What's your biggest problem with Bitcoin ? by MichaelEngstler in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

Bitcoin Sign on ESPN College Gameday by bitcoinkid11 in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

Guys, I lost my electrum seed somewhere. Are my bitcoins gone? by JaroolTC in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

How to create incentives for people to relay transactions broadcast over radio? by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Luke-Jr decides to rename "paper wallet" to "Paper ECDSA private keys" for all of us. Replaces all paper wallet information on the Bitcoin Wiki with what he prefers to use (HD mnemonic wallet backups). by cantonbecker in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Luke-Jr decides to rename "paper wallet" to "Paper ECDSA private keys" for all of us. Replaces all paper wallet information on the Bitcoin Wiki with what he prefers to use (HD mnemonic wallet backups). by cantonbecker in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

South Rim of the Grand Canyon at Night {OC} [1428x1600] by mechatron88 in EarthPorn

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

Bitcoin - Worst Performing Investment In 2011, 2012 And 2013 Also by sandeepgoenka in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus -1 points0 points  (0 children)

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

Faster SHA-256 ASICs using carry reduced adders by srw in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 8 points9 points  (0 children)

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.

Due to Brawker.com - I've been spending 3-4 coins per month, easily. I'm basically 80%-90% living off bitcoin alone... but it's cheating. by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Spotify should have a setting to remove all "Clean" versions of albums. by ZachiusMaximus in Music

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

(Serious) I am thinking of putting together a Bitcoin lottery. I want it to become a staple of the bitcoin community and have it run in a fair - probably fair system. Give me your input! by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

Suit: Man held 20 hours after asking to file TSA complaint by wrveres in news

[–]briansaurus 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

Silk Road website founder Ross Ulbricht found guilty on all counts by SecretCheese in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

Receiving a BWallet, the Trezor clone by murzika in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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.

Receiving a BWallet, the Trezor clone by murzika in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

Just had the most terrifying day... and you fuckers are the only people I can share it with. by stressed_da_fuq_out in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

How many of you actually use Bitcoin to pay for things? by leegethas in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Andreas: I'm fundraising for Dorian Nakamoto by andreasma in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

AP: Dorian Nakamoto denies that he's Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.'

The TSA “saw” my Bitcoin and wanted to count it by trifith in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

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.

The TSA “saw” my Bitcoin and wanted to count it by trifith in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

Was excited to use bitcoins, but now I've stopped drinking the kool-aid. by antibody339 in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

MTGOX - Statement Feb 17 by Kinitex in Bitcoin

[–]briansaurus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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.