I remember in the early days of linux, they had a similar problem where people attempted to trademark the use of the word linux all around the world.

To combat this, the formed something along the lines of the linux foundation and trademarked it themselves.

Is anyone working along similar lines with Bitcoin? As someone who is working on setting up a business involving bitcoin, this uncertainty is disconcerting and I would be happy to work with and/or contribute to an organization that would help solidify the bitcoin name.

Speaking as someone who is actively working on setting up an online wallet. I can understand your concerns. It's also our biggest challenge (to build trust)

As someone who is obviously against the idea. What would make you feel more comfortable with the idea?

Actions we are going to take:

1. Make it clear whose behind it.
2. Clarify how our system works and what safe guards are in place
3. How we plan on making money

The idea is interesting, but I'm not convinced that the uncertainty will ever be large enough to overcome the system.

My reasoning is this. Lets take a thought experiment where someone suddenly appears in the near future with 11 million coins. What would the impact be? Well if he does nothing with it, then there is no impact. If he attempts to sell all of it, inflation occurs and the prices of items will rise as more currency floods the market. If an attempt to flood the market occurs then the currency will spread around until an equilibrium is restored. What happened the other day with mtgox was an aberration of an immature market place. Rapid fluctuations should have placed a freeze on the market so that a reason for the change could be determined. I can only imagine a future where bitcoins are more common that there will be far greater regulation in exchanges and market places over what goes on.

And the further out I extrapolate the greater the discrepancy may be, but I can never see a great enough of a discrepancy to be concerned.  Because I mentally always come back to the thought that the market will adjust.

If you keep repeating yourself over and over, the problem may not be with the listeners but with how you're stating your answers

Anyways, I read and re-read this and there's a lot of back and forth.

But I'll try this once again:

Your assumptions are:

• Eventually all bitcoins will be lost
• That the uncertainty in the amount of bitcoins that are available will effect the price.
• The reason it will effect the price is that there is a potential of an unknown wallet created back in the dawn of time that will be discovered that, after all this time, will be large enough to dramatically shift the market.
• And that trade will halt because of this potential uncertainty which will only increase with time.

am i closer?

See, I'm reading the thread and it sounds like this is part of the problem you're stating.

So to restate, there are coins that are lost and coins that are hoarded. Just focusing on lost coins,there shouldn't be an issue. Because the value of the remaining coins would climb and, if necessary, the coins can be bit shifted to increase the overall supply.

The purpose of this heartbeat then, is actually focused around hoarders, early adopters who have a large number of coins and for some reason want to keep them rather then entering them into the system. And to force them into the market, is that it?

I pay some kid to figure out all the meaningless stuff like that.

Just a small question. Wouldn't this make it easier for an unauthorized individual to make a copy of the wallet and then use it at an arbitrary date in the future to access and steal any coins in it?

Couple of thoughts

If you're talking two way verification through public-private keys, you'll need some form of client for your customers to interact with, you'll also need a fairly robust key management system and a way to validate and manage when a key has been stolen.

SMS is an interesting idea for large exchanges, however if I'm going to have to jump through hurdles for each trade I might decide to go somewhere else where it's easier.

Not sure what the point is of establish a wallet for each user, the wallet should be buffered and fire walled off and not even accessible from the web server.

You awesome, if I had any coins I'd donate to you.

No need to to go overboard. If Mt.Gox had NO security precautions then there passwords would have been in the clear, OR they would have actually lost the bitcoins out of their back end wallet.

Just because tradehill hasn't been compromised means absolutely nothing. Why would anybody even bother? All the current traders are on Mt. Gox. since you have no idea what security Tradehill has, then implying that they are doing something better then Mt. Gox is just spreading a false sense of security.

I'm a die-hard pro-tax liberal so I'm all about reporting any dollar profit I make as additional income.

Saying that, I don't believe you have to go into details of how you got it unless it was a lot. I'm sure a tax accountant would be able to provide you additional details.

I think you're right. I 'll have to double check or ask someone smarter then me about that. But I don't believe that changes culpability.

The part that you are missing is that a backup is only good for a certain number of transactions.

The wallet contains a pre-generated number of addresses. When you copy,or back-up, your wallet those addresses go with it.

Once the number of transactions goes beyond that prefixed number then the old backup is worthless. because the key that goes along with it is now out of date.

-Jason

Yes, the virtual filesystem is temporary, so if you are using a Live CD and you create a wallet on it, and transfer money into your wallet. You have the option of saving it (where it ends up on your hard drive) or it disappears when you eject the CD and you lose the money.


That's correct

The first thing, that it would be extremely difficult to determine if it actually came from allinvain, as each transaction would have been made with a new send and receive address.

Secondly, there would need to be some sort of culpability on your part. If you suddenly had 10 BTC show up in your account, were you paid off, were you involved in some way in the (supposed) crime?

A real world equivalent would be a crime was committed and then money was deposited into your checking account from that crime. You would be culpable if you were involved, aided, and or supported the crime that took place.

I've seen several postings with people encountering issues with online accounts where they've had insecure passwords.

I've had over 10 years of experience with e-commerce development and security and I wanted to share some tips.


1. Make the password as long as possible. A website that's dealing with money and asking for less then 9 characters in your password has issues ( I'm looking at you Mt.Gox )
2. Combine the following; Upper and Lowercase characters, Numbers and Letters, Special characters (!,@,$,.,*... etc)
3. The more complex the better.


Examples of Good Passwords
!2#gHg6.&s
*(fs3IIIid3!F)

Examples of Bad Passwords
sdrawkcab
12121976
password

Hope this helps some of you

Good posting, a couple of points.

1. Live CDs. Your able to store things on Live CDs because they create a virtual file system file on the local drive. and merge that local file system with the filesystem that's on the CD. If you install your wallet on the Live CD. You are actually putting in on the hard drive of your computer. ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_CD#Technique)

2. I object to the usage of "100%" secure. There's no such thing The closest you can come is to make it portable at which point you're vulnerable to physical theft and loss.

-Jason

Hi I'm Jason,

My partner and I are working on a couple of new websites for bitcoin users. So I'm attempting to build up a rep