Silk Road forums

The exchange rate of bitcoins has nothing to do with mining difficulty. It is based on supply and demand. On trading platforms like MtGox, people post buy and sell orders at various prices. Let's say that BTC are currently trading for 15 USD. If a bunch of buy orders come in, then all the BTC at 15 USD will be bought up, so the next buyers will have to get BTC that are posted for 15.50 USD, then 16 USD and so on.

Conversely, if more people are trying to sell BTC than buy them, then sellers will have to post orders at decreasing prices in USD to get them sold (they are in effect competing to sell their BTC, so naturally the price will go down).

Take a look at http://mtgoxlive.com/orders

The diagonal lines indicate how many BTC will have to be bought or sold to move the exchange rate to that point. You'll notice some vertical jumps around the whole dollar marks. That's human psychology at work in the market. People are more likely to post a sell order at a round number like 20 USD, although plenty of people post sell orders at intermediate prices.

Based on all buy and sell orders, they know exactly how much BTC will have to be bought (or how much USD will have to be "bought" by selling BTC) in order to move the exchange rate to any point.

Wright et al. found that they could recover a bit here and a bit there but not enough contiguous bits to salvage any useful data.

Does the NSA have some advanced technology not available to civilians? Maybe, but do you think LE will be shipping your hard drive to the NSA? They have bigger fish to fry.

Is there a way to install the tor bundle into Liberte?

It's portable. You can extract the archive anywhere, including Liberte's persistent volume.

I was under the impression that using the tor bundle on your normal pc will leave traces of the sites you have been visiting. Is this true?

Only if you save bookmarks or passwords. Those will be written to files on the disk. Otherwise, it doesn't write to a cache on a disk during normal browsing. That would be a huge privacy leak. All browsing data is stored in RAM and discarded when TBB shuts down.

I don't understand.  What's the advantage to this, other than flooding the Tor network with even more packets...?

The network is only carrying about 60% of its advertised capacity:

https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.png

Encrypting the data seems to be the rate-limiting step.

That being said, the more users there are, the more diverse they are, and the more diverse the traffic, the safer and more anonymous everyone is. Bitcoin clients only download and upload about 100 MB a day (although that depends on how many connections they maintain), so this isn't like bittorrent traffic.

Just tunnel bitcoind through your Tor program and let it operate as usual: I'm not aware of anything an exit node can do that would harm you even when you're going through one to get to the next bitcoin node?

That's true, there's really no advantage to connecting to a hidden service as opposed to a regular bitcoin node over Tor, and the connections tend to be much spottier.

Bitcoin nodes only maintain 8 active connections.  I don't see how it's helpful to have other nodes trying to make incoming connections, when you can just make your 8 as outgoing and would start blocking the incoming ones regardless...?

You can specify however many connections you want in bitcoin.conf:

maxconnections=N

You can even specify the nodes you want to connect to (that's how connecting to onion addresses works, actually, you have to tell Tor to map private IP addresses to onion domains using the mapaddress feature and then tell bitcoin-qt to connect to those IP addresses).

Anyway, I don't think there's a distinction between incoming and outgoing connections.

In the meantime, you can visit the following sites (THROUGH TOR!)

  On GPG4Win (for windows users)

GPG4Win can be buggy and a lot of people have problems with it.

A lot of us who spend time in the Security forum highly recommend GPG4USB.

There's a tutorial on how to use it linked in my signature.

There's a fundamental contradiction between these statements:

i want the extra measure of security

Which is the most user firendly?

Sorry, but security is hard. If you want strong security, it won't be easy. You'll need to learn programs and possibly operating systems that you've never used before, and that might be twice as hard if you're a computer newb in general.

I see these demands all the time. People want strong security but make it easy. They want bitcoins that are fast, cheap, and anonymous. You can't have the world.

You need to pick a level of security that you are comfortable using and/or smart or dedicated enough to learn. Here's how I would break it down:

No Security: You use TBB and PGP on an unencrypted hard drive. Everything you do can be discovered by an adversary.

Low Security: All sensitive files are stored on an encrypted thumb drive, partition, or some other volume. This is low because the contents of such volumes can be leaked onto the unencrypted parts of the hard drive. For example, if you are a vendor who stores info in MyDrugClients.txt and you open that file in Notepad, the path and file name will be stored in the Recent Documents list. An adversary can discover the kinds of info stored on the encrypted volume and that alone can get you in trouble. The other problem is that you are still using the malware and shit infested Windows operating system. Microsoft cooperates with LE and even provides tools for forensic analysis of its OS. Your next KB134235325 proprietary binary blob update could be spyware pushed to your computer on behalf of LE.

Medium Security: A portable Linux distro like Tails or Liberte. Better, because they are open source, the developers don't work for a corporation that bows to government pressure, and they use isolated encrypted volumes that don't leak data. The trade off is that you get a lot of little annoyances with the weird filesystem layout, installing applications beyond the defaults that come with the distro can be a pain even for a seasoned Linux user (read the recent thread about getting bitcoin-qt runnin on Tails), and constantly having to reboot between sessions.

High Security: A Linux distro installed on the main hard drive with FDE. It offers the highest security because nothing about your computer can be known to an adversary except the kernel used to boot the system. They can't even prove the computer belongs to you if you purchased it with cash from a Craigslist seller. The main trade off is that this is the costliest option, because you need to dedicate a computer full time for this purpose. If you are wedded to your current OS, you'll need to buy a second computer, which can cost over $100 even for a used one.


Broadly speaking, those are your options. You have to choose how much time, money, effort, and brain cells you are willing to spend on your security.

A new post on the Tor Blog says that they are going to add the PDF.js extension to TBB next month, allowing users to read PDFs in the browser.

 https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-firefox-17-and-tor-alpha-bundles

Apparently they are confident that they can make this safe and prevent links from going over clearnet since the extension is contained within TorBrowser. That should make the building of disposable VMs for reading PDFs obsolete.