AdmiralBeotch

I have been doing offline transaction in bitcoin for years now. Private keys on the offline system sign unsigned transactions from an online computer and the interaction is completely over an airgap (webcams and qr codes on/from either side).

Electrum is primarily what I use to do this, but there is an android app called Bither that does essentially the same thing.

Additionally, the Electrum 2.4 client has multi-sig features and it is very easy to setup and use so the security of your funds is distributed across multiple devices/co-signers.

All 'yall need to be ashamed of yourselves if you don't own even a US penny's worth of Bitcoin. I'm not even kidding. If you've never witnessed a bitcoin transaction or held a bitcoin on an electronic device this far into the game, just hang your heads in shame.

I mined in mid 2010 from my CPU. I was not a hardware guy, so I gave up in about 6 months. I have managed to keep every bitcoin key I've ever owned, with the exception of one small mistake that cost me 1 bitcoin. During this mining period, they were worth $0.06 up to $1. It took me those 6 months to have my first epiphany about the value of Bitcoin. But it was just one of several more monumental epiphanies to come over the next 3 years.

I bought in to the BFL pre-order during the first few days of the announcement. It took me 12 months to receive the hardware. During that time, Avalon beat BFL to market and destroyed my expected difficulty. Fortunately, the $1800 I spend on the hardware has paid me back over 10x in dollar amount. It will take me about another 6-9 months to break even on the bitcoins I spend due to the massive rise in value since I made the pre-order. Fortunately, I bought a good number of bitcoins at the same time so I've made out on both investments.

I have purchase a BFL Monarch during the first few days of the announcement, but I do not expect to make the money back in any reasonable amount of time due to the flood of new ASICs and coming changes in difficulty. Fortunately, I do not have power costs.

Pay taxes and other government debts here: http://www2.egovlink.com/press-release-bitcoin.cfm

You can already buy food at a couple places in Vegas where I live.

The difference and what a lot of people seem to miss is the scarcity of bitcoin and the fact that its makers and followers are bootstrapping a new global economy. Having only $1B in liquidity is not enough to participate in all global markets. If bitcoin successfully acquires fractions of all global markets, there is but only one direction the exchange rate can go, and that is up until there are hundreds of billions of dollar value in bitcoin. Divide that by the 11 million bitcoins in current circulation, and each one will be worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

Get bitcoins from locals on LocalBitcoins.com

Most is probably being used for savings as the potential for it to increase in value over years is ridiculously high. If bitcoin succeeds in taking over fractions of global markets, which is is poised to certainly do because of its efficiencies, then the market cap will be hundreds of billions, and valued above several thousand dollars each.

But, bitcoins are being used in commerce too. New merchants added every day. I know of at least 6 brick and mortar businesses in Las Vegas alone that have sprung up recently.

I am a TOR exit operator and I strictly follow the guidelines established by the EFF. I never connect to my exit nodes for any purpose other than routine maintenance and when I do, it's well documented: times, purpose, etc. By minimizing my access, I remove myself from suspicion for any activity done through my node.

No because you'll eventually have something come up that makes you want to spend those bitcoins, even though you know they'll be worth more in the future. and when you do so, you'll be getting a significant effective discount on your purchase. For example, if you bought bitcoins now at $12, sat on them like a good little hoarder, knowing they'll be worth $1000 in 5 years and all of the sudden you need a new car and the bitcoins are only worth $24, you're getting a 50% discount on your car purchase by spending those bitcoins.

It will halve every 210,000 blocks for about 140 years until the reward is 1 satoshi.

Ridiculous argument. I've got old coin (purchased at a lower price) and every time I spend it, it's like getting a discount. It's a built in incentive to spend them.

the qt client, while being the baseline of measure, is a dinosaur. I use Electrum because it does not require the maintenance of a local blockchain, start up is immediate after long darkouts. It can be fully run off-line with no network connectivity. It supports aliases like email addresses instead if complicated bitcoin addresses. It uses deterministic key generation so I can literally backup my wallet in my head with a passphrase, erase my wallet, and recreate it from my mind. Oh yea, and it allows me to make transactions without any fees. Other worthwhile clients: Armory, Multibit. They are all viable and under rapid development.

Edit: electrum can be fully run offline as in you can monitor your balance without a network connection AND you can write transactions that can then be injected into the blockchain by a networked connection. But the electrum client at no time needs to be connected to the network.

Additionally, a networked computer can contain a deseeded wallet (no keys) for securely monitoring your off-line balances.

You should consider a feature for coinbase to allow for btc to be sent (via lookup) to email addresses. For instance, the Electrum client allows this by the recipient hosting a bitcoin url on their domain. julian@tosh.us maps to http://tosh.us/bitcoin.id/julian which returns my bitcoin address.

Bitcoin, the protocol, has never been hacked - only services built on top of the protocol.

You can certainly be fully anonymous with bitcoin but care must be taken... Mainly, you need to isolate your change to an identity wallet - a wallet used for specific purpose under a dedicated pseudonym. Identity of the pseudonym is protected by plausible deniability - "I bought those coins on MTGOX, but I sold some of them to some guy for cash on the street corner, that purchase wasn't me"

The more hops through a wallet (which can be created dozens of times), adds more plausible deniability and separation to any purchase.

Transaction fees are optional.

Currently, if you do not include a transaction fee, your transaction will get confirmed, but the first confirmation could take longer for a miner to pick it up - but it is very likely to still get confirmed.

As transactions per second increase and load is placed on the memory pool, those fee-less transactions may get lost and need to be resubmitted.

It will experience an inflation rate for the next 140 years or so. It is currently expanding at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. In december it will cut to 25 BTC per 10 minutes, half each 4 years after that.

Bitcoins have already been destroyed to the tune of about 80,000 BTC from disk failures, lack of backups, and forgotten keys. We will already never reach 21 million bitcoins in circulation.

Better to mount /dev/ram0 and do your encryption there. Then shred; rm -rf; umount for the win.

OP: I did the same thing... running a server for anything is the best way to get started in Linux..

I did a little write up on my "crazy ass email setup" here: http://julian.tosh.us/2010/01/my-crazyass-email-setup/

It's evolved a bit since then and addresses gst's point... I've recently added regular expressions to my postfix maps so an email must match a certain pattern to get through... so it's more like a moderated catchall domain.

Got mine a couple months ago!

I completely agree with this... Your excitement will be renewed 10 fold by the excitement you see when tutoring the next generation of nerds. Nothing beats seeing the lightbulb flip on when an 8 year old "gets" binary math or writes their first program under your guidance. Nothing.

Is anyone else left scratching their head at how the facebook login overtook OpenID?

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The answer is here so you may not be toiled, But kept ironically obsure, so for others not spoiled.

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I see your objection, an annoying obsession, but, in fact, I mean, the context of possession.

=8P

agree 100%

FireGPG is a firefox plugin that makes it SUPER easy strong encryption and signing with gmail (or anything really).