People have speculated that this is an attempt by some attacker to correlate ownership of older and newer addresses en masse. Some wallets give the user no control over which address(es) are used as the source for any given payment. When a tiny sum shows up in some old empty address still being tracked by the wallet, those coins will eventually be sent on automatically as part of a larger payment, alongside coins from one of the user's currently active addresses, and suddenly the common ownership of those two addresses becomes public record.
Most wallets only have the crudest tools to prevent identity attacks like this, such as setting a preferred address for the next payment. Frequently, you won't even see what the inputs and outputs of a transaction will be before it's broadcast to the network.
In that case, maybe publishing the addresses wasn't the most discreet thing imaginable. Still my "holdings" amount to a Starbucks card converted to BTC through an online service mentioned on HN. I wanted to motivate myself to become interested in Bitcoins, and thought that watching a miniscule amount might help, but the mischief around cryptocurrencies is demotivating. Cryptocurrencies should be regulated. Perhaps the Bitcoin will serve in the long run to address some rent-seeking behavior in the banking system. For now it's the Wild West.
Fuck off. So he used an extreme example, doesn't mean his point is invalid. Godwin's Law is not supposed to be used as an excuse to shut down uncomfortable conversations.
Edit: Just noticed you live in Europe. They do have a SEPA option for European customers, but I imagine the process is somewhat different, and SEPA listings are relatively sparse. Sorry!
www.bitquick.co
Prerequisites: A bitcoin wallet to receive the coins, and some cash.
1: Click Buy, browse through the offers and pick one that has a reasonable price and uses a geographically convenient bank.
2: Submit your bitcoin address and your desired amount, write down the bank account info that appears, go to the bank, and deposit the specified amount of cash into the seller's account.
3: Take a picture of the deposit receipt and email it to BitQuick.
4: Bitcoins will be sent from escrow to the address you specified earlier. Done!
If you want to keep things simple and maintain your privacy, you should check out services like BitQuick (http://www.bitquick.co) and Blue Sky Traders (http://ok2yri46aaptiu2d.onion). These services allow you to buy bitcoins by simply depositing cash into someone else's bank account. No ID required or anything. There's another similar service called http://www.cashintocoins.com, but I don't have any experience with them and they're apparently having issues with their SSL certificate right now.
Even if you do want to use an exchange in order to rapidly trade your coins and profit from price dips, depositing coins into an exchange is a lot easier and possibly more anonymous than depositing dollars.
Then if you decide to sell the coins, you can move them off the exchange and offer them on localbitcoins.com for physical cash.
These sites don't participate in the DNS. They (theoretically, at least) keep their IP addresses secret by sending and receiving traffic only through the Tor onion routing network.
That is not a capitalist society by any definition I know of. Capitalism involves things like land ownership and interest-bearing loans, things that eventually lead to significant inequality in the distribution of resources.
In a capitalist society, the other guy owns all the rocks, and if you try breaking one without his permission he might call the cops and have you jailed. But he's a reasonable guy, and if you're willing to break rocks for 14 hours a day, he'll pay you ten cents per piece, and then you can buy one back from him for thirty!
It seems a bit fallacious to equate a Dollars-to-Bitcoins exchange with the Bitcoin currency itself. I know it's easy to forget amid this speculative frenzy, but conversion into USD is not really Bitcoin's ultimate purpose. None of these attacks have had any effect on transactions within the Bitcoin network/economy itself.
No, actually, it isn't. You're quoting a piece of marketing material for chrissake. They handle 80% of all Bitcoin TRADE. As in Bitcoin-to-USD-and-vice-versa trades. Not Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions.
You clearly don't have even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin itself works. It's a distributed, peer-to-peer system. That statement is analogous to saying "The Pirate Bay handles over 80% of all Bittorrent traffic." In reality, TPB handles exactly zero actual torrent traffic, and Gox is in no way involved in processing actual bitcoin blockchain transactions.
Like TBP, Gox is a convenient target for people trying to disrupt easy entry into the more robust distributed system that it provides access to. But if you already have bitcoins and simply wish to spend them, Gox could get sucked into a blackhole and it wouldn't affect you any more than a raid on TBP affects your in-progress torrent downloads.
Is there a limit on the depth of comments here? I can't seem to reply to cjh_'s adjacent post. Anyway, he's correct that it's possible to keep all your coins on a Gox-hosted wallet. I kind of forgot that people actually do that. It's a really terrible way to store your coins, even if you use a more stable/trustworthy service than theirs.
There are much better ways to utilize the convenience of a web wallet without handing all your coins over to some sketchy website, such as blockchain.info's wallet system.
Yes and No.
You are right in that Mt.Gox doesn't handle 80% of all btc-btc trade.
However many use Mt.Gox as their wallet so the TPB analogy doesn't quite hold that far, as Mt.Gox being taken down would mean these people wouldn't have access to their BTC funds stored in that wallet.
I should have mentioned this in my original post, but I was sloppy.
At least some of these incidents appear to be actual DDoS attacks. It's true that Gox's trading engine sucks and is prone to lag during sudden spikes in activity, but many of these incidents have shut the whole service down very abruptly without any preceding increase in trading volume. Not to mention that they've released at least one Prolexic support ticket:
