The creation itself seems troubled with the possibility of fraud.

Do some reading. Bitcoin is absolutely uncounterfeitable.

Unfortunately, there have been more than a few fraudulent exchanges, which has more to do with the involvement of amateurs than anything else. The marketplace is improving fast.

There have been multiple places where the total paper ballots cast exceeded the number of eligible voters. Paper changes the fraud, but does *nothing* to stop it.

Stuffing a ballot box with fraudulent paper ballots is risky, and relies on many people to be effective in multiple polling locations.

Falsifying electronic records requires a few people at a strategic points, and can be impossible to detect.

Yes, of course your lending habits are kept private, and legally protected. You can relax.

The access logs of the security cage, on the other hand.....

Yeah, I saw that 30 seconds *after* hitting the submit button. :facepalm:

I got hit April 25th with this. I noticed within an hour, and it took me about an hour to determine that my connection to the pool had been spoofed, and my miners redirected to the attackers pool. I had no idea at the time *how* it was done.

My mining software was a couple of months old at the time, and the latest version would ignore such redirect requests. I updated and continued on, having lost maybe 2 hours of mining.

The redirect comes from that fact that the "Stratum" protocol used by many minors to request work from the pools was originally designed as a wallet to blockchain server protocol. Under that use case, it makes sense that the server might suggest to a (wallet) client that they use another server.

There is a hierarchy of trustworthiness with the judge at the top, and the dirty criminal at the bottom. Anything the police say will be believed over what you (the dirty criminal, otherwise why would you be arrested) say. Lawyers are above the police in that hierarchy.

Pick a nice, long, secure passphrase. Use it to secure a GPG keypair. Back up this keypair in multiple locations, and with multiple people who know "This is the key that encrypts all of my digital stuff. My family will need it when I die.".

Use that keypair to encrypt all of your important passwords and data. Back up the encrypted files in multiple locations. Make sure your family knows where these locations are, and why thy and the files they contain are important.

Download a copy of http://passguardian.com/ . Load the saved copy (preferably in an offline PC) in a browser, and use it to convert your passphrase into several N of M parts. ie: Create 10 parts, and require at least 6 to reconstruct the passphrase.

Use something like http://goqr.me/ (or any other generator) to create QR codes for the 10 secret shares. Laser print the text share, QR code and some instructions onto a business card sized piece of paper, and have them laminated.

You now have 10 waterproof, hard to damage cards, any 6 of which will unlock your digital data. Distribute them to trusted parties and locations with instructions to use the shares once they hear and confirm your death. These parties don't have to be literate enough to merge and decrypt the data themselves, they just need to know that it is possible with their share. On your death, they will arrange to bring the shares and data together, and even if they have to hire a nerd to help them, they will unlock what they need.

And from what I've read, if they catch you using your electronics, they'll help you get started finding those other places by escorting you to the parking lot. :)

$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces. Try adding a zero. Or two.

I'm a geek, and I've got a Pebble that I wear fairly regularly. But the watch I wear when I want to dress up a bit (or when I get tired of the cheesy plastic smart watch) is a Tag Heurer with an automatic movement. The Pebble is neat, and has IMHO the right balance of features and price. But it has no soul.

It's not encoding anything. Miners are basically doing sha256( sha256( block header info + random number )) until the result has (currently) about 15 leading zeros.

There is no room in the protocol to do anything else, or solve some sort of background problem.

This.

I've probably contributed a "Mr. Test Testuser, 123 Main St, Somewhere, CA, 90210" password 1234 once or twice a year for the last decade....

When was the last time you installed a "specially crafted" bdf font from anywhere?

You don't have to. Anyone with a writeable ${HOME}/.fonts can.

This could be really big.

http://passguardian.com/

This uses Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm to take your password, and split it into a configurable number of pieces, and requires a subset of those shares to reconstruct the original. Take your master password, split it into 10 shares, and require 5 shares to reconstruct. Then distribute the 10 shares to secure locations and trusted people.

Example:

Password: 12345
Share 1: 801650d0edcbd0c3c949f
Share 2: 802c91a40a532182e3570
Share 3: 803ad177a79bc1420a1de

Any 2 shares can reconstruct the password.

And the site runs entirely in Javascript. You can save it to a USB stick and run it from an offline PC, so you don't have to worry about your password being stolen.

Who needs luck?

Over the last couple of years, I've put a two to three thousand dollars into Bitcoin... I've made some bad decisions, and currently have "only" 20 BTC or so.

If the whole thing implodes, and those coins become worthless... I've had a hell of a ride, and think the couple of grand was well spent for the entertainment. On the other hand, if it takes off and Bitcoin turns out to be the next big thing like Ebay or Facebook, I can retire early.

Sounds like PayPal. :)