2 to 3 coins will buy a house? You wish.

Maybe a deposit on a house, but the full deal? I doubt it.

I'd love to see BTC at $50,000/coin but I can't see that happening for an incredibly long time. Sure, there is a chance, but it's a very small one.

$5,000 is much more likely than $50,000...and much much much more likely than say the $100,000 that some bitcoiners are claiming.

Buy some BTC for $500 each today and sell them @ $5,000 each...you'll have made 10x your investment. Now, that's not to be sneezed at.

An even bigger thing one would hate about Western Union is that they often require ID when transferring money to someone.

What would they use this ID for? To find out who is sending money to whom. That's what. Is that private? Not in my view, it isn't.

With Bitcoin you don't require an ID. You just create a wallet, and either mine or purchase bitcoins, and send 'em on their merry way. That's about as private as it gets. Sure, the transaction is stored forever in the blockchain, but remember that the authorities see nothing more than a bunch of cryptographic hashes so the authorities would have a bitcoin...*cough cough* um, I mean bit of a hard time finding out who is sending what to whom for what.

Eg. person 1aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhH sending X.XXXXXXXX bitcoin to person 1jJkKmMnNpPqQrRsStTuUvV for some thing-a-ma-[insert hysterical laughter here]-jig...

So this is great if you're trying to buy something not quite legal. With Western Union, if some nosy geek sees that you've sent XXX amount of dollars to someone who has been found to have been selling no-so-legal articles...guess what happens? Trust me there are plenty of them, yes, in Western Union in fact that system is AUTOMATED so you don't even need to be a damn geek.

That information gets duly passed on to the appropriate authorities, whether that be within minutes, hours or perhaps days of your transaction. Either way it probably doesn't matter much since by the time you would receive your parcel, your ID information gets recorded, your postal address is likely within that information and will be watched,  your parcel is picked up and seized and the FBI kicks your doors down and busts your silly ass.

Bitcoin...who would'da thunk!
And touch of PGP with your emails to that special someone, just in case someone else other than the intended recipient might be reading those messages.

First step: BACK UP. Make MULTIPLE COPIES.

When was the file dated?

If it was from say 2009 or 2010 then it's safe to assume it's a bitcoin one.

If it was 2011 it could be Litecoin, and if from 2012 it could be peercoin, or some other crypto from 2012.

First try bitcoin, and see if it comes up with anything. You could be in for a very pleasant surprise!

Ok. I stand corrected. I previously thought that you could have lots of private keys hashing to a single bitcoin address, but that collisions would still be so rare as to render that non-problematic.

The thing that I find interesting is that a private key is enormous compared to the size of a bitcoin address, leading me to believe that it would be possible to hash multiple private keys to the same bitcoin address.

No, you cannot have multiple public addresses from a single private key.

However, over 28 million private keys can produce the same bitcoin address. Seriously.

However, the chance of every producing a collision is so astronomically rare that you would have to be bitten by a shark, hit by a bus, shot by a gunman, struck by lightning and win the lottery all within a single day.

Trying to get a collision? Forget it, it's virtually impossible!

Of course, they need the passphrase.

However, if they dumped a keylogger onto the system, then the keylogger would be able to pick up the passphrase and redirect the logged keys to a remote PC and allow the person on that PC to then access the encrypted wallet and therefore they would be able to lift the keys from the wallet and drain the funds from those keys...

...the person who had funds at those keys would then lose their bitcoins because they would be moved to a new address by the person who managed to obtain a copy of the wallet and the passphrase. The other person would then control the coins from that point on.

You only need the private key to a bitcoin address to take the funds from that address. Since the private key allows one to spend the coins at that address, if you were to obtain the private key to another person's bitcoin address you would have to perform a transaction to your own bitcoin address in order to steal them (and of course keep it's corresponding private key - or else you couldn't access the coins yourself).

Well holy shit, if that's the case, then I'll be buying BTC, as fast as I can save the cash to purchase them
If indeed BTC is the new one-world-currency then I'll be able to retire on 10-20BTC...

Now, make sure you back up the old wallet before doing any of this.

1/ Reload the client

2/ Go into the console and type "dumpprivkey 1YourBitcoinAddress" where 1YourBitcoinAddress is the address that supposedly holds any coins.

3/ Repeat 2 for every bitcoin address that is supposed to contain your coins.

Store these keys somewhere safe. If you lose the keys you will lose your coins forever.

When you have stored these keys, rename your wallet.dat to wallet.old, make sure you do NOT delete it. The inventor of Bitcoin himself advised that you should NEVER delete a wallet.

Reload the client. Your balance will be zero since Bitcoin-QT will create a new wallet.dat that it will then work with.

