venaoy

You are wrong, in many cases the customer has no recourse for credit card fraud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8918865 People think credit card anti-fraud measures are perfect. They are not.

It is very rare for people in countries where cards have PINs to both lose a card and give away the PIN to the thief. Banks have educated customers well enough to not write the PIN on the card.

Likewise, a PIN-protected Bitcoin hardware wallet is reasonably pretty secure. You would need a thief with professional equipment to decap the secure chip to access data in the EEPROM that would otherwise be PIN-protected. I would trust this any time over the merchants systems which routinely get hacked over and over.

> The consumer isn't responsible for Credit Card fraud

Wrong. In many cases he is responsible.

Scenario #1: 60 days (typically) after the transaction, the customer has no recourse to report fraud. You were browsing your credit card statements and notice a $50 charge 2 months ago that you never authorized? Tough luck.

Scenario #2: When the card was physically present during the transaction, and when a pin code was used, the customer is always (edit: I meant "typically") held responsible unless he can prove he and his authorized users were definitively not present.

Which is easier: securing only 1 hardware wallet, or securing the HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of merchant systems that your credit card information flows through?

Doesn't matter what the cause is. A 20%+ variance in mere minutes _is_ volatility, by definition.

In my scenario, a machine knows the local exchange price as of 0ms ago (instantaneously) but knows the remote exchange's price as of 5ms ago.

You are saying it is better to know exchange A's price as of 2.5ms ago, and exchange B's price also as of 2.5ms.

But why? Either way you are ignoring 5ms's worth of trading activity. Either 2.5ms on both exchanges, or 5ms on one exchange.

Edit: I think I understand the advantage - see my edit #2 in my post above.

No. The parent suggests having 2 machines (1 at each end), but each trading order would be issued by only 1 machine (not 2). So there is no synchronization issue.

Example: machine A instantaneously become aware of some event at exchange A. It sends an order to remote exchange B (which takes 5ms) and at the same time sends a matching order to exchange A. Total time = 5ms, which is the same as having a machine in the middle having a latency of 2x2.5 = 5ms. [Edit #1: I edited this sentence to reflect the fact the algo sends the matching order immediately to the local exchange.]

So I still don't understand why is there any advantage in having a computer in the middle.

Edit #2: you wrote an edit ("This way the two machines don't need to sync up to determine if one leg was done and one leg was hung. All the information is in the same program on the same machine so there is no distributed state to reconcile.") which I think finally clarifies the advantage in having a computer in the middle. You don't run the risk of the 2 computers at each end executing orders that conflict with each other.

> If you have a unique key embedded in each keyboard/dongle pair, you would lose the ability to do this. In addition, if you lost the dongle, you would be SOL.

What about initializing the key during pairing? See parent's edit

A very important issue with Key Vault is: what to do when the Hardware Security Module dies? All electronics fail or stop working at some point. How do you make backups of keys that were on the HSM?

I liked:

Iridium Pager Hacking. Turns out messages are not encrypted at all, and can be captured by any one over wide geographical ranges (~1000 km). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCf5JFpOkDs&index=36&list=PL...

Security Analysis of Estonia's Internet Voting System. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_pHvhE4os&index=37&list=PL...

AMD x86 SMU firmware analysis. Not watched it yet, but topic seems interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE_PMcwltzo&index=16&list=PL...

And of course the SS7 talks showing glaring flaws in mobile networks:

Mobile self-defense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCkO0fWWqc&index=10&list=PL...

SS7: Locate. Track. Manipulate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0I5tl0YLY&index=4&list=PLO...

SS7map: mapping vulnerability of the international mobile roaming infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfPC9IHCW-U&index=27&list=PL...

I disagree. City driving at 25 mph is a lot more complicated and needs a lot more computing power than highway driving at 60-70 mph. City driving involves: handling the "dead zone" of intersection (square of pavement with no marking), poorly marked roads, pedestrians/cyclists/cars getting in your way, complex turn lanes, etc. By comparison highway driving is a piece of cake: clearly marked lanes, no sharp turns, no intersections, clear entry/exit ramps, all vehicles moving in the same direction, no pedestrians.

In case of curiosity, here are all the possible weather icons :)

http://jsfiddle.net/x6w7f44y/

Chrome v24+ does support all you need for channel-bound cookies: it supports TLS Channel IDs (previously known as Origin-Bound Certificates). To actually bind cookies, it is the server's responsibility to extract the channel ID from the TLS/SSL handshake, and bind the cookies to it.

> A small number of major bitcoin holders mostly determine the price.

