Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin

If one other person will make an offer to round out the 70BTC, I can create a new BPM account and handle the distribution myself, returning the principal to Kevin and whomever else and sending the rest to SIAI.

Edited to point out: a higher bid will still win.

This doesn't completely clear up why bitcoin is useful for SIAI. Is SIAI planning on making expenditures with bitcoins? Or is it just that giving people more different ways of donating increases the average amount that they will give, and then SIAI can just sell bitcoins for US dollars when they need money?

That chart shows all sorts of technical indicators. Are any of those metrics design to give an indication of how likely it is for a currency to completely collapse, based on what can be gleaned from current performance?

EFF accepts donations in Bitcoin, so their lawyers must have decided that it's not clearly illegal or bad PR.

I'm not sure that follows. What's more, if people generally use that reasoning, and EFF is wrong (or lacked due diligence in such an estimation), then people will now be able to cite both SIAI's and EFF's actions when using such reasoning.

And then you have an information cascade, where everyone believes Bitcoin "must be okay", all based on an expert judgment that never existed.

Have any other cryptography experts published critiques of Bitcoin? I'd contribute to a fund to get Bruce Schneier to spend more time on this.

whereas it's much less clear what accepting donations in Bitcoin now buys SIAI.

More affiliation with the mastermind behind cryptocurrency. :)

Do you see any specific legal hazard for users that I don't?

There have been a few others discussed in this thread and in the other thread on Bitcoin. They include the argument that since individual users are making the currency they are counterfeiting (plausible legal argument), or that each individual is acting as a bank(weak), or that all users of Bitcoin together make up an organization for purposes of RICO (plausible). Since Bitcoin is not as centralized as e-coins it is much more plausible that a government response would go against actual users rather than any central organization. In any event, the primary problem for the SIAI would probably be the public status hit if there do end up being legal issues, not the actual legal complications.

Bitcoin is designed specifically so there is no central agency to prosecute. So who would the government go after aside from the users?

Furthermore, if SIAI is involved with Bitcoin and Bitcoin undergoes some sort of legal investigation, I speculate SIAI might as well just because the FBI thought that they looked interesting. This feels like it would be a Bad Thing.

It doesn't look like any e-gold users were prosecuted, or like the grounds for prosecuting the operators of e-gold would generalize.

The government's response to a currency or payment system that could be shut down by shutting down a single "point of failure" is not particularly informative for predicting its response to a payment system that does not have a single point of failure.

The government correctly perceives allowing the man in the street to transact business or earn money outside of the awareness and control of the regulated banking system to be a threat to its revenue stream and to be an enabler of crime and terrorism.

The government could if they wanted to go after individuals on counterfeiting charges. See also the remark by pjeby about banking laws (although as I said there, that seems hard to pin down). Unfortunately there are a large number of different federal laws about money and taxes, so it shouldn't be that hard to find some federal crime to use. There may also be ways of tying in RICO charges which could be potentially used to then prosecute anyone using Bitcoin based on the most illegal activity of anyone using Bitcoin (so murder for hire, drug running, kidnapping, etc. from anyone on the network could potentially result in charges for anyone on the network.) In general, when the feds want something to be illegal and it involves money, they'll find a way.

Why would the US government go after Bitcoin? Indicting the directors of e-gold was one of the greatest accomplishments of Bush's Department of Justice and hopefully we will never again see such an insane justice department.

The government generally frowns on alternative modes of currency that aren't in their power. They really aren't going to like a form that is essentially untraceable. Either one of those would be enough for the government to be unhappy with. I'm also pretty sure that e-gold was very low down on Justice's priority list during Bush, and it doesn't take an "insane justice department" just a government that wants to be able to track money, control the size of the money supply, and be able to effectively tax.

Also, there is no US entity to even prosecute, just an IRC channel to gain control of. Some cyberpunk future where the world governments are trying to hack Bitcoin is almost more likely than any of the users being sued for things for things other than committing crimes while happening to be using Bitcoin at the same time.

When confronted with a problem, do you first try to use your existing skills and powers to solve a problem or others? Now, what ability do federal prosecutors have that most of the world doesn't? (Hint:The correct answer is not "an army of skilled of hackers".)

Simplest attack: just make it illegal and prevent people from converting bitcoins into cash. If it isn't connected to the larger economy not many people will be interested in it.

What government attack vectors against Bitcoin do you deem most likely to work?

From Wikipedia:

In order to prevent double-spending, the network implements some kind of a distributed time server, using the idea of chained proofs of work. Therefore, the whole history of transactions has to be stored inside the database, and in order to reduce the size of this storage, a Merkle tree is used.

So I would transact the heck out of it and make the database huge. IIRC at the moment every user needs a full copy of the database of every transaction, so if the .gov can make a multi-terabyte database a requirement, that would knock it on the head quite hard.

Also, the last time I glanced at the source code it looked quite ropey, and that makes me think it will have lots of exploitable parts lurking for the right skilled people to find and attack.

poke

I could, but the signalling of accepting this deal seems bad since if you don't have $200 to spare right now it seems unlikely that you will have $49,000 within the next year. One HD 5870 definitely isn't enough to generate that many Bitcoins.

You would, I suspect, have to specify how many bitcoins you would be wiling to donate to the SIAI or to Kevin by way of compensation for the hardware. With a suitably cheap power supply available it is plausible that both you and Kevin could profit from such an arrangement.

Apparently that's old. The address currently on their website is https://blockchain.info/address/1BszW45pwXx7d7g4x9Xxbs9MGJEQcJsd3v although that hasn't received any coins yet.

Maybe the old one is fine too, but unless someone can shed light on why they changed from the old address, it's probably best not to send coins to it, although I'd hope if it had become unsafe they would have announced it loudly.

I am a bit confused. Why would this process need to be continually re-done? Once you have generated all the hashes of numbers less than 256 bits long, then you instantly (up to the speed of accessing the database entry) know a short preimage for every hash value.