I'm curious about their statement that they automatically append a slash as soon as you type the month.
The instructions say "MM/YY", but do not indicate whether the month is required to have two digits, or just permitted to have two digits. My card says it expires 1/16 So when I key in 1, does a slash get appended? Probably not. Instead, it gets appended after 11. 11/6. now what?
11/6 may have been a valid expiration date before November 2006, but not anymore. So a smart algorithm could tell that you meant 1/16 rather than 11/6.
It even works if you put the year first. 16/1 is valid, and it's clear that 16 is the year. Meanwhile, 1/61 either contains an invalid month or is too far in the future to be a valid expiration date.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net [1] does it right. It accepts anything between 3 and 6 digits (MYY, MMYY, MYYYY, MM YYYY, YYYY/MM, etc) and only throws an error if parsing it results in an impossible date.
So, Agent-1, based on your training and experience, can you conclude, Agent-1, that simply because someone uses a pseudonymous username to conceal their identity, Agent-1, that they are a criminal?
Bitmessage is fairly atrocious to use in practise. It's slow (by design) and extremely difficult to use properly. Moreover, I'd bet my hat that it's not secure.
There's no reason to trust me, but if you send me bitcoins, I'll convert to dollars and send to the fund. You preserve your anonymity. I'll convert all donations at the end of each month.
Thanks for the offer, unfortunately I don't have any bitcoins so i would first have to buy them. Which I would have to do with money that can be traced back to me...
with coinbase, I transferred maybe $600 to Bitcoin. With Dwolla, I transferred maybe $60,000. That should be an indication of the potential.
The reason is that with Dwolla / Mt Gox, I could control my purchase much better. I love ooinbase: they are a GREAT consumer service. But for large sums, I think Dwolla could have a huge win.
Where did you get that, out of that PDF? The number 25% sounds extremely high.
I have read this PDF before, a while ago, and I don't remember that stat. A quick glance tells me that they say that 2 addresses have over 500,000 Bitcoins, but that's just 4.6% (or more, obviously) of the total 10.7M issued so far. And there's no proof that this is the creator of Bitcoin. In fact, it's more likely one of the large exchanges!
So, please help me understand your statement. If it's buried in the text of that PDF, my apologies.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the prevailing thought when that article was written (1992) was that digital currency would resemble more of a transferred digital coin, with signatures representing each transaction. So if I had coin #12345, and I transferred it to you, I would digitally sign it to you giving your private key the spend capability.
With those architectures, a central authority would be required to prevent the double-spend. And with those architectures, the coins grow with each spend.
The difference with Bitcoin (which I think is totally misnamed) is that it's not a coin architecture, it's a ledger architecture. So no matter how many times the amount 1BTC is transferred, each transfer could be just the same length - the sender's address, the recipient's address, and an appropriate signature. Even 50 years from now and ten thousand transfers of that "coin" later, the "coin" doesn't get larger.
The ledger gets larger, but the coin does not (since really there's no such thing as a "bit COIN" - really what you have is a series of account numbers in the giant shared ledger.)
"With those architectures, a central authority would be required to prevent the double-spend"
Not necessarily; another approach, which is common in protocols that allow offline transactions, is to force cheaters (i.e. people who double spend their tokens) to reveal their identity. It helps to think of the nonce in DSA: if that nonce is used for one signature, the secret key remains secret, but if the nonce is reused in another signature then the two signatures can be used to compute the secret key. Similarly, in a digital cash system, if the same token is used in two different transactions, then the two resulting tokens can be used to compute the identity of the person who spent that token in the two transactions (and hopefully, whoever computes this will warn everyone else about it).
"with those architectures, the coins grow with each spend."
Chaum's result applies to any secure offline electronic transactions, regardless of the internal workings of the transaction. The argument is basically this: to maintain the security of the transactions, the amount of information being transferred per transaction must increase in the number of offline transactions that involved a particular "unit" or its "derived" units (e.g. if the system supports splitting the currency, as Bitcoin does). It does not make a difference whether or not the system has a central authority; all that matters is that the system allows some value to be securely transferred in an offline/peer-to-peer fashion i.e. that a transaction do not require any communication with any parties not involved in the transaction itself.
"The difference with Bitcoin (which I think is totally misnamed) is that it's not a coin architecture, it's a ledger architecture"
I read this as saying basically this: there are no offline transactions in Bitcoin; every transaction involves communicating with other nodes in the Bitcoin network. Which is well-aligned with Chaum's result, because Chaum's result boils down to a trade-off: either you support offline transactions and incur a scalability penalty (which a central authority can fix by trading "old" tokens for "new" tokens), or you only allow online transactions (or something in the middle, like "receipts," which Chaum discussed). I would call the lack of offline transactions a major technical shortcoming of Bitcoin that severely limits its utility, but I suppose not everyone agrees with that statement.
Right now they subdivide to 8 decimal places. .00000001
With minimal change to the protocol they could subdivide to much smaller units.
I think "bitcoin" is a confusing name, because it's really more like a group of account numbers, which can have money with 8 digits of precision to the right of the decimal point.
Think of a Bitcoin Address(es) as your account number(s), and your Private Key as your ATM card, PIN, and signature all wrapped in one.
If someone sends me 50 bitcoins, I have it in my "account" in the giant ledger in the sky. If I want to send 3.5 of them to someone, what might happen is that I create a transaction that sends 50 bitcoins to two different places... 3.5 to someone, and 46.5 to another account (of mine, my change!) in the giant ledger in the sky.
Or for simplicity, think of them like rewards points, and don't try to make it too complicated.
Bitcoin is a protocol actually, that store numbers in a peer to peer ledger, what you do is change the values on the ledger, and the encryption is only to ensure the transaction was not a forgery.
Right now the protocol supports as the smallest one the "satoshi", but a "satoshi" is too small, so people for day to day use "BTC".
0.00000001 of a BTC is a satoshi.
But if Bitcoin really gets used in the mainstream, BTC might be valued in the millions, thus the protocol can be more or less easily changed to use a unit smaller than the satoshi.
The instructions say "MM/YY", but do not indicate whether the month is required to have two digits, or just permitted to have two digits. My card says it expires 1/16 So when I key in 1, does a slash get appended? Probably not. Instead, it gets appended after 11. 11/6. now what?