> What I don't understand is where the signature came from -- I do see a Jan 2009 transaction involving that address on various blockchain explorers, but that particular signature is nowhere to be found. This could absolutely just be me not understanding how all of this works, but in order for this to be "really big news" I think you'd have to show proof that the signature given was posted with the transaction back in 2009. Otherwise, it just means that Hal Finney's wallet is compromised and someone has been signing random messages with it.
Furthermore we know that the wallet spent coins in 2017, three years after Hal's death. Someone other than Hal had (has?) access to the private key for that address.
There was another site that had 30 day deletion policy, but if you logged in during the 30 days then deletion was automatically cancelled. Squirrelly behavior obviously.
I think that's what's going on here. Got another email today letting me know that my request to delete my account is complete, yet I could reset my password just fine.
That cap's been there for a while. IIRC, it was implemented some months after T-Mobile started the "race to unlimited data"... was that the winter before last? Speaking of the U.S. marketplace. I never read an official explanation, but my assumption/understanding was that this was Fi's response to remain competitive with other carriers' "unlimited" plans.
What concerns me is the throttling at/after 15 GB. Other carriers have this, too, but it is supposedly "dependent on local load/conditions", and comments have led me to understand that, for some if not many people, they don't encounter the slowdown much in practice.
Whereas, being an MVNO and also perhaps having better software, Fi might be more strict and aggressive with the throttling? I don't know.
^ A thousand times this. Vet your advisor like there's no tomorrow. This is trickier than it sounds because the best source on this is your advisor's current or past grad students, and they often won't open up cause they don't know you. Your filter should then be: "if they don't give you great/enthusiastic feedback about their advisor, play it safe and look elsewhere."
We offer multisig wallets so you can enjoy the convenience of using Coinbase while still maintaining full control over (a majority of) the private keys:
> Many times in the past bitcoin companies have been hacked, embezzled or otherwise lost user funds. There is no recourse.
Many times, other companies have had that happen, and there is all kinds of recourse. To the extent bitcoin companies are special, its because people participating in the bitcoin craze have been willing to entrust large amounts of value with companies that don't have the basic characteristics that would otherwise establish trustworthiness, or at least accountability.
What do you do when the money is gone? With other payment technology you can get court orders to freeze funds, or judgments against current holders.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is irrevocable and pseudo-anonymous. In July 2011 the owner of MyBitcoin.com web wallet allegedly walked away with 50,000 btc of customer funds. We know where those funds are. You can see them on any block explorer. But it is not possible to freeze or confiscate those funds. And we don't know what real world person or people have access to the keys controlling those funds. So what are you going to do?
MtGox went under with 850,000 btc of customer funds. Its creditors are currently fighting over the 200,000 btc that was found to still be in possession by the company. The other 650,000 btc? Who knows.
It's just a simple fact of reality. If you don't have physical control over the keys for that bitcoin, it is not your bitcoin. Some of us have learned that lesson the hard way.
>But it is not possible to freeze or confiscate those funds.
That is just a limitation of the Bitcoin protocol. One could build a protocol where communities could agree to freeze (not accept) or greatly devalue those funds.
Miners could conspire to mostly freeze certain bitcoin.
It wouldn't even have to be done in a way that was visible on the bitcoin network, they would just have to agree to not include transactions from whatever addresses.
A strong majority could probably refuse to acknowledge blocks including the blocked addresses, which would be a real freeze (rather than the hassle freeze obtained by not including the address in blocks produced by the conspiracy).
You'd need >50% of the miners to do that. It is precisely what I mean by building a protocol.
Of course, without strong consensus (and a real algorithm/protocol) such attempts will likely just result in fractured blockchains (basically the state at the moment, with many competing implementations of the same basic idea).
It is an explicit design choice of the bitcoin protocol (feature, not a bug) that doing so requires a cabal of the majority of the hash power. With properly distributed hash power like bitcoin had in its infancy, this would not have been possible.
Given that BTC is a currency that is not backed by a national treasury (and is, in fact, technologically not backable by printing more money), such insurance would be a prohibitively expensive percentage of a company's BTC resources.
The same features of BTC that serve as its advantage and, arguably, goal make it more difficult to offer basic protections that other fiscal infrastructures have had for decades.
