SangaMan, lets keep the technical discussion out of the poker forum. There are threads on bitcointalk where people discuss it. I haven't looked at it since a few weeks after it came out and the consensus was that it has vulnerabilities that were impossible to fix. PPcoin is way worse than bitcoin and no one has any incentive to do any research to try to fix it. It is just an experiment to try to find out if networks can be secured without mining. The way PPcoin is implemented, they can't. Buying it is flushing your money away. I would short PPcoin even harder than I am shorting litecoin if it was worth my time to find someone to lend them to me so I could sell them on an exchange.

PPCoin is NOT a decentralized cryptocurrency
[PPC] [DISCLOSURE] Stake Generation Vulnerability

Nemesis, mining on a CPU is not worth it. Mining on a high end video card can be good at the current price, but in another month or two, probably not. Mining is not free money. Your electricity bill will be very high. You will need to spend a bunch of hours learning and doing calculations to see if it is worth it.

Also, Ripple is very hard to understand. Even the developers don't seem to fully understand how it works. It will take a lot of reading on the forums if you want to figure it out.

Bitcoin FAQ
Bitcoin Myths
Ripple

Interesting article. Before i take time to understand all the methods, lets say there are those "evil hoarders" ...

And let's say the BTC becomes worth 1k a piece . Why on earth would they "dump" their money?

If the BTC becomes worth this much, then only because other currencies loose in value.. no?!

If they wanna "cash in" their winnings, they would do it over time and there's nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps i misunderstand somth, so pls somebody sceptical point out any flaws.

His argument seems to be "But what if they are with the NSA?!??!?!"

It is not a currency. It is centralized and not open source. It is an IOU exchange.

It seems that it is a p2p transfer service where you can fund your account with many currencies and the other person can receive many different currencies and in between your money is first converted to ripple "currency" and then the ripple "currency" is converted to the recipient's currency. How could they do this without having a sufficient amount of all currencies or they are trading for currencies themselves? Your account is held in ripple and it seems they are holding on to all the other currencies that have been converted. I would much rather be holding onto my own currency. Why not just send btc and if the recipient wants to change it to the fiat of their choice they are free to do so?

I must be missing something.

I'll buy 1k usd worth of BTC, I have skrill/stars. 5% vig

If greed is the pure motive, destroying Bitcoin would be the dumbest thing. Unless they stand more to lose from Bitcoin succeeding than what they could get from the network.

Ripple is not a currency, it is a project. There is an internal currency it uses called XRP, or ripples. It is currently centralized so that they can develop the code, but it will be decentralized eventually. The client is open source right now.

Your account is not necessarily held in XRP. You can hold any currency you want as an IOU. You can even invent your own currency. Hang out in the ripple threads on bitcointalk and you will see that people are trading invented currency, currencies backed by silver dimes, and doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is hard to wrap your head around. Ripple has some kind of order book exchange system so that the payment can ripple through to pay a merchant in a currency that he accepts with a currency that the buyer wants to pay in.

You can buy XRP if you think it will work, but I don't recommend doing that without having a good understanding of the properties of money, the history of money, and what makes things valuable. For example, you want to know why Somali banknotes continue to circulate in the absence of a central bank, how bills of exchange work, the weaknesses of Webs-of-Trust, why gold is a better money than silver, what advantages paper money and fiat have, what advantages bitcoin has over fiat and gold, and how ripple is different. Then you can possibly make a good judgement about whether XRP will be worth something.

https://ripple.com/wiki/Main_Page

Yeah I did look at the wiki a bit and I did go to bitcointalk but did not see much in the way of threads. I guess I will have to look further if I want to. From the sticky, List of all cryptocoins, is where I got the info that it was not open source. I guess they didn't update that although it seems that it was last updated 4/5/13 or as it says on the post 5/4/13. The US is special.

At least it will enable me to create a currency based on cat purrs so maybe it is useful after all.

As far as understanding money, oh well. Since increasing the velocity of money creates more wealth I think maybe I should base a currency on photons.

Please feel free to not reply to my babbling.

Hoping someone can just confirm a few things for me (<---noob)

Security: Ive downloaded the bitcoin software, encrypted my wallet using a password generated by keepass, and then backed up the wallet onto a couple of thumbdrives that I generally keep in different physical locations (these are also encrypted by true crypt). I just want to know if that is all I need security wise (along with common sense going forward)

A couple things I am unsure of

-Right now I haven't bought/received any BTC so my balance is still 0. The way I understand it is that since my backup wallet.dat files contain my first 100 addresses, that as I receive BTC to those 100 addresses, that means that if I restored one of my backups, I would have access to any BTC that were sent to those first 100 addresses. Is that correct?

-Im still unsure about my private key.. Is this something I should have written down somewhere, or is it something that I shouldnt even have to know what it is, barring some security mishap? Really unclear here

I'll send first to reputable posters.