You can then rebuild the wallet by going into the console and typing "importprivkey 5YourPrivateKey" where 5YourPrivateKey is the private key that I mentioned above, in the case of more than 1 private key, repeat the same command until all the keys are imported into the wallet.


If your old wallet is badly corrupted, you may need to ask someone more knowledgeable than me, if the above steps do not work for you.

Bitcoin will NEVER be obsolete. It's too deeply etched into history for that to happen. Because it's a protocol for asset transfer without 3rd party trust.

Neither will some of the alt-coins, for that matter. I'm talking about Litecoin, Vertcoin, Quarkcoin, Peercoin, Namecoin, in particular. They all have their uses and contexts.

Would Bitcoin ever become centralized? That's a huge fear in any mind.

But I think there will always be lots of miners, just that they'll continue to use more powerful hardware until they can no longer mine using that hardware, then continually upgrade. They would do this to support the network, and to protect their own interests - which is the face value of bitcoins. In the face of increasing hardware costs, bitcoins would need to rise to help meet the financing of the hardware upgrade cycle.

I can't see how this could cause great harm to Bitcoin, but it's possible down the road...just that I can't see how it could if everyone keeps increasing their hashing power.

85 people control the world with their wealth, and have as much wealth collectively as the rest of us.

Are you sure Bitcoin will be no better once it is adopted wide scale?

I think it will. Reason is, because it cannot be counterfeited. Unlike gold, it can't be used to coat tungsten bars It's based on pure unadulterated mathematics...and the codes are absolutely unbreakable.

I think Bitcoin has the ability to destroy the monopolies that have taken over...but you do have a point with centralization with regards to mining.

Maybe Quarkcoin or Vertcoin, or perhaps some other more-decentralized mining-wise coin will take over Bitcoin as the ultimate cryptocurrency...nobody knows, and only time will reveal the answer.

Matt,

Open the Bitcoin-QT client.

Wait for the blockchain to synchronize.

Go to your receive tab, copy the receiving address or the address that your coins were supposed to be sent to, we'll call this YourAddress.
Is it 1JJA3L6UGUtrK3MzscbKdWFt8mrv6eHfkk ?
If it is, then use that one.

Open up the debug console window, and type

dumpprivkey YourAddress

You should see the private key for that address. If it's not there, you don't have access to any coins at that address.

You are correct, it depends on the specific design. But there are many competing designs.

But Bitcoin is far from broken. It just works. It has it's flaws, but to me they are not that obtrusive. The system just works beautifully...BUT one must understand HOW it works, or they risk losing their funds. A perfect example of this is wallet maintenance and backups. People think certain wallet backups are still good but in fact are useless. People load up a paper wallet, spend a few coins, then just cross off say "50 BTC" and replace it with "45 BTC" and put the paper wallet away, forgetting about the wallet they've created on their PC or their web based wallet...and ended up with a rude shock after discovering later that they've lost the remainder of the balance on their paper wallet because they didn't understand change addresses.

The design that interests me the most is the design of Quarkcoin. Some call it a scam, but I beg to differ. 5/6ths of the coins that will be minted over the next 50 years were minted in a 6 month period. This gives it a huge stability advantage to those who are new to the cryptocurrency market. Most other cryptos are still being mined with an eventual finite supply.

To me a finite supply will eventually cause the Zilger-Hubermann loss-pattern-diffusion effect whereby the critical mass will reach its threshold much sooner than expected, and then subsequently collapse. Think the South Sea bubble. People assign Bitcoin value, so therefore it has value. But if it becomes virtually impossible to obtain new coins after a certain time frame passes, then it may well become useless. With Bitcoin and it's very finite supply of probably LESS than 20M coins (we can claim that more than 1M coins were destroyed through HDD failures, newbies who didn't understand change addresses, forgotten passphrases to encrypted wallets, lost wallet files, backup mistakes, formatted hard drives with forgotten wallets, or indeed anything that results in irrevocable loss of private keys, you could even add lost/damaged paper wallets to this list). A loss of 1M coins, you can almost bank on that. I'd be willing to bet everything I have that 1 million bitcoins were irrevocably lost by mistakes ranging from the common and simple to the rare and complex.

Bitcoin is definitely flawed. I make no bones about it. But so is virtually every one of the other cryptocurrencies...even Quarkcoin, which is my favourite crypto, is flawed in some way...but it depends on whether those flaws will affect the long-term appreciation and adoption into the mainstream usage over time.

To me, the ultimate cryptocurrency will have every feature required of a cryptocurrency for every individual ranging from the dumbest to the smartest - that is, all features FULLY open source, password protection options, wallet encryption options, backup options, paper wallet and key print out options, HD deterministic wallets that only require ONE master private key to secure and maintain, mining features fully built in that are fully optional to any user, and with programmable access to direct banking features, such as exchanges and peer-to-peer financial systems, such as p2p banks and of course bitcoin, but where one can sell or purchase this cryptocurrency with full fiat exchange.

