How To Use Bitcoin – The Most Important Creation In The History Of Man

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/..._bust_mt_gox_files_for_bankruptcy_protection/

Too bad excising this tumor from the Bitcoin community has such massive collateral impact.

No big deal in the long run, though.

http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/nakamoto-denial/

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source?id=2003008:Topic:9402&page=2#comments

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-involvement-with-cryptocurrency-9176107.html

"How to use Bitchcoin" .. huh?

/brb, coffee.

Well, I guess we have seen how the unregulated bitcoin market works. My guess is bitcoins will either have to subject to regulations, or cease to be a practical currency.

Demanding a free lunch before giving an interview? That man is my new hero!!!!!! God bless him.

From now on, before i ever do an interview, i will be demanding a cheeseburger AND a Mississippi mud.

Actually, no. The technology is what it is. Despite the anarcho-capitalist bent of many of its proponents, there is nothing inherent in Bitcoin that means it can't operate in a regulatory environment alongside more traditional currencies. As recent events have demonstrated, the lack of trustworthy institutions in Bitcoin-land is a very bad thing.

The technology itself is rock-solid.

The PEOPLE are fucked.

Considering the nature of Bitcoin culture, self-regulation would probably tend to take a form more like a consensus-based set of best practices than a top-down command structure. Think of something like the GNU Public License.

That is, people could continue to do business with shady fly-by-night operations like Mt. Gox, but people who weren't quite that stupid could choose to do business only with operations that subscribed to some or all of what they consider to be best practices.

[quote="muldrake, post: 2434080, member: 763”]...people who weren't quite that stupid could choose to do business only with operations that subscribed to some or all of what they consider to be best practices.[/quote]
How do people check who is following best practices, and who is only following best practices long enough to get a bunch of bitcoins someplace easy to hack into?

Maybe. But the test of time will likely be needed to prove that auditing works to prevent major bitcoin heists.

Well, depends what you consider best practices. Ideologically, most Bitcoin people are hostile to the practice of marginal reserve banking, and the blockchain provides a method for proving that one actually does have claimed reserves. In its simplest form, one would simply send a small transaction of a specific amount from an address (known to have the funds you claim it has) to another, showing you had funds.

Then there are more legal issues, like showing for instance that you've registered with FinCEN or whatever has jurisdiction. Call me a statist fuck, but I'm not going to trust any goddamn entity with my banking information that views itself as above the jurisdiction of the law. And I think results have spoken for themselves. Amateur hour bullshit like Gox Goxed over all its customers and Mark Karpeles may have even personally stolen all that money.

My opinion might change if the magic invisible free market hand actually succeeds in creating some robust form of self-regulation, but the track record so far has been utter shit in that regard. As for me, if I do business with something, I want a corporate entity of some kind, in a jurisdiction where I have access, that is visibly solvent, so I have something within easy suing distance if things go south.

http://business.financialpost.com/2...ge-defrauded-of-100000-in-easiest-heist-ever/

At least this case is fairly simple. A bailee, even an apparently retarded one, is liable for losing property entrusted to him as part of a job for services.

It might cause an interesting shift. Previously servers could contain valuable information, but now they can contain valuables. For $100,000, a physical robbery might be a possibility, and a few doors and a padlock aren't much against guys with guns.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="tier 4" data center armed guards

Oh sure.
http://www.thebunker.net/newbury/

But what happens when someone has a cheap colo at a little mom'n'pop company that has a couple metal doors, a wire cage with a padlock, and a couple techie kids on the night shift when someone transfers in a few million in bitcoins? ("No one will know it's there, it'll be safe!")

I think small colo operations should review their contracts to (a) protect their asses, (b) sue the silly bugger who put them at risk of armed robbery by using his server as a bank vault.

IRS Rules Bitcoin Is Property, Not Currency

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/irs-rules-bitcoin-is-property-not-currency/

The IRS Just Made A Crucial Ruling About Bitcoin

The IRS has ruled Bitcoin should be treated as property for federal tax purposes.

