Exchanges are not insured, and they can crash and burn at any time. Sending money to them always carries a high risk of never seeing the money again. This is far less of a concern with a bank, where you have a contract and where your money's path is traceable.

Note that both conversions (to and from BTC) cost you money; and the BTC transfers themselves also cost money. BTC was always claiming that fees are optional and symbolic, but none of that appears to be true today, as mining turned into a for-profit business with hefty investments and running expenses. In the end, the service (BTC or bank) will cost you something because the work has to be done, somewhere and by someone, and the BTC not a network of close friends anymore. People are in it for money, and guess whose pockets that money is supposed to come from?

the divisibility of bitcoins is set on the current version of the protocol and can be increased any time with a update version. the protocol already had several updates, one of then a mandatory update to solve a large block fork issue

Such theft. Much mad. Very suprise. Wow.

DogeCoin for much funny in case you feel left out of the joke. The whole thing is just another bitcoin clone, with slightly different settings ("very scrypt" like litecoin), which are somewhat intentionally badly chosen to produce "many coin, wow!".

Millions of DogeCoin is still basically worthless. Its just a bunch of crypto currency folks screwing around. Its not a serious alternative to bitcoin. Blocks started with million DogeCoin rewards per block and very low difficulty.

Looks like there are some non-trivial challenges to doing this:

Problem with bitcoin and other virtual currencies is pretty much same as real currencies as well.
It accumulates to certain individuals who instead of keeping the cash flowing and market running hoard it like Scrooge McDuck.
The imagined lack of availability with increased interest drives the price point up for those who participate at the market and this creates valuation bubble.
Bitcointalk has nice estimates of the distribution in this thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349198.0 and here is how it works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=353971

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349198.0 and here is how it works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=353971

I'd imagine that the fact that even GPU mining is a fairly dubious proposition at this point (I can't remember if the increases in price lately allow it to still be viable if the hardware costs are already sunk but you need to pay the electric bill; but the FPGAs and ASICs aren't getting any slower or less numerous)

Indeed, for *Bitcoin*, anything under a high-end ASIC (dozens or more GH/s) is worthless and a huge waste of electricty and heat.

even donated or stolen CPU time would be close to worthless, even if doing it in Javascript doesn't impose much overhead...

The trick is choosing the correct crypto coin: there's a whole zoo of them.
Some rely on SHA256^2 hashing like bitcoin, other rely on hashing algorithme for which only CPU implementations do exist (Primecoin is a nice example, and also doubles by doing actually useful computations instead of just plain brute-forcing hashes).

In fact TFA article is wrong, this isn't a Bitcoin miner. This is a miner for Protoshare, which is currently mostly mined on CPUs.

The "accounts" analogy doesn't go very far when you can create and empty a bitcoin wallet with no cost and no penalty. There are "mixing" services which take the bitcoins from multiple sources and redistribute them.

Although the mixing service seems to be analogous to going to a back alley and meeting with a dozen shady guys, all with suitcases full of money and traced serial numbers on their bills, dropping your $100k into a trash bin with all the other guys's $100k, where some guy then takes the bin into a room in the back, shuffles the money around and hopefully gives it back to you.

Tracing back these kinds of laundered coins could be very difficult, but it only seems to mask the person hiding the transaction in plausible deniability. It seems clear they're hiding something, but the law doesn't (fortunately) permit *that* to be enough to prosecute them for anything.

But with anti money laundering measures, pure mixing services are risky, transactions could be traced back through the blockchain until the police ask "so... where *did* this $200 worth of BTC come from if you didn't get it from selling crack on the Silk Road?" which I think would force you to admit to using a mixing service, which may be, or very soon be illegal.

So what plausibly legitimate business takes money from thousands of people and spreads money to thousands of others, while taking a cut for the house? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=162807.msg1713104#msg1713104

For those armchair economists here who haven't read anything about Bitcoin, but know what it's all about because they're, like, economists, I present this link:

Bitcoin - The Libertarian Introduction.

Reading this might prevent your post from getting a response that makes you seem ignorant, if you care about that sort of thing.

(Such posts as: "it's a Ponzi scheme", "it can't work because it's not based on anything", "it's only for illegal commerce", "it's got some sort of technical flaw", or "the authorities will try to stop it, and that's important".)

I'm pretty sure that "trustless mixing" is the very same method as described here. This method requires no changes to the bitcoin protocol and I'm fairly certain is in at least limited use today, given that there's been software released to facilitate it.

You're ruining someone's troll post by bringing facts into the conversation.

So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on...

Supposedly, like this. It has its limitations, of course, but it's pretty neat.

The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed.

Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.

I haven't RTFA--this is Slashdot, after all--but I'm pretty sure that "trustless mixing" is the very same method as described here. This method requires no changes to the bitcoin protocol and I'm fairly certain is in at least limited use today, given that there's been software released to facilitate it.

