Interesting.  I may have to give it a whirl.

I was trying to use the Electrum console (from the GUI) to follow these instructions:

https://gist.github.com/atweiden/7272732

but got bogged down around about Step 3 (signing and withdrawing).

- Dave

THANK YOU for clarifying this.  I too was following https://electrum.org/tutorials.html#restoring-seed and couldn't figure out how to create a seedless wallet (Windows).  I never thought about selecting "Create a watching-only version of an existing wallet", although as you said, thinking about it, it's "obvious"  .

It might be worthwhile to get this mentioned explicitly in the next revision of the tutorial.

- Dave

Confirmed.  A respected Bitcoin security researcher was running a POC brainwallet bot and nabbed my bitcents instantly.  He DM'ed me and returned the funds.  Seriously righteous thing to do.

- Dave

I just tried flipping another 0.01 BTC to one of the main Receiving addresses generated when I installed Electrum.  As quickly as I hit send on my Android client, the History screen updated with my transaction, which so far is safe from Internet highway robbery.

Barring any other theories, it would seem that deterministic addresses generated from weak passphrases should be avoided at all cost (pun intended).

- Dave

Thanks for the replies, Akka and Russell.

I was thinking about this more, and wouldn't a "robber" using the same passphrase end up with the exact same deterministically generated public Bitcoin address?  I just typed the same even weaker passphrase ("testing123") into http://brainwallet.org/#generator and got the same address every time (1AyFk2sxtjoG4nz35uNxcZJhLUWAymBr5B).  If I had a public key collision, then where did 1JvojZKzuABZT5iCm6hKJnV7Lm1VQ8iaDk come from?

- Dave

Another interesting data point.  When I look at the transaction ID for the "pickpocketed" transaction, I see:

https://blockchain.info/tx/e00709e118af2b1d6737ccaf10c8423d6a49b24b72472f2754d35efca7b0ab23

The page states: "Warning! this transaction is a double spend of 112743537. You should be extremely careful when trusting any transactions to/from this sender."

The imported address I used to send the BTC was deterministically generated on brainwallet.org using a not-so-strong passphrase (after all, this is just a test).  Is it possible that someone else in the vast Bitcoin universe used the exact same not-so-strong passphrase and just got an unexpected donation of 0.01 BTC?

I'm more concerned about the mystery than the $$$.  If I learn something today, the lesson will be worth the $6 USD.

Thanks (again).

- Dave

I heard great things about Electrum and decided to try installing the portable version (Windows) to give it a test drive.  I then sent an imported address (18YiwUnAvDJz9eUss3DZGPrH7L8vi9ciDx) 0.01 BTC and things seemed to go well ... that is, until an unrecognized address (1JvojZKzuABZT5iCm6hKJnV7Lm1VQ8iaDk) debited the exact same amount the instant I sent it:

http://imgur.com/pndP1lA

I thought this might be some artifact of the way Electrum works and so waited about an hour.  I still have a 0.00 BTC balance and the blockchain seems complete:

https://blockchain.info/address/18YiwUnAvDJz9eUss3DZGPrH7L8vi9ciDx

What the heck happened?  Did I just get robbed by 1JvojZKzuABZT5iCm6hKJnV7Lm1VQ8iaDk ... somehow?

Thanks for any insight you can provide!

It may depend on where you are in the world.  US-based funding of MtGox has gotten a bit more challenging now that Dwolla is no longer accepted, and last I checked, BitInstant is offline. 

For some, Coinbase is much more hassle-free ... again, based on your indifference to privacy.

I'm a long-time fan of Bitcoin and only recently found a convenient way to get USD from a bank account into a Bitcoin broker.  I now have a handful of Bitcoins to "play" with, and am not too terribly concerned about the market fluctuations so far.

From Bitcoins, I started delving into private/anonymous/pseudonymous messaging called Bitmessage, and really find it intriguing.  I've been monitoring and contributing to the general, Bitcoin, tbb, and privacy Chans as appropriate.  Then someone mentioned the .bit DNS 2.0 top-level domain and I was hooked on Namecoins.  This has been my obsession for the past couple of weeks and finally think I can make my way around 'namecoind' without making too much of a mess.

In any case, this is my introduction and interests.  Feel free to reply or contact me in any of the usual ways.