Here is the full text of their detailed Q&A:

Continued at http://www.businessinsider.com/irs-bitcoin-is-property-not-currency-full-release-2014-3

Is that a bad thing?

I mean, you can still barter with it, some of the indie game developers are selling games for bit coins now.

Personally i do not trust it. the whole mt gox lost bit coins incident raises too many concerns for me.

But to each his own.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/02/dvr_botnet_mines_bitcoins/

China gets first bitcoin ATM, skirting bank crackdown | Reuters

BTC China, one of the country's leading digital currency exchanges, has installed China's first bitcoin ATM and launched an online app allowing individuals to buy and sell bitcoins using mobile phones, skirting local banking regulations seen as increasingly hostile to so-called crypto-currencies.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/16/us-china-bitcoin-idUSBREA3F0MK20140416

At Mt. Gox bitcoin hub, 'geek' CEO sought both control and escape | Reuters

In June 2011, when customers of now-bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox agitated for proof that the Tokyo-based firm was still solvent after a hacking attack, CEO Mark Karpeles turned to the comedy science fiction novel "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

During an online chat, Karpeles moved the equivalent of $170 million in bitcoin at today's market rates - the virtual equivalent of a bank manager flashing a wad of cash in a wallet to establish credit. The gesture - with a sly wink to the "geek" culture Karpeles believed he shared with many of his 50,000 customers at the time, including an interest in coding, Japanese manga comics and science fiction - succeeded.

By moving 424,242 bitcoins, Karpeles, then 26, evoked the random number, 42, described as the "meaning of life" in Douglas Adams' sci-fi novel. "Don't come after me claiming we have no coins," Karpeles said, according to a transcript of that online discussion. "42 is the answer."

As the price of bitcoin soared from a few dollars to above $1,000, Mt. Gox grew to become the world's largest exchange for the digital currency, handling flows worth $3 billion in 2013, by the company's own reckoning.

But even as Mt. Gox boomed, French-born Karpeles seemed both keen to maintain total control of key operations and indifferent to commercial success, according to former staff and associates who spoke to Reuters, but asked not to be named because of ongoing investigations into the exchange's collapse.

Creditors who want to know how Mt. Gox at one point lost some $500 million worth of bitcoin and another $27 million in cash from its bank accounts, are seeking answers from Karpeles, who has spent recent days huddled in meetings with lawyers in Tokyo.

Mt. Gox and its lawyers declined repeated requests for comment for this article.

Lawyers for Karpeles told a U.S. judge last week that he was "not willing" to travel to the United States - as ordered by the judge to answer questions in a bankruptcy court - until his attorneys can "get up to speed" on a new subpoena from the U.S. Treasury Department. Karpeles doesn't want to go to the U.S. as he fears he could be arrested by authorities there, a person familiar with his thinking said.

"Regardless of whether it was a massive fraud or whether he was just grossly negligent, at the end of the day he's at fault," said Steven Woodrow, a lawyer representing a U.S. class action against Karpeles brought by Mt. Gox creditors.

Mt. Gox's bid to resuscitate its business was dismissed by a Tokyo court on Wednesday, and the court-appointed administrator said that meant the firm was likely to be liquidated. He added that Karpeles was likely to be investigated for liability in the exchange's collapse.

Continued at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/21/us-bitcoin-mtgox-karpeles-insight-idUSBREA3K01D20140421

5 Bitcoin Projects That Could Make Payments Far More Anonymous | WIRED

Some believe that bitcoin’s anonymous properties are a bug, not a feature. This past January, New York financial regulator Benjamin Lawsky called for a crackdown on software that anonymizes transactions in the online digital currency, saying it will merely help criminals evade law enforcement. And one of the currency’s biggest supporters, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, believes bitcoin will truly thrive only after it shrugs off anonymity protections.

But some parts of the bitcoin community have other plans in mind.

