That game has fees (initialized at 1%, I haven't checked to see if that's changed) so I wouldn't exactly call it a zero-sum game, but it does look like an interesting game, and a quick look at the contract doesn't raise any obvious red flags.

A well-designed website definitely makes things more interesting, not to mention making it easier for someone with a less technical background to play. The game you linked literally just gives the JSON ABI and instructions for playing from MyEtherWallet. A website, maybe with lightwallet built-in so you can connect to any public RPC node, would make it a lot easier to play. Me personally, I can play from the geth console.. but I don't really consider that user-friendly.

Well that was a little harsh.. but yeah, you specifically mentioned disinterest from ponzis and other scams, so of course the spammers had to come in and post their ponzis on your thread. I can see the appeal if you get in at the beginning, but if you look at any of these active ponzi contracts running on Ethereum right now and actually look at their data (on ether.camp) you'll see that if you invest now it'll take hundreds more ether invested before you have a chance of getting paid. I don't see the appeal of waiting that long for a potential 120%-150% ROI.

Gambling games might be interesting, but only if it's a zero-sum game. If I want to play with a house edge, there's a brick-and-mortar casino about a half hour drive from here (and I quite enjoy the atmosphere of a brick-and-mortar casino, I love all the lights and sounds.. plus they have buildings to maintain and employees to pay, so I don't mind giving them their house edge when I play there).

I'd love to see more games based on the idea of a RanDAO (examples: https://github.com/randao/randao and https://github.com/MakerDAO/maker-darts ). I think there's potential there for the "house" to make a profit off of a zero-sum game, by also operating a "random oracle" service to sell random numbers to other contracts. Some of the fees from the oracle service could even go into the prize pool for each round, making the game better than zero-sum for the players.

edit: I think something based on maker-darts would be especially interesting, since it deals with tokens instead of ether, and as far as I can tell the plan is to eventually replace ether (as it exists now) with a precompiled token contract at address 0. For now, you can use ether as a token with a simple token proxy contract.

In most cases (shockingly), it's not really the politicians, or at least not enough of them to make the changes that the FBI, CIA, NSA, et al. are pushing for. For decades now, the law enforcement and intelligence communites, along with a small handful of politicians and judges who refuse to learn anything about technology, science or math, have been pushing for any kind of encryption backdoor they thought they could sell. So far, Congress has consistently refused to grant them the powers they've been asking for, which is really what the 'iPhone of terror' (I'm totally stealing that, BTW) is all about. Now they're trying to get several federal judges (with the one in San Bernardino being the most high profile case) to give them a new power that Congress has repeatedly denied them, based on a ludicrous and unprecedented interpretation of a 200 year old law, telling the judges that it's "just this one phone" and "it won't set a precedent" while simultaneously arguing to Congress that this is going to set the precedent that they need.

One judge already has rejected their claim that the All Writs Act gives the court the power to do what the FBI wants to do, and I doubt Congress is going to cave and give the FBI a power that it's been withholding from it for decades in spite of repeated requests, hearings and arguments on the subject(and even in the wake of 9/11 when the law enforcement and intelligence communities were given all kinds of new surveillance powers).

Also don't forget that while they get away with a lot, American politicians do have their limits before the people start pushing back. They sneak a lot of things past a mostly uninformed public, but the people were able to stop things like SOPA/PIPA (at least at the time.. sadly a lot of that got slipped into TPP while nobody was allowed to look) and even the "Clipper chip" backdoored encryption they were pushing for back in the Clinton days.

Not exactly. Their source code is still there, but you'll probably need git (rather than just downloading a zip) to get it.
This should work:


f7679dd0 is the last commit before the site was closed, it looks like everything is still there. Please ONLY use this to recover an old brain wallet, don't make new wallets with this since we all know it's broken.

