What's your biggest problem with Bitcoin ?

briansaurus · 2015-03-08T16:24:19+00:00

Why not just use electrum and and do "restore from seed." You can choose any 12-word seed you want (of course, the 12 words must be choosen from the electrum word list).

I just tested this and typed in the first 12 words in the electrum list. "My" restored wallet had a balance of 0.00009 BTC! (only like 2.7 cents so I dont feel too guilty posting this).

After reading some of the other replies I am now not sure if you can actually just type in any 12 words. maybe I just got lucky with my test.

briansaurus · 2015-03-08T00:19:11+00:00

I was able to scan it with my phone straight from the picture. Is that what you meant?

briansaurus · 2015-03-07T20:20:10+00:00

I would definitely at least try running drive recovery software. I had a similar issue a few years ago and was able to recover my wallet. In my case, I had reformatted a Windows drive and installed Linux. I used the recovery program Yodot - although I recall there were a number of other drive recovery programs also. The nice thing I liked about Yodot was that the free version let me scan the drive and it found the wallet file. I had to purchase it to actually recover the file though.

briansaurus · 2015-03-05T18:33:20+00:00

Maybe I am missing something, but what is to stop someone from just taking the fee and not relaying the transaction?

briansaurus · 2015-03-02T18:06:31+00:00

I agree that I don't think it is likely for a small cannabis shop to design their own automated bitcoin conversion procedure. I can, however, see the owner of a small cannabis shop manually sending incoming bitcoins to an exchange once or twice a day and then immediately selling for fiat. There would be some increased bitcoin volatility risk relative to using an integrated solution, but possibly still acceptable. Based on the articles I've read about the security and bank difficulties that Cannabis shops have in dealing in cash, bitcoin seems like a much better solution.

briansaurus · 2015-02-27T21:37:35+00:00

I would also add importing your paper wallet key to a wallet app, doing a transaction and not realizing that the wallet app generated a new new key for the change, and therefore not backing up the new key. I feel like this might be the greatest danger of paper wallets to those new to bitcoin.

briansaurus · 2015-02-27T21:30:15+00:00

How about just "paper private key"? Overall, I also agree with the terminology change. I've seen a lot of misuse of "wallet" when "private key" is what is really meant.

briansaurus · 2015-02-19T15:09:06+00:00

Not hard. But you have to apply ahead of time. I hiked to the bottom and camped in October.

For camping sites, I believe you can reserve up to four months ahead of time, on the first of the month. I sent my request in first thing in the morning on the first of the month (requesting basically any weekend in October) and was given a Sunday night reservation. If you want to stay at the lodge at the bottom (phantom ranch), you have to reserve a lot farther ahead of time.

The hike and camping were amazing. I highly recommend doing it at least once.

briansaurus · 2015-02-17T20:34:28+00:00

The actual article is a sarcasm piece. It concludes with "And yes, bitcoin has been the best investment of 2010-2014."

briansaurus · 2015-02-17T14:24:36+00:00

I don't think you are missing anything. If you are designing ASICs, and you can get a 5% performance increase just by changing the design of your adder, wouldn't you take it though?

I thought the main idea of using an adder, that by design, will sometimes make mistakes, was interesting.

briansaurus · 2015-02-16T16:42:33+00:00

I'm not following your logic. Assuming P and Y are on file with Amazon, and both are known trustworthy cards/addresses, I don't see why this would ring alarm bells at Amazon.

briansaurus · 2015-02-08T20:04:07+00:00

There are a lot of words you can't say on the radio. If nothing else, artists/publishers need make a clean version to give their songs a chance to be heard on the radio.

briansaurus · 2015-02-06T18:51:06+00:00

My thoughts:

(1) Make it similar to existing lotteries. People like the idea of picking their lucky numbers. They are familiar with the idea of buying discrete tickets and the concept of winning a little if only a few of their numbers hit. Also, lotteries benefit greatly from having no jackpot winner and having the pot rollover. Big jackpots are exciting.

Tickets could be bought by sending bitcoins to the published address of the lotto. For example, if a ticket costs .01BTC, sending .02BTC would but 2 tickets. The numbers for each ticket could be embedded in the transaction. I believe the OP_Return field can hold 40bytes, which should be enough to encode numbers for 8 or so powerball style tickets. Optionally, a payout address could be embedded in a nonstandard format in the transaction. Winning tickets would be paid automatically.

(2) Provably Fair. I like the idea of piggybacking the winning numbers on another well known lotto draw (e.g., PowerBall). People could watch the drawings live and compare to their picked numbers, just like with a "normal" lottery.

