$Hidden Messages In Bitcoin Blockchain

http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html

 

boy, doesn't that just make you feel all super warm and secure about bitcoin..... :bobby:
if the code can be hacked and information injected, that pretty much fucks the supposed security and anonymity that is Bitcoins selling point in the ass real hard, doesn't it.
so how hard is it going to be to inject code that allows transactions to be tracked?


not long at all is my guess

This may herald the death of Bitcoin.

 

hacking it isn't the same as stealing coins .. as those transactions pretty much burn a few satoshi. i can post code some code in this box, but it'll show up as text, and won't be actually executed so i still trust the protocol. i can see how it might put doubts in the mind of some.

to steal coins you have to have the private keys for a particular address, without it you can't generate a valid transaction.

here's some code .. execute this

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

char *cock = "(,.)===#)";



int main()
{
char c = 0x1A;
int count = 0;
while(1) {
count++;
printf("%c", c);
c--;


if (count==1) {
printf("lolcockscoin");
count=0;
}}
return 0;
}

bitcoin lives, and lolcockscoin

 

and as the days went by.....most even wondered what bitcoins meant, and then one day super kid got rich before our very eyes.....lol

 

alot of people wish they had bought in back when bitcoins were worth almost nothing .. they are filthy rich now! anyone who buys now is still an early adopter, bitcoin is still young. it's never too late ...

 

I believe you! I was not being funny...I know what I said will be true.

 

I guess you missed the gist of my post.
it doesn't mean jack shit about "stealing" coins. bitcoins appeal is that it provides a medium of monetary exchange that is supposedly not trackable, correct?
Well if people can inject code into the transaction code or coins or whatever the fuck, then being able to track them is not far behind, and you know enough about this shit to know that I am 110% right

 

yes, you are absolutely correct, all transactions can be seen in the public blockchain. so in that sense, no, transactions are not anonymous and were never intended to be. however, transactions do not contain hostnames or IP addresses, or any other identifiers like name or residential address as part of the transaction. so if you never claim that an address belongs to you, then it is just a number, even though it is a publicly viewable transaction. you can search the blockchain for any bitcoin address, hash, or transaction ID etc at blockchain.info..actually you can just google it and that usually finds it as well

bitcoin mixing can help provide more anonymity, by ensuring that the coins sent are different than the coins received. it is too much to explain here, so i suggest anyone interested good "bitcoin mixing service" or "bitcoin laundry". basically it's the same thing as handing someone a 100 dollar bill and getting 5 20's back with different serial numbers. it's important that people who use bitcoin understand what bitcoin is, and also, what it is not.

 

Myself I still feel pretty secure using Bitcoin. But you need to be aware of security issues and protect any coins you hold by storing them offline, and ensuring you never expose your private keys.

I have heard that the Blockchain could be used for other things than simple BTC transactions. Things like escrows, contracts, even voting. I'm not sue how that would work as I don't know enough about the tech.

 

the weakest part of any security (including bitcoin) is always the human component. the passphrases i use for bitcoin wallets are 16 character pseudorandom strings. i could not reliably remember these strings and guarantee that i would still remember them correctly some months or years later so i am forced to write these down somewhere. obiously if someone had physical access to both my machine and this information on paper they would also have access to my coins. i do believe this is better than risking forgetting the passphrase and losing my coins that way.

i am currently trying to come up with a better solution to this, possibly by storing this sensitive information on a usb flash drive or sd card encrypted (with a passphrase i cAN remember) and hiding this drive somewhere i think it would be unlikely to be discovered. keeping backups of the wallet file is very important. i made a special partition on a seperate physical disk and made a symlink from the .bitcoin directory to the directory on this partition that stores the blockchain, wallet.dat file etc. it looks like this: ~/.bitcoin -> /cryptcn/.bitcoin since i mounted that partition to /cryptcn. it might be a good idea to put this on a RAID 1 array, which is 2 disks that each store a copy of the same data, in case one fails it can be recovered from the other disk. maybe this is going a bit overkill, but if one had a lot of BTC it would probably be wise to be as careful as possible, and if they had a lot of BTC then they could also buy hard drives on newegg.com using BTC!

 

here is one possible option;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw

 

lol

 

As I understand it, this is just stored by the way transactions are conducted.... could be wrong.

You could only track transactions you made, in the form of the code you're leaving.

I could be wrong. Didn't read the article. Of course nothing is anonymous, because they watch every thing sent by every person, but in a practical way for most people, it is, or can be if used properly., at the moment.

The way to track bitcoin would just be with a hacked or modified client. Something that calls home to report transactions.

 

the way these messages are left in the blockchain is by encoding binary data into the base-58 format used for bitcoin addresses. since no one holds a private key for those addresses the tiny amount of bitcoin sent in the transaction can never be spent, thus "burning" some amount of BTC.

any transactions made by anyone anywhere can be "tracked" in the public blockchain, so there would be no reason to "call home" .. transactions contain input addresses and output addresses which are derived from the public keys, to generate a valid transaction the client must use the private keys for each of the input addresses. the output addresses, in order for someone to spend the transactions to that address must have a private key that "fits", or else it can't be spent.