If I had global adoption tomorrow, I'd have no reason to ever sell my coins, I could just spend them as-is without having to worry about exchange rates and fees.

edit: To a certain extent I already can. I've been paying for web hosting with BTC for a couple years now, I can buy electronics and certain other miscellaneous items on Overstock, and there are plenty of other places online (sadly, no local brick-and-mortar) where I can spend them. I'd think with global adoption, though, the value (in terms of buying power, or USD/Euro price, or however else you want to measure it) would be a lot more stable.

It's not a change in the implementation of BIP32, it's a change in Electrum's wallet implementation to BIP32. Electrum's deterministic wallets that you've been using for years came along before BIP32 even existed. Recent versions of Electrum (2.0.0+) have moved on to creating a BIP32 wallet by default, which of course uses the "xpub" representation of the master public key as defined in BIP32 instead of the hex representation. Key derivation is also different with BIP32, a BIP32 master public key is not compatible at all with tools like addrgen that were designed for Electrum's previous wallet format.

If you have the 12 word seed from an older Electrum wallet (or an older version of Electrum to create a new seed with), I do believe you can import that seed into recent BIP32-enabled versions of Electrum and it should use the old wallet format for that wallet. If so, that's your easiest path forward. If not, you'll need to find some PHP code that handles BIP32 key derivation, unfortunately I don't know of any off the top of my head.

If you're going to assume any one piece of software in the official Ubuntu repositories (which the Software Center installs from) is compromised, you have to assume they could all be compromised. In that case, you also have to assume that your installation disc (built from those same packages, by the same people who maintain those packages) is compromised. Better ditch Ubuntu altogether and go with Gentoo or Linux From Scratch in that case.

Realistically, though, Electrum is a Python app. It might be compiled to an EXE on Windows, but on any other operating system the source code is what you run and there's no real need to compile it. Technically the Python interpreter will compile it to an intermediate byte code (.pyc files) but that's just an optimization and the .py (source) files will be used if they don't match the .pyc files.

Out of the box, Ubuntu does contain some things that some of us might consider to be adware or spyware, but it's not hard to remove those things (which don't matter on an offline machine anyway). What is there is far from being the kind of wallet stealing trojan you'd be worried about, it's mostly there as a way for Canonical to make some extra money off of the mostly free distribution of their Ubuntu Linux OS.

BTW if you're so worried about Ubuntu that you want to compile your Linux OS from scratch, keep an eye on Gentoo as well, some packages contain some pretty controversial patches and if you let Portage install them those patches will be installed along with them.. so compiling everything from source isn't necessarily the silver bullet you make it out to be either.

Another tool to learn about multisig and manually create multisig addresses or spend their outputs (and I think it can even be used offline) is http://coinb.in

If you want a multisig wallet that just works, your best bet right now is probably GreenAddress where you can get a 2of2 wallet recoverable by nLocktime transactions in case they ever disappear and optionally a 2of3 wallet recoverable manually (maybe through something like coinb.in).

Electrum would be another good choice, but then you have to manage all the keys yourself and it's only really secure if you have an offline computer for signing (and in that case, it's easier to just set up a watch-only wallet online and keep the seed offline). I haven't really done much with Armory, but I hear it comes highly recommended by those who have used it.

Why not? It's about as likely to work as investing in something you don't understand to try to get rich quick. If you invest in something you don't understand, you're gambling. If you're gambling anyway, might as well have all the bells and flashy lights, right?

Maybe you have a 2of2 wallet, with one set of private keys stored on a permanently offline machine (in my case, I've used a laptop with its wifi card physically removed). That way you have the security of a cold wallet, but with most of the convenience of a hot wallet. You could just as easily ask "Why buy a Trezor when I can manage my own keys offline?" and the answer is the same, it's a way to combine security and convenience. I could pick up a used laptop for less than a Trezor would cost me, wipe it and install Ubuntu in about an hour, pull the wifi card and I'm good to go.. but none of that is as easy as plugging in a USB device and pushing a button when I went to spend.