Except for that pesky fact that "no, that won't happen."

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139735.msg1494135#msg1494135

Nope. They don't have enough computing power for a 51% attack anymore. Until they build their own bitcoin mining ASICs at least. The network is running at nearly 1 petaHash / second, with each hash performing ~1,300 32bit adds. So, in very apples to oranges terms, the network is secured by 1,300 petaFLOPS (and rising at ~2.5% PER DAY). The sum total FLOPS of the top500 supercomputer list from June 2013 is 223.6 petaFLOPS.

Bitcoin is well suited to micropayments. Mike Hearn has a micropayment scheme in his Bitcoinj implementation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244656.0 It's a rather elegant example of true innovation in this heavily researched topic (note that the NSF and DARPA funded research on digital currency in part to try and solve the massively high volume, low value transactions they anticipated the internet would require...for things like paying a very small amount for a very small but of content). Digital currency (pegged to the US dollar) used to be purchasable in the mid 1990's at a US bank. It flopped mostly because it came before anyone really did much payment via the Internet. The best private industry has come up with is the equivalent of handing over your private encryption keys (cc #) and putting a middle man in to skin off the top and attempt to control the fraud that results from this crazy design. If you want to truly learn something about the open source project called Bitcoin, take a look at btcedproject.org and the udemy course (you'll need an account...or you can login via Facebook like I just did here to post): https://www.udemy.com/bitcoin-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-crypto/

Bitcoin is unusable for micropayments (as if anyone cares about those.) The reasons are simple. First, each BTC is very expensive (tens of US Dollars each.) Second, the fee for payment is pretty expensive. Mathematically it is small, 0.5 mBTC, but it is enormous when you want to send 1 mBTC (0.126 USD as of today.) In theory, small transactions (both in bytes and in BTC) shouldn't have the fee, but... the fee is charged anyhow.

One can rebuild the client without the fee, but then your transaction will take forever to be included into the block. Which means that it's still useless - you paid yer money but you've got nothing in return, until "the check clears."

So we have a case of sour grapes, then? Unless one of the NSA requests was "we want a backdoor" then this by itself doesn't mean much because the NSA is a weird creation that not only spies on everyone, but has an "information assurance" department that tries to design secure systems for US usage. They're behind the creation of SELinux which is both highly sophisticated and well reviewed by independent third parties. It does not have back doors. Also, many important constructions in cryptography were designed by the NSA. For example SHA2 was designed by the NSA and it is extensively studied. It has never been found to contain even a hint of a back door.

This crap about how the TPM allows Microsoft to remotely control computers for DRM purposes came up over a decade ago when trusted computing extensions were first designed. It was FUD back then with no connection to reality, and it's certainly FUD today too. If you want to learn about the actual next-gen TC technologies, go and read up on Intel SGX. Then go and read this post on bcflick, a use of the TPM and trusted computing designed to make Bitcoin wallets more secure. That's the kind of thing the tech is designed for. The TPM isn't even electrically capable of controlling the CPU.

My client was a US whistleblower who generated a huge bunch of bitcoins and I need help smuggling him into Kenya?
Add in some https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=240657.0 details with a bit of http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/11/bitcoin-prism

Doing it with ASICs requires dealing with slimeballs who insist you pre-pay for hardware and deliver months later, if at all.

Maybe you were too preoccupied with greed to get it from the one company that actually DOES have a shipping product(Global delivery in 3Days): Block Erupter Blade
Proven track record with 1000s of units sold already(usb miner and blades)

Remember, more than half the Bitcoins that can exist have already been mined, and it gets steadily harder.

And almost half are yet to be taken, >40% of that within the next 3½ years.

Stealing other people's GPU cycles has a track record of success. But it's hard to do that from JavaScript.

Yet I bet the slimeballs will still manage somehow 1dice9wVtrKZTBbAZqz1XiTmboYyvpD3t

Bitcoin is a tough nut to crack these days.

My nutcracker is made by ASICMINER 12 billion nuts a second and still cracking...

This post made 0.02BTC while you where reading, thx

CAPTCHA: 'Namely' - It's namely a case of shilling.

There are a number of "alt coins" which appear legitimate, and are used by a wider community. This thread on the Bitcoin forums has a good overview, it also includes the less popular and dead crypto currencies: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

I like the idea of PPcoin very much, being an ecologic alternative to Bitcoin. They still have mining, like Bitcoin and all other alts, and this will consume as much electricity. But when all coins are mined, the power needs will drop significantly. The creators devised a very clever way to record transactions in the block chain without the need to do all the calculations which are done when mining. Website, including the white paper with a detailed explanation: http://www.ppcoin.org/

Probably the oldest alt coin still in use today is Namecoin. It integrates a naming system in the block chain, effectively creating a decentralized alternative to DNS.

