Yet, despite all this, Bitcoin keeps appreciating, recently reaching an all-time high.[1]
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[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all
- Winklevosses: Bitcoin worth at least 100 times more: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101190181
- Federal Reserve economist says bitcoin is a remarkable technical achievement: http://www.coindesk.com/federal-reserve-economist-says-bitco...
- Shopify (70,000 merchants!) accepts Bitcoin: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/09/shopify-now-accepts...
- China fuels Bitcoin surge to record high: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/12/investing/bitcoin-record-hig...
Also, only the latter two are actual economic developments, rather than analysis. The upcoming Congressional hearings might be newsworthy too.
For that to be a reality, we need to combine hardware wallets (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardware_wallet http://www.bitcointrezor.com/), the new payment protocol (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0070), and escrow transactions (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Escrow_Service), but the result would be pretty awesome.
The _price_ of BTC is completely irrelevant to its "success". The only people who care about BTC price are speculators who are simply "day-trading" with the newest penny-stock.
The real measurement is whether or not people are actually using BTC as a mechanism to transfer wealth between each other.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
Notice: the number of BTC Transactions have remained steady for months.
When BTC transactions reach an all-time high (and when those BTC transactions are more than just temporary "flash crash" exchange volume), then I'll start calling it a success.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s...
1. http://now.msn.com/kristoffer-koch-norwegian-man-buys-apartm...
quick, easy and escrow available.
edit: a word
If you want to do business in such a system, then you must rely only on yourself and keep in mind the risks from counterparties and intermediaries that are significantly different than for "normal" currencies.
For example, if you want to wire $10 000 to someone, you can basically ignore risks of someone stealing it in the middle; if you want to give someone $10 000 worth of bitcoin - then if any intermediaries are involved, you'd have to check them yourself. If a regulated financial institution holds $10 000 of your money, you can pretty much ignore risks of it going bankrupt; but if an unregulated money transmitter holds your bitcoins or cash in the same amount, and they go insolvent or fraudulent, then your funds are gone.
This is true, yet means absolutely nothing. You're using absolutes when you should be using relatives.
If in a pool A of a hundred transactions one is a fraud, and in a pool B of ten thousands transactions a hundred are frauds, both pool present the same risk of a transaction being a fraud despite one having orders of magnitude more frauds than the other.
If you can hack a Bitcoin "bank" and rob it, wouldn't it be smartest to wait until the money inside it is worth the most?
Stealing 100 BTC today is not different from stealing 100 BTC tomorrow.
Their "value" only gets confirmed at the time of the exchange/transaction. Nothing stopped them from stealing that money 2 months ago, and hold it until it reached a high value.
That said, the motivation indeed rises when the value of Bitcoin rises (100 BTC worth $0.01 each is not worth the hack).
Today, why would you steal worthless US dollars? We all know that Wall Street and the Fed have an enforced monopoly allowing them to 'steal' dollars anywhere possible!?
Rather, (non-bankster) criminals go where opportunity lies. Steal BTC and you don't need to risk anybody's life. Steal BTC and your heist will triple in value in a very short time.
https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?showDataPoints=f...
btw, isn't the point of bitcoin system is that all transactions are forever traceable, ie. bitcoins can't just disappear, they only can be moved from one known place to another?
Edit: From the 'wikileaks' account listed on bitcoin-charity.info 150btc each were sent to 2 other addresses listed on that site. An african charity 'Amani Kinderdorf' and a 'Nonprofit Recycling and Exchange Network'. It seems like (though the charities are real) the bitcoin links are not related to them and bitcoin-charity.info was a scam site. (google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bitcoin...)
Soom.cz is not very reliable source. Also Czech Linux community does not mention anything.
But according to some users it did not even used SSL!!!
It's never going to stop amusing me that Bitcoin's big selling point is how it's this amazing form of applied cryptography... and the people who actually try to do this kind of thing cheerfully neglect security concerns that seem rather basic.
It's not hard to explain this phenomenon, but it's still amusing.
A brainwallet sounds far far simpler to set up, at least.
