I'm pretty sure selling something you don't actually have isn't allowed on ebay (he's selling a phone he hasn't received, and in all likelyhood wont receive as google could quite easily cancel the other 2 orders as they seem to be a mistake).
There are 8600 likes on google+ for the Nexus 4.
If you are very generous you could say that would translate to 860,000 purchases.
No decent smartphone manufacture plans for sales of less than 1 million units of its flagship product.
The fact that the nexus 4 sold out in every country it was sold within one hour would only demonstrate complete operational incompetence on every level to be that far off the mark.
It's a stunt and I don't like it when companies treat people like retards.
This is all a setup and im pissed because I wanted one.
Yes if you are Google and you keep track of all of these things you can quite accurately translate those metrics into potential sales.
Especially when you can build Plus Ones profiles for every phone every made then correlate that to actual sales figures. It's not 100% accurate but it's certainly accurate enough not to go out of stock in 1 hour.
Its Google entire business model last time I checked.
We don't know how many units were shipped. We don't know if Google is celebrating this or if they knew this would happen. It is possible that LG has supply chain issues and they can not crank out phones to meet demand.
You don't know that it was a stunt. It is possible they sold many phones. I really doubt that 8600 likes translates to sales numbers. There is no way of knowing if Google sold 500 or 2 million phones before it ran out of stock. It is also possible that LG does not have the production capacity meet demand. It would be a marketing stunt if Google is intentionally creating a supply shortage, but I doubt that is Google game. Then again, we won't know until Google releases a statement about how Nexus 4s have been sold.
I don't think bitcoin related sites have less security than other sites that claim to be secure, it just that they are such a high value target and attract the attention of nearly all criminal hackers.
Also nearly all of the thefts that occurred where a result of a compromised email account which eventually led to root level access of the server through a virtual server console. Not as a result of bad programming that led to an exploit.
All the incidents to date except the first Bitcoinica heist were due to bad security practices one way or another. Even that one could be considered bad security practices by trusting that Linode was secure.
That said, I expect we will see some really hardcore Bitcoin security incidents in the future that rival state sponsored hacking.
Stealing Bitcoin requires no additional effort to profit. Since Bitcoin is money and easily made anonymous, stealing Bitcoin == profit. Therefore there exists an arbitrage opportunity between the cost of buying 0-day exploits and the Bitcoins that can be stolen by use of those exploits. I expect as Bitcoin goes up in value so will the cost of a certain class of exploit.
What kind of software stack would you run if you were operating a Bitcoin bank that held a large amount of funds?
This is the downside of Bitcoin's operating in a cash like nature. There is no FDIC for these "banks", the bank walls are digital and porous in ways unknown, and the bank can be robbed across international boundaries. What these companies need is insurance, but that insurance would be very hard/impossible to obtain.
On the plus side, the way transactions work, the vault never needs to be connected to any networks at all. Hot storage is risky but cold storage is extremely safe.
I think this could be fairly easily harnessed in a semi-scalable manner too.
Two computers, A is trusted and B is untrusted. B is networked and hooked up with the rest of your system, A is in a vault and completely air-gapped. A has your wallets.
Give both a printer and webcam/scanner to both. B prints a transaction encoded as a QR Code (or something custom, if those don't hold enough data?) as well as key details (transaction amount say) in giant black bold capitalized English.
The human operator checks the english description for sanity, then gives it to computer A. Computer A reads the QR code, does OCR to confirm the key details (or lets the operator confirm them on the screen) and the QR code match, and preforms the transaction.
This could work at a "local bank branch scale" I think, but getting it up to "website scale" would be... improbable.
Not sure if I would trust this with my money, but it would be fun to implement.
(technically A wouldn't be air-gapped, it would just be operating over a QR-code sneakernet.. Should be reasonable though I think.)
Of course. But is it worse the flaws with than any business that handles cash? The idea is to use bitcoin's 'offline' functionality to bring it up to about the same security of regular cash.
What kind of regulations? There are already plenty that affect a company's accounting no matter if it uses dollars or pesos or gold or bitcoins or pokemon cards.