You can store $100m in bitcoin on a piece of paper in a vault. It reduces perfectly to the solved problem of securing $100m in $100 bills in a vault (which, yes, you can insure).
While true, that does not offer the same protection as an FDIC-style insurance program (and restricts the storing entity's ability to compete and perform by preventing them from investing that $100m, so the market will tend ceteris parabus to punish companies that take such a step in good times with relatively-slower growth, acting as a disincentivizing counter-weight to offering insurance). In contrast, the FDIC has unlimited borrowing capacity with the US government; worst-case scenario, the Treasury can basically start printing money and the FDIC can hand it out to people with savings in failed banks.
Many see this capacity of the US Treasury to fabricate money from nowhere as the very sort of flaw that BTC's coin-generation process is intended to avoid, but that protection does not come without a price.
Since this is about an amount of $100m, I'd say the above suggestion (theoretically) offers much more protection than FDIC, which only covers losses up to $250k iirc...
I suspect that at the moment it may be more difficult to find an insurer for a vault with that piece of paper, compared to a vault with $100m cash though :) but perhaps that'll change.
> While true, that does not offer the same protection as an FDIC-style insurance program
Sure, but whether that difference from "the same protection" is more or less protection depends on the number of people that $100 million is held on behalf of.
There's no FDIC providing government backed insurance for most commodities, or for non-bank accounts in fiat currency (e.g., those you'd have with a typical brokerage), so I'm not sure bitcoin is really fundamentally different than most commodities as a speculative investment
So for a speculative trader, I dont e that holding keys if any more essential than physically holding goods is for physical commodities; you obviously have to account for trust/security of the entity serving as your agent/broker, but that's typical.
Now, holding the keys may be essential to realizing some of the benefits of bitcoin which drive is value to some users, but for people investing in bitcoin, that may be peripheral to the purpose.
There's a qualitative difference between "I own stock that might become worthless" and "I own a security that someone could just take from me because they notice my deed just sitting somewhere unprotected."
If someone steals my Schwab account contents for Schwab's servers, I can call on the government for help; and the stock market bookkeeping system has the technical ability restore my shares to me. If someone gets a copy of my wallet key, I've got no recourse unless (unlikely) someone can track down the obfuscated thief.
> If someone steals my Schwab account contents for Schwab's servers, I can call on the government for help
If someone steals your bitcoin from an exchange, you can call on the government for help, too. If the exchange itself is completely insolvent, that may not be effective recourse, and that risk is certainly greater for the kind of firms people have been dealing with in the bitcoin space, which often aren't held by their customers to the same standards that customers of similar services for commodities other than bitcoin would hold companies to.
That's my point: the lack of recourse isn't essential to bitcoin (yes, holding the keys is like holding cash, and not holding the keys is giving something up just like not holding cash is -- but we deal with other businesses with accounts denominated in national currencies without holding all the cash ourselves all the time, and have recourse available for losses.) The lack of accountability is because the firms people choose to do business with are, compared to the firms that people do other financial business with, shady fly-by-night operators.
> so I'm not sure bitcoin is really fundamentally different than most commodities as a speculative investment
That's the point, though. You're looking at it as a speculative investment, and proceeding accordingly, which is good. The OP is admonishing people to not treat bitcoin like a standard bank account (which is all too easy to do), but rather in the same terms as you already do.
I recommend https://electrum.org, even though the website doesn't look super awesome. You'll get a "seed" that generates your keys that is 12 words long. It looks something like this:
"help staple correct horse ..."
From there, just store that seed somewhere secure and you can use that to generate your keys whenever you want, on any machine you want. Personally I keep my seed in two different safe-deposit boxes and one on (shameless plug) my own encrypted text app I made called Onions - http://onionsapp.github.io.
Electrum is great, but not very easy to use (since it's desktop). Get Electrum, Mycelium or Breadwallet, depending on your platform. I've heard good things about GreenAddress, and I recommend a ledger hardware wallet. You can use the ledger with Electrum and Mycelium, so you can spend coins from desktop or mobile. I've also imported my Mycelium wallet onto my second ledger, just so I can move coins from the desktop.
Ledger is pretty good for the price tag it has. It is simlple yet effective. Trezor is a worthy mention since it can be used anywhere(even on an infected computer) whereas you need to setup the ledger on a secure host.
