Topic: [Emergency ANN] Bitcoinica site is taken offline for security investigation - page 52. (Read 224562 times)

maybe it means 'mass' in the chemistry sense

the wallet needs to be unlocked for withdraws to work... if the server can unlock it, a hacker that gets access can unlock it

I stopped reading at page ~20 or so.. just wondering something for my educational purposes..

Aren't the private keys stored in an encrypted file ?
On my windows laptop with my wallet ,if someone logs in as admin they need to decrypt the wallet to get the private keys I always thought

What if I give 1000 chips for 1 satoshi on my backgammon betting site? Does that make bitcoin somewhat divisible and worth somewhat less? What if everyone did it and everyone thought in terms of milisatoshis? Essentially the bitcon network would just impose a 1000 unit minimum on transfers, would that really make the system worth more? A lack of ability? Possible I suppose.

Not true at all.

Bitcoin's (so far) highest volatility period, making all others seem insignificant, came and went before Bitcoinica existed.

During bitcoinica's lifetime, bitcoin volatility has been lower than during the previous Big Bitcoin Bubble period.

Thanks for that. Did a check through LastPass to see what was shared and greatly increased security & password variations - just in case.

Well, the one that has these many 0.005 BTC payouts (15Art...) is anyways just the bitcoin faucet, so all relevant transactions should fit on a normal screen anyways, just take a screenshot.

Probably there's some highly sophisticated stuff (or a Firefox addon I'm unaware of) that can also do this, but I guess you'lll have to reasearch this without my aid.

How do you get a complete expanded view of the blockchain.info/tree view in a .png?

Check it for yourself in realtime:
http://blockchain.info/tree/5416502

Edit:
I'm not sure if it came up already, but there's a quite obvious message encoded in the transactions going out from there:

Maybe a bit related - is there a way to short Bitcoinica?

Edit2: Ok, seems like it was posted already.
There are however still 116 BTC waiting on the "writing" account. Either they were just too much (as the rest was split up in nice 2600 BTC chunks) or they will be used for an up to 28 letters message (or several smaller ones) - more than enough for a pastebin link...

Nah, that's just there because over millions of gallons of gas all those 0.1 cents turn into something. Just like all those 0.0005 tx fees.


The two biggest problems I see with BTC is blockchain bloat and attrition (lost coins). Determining attrition is as you said very hard if not impossible. The purpose of BTC to prevent the ability to print money or decrease it so that it maintains a constant supply. Attrition erodes this principle. Coins have been lost, you can't replace them so erosion is occurring.

:Tin Foil Hat: It might just be an advanced AI to get our money (or my money) so peg the value of 'something' in BTC to the USD and avoid the hole BTC issue, if you are really paranoid. Hence, making the conspirators spend tons of money gaining nothing while you profit off of their expenditures.

 
Well as you stated it is very hard to determine true attrition. However, if over a period of 10 years people will be aware of the change to BTC v.2 and transfer them at a 1:1 value. Those that have not transferred will be attributed to attrition. And then miners will be able to make up the difference again. Rinse and Repeat when necessary.

Ok, back to topic again.

So, How many spends have their been on the 'stolen' money?

If I buy gas at the station, it's priced down to sub-cents (0.1 cent). I'm not sure if this does anything to supply and demand other than offering gas stations another way to display more nines in the end of a price sign.

Hoarding + loosing Bitcoins is not distinguishable. There is also NO way for you to proove with certainty that it's not an elaborate scam of an advanced AI that generates fake transactions + websites + forum posts etc. and is trying to slowly screw you out of money. All Bitcoins that you currently don't possess are potentially controlled by this entity...

To get less paranoid again: Even saying "in 10 years, all your Bitcoins are useless and until then you can exchange them for 1000 Bitcoin2.0 a piece" won't change the fact that someone holding 10 million of BTC that were believed to be lost could crash the economy simply by moving them, prooving that they are in fact NOT lost. Unless something like this happens at regular intervals (depending on where you live, this actually happens in real life too! My grandparents are now probably using their 4th or 5th currency already...) there simply is no way to tell if coins are lost for sure, which (since this is a risk) surely is a factor pushing down on the exchange rate. The longer old coins haven't been moved, the more people will probably believe that they are "dead", there's no way to know for sure though.

looks like you guys are confusing two things

• changing the value base of an unit of measurement
• changing the representation of a number

For Bitcoin, changing the value base would mean: there is an official announcement, stating e.g. that from dax X on 1 BTC(old) == 1000 BTC(new)

OTOH, changing the representation is just an internal technical thing. Right now, bitcoin behave like floating point numbers, just rounded to 8 decimal digits after the point. Internally in the software they are represented by an integral number and a scale factor (haven't read the code, but thats my understanding of the FAQs). So we could just issue a new software version using another scale factor and a compatibility conversion for transactions generated by the old version. For the user, the net result would be behaviour like floating point numbers, just now rounded to more decimal digits.