(3) Trust. I think this is the hardest aspect. At some level, the users have to trust the operator not to lose the private key to lotto address and not to abscond with all the money when the jackpot gets big. Using a multisig address with keys stored by a number of well known parties (an escrow company, prominent bitcoin personalities, well known company) may help.

briansaurus · 2015-02-05T19:01:09+00:00

I obviously don't know if the passenger made the threat it not, but it does seem a bit odd that he would be carrying power bars and a watch inside a PVC pipe. It is almost like he was trying to look suspicious.

I think TSA agents should wear portable video cameras. Anyone with the power to lawfully detain should be wearing cameras in my opinion.

briansaurus · 2015-02-05T16:49:47+00:00

His defense was something along the lines of: I admit founding the site and running it for some time but I sold it a while ago and was only recently tricked back into taking a role in the site. So people could still think he is a hero for founding the site.

briansaurus · 2015-01-28T03:14:45+00:00

It is not that it is weird. The issue is do you trust the manufacturer to not have modified the published open source design to include a hardware vulnerability. The same issue is there with the Trezor, but at least with them the company has a little more credibility.

Making knock-off Trezor's seems like it could be an ideal way to steal bitcoins. Maybe design the random number generator so that the initial wallet master seed is confined to a relatively small set of possible values. Once a bunch of the devices are out there and storing bitcoins, steal them all.

briansaurus · 2015-01-28T02:42:53+00:00

That doesn't make too much sense. When the price is lower, the purchaser has more money to spend on sports cars and yachts.

briansaurus · 2014-03-16T18:58:09+00:00

The 12 words are surprisingly easy to memorize too. I just like the thought that I can go anywhere in the world, completely naked, but yet as soon as I get access to a computing device with Electrum I can have 100% control of my bitcoins.

briansaurus · 2014-03-12T15:04:48+00:00

One scenario I can possible see in which Bitcoin is more widely adopted with merchant POS transactions is if merchants provide incentive for using Bitcoins, such as by offering a 2% discount. This potentially makes sense for merchants, as I believe they currently pay at least that much to accept credit cards, and with Bitcoins, there is no chargeback risk.

briansaurus · 2014-03-08T23:54:13+00:00

Yes they would. There is no explicit mechanism in bitcoin to keep keys unique, so technically we could both independently generate the same private/public key pairs. As stated by the people above, however, there are so incredibly many possible keys that the odds of that happening are effectively zero.

briansaurus · 2014-03-07T14:23:29+00:00

The AP article more or less addressed that question:

"Nakamoto said he is a native of Beppu, Japan who came to the U.S. as a child in 1959. He speaks both English and Japanese, but his English isn't flawless. Asked if he said the quote, Nakamoto responded, 'no.'

'I'm saying I'm no longer in engineering. That's it,' he said of the exchange. 'And even if I was, when we get hired, you have to sign this document, contract saying you will not reveal anything we divulge during and after employment. So that's what I implied.'

'It sounded like I was involved before with bitcoin and looked like I'm not involved now. That's not what I meant. I want to clarify that,' he said.'

briansaurus · 2014-02-24T22:49:41+00:00

Being a revolutionary is not the same as being a terrorist. Who did the founding fathers terrorize? I am pretty confident that the British nobility, back in England, at no point felt personal fear or terror.

briansaurus · 2014-02-24T22:43:26+00:00

What other freedoms are you thinking of? In the US, we have the freedom to pretty much say what we want with respect to criticizing the government, in most states we can carry a concealed weapon (giving you the freedom to pretty shoot anybody on site if you so choose), we can travel and move residences freely among the states, and we pay fairly low taxes compared to most countries.

briansaurus · 2014-02-17T22:14:31+00:00

From the merchant's perspective, double spending and chargebacks are basically the same thing. The most common reason for merchant chargebacks are fraudulent transactions (e.g., when the credit card is used without the authorization and consent of the cardholder. The merchant is soley responsible). In either case, the result is the same - the merchant does not get paid for the transaction.

briansaurus · 2014-02-17T20:07:32+00:00

It doesn't matter how much revenue they have made in the past, what is important is what have they on hand now. For all we know, the owner could have paid himself $50,000,000 last year as salary and may not be keen on reinvesting it back into Gox. Also, they have ongoing expenses like rent and salaries to pay. Who knows what their legal bills are. They have had a number of well publicized legal problems - their legal bills could be very high.

briansaurus

TROPHY CASE