there is no reason to call home because ur not gonna find anything that isn't already made public anyway (in the blockchain) .. I'm not even sure what u really mean by call home, as usually that refers to a program opening a session on some port on a server somewhere but since bitcoin is a decentralized protocol there is no central server, the nodes that relay transactions are distributed around the world and anyone can run one ... I think I know what u were trying to imply tho tho. using tor can be used to keep ur IP address from being discovered through some kind of timing attack which has a low certainty of success or accuracy anyway. if you are worried about your bitcoin client bein hacked or compromised then either compile it from source code, or verify the MD5SUM of SHA-256 hash of the binary to make sure no unintended changes have occurred. the bitcoin protocol is open source, developed by a group of "experts" so if anyone was to find an exploit that could be used for this type of malicious intent it would be these experts who would quickly fix the code and make sure everyone updated their software. it is far more likely that an attacker would simply hack you to steal your coins than to be concerned about your real identity.

in the case of law enforcement you should google "plausible deniability" as it is a bit much to explain and beyond the scope of this I think. plausible deniability is NOT specific to bitcoin.

of course the most likely place your personal identity could become associated with a particular bitcoin transaction is not any of the above, but much more likely during the exchange between BTC and other currencies where exchanges require personally identifiable information. and it goes without saying that if someone has physical access to your computer it can easily be hacked to access your wallet unless you use rock solid filesystem encryption, in which case they would need physical access to the passphrase that's probably written down somewhere in your home since it's so long you can't remember it

one solution to this is to send some coins in a multisignature transaction which must be signed with several different private keys, which no one person would have all keys, they could be stored in multiple physical locations, possibly be different people. this way the chances would be very slim someone could find all of the keys to spend that transaction.

I have to say, bitcoin ATMs are pretty freakin cool, and absolutely no personally identifiable information is given that way .. just anonymous cash .. if they would do the reverse just the same that would be even cooler

 

Having only skimmed that (limited interest) I believe you can anonymize bitcoins by moving them between wallets. a few times. A client that calls home would be able to coordinate what transactions are where/who, and really simplify tracking bitcoins, including the transactions of others without compromised clients.

 

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service

bitcoin mixing services ..

if ur really worried about "calling home" then you can set up ip tables to allow only connections to a handful of trusted nodes and reject any other connection attempts but i think it's really a non-issue and IMO shouldn't worry about "calling home"

moving between wallerts does very little in obfuscation as you can still see the transactions between them in the blockchain and they are technically still the same coins .. with mixing services you get different coins, ie if you want to transfer coins between wallet A and wallet B you send coins to the mixing service from wallet A, and wallet B receives some completely different coins from some other wallet out there also participating in the mixing service, therefore breaking the link between wallet A and wallet B.

sending between two wallets you own seems to me that it would at least obfuscate the amounts of the transactions if when you spent the output at least somewhat, but won't obfuscate the origin. people that know more than i however tell me that it really does very little except make it appear that a transaction you make has inputs from more sources than it really does.

edit: it could be a good idea to store coins in multiple wallets to minimize risk however (in case one wallet became compromised) .. similar to not carrying all of your money in your wallet so in case you got robbed you wouldn't lose everything.

 

The ability to be anonymous and do transactions that can't be traced is only part of the whole thing with Bitcoin. That would be useful if you wanted to do stuff which governments deem to be illegal. If not, then it's still much more anonymous than conventional banking.

There are many other features of Bitcoin though which could benefit millions. For example giving people in the 3rd world access to banking and the ability to send and receive funds easily at virtually no cost.

It seems to me to be one of the very few practical steps that have been taken towards taking power from the banks and other parasitic financial institutions.

No doubt Bitcoin will have many more ups and downs, but I think it's here to stay.

 

to me, the low transaction fees are one of the major benefits. this is more easily realized when sending money internationally overseas, banks can easily charge extremely high fees for international wire transfers (on both ends). with bitcoin, a transaction to your next door neighbor is no different than a transaction to China, or anywhere else in the world.

there are no "third party transactions" when using bitcoin. there is no Federal Reserve, or SWIFT network to deal with.

bitcoin is going down again i noticed, now might be a good time buy a little, i just picked up 0.0836BTC more today. remember, we need to actually spend bitcoins tho if we want to actually bring stabilty to the market .. real transactions for real goods as opposed to pump and dump transactions by whales.

newegg.com accepts BTC, so you can get all you electronic needs there and pay in BTC! there are quite a few vendors now accepting BTC and this will only continue to grow. I heard a week or two ago about paypal incorporating bitcoin into its system (bitcoin WAS against their AUP/TOS ..). currently i have found the easiest way for the best price to buy BTC in the US is through bitcoin ATMs (BTMs). this avoids paying international wire transfer fee's to foreign exchanges. if you are in europe, you probably have it a little better right now.

find the nearest bitcoin atm to you here:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-atm-map/

right now they seem to be only in some of the bigger cities, hopefully one day they will be just as common as regular atms, and do 2-way transactions as well. if you discover a new ATM not on the map email coindesk at atm@coindesk.com so they can put it on the map

 

Great post Ace K. I think now is a good time to buy Bitcoin, as it's very likely reached a support level and will begin to gain value in the not too distant future.

I'm not just saying this because I'm a crypto enthusiast, but because I see that there are many start-ups going on in the Bitcoin space. Companies are investing money - not directly by buying BTC, but through investment in new tech. I see this as a very positive sign, that people are investing tens of millions of $$.

I also think that in his Autumn statement, George Osborne,, British Chancellor, will make a positive statement about crypto. Let's wait and see. But I'm hoping he's going to say that London should embrace Bitcoin.

 

This is interesting

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/how-can-the-bitcoin-blockchain-help-humanity/