I've made myself a new OpenPGP key pair; the old one is still good, but it's time to start retiring it due to old age.
Below the fold is a message containing my new key, signed with my new key and then again with the old key; copy and paste it into gpg | gpg to see the signature verifications, then consider adding | gpg --import to the end to import the key.
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As I write, there is still uncertainty about just how private the pseudonymity of Bitcoin really is.
I can't say I have an answer myself, but I can explain the complex issues involved and make a few predictions!
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The recent bubble-and-crash cycle in the price of bitcoins leads, logically, to wondering what their "true value" should be.
The idea is that there is a true value - some amount of something else that 1 bitcoin is actually worth - that the market will be trying to tend towards; but the market price is being distorted by irrational people buying them at above that true price, and panic-sellers willing to sell them below the true price.
So what might this true value be?
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Over the past few years, I've been getting worsening pain in my lower back. An ache just to the right of my spine (where it joins to my pelvis), with shooting pain down to my right knee; sometimes it would be so bad I couldn't stand up straight. At first this would only happen if I'd had a hard weekend carrying boxes or doing long drives, but it became more and more frequent, until I was having to carefully watch my posture in every aspect of my life for fear of triggering it.
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The biggest currency exchange market in the Bitcoin world is MtGox. When it goes down, either due to a DDoS attack or sheer high load due to everyone panic-selling, then people who hold bitcoins and care about their value in dollars get the panicky realisation that they can't easily sell them - which causes two things:
A drop in the value of bitcoins; people care about their ability to turn them back into fiat money, and will continue to do so until lots of things can be bought directly with bitcoins.
Widespread angst that MtGox is a central point of failure for the Bitcoin economy, complaining that they are vulnerable to DDoSes and get high trading lag when under load, and so on.
So, as a high-performance systems developer, I thought I'd write some notes on how to build a more resilient exchange platform. Perhaps MtGox will do something like this, but perhaps more ideally, one of their competitors will, and thereby win some of MtGox's market share, and thus decentralise the exchange market somewhat.
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Alaric | alaric | 
Mon 29th Apr 2013 10:36 am | 
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