You're taking me too literally. At that point in time Bitcoin didn't have any value for which to launder. Now of course it does, and doing that again now would be money laundering if you were trying to obfuscate illegality. All your examples can be money laundering because you're using objects with value. No judge would buy the argument I was money laundering by sending a chain email with a promise to pray for their soul for instance, because that email has no value.

It's well known that the vast majority of Bitcoin's created in the first half of the life of Bitcoin, back when they were totally worthless, are probably lost forever. This paper never even talks about that issue and assumes that every Bitcoin can still be spent.

In general it's a major flaw of the paper that they quote Bitcoin's in, well, Bitcoins everywhere, rather than talking about the value of the Bitcoins in USD for the transactions they're talking about.

Nov 8 2010 was about a month after Bitcoins had any value at all. If you look up the Mt. Gox prices for that time they were completely flat for ages with just a couple dollars a day of trading activity. Then they picked up a bit and by Nov 2010 they were looking at low hundreds of dollars a day. It was really early in Bitcoin history and that transaction was likely just someone playing around with transaction making code, who accidentally lost their wallet.

It's only money laundering if what you're laundering is money... at that time Bitcoins were just an experiment that didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Exactly. Even then people understood that you couldn't hide coins by moving stuff around. I like the analogy of trying to walk across a large desert. If you enter the desert, walk all over your tracks over and over again, then exit, anyone can deduce that the tracks entering and exiting the desert was the same person.

Real attempts at hiding the source of Bitcoins always involve swapping your coins for someone elses, and even then, that's a quite legitimate thing to do for privacy given that every transaction is public. It's only money laundering if you're trying to launder illegitimate funds, keeping privacy for legit transactions is not illegal.

If you go to the Tor website, you're presented with some software to download. Click on that, installed the software, and go. Sorry, but this is frankly very easy. There aren't solutions that "work better with the web"; HTML5 doesn't allow Javascript to open connections to arbitrary hosts on the internet, so any "web" solution would still require trusting a server run by people you don't know. Similarly the connection to that server can still be "man-in-the-middled" in a direct, but difficult to detect way. At least with Tor you can download the software on a different computer, unconnected to you.

Any technology-based solution is going to require some knowledge to use safely. Tor is already pretty close to the least-knowledge solution out there, and it has the advantage of being widely used for all sorts of reasons, so use of it doesn't raise that many red-flags by itself.

And how do you propose this is going to work, yet not require technological competence? At least organizations like Wikileaks and traditional journalism can provide things like maildrops, a non-technological solution that is accessible to people without security expertise.

Maybe this is why Openleaks hasn't released any code: did they go into the project with high hopes, and realized that there didn't exist technological solutions to the problems they were trying to solve?

Dead wrong. Intel drivers are excellent and I and many others have had great success with them. They also usually work quite closely with the kernel community as a whole to make sure things work as expected; that's why what this article is saying seems to out of character for Intel. For instance, try searching for "intel.com" in the git commit log. Lots of kernel developers are on Intel's payroll, including core people like Alan Cox.

You also gotta wonder, what exactly is that technology supposed to be anyway? Tor is readily available, as are file uploading sites and message boards accessible with tor. If you have the technical know-how to use the "Openleaks technology" to publish your leak, you probably already have the know-how to use Tor anyway. Wikileaks also offered "mail-your-leak" dropboxes, a very secure option that has nothing to do with source-code.

The real thing Openleaks could add is vetted technology to remove things like embedded tracking of documents, for instance the metadata in jpegs and word documents, as well as technology to defeat stenographicly hidden per-file tracking codes. I haven't heard of anything from Openleaks even mentioning that stuff, yet defeating can be vital if a leaker wants to remain anonymous. It's a much harder problem than the actual publishing as well. It's also a problem more easily solved by human efforts, such as trusted individuals that re-word and summarize documents and publish the summaries rather than the originals directly.

What Openleaks can't do with technology is vet the leaks to ensure authenticity. For that an organization like Wikileaks makes much more sense, as does traditional journalism.