And that's a legitimate concern with any method of communicating over the internet.. whether you're using the blockchain, a centralized server, some other P2P mechanism like BitTorrent or (as you mentioned) even something like PasteBin. Theoretically a virus, trojan or other malware could just as easily use a GMail account for the same purpose. Any of those methods would probably be a lot easier and less expensive for the malware author than repeatedly paying to put messages in the Bitcoin blockchain (either as fake outputs or OP_RETURNs), but I can see how putting the messages in the blockchain would be much more resilient than most of the other methods I can think of.


Perhaps it's the way the article is written, then? I took to mean the same thing, especially since it specifically mentions "fetching information from transaction records and running it as code" and in that light it's nothing but FUD, no Bitcoin client does that and there's no need for any Bitcoin client to ever do that. Of course some hacker using it to send messages to control infected computers is a much more legitimate concern. Even worse, I'd think, would be a hacker using it to send messages from infected computers back to himself. But we already have viruses and keyloggers that do a pretty good job of phoning home without ever having to touch the blockchain.

Where are these applications (presumably, applications a bank would be interested in) that aren't possible with fiat?

Vault with insurance: Isn't this one of the services banks have provided from the very beginning regardless of whether the currency is gold, silver, fiat dollars or whatever else?

Invest and/or loan: I put these two together because, between the two of them, this is how nearly every commercial bank in the world makes the majority of its profits. You deposit money, they loan it out or invest it, usually they loan out more than you actually deposit (sometimes up to 10x more). Bitcoin is far worse (for the bank) than fiat in this respect, since the bank can not create BTC it doesn't have and loan it out as if it really exists. I guess in theory they could operate a fractional reserve, but with a hard limit on the number of Bitcoins that can exist I see that scheme collapsing pretty quickly, Chase and Bank of America would be in no better position than MtGox because they still can't create these extra BTC out of thin air and unlike dollars, nobody is going to print more once we hit that hard limit. This also makes the "vault with insurance" service much less profitable for the bank than it currently is with fiat money.

I can't think of applications a bank would be interested in that aren't possible with fiat, but for those applications and services that a bank traditionally already provides, BTC would put the bank at a significant disadvantage compared to fiat.

To me, this makes Kaspersky and INTERPOL sound like a joke. A well-known antivirus/security software company and a large international police force took this long to figure out that you can put arbitrary data in the blockhain? The rest of us have known this all along, a few even use it as their business model. While I could see it being a problem in the future (especially if we don't fork to increase the block size, these spam transactions could eventually make it harder to get a legitimate transaction confirmed), so far it hasn't really hurt anything, it's just made the blockchain take up a little bit more hard drive space than it would have otherwise.


How long ago was that, and Kaspersky (along with INTERPOL) is just figuring it out? No wonder people are laughing at this and/or attacking them. BTW, if you had read the entire thread you linked and looked into it, there were not (and as far as I know still are not) child porn pictures in the blockchain. What is there is some data from a TOR service called The Hidden Wiki which includes, among other things, links to TOR hidden services which served as blackmarkets, child porn sites and the like. Odds are, with all the "dark web" busts in recent news, a lot of those services have probably been shut down by now anyway and I'm sure new ones are springing up every day.

Any company (a few obvious examples would be Red Hat, Canonical, Google, IBM) is free to hire developers and/or find volunteer developers to contribute to whatever GNU or Linux projects they want. Those developers submit patches just like you or I could, if the project's developer community (especially core devs) likes the patches they get included. Some of these people eventually end up getting commit access or even being core developers on their chosen project. For companies like Red Hat and Canonical who package their own Linux distributions, if their patches aren't accepted upstream they're still free to maintain those patches and package them with their own distro.

No central authority is really needed beyond those people who have commit access on GitHub (or wherever else the code is stored) reviewing patches and deciding which ones to merge.

(emphasis mine)

(emphasis mine)


So basically, you're cybersquatting. While that may or may not be legal depending on your jurisdiction, it's something that's generally frowned upon.