See here: https://www.google.com/search?q=brainwallet+(stolen+OR+hacke...
1) Security is compromised at an entity that deals somehow with bitcoins. The security of the blockchain remains unimpacted, it is as relevant to the fundamentals of the currency as much as someone getting robbed is relevant to the fundamentals of the fiat currency they were robbed in.
2) Much whining and gnashing of teeth ensues as to how bitcoin is going to collapse any second now because clearly it is just some crazy snake oil and look at the rash of compromises as evidence, and by the way it also happens I disapprove of it because it goes against my views on what a currency needs to be.
3) People respond much along the lines I'm responding now.
4) It devolves into an ideological argument along the lines of the characteristics of the currency itself and the potential death of fiat money and its implications.
Conclusion; Some people are fundamentally ideologically opposed to bitcoin and will use whatever they can to drag it through the mud at every opportunity.
Compromising the blockchain or the fundamentals of bitcoin itself is news, even when it's overblown or exaggerated like the recent Cornell findings, some venture getting owned because they failed to adequately secure their place of business is par for the course and barely a footnote at this point in time.
For the first time in normal everyday business history, security really matters now. You can't just put up a banner with the legal penalties for acting against corporate policy and actually expect to hold people accountable via the legal system for ignoring your banner, the new rules are that you need real security.
Frankly I think that's a good thing and something that is far overdue, the swiss cheese state of general security practices coupled with the apathy and ignorance of general computer users has gone on for far too long, but because the individuals in question were never held personally to account there was never the motivation to really fix the problem.
Now there is, people need to accept this new paradigm if they want to deal in this space.
[Edit: Thank you for your lame negative votes, sad people. You can go further and ask for more negative power to vote this down and then just die negatively voting right here.]
https://kapiton.se/news/2 https://kapiton.se/news/3 (site in swedish language)
But my guess is it comes down to poor security.
Six in one hand...
But it is good to realize that there really no such thing as perfect security. If it can be accessed, it can be accessed nefariously.
I don't believe that bitcoin will destroy fiat or the finance industry as a whole, but I do think it will become a very convenient way of moving money around, especially between national currencies. Much in the same way that sending an email is more convenient than sending a letter internationally. It's not a complete solution; it's a foundation to build services upon, and those services will most likely be offered by the same large financial institutions we have today, along with a few upstarts. Just my 2 μBTC.
Trade volume has skyrocketed. IE: people are trading more BTC for USD than ever. It wasn't since the Crash of April since we've seen trade volume this high.
One can never be right against the HN crowd. sigh
I've been doing dollar cost averaging through coinbase for the last three months (buying $20 worth every week), and with the recent surge my ~$300 investment is now worth over $1,000.
Brainwallets with weak passphrases are a bad idea. Every case of a brainwallet theft has been due to users coming up with predictable passphrases to generate the key.
Most brainwallet private keys are simply a SHA256 hash of a passphrase, which is fairly easy for a dedicated attacker to crack via bruteforce or dictionary attacks, yes. But if you use, say, a 12-word sentence with completely random words, like SHA256("fire pickle shipment lachrymose deity unwitting pernicious obstacle kitchen tumbleweed mannequin erudite"), and maybe some random letters or numbers at the end, it's infeasible that it'll ever be cracked.
One common problem is that many people will pick song lyrics, book titles, or Bible quotes as their passphrase. Obviously attackers are going to scrape and add those to their dictionaries (which will then also be permutated in many ways), so it's critical that the words are picked arbitrarily and that there are enough of them.
The idea itself isn't inherently insecure, except for the fact that SHA256 was probably a poor hash function to use since it's fast.
I can guarantee that this will always be more secure than trusting any online service to store your wallet instead. The only risk is you forgetting one or more of the words, in which case you're in trouble.
For example SHA256(MySuperSlowAwesomeLongHash("fire pickle shipment lachrymose deity unwitting pernicious obstacle kitchen tumbleweed mannequin erudite"))
Someone should really make an alternative with bcrypt or scrypt.