If one could achieve this in a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin would be in an uphill battle against this new cryptocurrency. That's the truth and for bitcoiners it might be terrifying, but those are the facts. C'est la vie. I'm sure bitcoiners could produce something such as what I've described above. And in fact, with Armory and Electrum, they've done just that to a certain extent, but we still have a long way to go before we could say that Bitcoin is a completely finished product. It's still a ways to go, but I am certain we will get there, but it will be a slow process, with many hurdles to cross, and of course this will happen over time.

Vertcoin might be Google in 1998.

Or Darkcoin might be...Or Quarkcoin might be.

Time will tell.

Why don't you have access to your old address any more? Did you remove the account wallet that had that address?

Did you keep the private key to that address somewhere? Did you export it from the website? You should always backup your keys in case something like this ever happens again. The old keys, if they are backed up, will allow you to easily restore access to those coins.

If you did not store those keys anywhere, and you shut down the online wallet (which effectively destroyed it), I'm afraid those coins are gone for good.

It may be worth noting that this isn't the first time (and sadly won't be the last) something like this has happened.

Wow, sounds like a very good success story. As you said you never have to leave your home, did you buy thousands of bitcoins and become a bitcoin millionaire?

If you did, then congratulations!

One very happy story!

Bitcoin > Litecoin > Quarkcoin (either that one or some other alt.coin with a fast transaction time).

Bitcoin = Diamond
Litecoin = Gold
Quarkcoin = Silver

It's a bit like that, depending on what happens. If Bitcoin dies for whatever reason, I'm sure there is a way for Litecoin or Quarkcoin, or indeed some other crypto to take the place of Bitcoin.

But, I think Bitcoin is very safe and secure for now...until SHA256/ECDSA is broken...very unlikely but still possible and would constitute a black swan event in security protocol the world over, would be very bad for everyone if SHA256 was ever broken. RIPEMD160 would be pretty bad if that was ever truly broken as well...but honestly I can't see this happening for at least a good few years. I could be proven wrong, but I hope I'm right, as I support cryptos 100%...for one reason, that they make people accountable, especially with those with something of value, since they can't just create bitcoins out of thin air, they are finite resources, and can't be counterfeited. They can only be stolen or lost, so they are perfect for a store of value and if proven over time they will be accepted.

But security is NUMBER ONE when it comes to anything to do with the internet and finance.

And any 3rd party idea with Bitcoin is bullshit - Mt Gox proved this with aplomb that 3rd party with Bitcoin is utter bullshit, because the whole damned idea of Bitcoin in the first place was to avoid the 3rd party and the issue of requiring trust of a 3rd party, and to send money DIRECTLY to someone else without anyone else's oversight.

Of course, whether you trust the seller, is up to you, if you are buying. But the blockchain tells you EVERYTHING about the transaction and the address the money went to. If a seller uses an address, and you can connect that seller to that address then you can prosecute them quite easily since there is proof and a link to that proof, of any fraudulent activity.

I can't understand why Mt Gox wasn't being investigated more thoroughly when it first had trouble.

I'd check things out before you enter anything into bitaddress.org...but didn't someone mention code there that sends the information to a server? I wouldn't want anyone with my private keys except myself. I wouldn't do anything online with that sort of data, unless it's for like 0.1BTC...but even 1 BTC I wouldn't do it, it's too risky. People will steal 1BTC without any qualms.

You should be able to verify if a private key points to a public key. It should be easy to do so. Just load bitcoin-qt, wait for the blockchain to sync, and use the importprivkey command to import the private key into the client. bitcoin-qt will find the public key for that private key and then proceed to update the balance. It's not that hard.

Don't use online stuff unless it's heavily password protected, and even then I wouldn't even trust it. I've heard too many stories of BTC going AWOL because someone wanted to test something out.

With this paper wallet, did you withdraw coins from MtGox into this wallet's address?

The paper wallet looking like this:

1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and 5xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, the former being the public key which is where you withdraw BTC to from MtGox, and the latter being the private key (MUST keep hidden from prying eyes), marked as X but are just random numbers/letters.

If you didn't use withdraw function at MtGox, then they're gone forever, as MtGox has shut it's doors, probably forever.

It would be nice if someone could really find out the truth as to what happened to this BTC, but no one will ever know...unless it's leaked somehow. The common sense in this matter is, the BTC were NOT likely lost forever, and far likely STOLEN.

50,000? Fuuuuuuuuuck!

Now that is a LOT.