Maand: augustus 2013

I have a question after a silly discussion.

We discussed for the best way for terrorists to get money. I have offered bitcoins. My question is: is it possible to trace who has cashed out bitcoins into money if you know the bitcoin wallet address.

I think it should be possible to trace, but how to trace such a thing?

NOTE: I’m just talking about cashing out bitcoin into money, not buying some cheap stuff.

I am switching from bitcoin-qt to Electrum, and it seems as if I will need to download the blockchain again. Can I copy and paste my wallet.dat into Electrum’s files?

Can a Bitcoin transaction have the same address for input and output, i.e. spend some of the coins that are linked to an address and send the rest back to that same address? Is there some reason why it is imprudent to do so?

I work as a volunteer for a tax exempt organization in the US. We are currently accepting donations in bitcoin but not issuing receipts for those donations. I would like to start issuing receipts. Is there any legal guidance available online about this? I haven’t been able to find anything.

I’m looking at the crypto street home page and the pairs are backwards when compared to other exchanges. It doesn’t appear to be a mistake because the prices are inverted compared to other exchanges – it just seems odd.

I’d like to buy bitcoins via SEPA deposit automatically with a recurring schedule. To specify this with an example, I would like to purchase bitcoins for 100 EUR each month, at the current market rate, without manual intervention. For this, I can set up a recurring payment at my bank to a SEPA bank account. The manual way to do this at Bitstamp would be:

• Start SEPA deposit at Bitstamp for 100 EUR.
• Make a bank transfer to the given account with the given message.
• Wait for funds to appear at Bitstamp.
• Use instant order to purchase bitcoin for 100 EUR (converted to dollars).
• Wait for the transaction to complete (may take days if market fluctuates).
• Withdraw bitcoin from Bitstamp to a given address.

I am not bound to a single exchange, any one of them will do as long as they roughly follow the current market. I am not afraid to run a server, or to create my own program using an API to do this. However, I am not willing to use screen scraping, because I would wish for this to run with minimal intervention and such an approach would seem too error prone. I am also obviously not able to affect my bank, so the best I can do is to have a recurring payment with a fixed message/reference number each month.

Is there an exchange or combination of services that will let achieve the above automatically?

I am interested in the possible use of the Bitcoin (or other altcoin) blockchain as a generalized distributed ledger, meaning that it is useful for tracking information other than coin transactions proper. A prerequisite for that would seem to be the ability to pay for transactions whose primary purpose is not moving Bitcoins from one address to another. So, can Bitcoin transactions list no outputs, thus leaving all inputs as a transaction fee reward for the miner?