I expect we will see some really hardcore Bitcoin security incidents in the future that rival state sponsored hacking.
It depends if Bitcoin becomes big and popular. If so, then yes, there will be lots of hacking attempts. If these security flaws with bitcoin sites keep appearing, then it will never get beyond 'toy' status.
The first design rule would be not to have the wallet file on the same server as whichever stack was used.
Secondly the client facing stack can not interact with the server holding the wallet file directly. It would have to go through a third server which would run sanity checks on any transaction requests.
"security" is not just programming, but the whole methods & procedures. They might have good 'programming', but they had bad policies and bad security. If there's an email account of a founder, that when compromised, leads to the entire contents of your bank vaults being robbed clean, then you have bad security.
It should not be possible for there to be a virtual machine console, or for one compromised email account to give you that much power. That's how you do security.
There are plenty of high value targets e.g. Amazon, Apple Store, eBay, banks just to name a few. So to claim that Bitcoin services are unique in any way is just ridiculous.
And just because you get root access to a server does not mean that it should be trivial to gain access to the bitcoins. And why are they being hosted on VPS in the first place ?
The point is still valid that a true PROFESSIONAL is desperately needed.
The difference here is that storing Bitcoins is like having cash sitting on the server that thieves can pick up and run away with. If you steal from Amazon the Apple store, an ACH or credit card chargeback will set everything straight.
If a burglar has the choice between a car worth $50,000 retail or $10,000 cash, what would he rather take? A stolen car is a lot harder to turn into something usable.
Bitcoin services are unique in the fact that it is very easy to send the money to yourself, be in your control, with out having it be attached to you identity in anyway. This seems unique to me, if there are other cyber crimes that make this just as easy I am interested in hearing about them.
Why did you swap out 'the server' with 'a server'? Of course a server doesn't mean you get bitcoins. But the server, the server with the wallet, there is no realistic way to stop root from grabbing the encryption keys.
No it isn't. Bitcoin's killer feature is anonymity. It has no underwriting, no risk prevention, and worst of all, no ubiquity.
Once you pay someone with BTC, your money is gone. It's that simple. Unless you involve a third party of some kind, and then it's PayPal all over again... though I assume it's a great deal easier to become a BTC middleman than a middleman of any established currency, due to lack of idiotic government red tape to jump through.
Actually Bitcoin's killer features indeed includes removing banks/other intermediaries from the transaction process, in addition to making state-sponsored inflation impossible.
Bankers hate BTC because it removes them from inter-mediating people and their money, statists hate BTC because it nullifies their socialist dreams of gathering funds at will (printing money). Anonymity is just a nice bonus.
Both physical goods, cash and bitcoins once transferred are hard to get back. But this does not invalidate property rights and prevention of fraud. If two parties cannot resolve a conflict by themselves, they turn to a third party. This has nothing to do with bitcoins, paypal or any money system.
Bitcoin is valuable because it gives you a choice: you can either have third party to resolve issues and insure risks, or you can go by yourself. In case of paypal/visa/wire transfer you do not have such choice.
From a customer's, it means you have precisely zero assurance once you've paid that the other guy will follow through. It's just like sending cash through the mail, except with no chance it won't get there.
It is much easier build merchant rating services/databases than customer rating services/databases. Proof: compare (1) buying from a high-rated eBay seller which is pretty much riskless, to (2) the complex consumer credit rating industry which is doing a poor job at maintaining fraud at constant levels (fraud increasing year over year, small merchants going out of business, etc).
Therefore I assert that the Bitcoin model is superior: solving the fraud risk for merchants is more important than for customers. If a merchant start delivering poorly (or not at all) with purchases, he will quickly receive poor reviews and go out of business, hence self-correcting the fraud problem.
Of course another option with Bitcoin which you are not thinking about is to use escrow services as third party between buyers and sellers.
No. Bitcoin is deflationary, not inflationary. (The value of a coin increases much faster than the coin supply. About half of the 21M coins have already been generated.)
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