This was so uneducated that it was a bit painful to read.

You should look into the Test Network, I'm pretty sure there's a few faucets that will give out coins there... It should be suitable to do any kind of testing, as the behavior is identical to the real network (as I understand it), except that the coins do not have any value.

For anyone wondering... yes, money was sent . He's legit, and I'm now 1 mbtc richer.

I fucking lost it right here.

Good to see that this has been tested before, and doesn't seem to pose any significant risk.

There was some talk about this in another thread as well:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=559365.0

This method really depends quite a bit on how each AV scans files.

From the PasteBin post:


You're essentially creating a transaction with a fake recipient address which matches some virus signature. I'm not too sure where to get virus signatures that in use by AV products. I doubt they're publicly available (other than the EICAR test string (which Im not sure will fit here anyway) ). You'd probably have to do some reverse engineering to actually get them.

EDIT:I should mention that I have no idea whether such a transaction will actually get propagated and stored in the blockchain (invalid address), or if would simply be dropped/ignored, someone with more experience with the raw protocol would have to chime in. If you brute-forced an address that was a valid virus-signature and sent some bitcoin to that, then it should work regardless.

I haven't tested it, because I don't run antivirus software (On Linux at the moment, usually running some flavor of Unix), and I don't feel like spinning up a VM.

Lots of AntiVirus's basically scan for known byte-patterns of malware, at least when doing a basic static scan. Smarter ones might check where the "signature" resides to try to determine if its actually malicious, others will flag it regardless of the signature position.

So, at least theoretically, it should work against a few AV's.

A fall from $1100 was pretty much guaranteed considering the insane speed at which the price rose to get there. There's tons of discussion about why the price fell to where it is now, but the main factors that are often cited are the MtGox fiasco, as well as all the uncertainty coming from China.

It's really impossible to tie down exactly why a price fell. Some people probably lost confidence and tried to cash out into USD, enough people do this with a high enough amount of coins, and the prices sinks. What motivated all of them isn't really possible to determine.

There was a pastebin fairly recently that suggested exploiting the fact you can attach short amounts of data to the blockchain by spamming the network with transactions that contain signatures for random viruses. Thus being flagged by tons of AV software, and potentially causing a loss of coins.
http://pastebin.com/ct2WHUK5

The good news is that you can't really create a virus via the blockchain. Messages are limited in size (20 bytes? I think), and there's really no room to create an exploit since the format is so well-defined.

Sent a PM