What makes you think they never had that "critical mass of readership"? I'd argue their most important readership was other journalists, and pretty much every leak they've ever published has been picked up by the press in some form or another. That the general public can read the leaks easily is a side-effect, necessitated by the fact that they want to keep the journalists honest, and by the fact that the term "journalist" should be interpreted fairly inclusively.

It's better than that: sure helium can leak out of your hard drive enclosure, but it's also the only think that can leak into the enclosure as well. Helium is present in the atmosphere in small quantities, so the pressure in the hard drive will track atmospheric, albeit very slowly, yet still maintain a nearly pure helium atmosphere.

Linus Torvalds has an interesting comment regarding your style of programming: plain-old C can make a lot of sense precisely because abstractions wind up being implemented with relatively verbose code. Compare C++ code using operator overloading, vs. object-oriented C code using functions, or at the very extreme, lisp where the language itself is different due to heavy macro use. It's the C code that's most likely to be readable by other maintainers, even if it takes more lines and typing to do what it does. The Linux kernel has a lot of developers with relatively little management structure or co-ordination, as well as being relatively simple programming in the sense that they can avoid a lot of the more complex logic more often seen in, say, GUI code, so you can see why that kind of trade-off can make a lot of sense.

I'm an electronics designer and I'm in the exact same boat, although where I work we're pretty lax on all the other stuff, so often we just have schematics to work from. Granted I'm at a schedule-driven startup, so being lax can be a valid tradeoff between time spent on documenting stuff, and time wasted due to forgetfulness and the bus factor. Just like with programming (a former career path of mine) even just some simple notes on what equations you used to design something can be hugely useful I find.

Nah, that won't be an issue. The secret sauce of my plan is actually the marketing people; required to convince the business world that a shitty low-resolution black and white company logo and unreadable signature really is going to make a better "personal connection" with their customers...

...and if you are using it for an actual application, it's frustrating how expensive the damn stuff is. As an electronics designer I'd much rather just gold plate everything for durability, rather than having to fight the cost-engineering department every time.

Gold bugs are a very real part of the reason why consumer electronics are unreliable. Remember that every time a crappy tin-plated connector fails. Heck, silver bugs too: for high-current connectors and RFI shielding silver is usually the best option, but again it's unaffordable for a lot of applications.

If anything, BitInstant's paycard is an attempt to avoid this problem by giving you a way to easily spend Bitcoins with people who haven't adopted it. If they can eventually find a way to somehow allow you to deposit funds from a bank machine onto the card in the future, even better.

What they're doing is kinda like an early fax machine company setting up a nice fax-to-postal-mail service. Imagine being able to skip days of letter delivery overseas by simply faxing an office in the same country and city as your recipient...

Actually, excuse me, I need to find some investors and a time machine...

As I said, the currency conversion could work either way. It'd be easiest doing it the way you describe, however a big part of BitInstant's other business doing fiat-Bitcoin conversions is that they have good mechanisms to complete the conversions as fast as possible with accurate pricing. This may enable them to do the conversion fast enough that they'd somehow load the dollar balance on the card as you attempt to spend it. Effectively they'd intercept that "over-spent" notification somehow in the computer system, and instantly transfer over dollars as required. They then take the risk that they can't buy the dollars back at a profitable exchange rate.

Re: risk, any balance actually on the cards would be the responsibility of the bank actually issuing the cards. This isn't any different from any other pre-loadable card. BitInstant itself is a registered company in New York, NY with a physical office. The identities of the people running it are well known. On IRC they hinted that they're looking into allowing you to hold the private key associated with the Bitcoin balance on your card, so if BitInstant failed you could recover the Bitcoin balance yourself. (the BTC funds wouldn't be pooled in that case) The issue there is the person holding the card spending the coins before BitInstant can take them to sell on the market. However, the card isn't anonymous, so they know who you are if you try to pull that scam and will just ask you to give them Bitcoins to replace the ones you took. Also in practice even a transaction that's been on the Bitcoin network for only a few seconds is difficult to reverse.