Even as regulators work to tie new identity restrictions to bitcoin businesses, a collection of projects is moving in the opposite direction, trying to preserve or even upgrade bitcoin’s properties as an ultra-private, untraceable payment system as anonymous as handing off a briefcase of unmarked bills. Last week saw the launch of Dark Wallet, a piece of bitcoin software that represents perhaps the most radical move yet to evade tracking of who spends and receives bitcoin. When it comes to describing the project’s intentions, Dark Wallet’s 26-year-old organizer Cody Wilson doesn’t mince words. “It’s just money laundering software,” he says.

But despite the controversy that surrounds the idea of untraceable digital cash, efforts to make bitcoin anonymous serve a real need. Bitcoin transactions are public by default, visible to anyone who searches the blockchain, the distributed public ledger of all bitcoin payments that keeps it safe from forgery and fraud. Deny bitcoiners the ability to hide their identity, and they’re left with a serious privacy problem. “The problem is not just about how to buy drugs online,” says Ian Miers, a graduate researcher at Johns Hopkins focused on cryptocurrency privacy. “As bitcoin becomes more mainstream, it becomes an issue of how to fix consumer privacy.” The problem may be even bigger for companies. Legitimate businesses, for instance, may want to hide their transactions so that competitors can’t track their sales growth.

Here are a few of the projects seeking a more private way to bitcoin:

Continued at http://www.wired.com/2014/05/bitcoin-anonymous-projects/

Julian Assange: Bitcoin could establish a new global consensus | memeburn

http://memeburn.com/2014/05/julian-...establish-a-new-global-consensus-net-prophet/

Your PC is now STONED

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/18/bitcoin_user_stoned_on_virus_warnings/

Lol, yup, gonna store my riches inna fucking electrical device's imaginary universe.... good-fucking-christ-onna-bbq-people-are-stupids

US to auction off 29,656 bitcoins seized from Silk Road, worth over $17.5M | Ars Technica

These are only bitcoins located on Silk Road servers, not suspect's computer.

On Thursday, the United States Marshals Service posted a notice that it will be administering the sale of the over 29,600 bitcoins seized in the Silk Road case. At present exchange rates, those bitcoins are worth over $17.5 million.

These bitcoins resided in six different wallets found on Silk Road servers and do not include the “bitcoins contained in wallet files that resided on certain computer hardware belonging to Ross William Ulbricht, that were seized on or about October 24, 2013.”

The USMS said that the first deadline for bidders will be 9am Eastern Time on June 16, 2014.

Continued at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...coins-seized-from-silk-road-worth-over-17-5m/

Bitcoin security guarantee shattered by anonymous miner with 51% network power | Ars Technica

In a first, one player got a monopoly of Bitcoin's total computational power.

For the first time in Bitcoin's five-year history, a single entity has repeatedly provided more than half of the total computational power required to mine new digital coins, in some cases for sustained periods of time. It's an event that, if it persists, signals the end of the crypto currency's decentralized structure.

Researchers from Cornell University say that on multiple occasions, a single mining pool repeatedly contributed more than 51 percent of Bitcoin's total cryptographic hashing output for spans as long as 12 hours. The contributor was GHash, which bills itself as the "#1 Crypto & Bitcoin Mining Pool." During these periods, the GHash operators had unprecedented powers that circumvented the decentralization that is often held up as a salient advantage Bitcoin has over traditional currencies. So-called 51-percenters, for instance, have the ability to spend the same coins twice, reject competing miners' transactions, or extort higher fees from people with large holdings. Even worse, a malicious player with a majority holding could wage a denial-of-service attack against the entire Bitcoin network.

Like tremblers before a major earthquake, most of GHash's 51-percent spans were relatively short. Few people paid much attention, since shortly after a miner loses the majority position, it also loses its extraordinary control. Then, on June 12, GHash produced a majority of the power for 12 hours straight, a sustained status that enables precisely the type of doomsday scenario some researchers have warned was possible.

Continued here:
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...red-by-anonymous-miner-with-51-network-power/

Hacker Hijacks Storage Devices, Mines $620,000 in Dogecoin | WIRED

Dogecoin, for those who don’t spend their time indulging in Internet meta-memes, may seem like harmless nerdery. But for one enterprising hacker, it’s created a small fortune—at the price of annoying a lot of systems administrators.