Now, the argument is: it is the market which determines the value, not any power in charge. So, if the market happens to discover a value for a lot of common goods, which can't be represented as BTC amount with just 8 decimal points, the developers are mandated to roll out a new version with a larger scale factor to cope with the situation and allow to handle the kind of values as the market demands.

Note: no one issued new units of currency during that process

--Ichthyo

I didn't mean to give the impression of disagreeing with the math but the ones controlling the choice to add another digit can control the supply and demand to some extent. Is this not what is being done with the FED?

Another aspect, is suppose someone is hoarding a lot of Bitcoins say like 10 Million (extreme example), we add another decimal and the hoarder starts spending. It messes with the economics of it. What we might have attributed to attrition is actually just a large saver.

I agree with you on the psychology of the currency. People like 1 to remain 1 and not change into 10 or 0.0103 etc... So I would not disagree with the milliBitcoin principle to at least keep a 1 as close to 1 as possible when the value of things change based on resource availability. The -qt client allows this to some extent.

For the reasons I have stated, I favor a migration rather than using a division to account for monetary base erosion through attrition. Possibly over a 5 to 10 year period to give savers time to migrate before their coins become useless.

Maybe my stock splitting concept wasn't the best way to express my views. And it isn't really about the splits but who gets to decide to split or not split because they will have control.


Edit: Sorry for going off topic here. Back to the Bitcoinica debacle.

Some people said you should never host with a VPS or do dedicated hosting and instead do everything with colocation hosting. What do you think of that?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.867666

Well, there is an entire piece of science designed to bring evidence, it's called mathematics.

As there is no way to send e.g. 1/3rd Bitcoin, only atomic units (and to make it more convenient, we call 100 000 000 of these units "1 Bitcoin"), even dividing these further will in the beginning only add zeroes after the decimal seperator (so you will always have only 1.0 or 4.0000 or 1337.00000000000 Satoshis). Afterwards the atomic unit is simply a millionth (or whatever) of a Satoshi. If this after some time is still not enough, then you cann expand the size again.

You can multiply all USDs you own by 100, then you have everything in US-Cents, for cash money that would be these atomic units. Unlike fiat money coming from a central bank though, Bitcoins do NOT need to be issued in a new way or shape, they just need to be multiplied by a factor of 10 or 1000 or whatever. Imagine an US-Cent being worth close to nothing (like a Satoshi) - instead of paying with tons (literally) of USD notes, you'd pay with 1 million USD notes. Bitcoin has the opposite direction. Money available to users won't get more and more, but less and less.


By the way, I really believe, there are also a lot of psychological effects playing part in this. I'm for example still strongly for adopting milliBitcoins as standard denomination, meaning 1 current Bitcoin = 1000 milliBitcoins, both amounts valued at ~5 USD currently.
Yes, you won't be able to brag that 1 unit of standard denomination buys you a happy meal at McD, but We would be more or less on par with Linden Dollars instead and people might feel better about themselves, if they hold a 4-5 digit amount of milliBitcoins than right now where even buying 1 BTC is already looking like a little investment.

I wish.



Trust me, many people care about them. All those Satoshi's are adding up.


I might not have properly conveyed my point though and am sorry for that. Sometimes my fingers don't type what I am thinking.

To sum up, I basically look at dividing as a stock split, and shredding as a reverse split. If one can do that, they, imo, can control the value.

Shredding will not really be destroying them because we can always divide them again to adjust the amount that it takes to buy things. Do you see where I am going?

If not, I didn't properly convey my thoughts on it. And I might be wrong, as there is no evidence for both directions yet.

WIN! Too bad it's only an apache status page for now

Yea, that is why I reposted to clarify my position. Please re-read.

I know many will disagree, but it is just my opinion. I am not offering empirical proof of it, until it happens.

I lolled
Telling from your other later posts, this is not trolling? Yes, we can decide to add a billion decimals and in fact if the smallest unit buys you a house, we will. Definitely. Most likely we will even when it can buy you a grain of rice.
For now nobody cares about the 10 digits other then when you want to brag about thefts in anonymous messages.
With the recent sky-rocketing of the USD the FED will soon print bills µ$