Wrong. Your assertion is easy to debunk: if this was true, then, since they hold many bitcoins, why don't they make the price go up to increase the value of their assets? Why do they let it fall from $1200 to $350? Answer: because they can't willy-nilly make the price go up or stop the fall.

The reality is that anybody who is wealthy (the millions of high net worth individuals in the world, which is a lot more people than the ~1000 guys in the world holding 1000+ BTC each) can somewhat influence markets, up or down, but nobody can really "determine the price".

That's a misleading comment. Sure, if you bought BTC on January 1st, 2014, maybe, since this would have been timed perfectly to align with the peak of the Bitcoin bubble.

But if you bought BTC only 60 days earlier (November 1st, 2013), it was at $200, so you would have a +65% return rate as of today, easily beating the ruble, or virtually any of the world's currencies for that matter: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60zigDailyzczs...

And credit cards provides zero protection against identity theft. In fact, they even enable it because you give your full billing info (credit card number, address, etc) when paying an online merchant with a card.

You see, no payment technology is perfect. Credit cards have flaws. Bitcoin has flaws. But Bitcoin is better than credit cards for the average consumer. In the last 10 years:

- I have had to deal with 2 identity theft incidents that caused me major hassles and waste of time. Bitcoin would have prevented this because a Bitcoin transaction authorizes 1 and only 1 payment to a specific address. Bitcoin utilizes cryptography to guarantee that, not blind faith in the merchant not being compromised by hackers...

- on the other hand I have never had the need to issue a credit card chargeback, so this protection of credit cards was, although real, unneeded, useless to me.

You are incorrect. An HTTP GET still requires a 3-way TCP handshake, so your suggestion requires 5 steps not 2:

  1. TCP SYN to port 80
  2. TCP SYN/ACK
  3. TCP ACK
  4. HTTP GET
  5. HTTP reply with HTML content

False. IP fragmentation allows the size of a single UDP DNS response to be up to 65535 bytes, regardless of the network MTU.

Yep, another error. He also wrote 412px instead of 414px in some other location.

That's because the author made a calculation mistake. He wrote "412" instead of "414".

> Firstly, GPUs haven't followed More.

Yes they have. Any integrated circuit that tries to pack as many transistors as possible on a die is, by definition, following Moore's Law. To convince you: http://www.mumblegrumble.com/visual/roadmap/other/nvidia_moo...

Sell on an exchange. The big ones have a monthly trade volume of 100k+ BTC ($50+ million): http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d Clearly $200k is a drop in the bucket for them.

> That only works if you're talking about a customer buying something from an established merchant.

True. However my point stands: Bitcoin reduces fraud overall, because most transactions happen with reputable merchants.

> Charges that the credit card company pays, not you.

That's incorrect. In the end it comes from the customer's pocket. Because credit card companies have to have higher CC processing fees to cover higher fraud levels, which indirectly causes merchants to raise their prices. Sometimes it is not obvious (eg. all prices are 1-2% higher in an industry, eg. supermarkets), but sometimes it is more obvious. There is a perfect example from a few weeks ago demonstrating my point: AirBaltic charges a 5.99 EUR fee when processing a CC payment, but not when processing a Bitcoin payment: http://www.coindesk.com/airbaltic-waives-controversial-bitco...

By birth you mean: sex, race, physical attributes, etc?

I strongly disagree. Bitcoin is an improvement for 2 reasons.

1. Fraud come most often from customers (who have nothing to lose), not from merchants (who need to maintain their reputation). As a matter of fact, fraudulent chargebacks cost more than $11 billion a year: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/03/20/friendly-fraud-costs-... This is why merchant love Bitcoin's irreversible transactions. This fact alone cuts down most of the fraud that currently occurs with traditional payment systems.

2. In the extreme minority of cases where a merchant is malicious, credit cards are actually terrible. Handing over all your identity details (CC number, expiration date, CVS number, billing address, etc) allows the merchant to steal your identity and make fraudulent charges. Identity theft costs $25 billion a year: http://www.businessinsider.com/bureau-of-justice-statistics-... It is possible but a PITA (and still costly!) to recover from a serious identity theft accident... That's why Bitcoin is an improvement because a transaction authorizes merely a transfer of coins and nothing else, so the malicious merchant cannot cause further damages. On top of that, Bitcoin also allows you to completely get rid of this possibility of even losing coins, via cryptographic escrow systems: two-party trustless escrow (http://blackhalo.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/whitepaper_...), or 3-party escrow but where the escrow does not even has access to the funds (https://bitescrow.org/)! All this is completely infeasible with traditional payment systems. Surely, the practicality of such escrow systems will increase overtime. Don't judge Bitcoin based on its current imperfections, but envision what is possible.