A strong password and multiple backups is a great start. Is your keypass backed up as well?

The keypool issue is tricky. If you only use the wallet to receive coins you could essentially go forever receiving coins to those 100 addresses. HOWEVER, each time you send bitcoins you have to use up all of one (or more) of the transactions you have received and if that is too much you also send some back to yourself at a new address out of that keypool. That means that even if you only ever receive coins at one address your backup will be stale after 100 spends.

There are a few different solutions:

Make new backups regularly.

Use a bitcoin.conf file to change the default keypool from 100 to say 2000 and not worry about it again if you don't use the wallet for very high volumes.

Use Electrum. Electrum wallets have a master key (or 'seed') that can be used to remake all the keys in the wallet. Keypools are not an issue with Electrum. This is called a "deterministic wallet" and I hope the "standard" client supports them eventually.

---------------------------------
You should never see your private keys. An exception is when using Electrum, you have an option to view your seed in a format intended for memorization, it will appear as 12 common words.

Electrum does allow you to put a password on a wallet, but that just locks down the seed. The seed (without the password) is always sufficient to recreate the Electrum wallet.

Another important fact about Electrum is that you don't have to download and maintain the blockchain. Your wallet will connect to a server when it needs info. The way it is set up they cannot trick you in any malicious way. It is also possible to run your own Electrum server, it is all open source. Furthermore, if it was ever necessary your keys can be exported to the "standard" client.

One thing people have been getting caught out on is that each transaction from your wallet creates a new hidden 'change address' where excess bitcoins are returned to in transactions. This new change address is hidden from your address list, but may still be holding btc. This means that people are using up the keys from their keypool faster than they realize and not backing up enough, reverting to back ups with a load of btc missing (as the old back up wallets don't contain all the new keys that were created in the new wallets past the first 100).

So periodically back up your wallet.dat if you make regular transactions, even if you haven't manually created any new addresses.

If you have a decent amount of btc i would have a separate cold wallet for savings and write out the private key and store it somewhere safe.

Edit: ffs Alberto

If anyone is interested in selling me some BTC then i'm looking UK is so damn hard to get a hold of some!!

idk wtf is going on, volume and price movement crazy for a sunday

155 on gox now

Ate the wall at $150 in about 60 seconds. Mental, considering it's Sunday. I think traders are pre-empting the expected monday surge

It seems that a lot of you guys that bought pre run up are selling , so it probably means that a second run is about to take place. congrats to those that got in early.

this week will be insane

Hey Tom, I'm back in this thread due to the latest jump in bitcoin. If i recall correctly, you were one of the most reasonable anti bitcoin investors from last year and I was just wondering what you thoughts of the latest run up were.

I wonder if the monday surge will still happen with everyone and their mother expecting it.

14000 people in the verification queue do give me hope at least.

im still worried how dependant bitcoin is on mtgox, im not sure holding on 4/15 is a good idea the doj likes to take action then

can someone prove me wrong so i feel better about reinvesting?

More exchanges and markets are developing that will soon distribute some of the heavy mtgox concentration a little more. The good thing is the market is moving at rapid pace while who knows how long it will take the doj to act. The real crack down in poker didnt start for many years, for example, and i dont think that was due entirely to a lack of conviction.

If this is an anonymous currency how will the doj intervene? I don't think they would just shut down bitcoin all together

It is not hard to buy bitcoins in the UK. Use localbitcoins and do a bank transfer to a reputable seller, or use transferwise to ship your money onto a Euro-based exchange without a huge currency conversion fee.

The DOJ cannot just decide to shut down foreign exchange operators in Japan and the Eurozone. MTgox has a room full of lawyers they have to go through. MTgox is also in the process of separating all its American clients onto an US based exchange, Coinlab. If MTgox disappeared for some reason, there are plenty of other exchanges that will be happy to take all the extra traffic.

Bitcoin FAQ
Bitcoin Myths
http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/

I believe ripple is a dishonest scam. Basically you got a webstore that accepts bitcoin and sends you fake ripple coins. They put up a Potemkin village, a fake wiki, a fake source code, and a even fake cross connections like opencoin. Even some fake protocols like consensus, taken from opentransactions.

The reason for this opinion.
Where is the blockchain?
Can you see who owns all the coins?
How many connections to the server?

You certainly don't seem to have a problem spouting off and screaming "scam" about stuff you know nothing about. Many bitcoiners think ripple sucks, but not for the reasons you state. There is no blockchain. It doesnt use proof-of-work, it uses a trust-based system to verify transactions. There is some kind of transaction explorer for it iirc. OpenCoin has most of the 100 billion coins. They are trying a different initial distribution method, involving giving them out to everyone with a facebook account. This is arguably better than bitcoin's distribution, although not decentralized and free from control. The server source is not public yet because they are working on it and still making major modifications. The client is open source.

https://ripple.com/wiki/Main_Page