Using the same name isn't likely to be copyright violation, but it could be trademark violation and it's definitely a form of cybersquatting. Using any actual content from the site (like the banner) would probably be copyright violation, whether or not copyright was ever registered in the U.S. and most Berne Convention countries.

edit: OP, it's not a bad site and there definitely needs to be an alternative to landofbitcoin, but for your own sake please change the name. You aren't going to earn any points in this community (or most other online communities, for that matter) by trying to justify cybersquatting. Even if no legal action ever comes from it, it's still not a good way to build a reputation online.. at least, not a reputation that you would want.

Compress it first, the ciphertext PGP/GPG produces will resemble a stream of random bytes and won't compress much (if at all). PGP/GPG also internally does some compression (using zlib, I believe, so basically zip or gzip compression) but you might be able to compress it further by using 7zip and encrypting the resulting .7z file.

This way your wallet is compressed as small as possible and you have up to three layers of protection (wallet passphrase, 7zip passphrase and PGP key/passphrase) along with an optional PGP signature so you can prove the file wasn't tampered with.

Of course this is all overkill assuming you have a strong passphrase on your wallet.dat, but it's nice to know that if someone hacked your dropbox or gmail account it might take them a few billion years to get through the multiple layers of encryption and access your wallet.

I wonder how that would expose Wordpress to a lawsuit. Aside from the fact that the software is distributed free of charge with source code and no warranty whatsoever, this was clearly a customized and modified version of Wordpress (I know of know official cryptocurrency exchange plugin) and the software was clearly not being used for its intended purpose (blogging).

If I'm out street racing in a Corvette I modified myself to be faster than stock, I cause an accident and General Motors releases a statement to the effect that their vehicle was never intended to be driven at that speeds.. I fail to see how General Motors would expose itself to a lawsuit in that situation. In that situation, I created the problem myself and it is entirely my responsibility, not theirs. Similarly, in the AllCrypt situation, the site admin clearly created the situation that made his site unsafe and the responsibility is his. If he did not know that Wordpress was never intended as a financial exchange platform and was never secure enough to be used as such, that's his own fault for not knowing how to use Google.

I don't see what problem Facebook thinks it's solving here. To me it looks like Facebook just sees companies like PayPal, Apple and to a lesser extent Google making a lot of money by piggybacking on top of the existing credit card, ACH and/or SWIFT systems and they want in. It's still a centralized solution, relying on technology we've all had indirect access to (through our banks and our credit/debit cards) for decades. When PayPal came along, they at least made the leap from having to go to the bank or a Western Union to wire money, to being able to just email money to someone. I don't see any similar leap with any of the solutions that have come along since PayPal with the possible exception of NFC payments with Google Wallet and Apple Pay.

A threat to Bitcoin? No, just someone else trying to capitalize on PayPal's business model.

Of course. Plus, I imagine in Austin the situation is much more like Los Angeles the last time I was there, probably open wifi on almost every corner so you might not even need data service on your phone.

I'd like to see them both run successfully side by side, I like both for different reasons and they do each have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.

My understanding of Protip is that all tipping is done peer to peer on the blockchain. This of course fits perfectly with the idea of Bitcoin since it's decentralized and trustless. Being entirely on-chain does have some disadvantages that make it less than ideal for microtransactions. Extensive use of Protip could pollute the UTXO set with a lot of small transactions and result in people playing larger fees to spend their BTC, it also makes it difficult to send someone a tip smaller than the "dust limit".

Changetip is great for aggregating microtransactions off-chain, minimizing fees and potential UTXO bloat. Of course it comes with all the potential disadvantages of relying on a trusted third-party, something Protip avoids.

Since I personally trust my coins a lot more in my own wallet than in any wallet run by a third-party (with the possible exception of a GreenAddress 2of2), I would use Changetip for smaller tipping transactions like you usually see on Reddit and I'd use Protip for larger transactions like donating to an opensource project I want to support.