Congratulations, and thanks for all your hard work.  This is excellent news for bitcoin.

No one should panic sell a decent security because of this.  The underlying company that you own part of is not the same as btc-tc, and Burnside is not going to steal from you.  The biggest chance to lose from this is if you panic sell at a stupidly low price.  Also, it's a good chance to pick up some good securities cheap.

But also

'In a world first, SYTECH has announced a stolen Bitcoin tracing and recovery service; turning its decades of digital forensics expertise to tracing online Bitcoin criminals and recovering stolen Bitcoin for their clients.'

From http://www.sytech-consultants.com/blog/2013/worlds-first-stolen-bitcoin-tracing-service-and-bitcoin-data-recovery-high-profile-digital-forensic-services-company-sytech-embraces-bitcoin

If it was my coins stolen, I think I'd offer them the job if they would take no more than 50% of what they recovered.

How good was your wallet password?  Could you post a similar dummy password here?  Thanks.

I just got this

Someone suggested that Lemon was the subject of these links.  Lemon if you're reading this, are they you?

https://twitter.com/Lemon_SX

https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Senshimedia

http://pastebin.com/JuHV0mEn

Are the rules for this posted somewhere?  Thanks.

Blockchain info is saying it is unconfirmed.  Specifically on this page https://blockchain.info/tx/9a6608efc8338d707f636594a6b547f849c12e002897e47a37bd5c8b6f994d80
it says 'Very soon' for 'Estimated confirmation time'.  That is what happened in the reddit case I mentioned.  In the reddit case, the guy had used a blockchain info wallet to send the transaction, which is presumably why it could be seen on blockchain info and nowhere else.  I wonder if friedcat used blockchain info to send the transaction too.

If someone has messaged friedcat about this, please could they say so here to save him from getting deluged.

Something similar happened here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1eppnb/48_hour_unconfirmed_transaction_whats_wrong_here/  In the end the transaction vanished

The last unblocked transaction in the chain has 15 confirmations. https://blockchain.info/tx/618364652674551068cff5ce6a9b3889a6836c662c0f28c69c015e12ec6b6a6e

Is it out of the question that blockchain info has a bug?

My dividend payment doesn't seem to have made it off blockchain-info.  I can't see it using blockexplorer.com.  Which is right?
https://blockchain.info/tx/9a6608efc8338d707f636594a6b547f849c12e002897e47a37bd5c8b6f994d80

Thanks for the information.  Maybe there is something to be said in favour of the approach I suggested though: it would only lead to an ordinary transaction being recorded on the blockchain which might be useful for privicy reasons if multi-sig transactions are rare and become associated with sensitive purchases.

I'm not a cryptographer so take this with a pinch of salt.

Roughly speaking I'm proposing a protocol that is analogous to tearing a banknote in half and handing half to the seller.

Suppose that Alice wants to buy goods from Bob but that neither entirely trusts the other.  The parties each select a secret random number less than the degree of the bitcoin underlying field.  The parties go through the elliptic curve Diffie-Helman key agreement protocol using the bitcoin elliptic curve, and their secret random numbers.  They also agree on a random value for k.

The exchanged key together with k forms a bitcoin public key known to both parties from which a bitcoin address can be generated, but neither party on his own can find the corresponding private key.  Alice deposits bitcoins into the address.  When Bob sees that the payment has been made into the address he hands over the goods.  Once Alice has the goods she passes Bob her secret which enables Bob to generate the private key (it's just the product of the two secrets modulo the prime), and transfer the bitcoins to his own wallet.

After Alice deposits the bitcoins, Bob could try to blackmail her.  After Bob has handed over the goods, Alice could try to blackmail him.  However, neither party can gain anything without the other's cooperation.  If a small positive reward is available for successful completion of the protocol, such as is available through a reputation system, or even because the trade is mutually beneficial, and if neither party appears desperate, then blackmail is unlikely.  If a permanent blackmail happens, then the bitcoins are lost forever.

You've done your 5 posts.  I think you need to wait until the 'Total time logged in' near the top of the page says '4 hours'.  Me too  They don't know what wisdom they are missing out on!

Cyprus pulled the trigger on some bank account holders today keeping initially 90% of their funds.  That could increase bitcoin value.

1) Yes, if you give people the bitcoin address corresponding to the paper wallet then they can deposit into that address.
2) Importing the private key into another wallet is probably the easiest way to spend from a paper wallet, but once you have done this, the wallet is less secure so it's best not to use it again.
3) You can type the bitcoin address into http://blockexplorer.com/ to see all the transactions that have happened involving that address.

My top tip is to try out using a paper wallet with a small amount of bitcoin and check that you can retrieve it after you've sent it to the paper.  After you've checked the process, send larger amounts to new paper wallets for long term storage.

You can actually split the wallet up into pieces such that you need some pre-defined number of those pieces (for example 4 out of 6) to reconstruct the key https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104086.0

Two factor authentication does help with a key-logger though, which is a much more likely threat than an attacker virtually looking over your shoulder.  I've used bitstamp a few times to buy coins, and it's all worked smoothly except that on your trade window, they seem to provide out of date information, so it can look as though your bid is for more money than the the best offer but is not activated.  For what it's worth, I think they're inSlovenia rather than Slovakia. [Edit] There's no evidence they're scammers.

It wouldn't be possible for anyone to know that you haven't kept the secret key with which you've reloaded the coins.  The originally loaded coins have value because people trust the guy that makes them, but unless you have a very good reputation, that probably won't work for you.  It's silly to actually spend loaded physical bitcoins because they are worth more than their bitcoin value.

Hi,
I made a post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190895.0 that is a bit technical, and I'd like to post it to 'Development and Technical Discussion' because I think it's unlikely that it will be seen by an expert in the newbie forum.  Thanks if you can help.

I'm not a cryptographer so take this with a pinch of salt.

Roughly speaking I'm proposing a protocol that is analogous to tearing a banknote in half and handing half to the seller.

Suppose that Alice wants to buy goods from Bob but that neither entirely trusts the other.  The parties each select a secret random number less than the degree of the bitcoin underlying field.  The parties go through the elliptic curve Diffie-Helman key agreement protocol using the bitcoin elliptic curve, and their secret random numbers.  They also agree on a random value for k.

The exchanged key together with k forms a bitcoin public key known to both parties from which a bitcoin address can be generated, but neither party on his own can find the corresponding private key.  Alice deposits bitcoins into the address.  When Bob sees that the payment has been made into the address he hands over the goods.  Once Alice has the goods she passes Bob her secret which enables Bob to generate the private key (it's just the product of the two secrets modulo the prime), and transfer the bitcoins to his own wallet.

After Alice deposits the bitcoins, Bob could try to blackmail her.  After Bob has handed over the goods, Alice could try to blackmail him.  However, neither party can gain anything without the other's cooperation.  If a small positive reward is available for successful completion of the protocol, such as is available through a reputation system, or even because the trade is mutually beneficial, and if neither party appears desperate, then blackmail is unlikely.  If a permanent blackmail happens, then the bitcoins are lost forever.