A pair of researchers at Dell’s Secureworks security division have traced a collection of malware-infected storage devices to a hacker who has amassed more than $620,000 worth of the currency, which they say he mined from those hijacked machines and others. They say that stash, largely created in just two months earlier this year, may be the largest cryptocurrency hoard ever mined from the computers of unwitting victims.

Continued at www.wired.com/2014/06/hacker-hijacks-storage-devices-mines-620000-in-dogecoin/

Hai guys, can I ask a dumb question?

There’s a company, “Silkroad Network Inc” at the same address as some heavy hitting Scientologists like Feshbach. Is this Silkroad at all related to the Silkroad in the news?

http://www.advancedbackgroundchecks.com/address/110/Atherton/Atherton/CA

I'm glad I don't deal in this shit.
~*really*~

SynoLocker demands 0.6 Bitcoin to decrypt Synology NAS devices | CSO

“My Diskstation got hacked last night. When I opened the main page on the webserver i get a message that SynoLocker has started encrypting my files and that I have to go to a specific address on Tor network to get the files unlocked. It will cost 0.6 BitCoins. It encrypts file by files. Therefore I started to copy my most important files to another disk while encryption was in progress on other files. After the most important files were copied I turned off my disk.”

http://www.cso.com.au/article/551527/synolocker_demands_0_6_bitcoin_decrypt_synology_nas_devices/

This search: https://privatelee.com/search/?q="Silkroad Network Inc"

Found this: http://california.14thstory.com/silkroad-network-inc.html

Silkroad Network, Inc. was a corporation registered in the state of California.

It was a domestic corporation, meaning it was formed, as well as registered, in California. Its articles of incorporation were filed on May 26, 2006.

All of Silkroad Network, Inc.'s powers, rights and privileges in the State of California have been suspended. This could have happened because they failed to file a return and/or pay taxes to the California Franchise Tax Board, or because they failed to make certain informational filings with the California Secretary of State. The specific reason for this suspension can be found by ordering a status report from the Secretary of State.

Can you beat ALS by having your body frozen? This Bitcoin pioneer is going to find out. | Vox

Bitcoin was invented by a mysterious person who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. But to make it useful, he had to convince other people to give it a try. The first person to do that was cryptographer Hal Finney, who used the software to receive the first Bitcoin payment from Nakamoto on January 12, 2009.

Tragically, Finney suffered from ALS, and over the last five years his body has deteriorated. According to a post on a cryonics mailing list, he was declared legally dead on Thursday morning.

Finney is a customer of Alcor, a cryonics company that freezes people in hopes that the technology will someday exist to revive them. Here's what's happening today:

Immediately after pronouncement of legal death, Alcor’s standby team went into action, restoring circulation, ventilation, administering an array of medications, and initiating external cooling. Surgery is currently underway to enable us to replace Hal’s blood and interstitial fluids with cryoprotectant. Once perfusion is finished we will be able to plunge Hal’s temperature down past the freezing point without any significant ice formation. Once he is down to around -110 degC we will slow cooling and take a couple more days to reach the final storage temperature of -196 degC. After that, Hal will be placed in long-term storage and cared for until the day when repair and revival may be possible.

Finney, who grew up in Los Angeles and studied computer science at Cal Tech, had a lifetime interest in cryptography and digital currencies. He played a role in the development of PGP, email encryption software that is still widely used today.

Finney became the first Bitcoin user because he was a regular on the cryptography mailing list where Nakamoto made the initial Bitcoin announcement. One of his last interviews was with Forbes's Andy Greenberg, who talked to him in March. By then, ALS had damaged his body to the point where he could only communicate by moving his eyes. Greenberg says it took Finney almost a day to compose a single 3-paragraph email to Greenberg.

Continued here:
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/607966...bitcoin-is-legally-dead-and-his-body-is-being