131–140 of 146 posts
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Not if you have a secure means of input in your OS. OSX does, for instance, you can turn it on in the Terminal application and no loggers will see what you type. Unless they install as a kernel extension, then you're screwed. But that requires a password.
or a bog standard privilege escalation bug
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The thing I find more dangerous than that is anyone with your wallet.dat file can go and do whatever with your account. There really should be additional checks. Having to sign your transfer requests and allow people to impose a voluntary delay on their transactions to allow time for cancellation would help significantly.
My wallet is on an IronKey - in order for me to use it I have to plug it in and decrypt it. I also backup my wallet on a NAS server but the wallet is encrypted with GPG. Gotta protect your data!!
This reminds me of the "come from" statement. COMEFROM is a long-running joke, it's a flow control statement which is intentionally confusing. It works like a GOTO but backwards. There is no indication in the area being jumped from that flow control is about to go somewhere else in the program. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/COMEFROM I think, when parts of your currency start to resemble any part of I…
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What you described is not how banks or money work. Below is an entertaining, albeit slightly alarmist, educational video on how the money system works today. This should be required viewing for anyone considering using money: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
I don't want to risk wasting 45 minutes listening to a crackpot, and honestly, there are quite a few indicators for lunacy in the first few minutes. Can you give a few bullet points to help me decide if it's worth to watch?
What most people don't realize is that banks don't have to actually have the money they lend out. That's the basis for our monetary system and while it has nice qualities, like spurring innovation, there are some undeniable drawbacks.
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What prevents you from setting up a BitCoin bank? More interestingly: are the features that let you set up a dollar-denominated bank features or bugs?
This is one of the casualities of the Bitcoin monetary policy. (Obviously I'm simplifying, your money gets pooled with others and deposits and withdrawls happen from a pool of money, you don't get your own money back when you withdraw, but lets compare two hypothetical banks with only 1 customer each) A dollar denominated bank takes your money and invests it. They use it for mortgages, or they put it in bond markets…
It should work just fine if they do the investments in Bitcoins.
Third sentence: > If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD. Yep. Anyone who doesn't do this is stupid.
Could a hacker move the file somewhere else and ask for ransom? If so, that's a lot easier to deal with than losing everything outright, but not risk proof.
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Bitcoin is not money on the bank, but cash. If your wallet is stolen, the bank will not refund you, either. You can, however, go to the police and that is what the victim here is doing as well. There is, of course, a much lower chance of catching the thief than there would be with real cash.
I have spent very little time thinking about bitcoin, so I really am not qualified to say anything for or against it - however I have a question that seems ridiculously obvious: WHY would you implement the digital version of cash, as it seems you just stated -- WHY would you create a digital currency with no ability to really track and disable and refund?
The US government won't let you leave with more than $10k in physical cash without "declaring" it, but declaring exposes you to likely theft by the government in the form of civil forfeiture or tax seizure, as does carrying it past TSA. Your bank won't let you wire-transfer large amounts without having to file a bunch of CTRs, again exposing you to potential legal liability. Making transactions in smaller amounts to avoid notice of the big amounts - even if you're doing so to avoid private thieves - is a federal crime called "structuring". Credit card companies solve some of the problem but can randomly "put a hold" on your funds without your consent.
Digital cash is trying to fill the role that cash used to fill before the War On Some Drugs made everything insane. Back when the government printed $500 bills and $1000 bills and it wasn't deemed "suspicious" to use them. In the modern age, digital cash promises to let us buy things around the world, "no questions asked", without banks and governments and other middlemen getting in the way.
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> Banks are regulated by law and have the funds insured by FDIC. i.e even if the bank goes belly up, the FDIC will make sure the depositors get the money. With BitCoin, how do you trust a bank? There were banks before the FDIC and people trusted them. The threat of insolvency can (but doesn't always) keep them honest.
True, but atleast the banks were real physical places with real people at the helm. It is really hard to trust anything over the internet these days,except if one of the big financial players like Citibank or someone like Amazon starts a bitcoin bank. AFAIK any of the online banks could be running out of a hole in the wall in Ukraine or Nigeria. Even paying online sites with credit cards is risky these days with the…
That's part of how the market solves this sort of problem, traditionally. When trustworthiness is especially valuable, brands develop that have it. One way to bootstrap the process is to start with an existing brand that has it, like American Express. Companies that want to be seen as trustworthy can also do things like offering money-back guarantees and putting money aside in an escrow account held by a third party.
BitCoin has an analog in cash. Yes, it's anonymous but there are things you simply dont do with it.
The design of BitCoin only includes very weak anonymity. A medium-to-large scale network analysis could most likely break any anonymity people thought they had.
Third sentence: > If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD. Yep. Anyone who doesn't do this is stupid.
I haven't used Bitcoin, so this is an honest question - Why doesn't the software encrypt the wallet automatically?