The most popular alt coin is Litecoin. By some it's called the silver to Bitcoin gold, as it provides faster transactions and more coins generated.

Silk Road run a mixing service?

I believe they have an internal bitcoin mixing service. See here, "Bitcoin wallet that mixes all incoming and outgoing coins so as to obscure their origin".

Or here "Silk Road has a built in coin mixer. When you add coins to your account, they are sent through a bunch of dummy transactions, split up and recombined with the coins of other people."

There is likely more detailed info on the SR forums.

It'll perform a bit worse than a GTX Titan, which gets in the region of 330Mhash/sec. For comparison, an AMD HD5870 from 2009 managed about 400Mhash/sec.

Bitcoins earned: 1.00
Value today: $133.58
Total time: 14.5 days
Rigs operating: 2-3

Towards the end of the run I was getting impatient and ExtremeTechâ(TM)s Joel Hruska helped me sprint to the finish by giving me access to some of his machines...

The era of Bitcoin mining with off-the-shelf hardware is over. The serious people are already using FPGAs, and if the people advertising ASIC hardware actually ship working product in quantity, even that will be obsolete. Like most Bitcoin-related businesses, the people selling ASIC mining hardware are flakes.

Bitcoin mining becomes exponentially harder as the 21 million Bitcoin limit is approached. Over 11 million Bitcoins have already been found, so this is already more than half over. All miners are in competition. The rate of Bitcoin discovery is fixed, so the more people mining, the less each miner makes.

Someone might modify the malware to still generate Bitcoins, but to record the coins generated. Then watch the blockchain to see who spends them. Bitcoins aren't anonymous. Mt. Gox has on at least one occasion frozen an account due to possession of "tainted" coins.

Bitcoin isn't as distributed as many enthusiasts think. 80% of transactions go through Mt. Gox, a/k/a Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange.

I'm sure the customers of Laiki Bank were highly satisfied with their government-provided deposit insurance too, right up until they lost all access to their funds for a few weeks, and lost the majority of their balances. I'm sure the people who aren't getting paid because the company they work had payroll funds frozen are singing the praises of deposit insurance right this minute.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48521.0
From 2011.

As best I can tell 35.5% of all bitcoins have already been minted. These 7,473,950 coins are all property of existing bitcoin users. There seem to be about 41,280 registered members of this site. I'll be generous and say there are ten times as many bitcoin users as there are members. That means about 410,280 bitcoin owners with on average 18 BTC each. Clearly BTC ownership is more concentrated than this, but lets be egalitarian for the moment.

If we pretended all bitcoin owners were all Americans that is about 0.13% of the population. It's not of course. Bitcoin is intended to be a world currency. So 0.0068% of the world population own 100% of all current and at least 35.5% of all possible bitcoins.

The view on this forum is that the world will come to their senses, throw out fiat currencies and move to something rational like Bitcoin. This of course means 6,000,000,000 people basically begging to use a resource owned by a relative handful of people. Say we just minted up the remaining 13,526,050 BTC and scattered them to late adopters purely out of the kindness in our hearts. That means about 0.00225 BTC for each of them to use in rebuilding their economy. Sure 18 BTC on average doesn't make us feel very rich. But it is 8,000 times what everyone else would have if we stopped competitive minting today.

But we won't stop competing of course. Sometime around Pearl Harbor Day of next year Bitcoin will hit the 50% distributed mark.

----
By that day, how many active Bitcoin users and daily goods trades do there need to be to make a sustainable Bitcoin economy viable?
----

Because to potential new adopters, after that point Bitcoin is going to look like a new a 21,000,000 coin currency with a 10,500,000 coin pre-generation that went to the creator and his "friends". Certainly people will stop caring about Bitcoin long before they show up on our doorsteps with signs saying,

"We are the 99.9932%!"

This is so totally wrong I first thought it was a parody. On closer inspection, it does appear like they mean it. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less wrong. They're open-source and printable, which would make them trivial to counterfeit. Yes, real bills could readily be identified given a computer with internet, but if you have that, what's the point of the paper? You're not "off-grid" anymore and validating the bill would be just another bitcoin transaction. Now, buying stuff from "someone who is new to bitcoin" with counterfeit PrintCoins? Genius!

See also.

Well, firstly, you can, of course, convert to Dollars (Or Euros) and use those.

Second, there are online site that you can buy groceries from. Even a trivial amount of research (like typing "bitcoins groceries" into Google) will show this.

Third: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73712.0
"Topic: Las Vegas Property Management Co Accepts Bitcoins for Rent Payments"

Forth: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1867.0
"Topic: Reloading a pre-paid gas card via bitcoin"

So... as per your request, I'm letting you know. HTH. HAND.