I mapped the last 6 months of Bitcoin price and volume versus the major security breaches at Mt. Gox, mybitcoin and bitcoin7.   

Here is the graph and link to posting.

http://bitcoineconomy.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/update-december-14-2011-correlation-of-bitcoin-price-drops-to-security-breaches/

http://bitcoineconomy.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/bitcoinsecurityversusprice.jpg

Price is the black line with values on the right side of the graph.  Volume is the colored bars and volume on the left side of the graph.  (Thanks Mt. Gox for the graph).

I agree.  A phone-based bitcoin wallet that can convert to NFC-enabled payments is inevitable

@tablekart.  Funny.  I tried to open an account at IBB for their interest free Islamic bitcoin loans.  I want a few hundred thousand bitcoins interest-free.  For some reason their loan department didn't call me back.  Very strange.

 

Lets see...

Take over a couple of the mining pools.

or

start a new mining pool with a zero fee and get people to switch over (hey, even lie about how many GHashes you have to get more people on board), then use this to attack

I'd argue that bitcoins ARE something, and can have legal standing.

My analogy is that digital certificates, and their public/private keypairs are something, and can be used for legally binding electronic signatures in various jurisdictions.  Therefore if an electronic document signed with a private key can be a legally binding contract, then a bitcoin value and block, signed with a private key, can just as easily be a legal currency and form of monetary exchange.

Thoughts?

Would it be possible to trim the blockchain by periodically publishing a block with the status of all current bitcoins?  Then one could delete the history between these events?  Almost like a system checkpoint event.

Forever having to store the entire transaction history won't scale.  If that is what is needed, then eventually it seems like most people will need to use hosted wallets.

I had similar problems with the Mac OSX bitcoin client.  Running at home and at work, I could never get more than 8 peers, and downloading the block chain took two weeks.  I can understand the frustration.  Perhaps the recipient was also a new bitcoin user and had trouble downloading the block chain?

It's certainly one argument for server-based wallets.  It would help get new consumer users up to speed much more quickly, and avoid problems like having to ensure that port 8333 is open on your router, for example.

Sorry you had problems.  Give it time, the transaction will eventually show up.

Check out the banks that engage in global trade and trade finance.  They will all accept incoming money.  It's just which routing system and which in-country branch or headquarter that you need to route the transaction to.

Try:
Citi
HSBC
ABNAMRO
ING
JPM Chase

I guess dwolla is slow because they are using the ACH network to send the payments.  This can certainly take overnight (ie. 2 days).

Is this pretty much what all mining pools are?

Yeah, I think Spike is correct.  Even if you could get a bus that could handle so many cards, power is your big issue here.  You're going to need a bunch of computers with their own power supplies to run something like this.  Think of racks of servers.  There's no feasible way to build a power distribution capability (at least not in a reasonable amount of time, since I assume you'd want to start mining quickly before the reward drops by 50% in 2012 sometime).

And of course even if you can get free electricity (just run a jumper from your neighbor's house! :-)  you're next issue is going to be cooling.  You will need a lot of AC to keep the place from melting down, and that will require not just the AC units, but adequate venting and ducting to ensure that the hot air can escape.  Or maybe a bit water cooling rig....   Big project.

Vladmir,

how would you know that you don't have any viruses or trojans if you don't run any anti-virus or anti-malware software?
You could have keyloggers, bots or a banking trojan and have no way to detect it.  Also no idea if a rootkit got installed.
??

China is outlawing it for physical transactions.  France is figuring out what to do (is it money or something else?).

I am sure some governments might want to DDOS or somehow otherwise attack it if lots of transactions are happening.  But really these days they are more interested in intercepting encrypted communications (see the Comodo and Diginotar CA hacks where Iran was intercepting encrypted gmail traffic).

I would think that intelligence agencies would be more interested in letting bitcoin run, and in building analytic tools to watch the blocks and try to deduce patterns around who is transacting with whom.  Combine this analysis with IP logs and they may be able to slowly figure out some "people of interest".  For example, if they arrest a criminal who has a wallet, then they know their keys and historical transactions, and this can be traced to see which receivers got their coins.  With enough seized wallets they then start to know some IPs or keys of other bad players.  Maybe this won't lead to finding people, but it could be used as evidence in prosecutions once someone is arrested.

$0.02.

oops, sorry, I mean 0.002 BTC

A yubikey or similar one-time-password (or even out-of-band authentication like an SMS code to your phone) only protects against rudimentary keylogging malware or phishing.  And it only protects the online account where you store bitcoins (clearly doesn't protect a locally stored wallet on your PC).

The problems with this for an online wallet include:
 - man-in-the-middle can get your OTP and password and take over your online wallet
 - man-in-the-browser malware can get your OTP and password and take over your online wallet
 - a hacker can still break into the online wallet service and steal/copy your coins (there are mitigations to this that online wallet services can and slowly are implementing)
 - bitcoin-specific malware can wait until you log into your online wallet and then do a session hijack to allow an attacker to basically become you and be logged in.

For protecting a local wallet, the bootable Linux approach (either on a USB stick or CD) is the most secure.  Store your wallet in an encrypted file partition on a flash drive (you could use a hardware encrypted drive like IronKey or MXI), and inside there, use TrueCrypt to double encrypt your filesystem which contains your wallet.  This is a highly secure approach using both physical crypto, software crypto and a clean OS that is reset every time (because you boot from a CD image).

Not sure how practical this is unless you have LOTs of bitcoins to protect!  And in that case, you should split them up into multiple wallets on different storage devices.

Hi

I've been following bitcoin for some time.  I'm working on a bitcoin startup at the moment, and will be looking for talented developers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I'm interested in high speed transaction confirmation methodologies, and how mining pools might be used to achieve this.

BCH