[tripzilch]

So, how about if you could have a Linux boot image onna stick, properly secured, no Java, several BitCoin apps preinstalled and optimized to boot extremely quickly into what would basically be a sort of BitCoin Wallet dashboard interface.

You could plug in the USB, hibernate, flip the switch and be Bitcoin banking within seconds. Then unhibernate and get on with whatever you were doing on your day-to-day OS.

That way it can be completely separate from whatever risky, dangerous and/or irresponsible things you do on a regular basis with your computer--things that seemingly are worth the risk as long as they don't directly give attackers access to thousands of $$$ digital cash.

Question, I'm making a rough guess that a realistic speed-optimized fast boot-time for a Linux OS that doesn't need to do much is in the order of five seconds, is that about right? Also, I'm not 100% sure if that hibernation trick is actually possible, I've never really seen it on multi-boot systems and I wonder why, but from what I understand about hibernation (RAM gets saved to HD, restored next boot) the components are there?

And, make it look unlike any other OS, to make users instantly aware if they're operating on their banking/money "inside the stick" or "out in the open" (on the regular OS). For instance, a glowy green CRT terminal filter.

[steveklabnik]

    > So, how about if you could have a Linux boot image onna stick, properly
    > secured, no Java, several BitCoin apps preinstalled and optimized to boot
    > extremely quickly into what would basically be a sort of BitCoin Wallet
    > dashboard interface.  You could plug in the USB, hibernate, flip the switch
    > and be Bitcoin banking within seconds. Then unhibernate and get on with
    > whatever you were doing on your day-to-day OS.
    > 
    > That way it can be completely separate from whatever risky, dangerous and/or
    > irresponsible things you do on a regular basis with your computer--things
    > that seemingly are worth the risk as long as they don't directly give
    > attackers access to thousands of $$$ digital cash.

Bitcoin: a currency for regular, everyday exchange.

[kragen]

I think it's clear to everyone that current desktop systems (Windows, but also Linux and MacOS) are not up to the task of securing thousands of dollars of transferable digital currency. Bitcoin depends on you running a secure computing environment. This could be an opportunity for emerging platforms like http://qubes-os.org/.

[tripzilch]

> Bitcoin: a currency for regular, everyday exchange.

Heh. But now I wonder how our banks do it.

Over here, and this is different than the credit cards you use in the US, you can log on to your bank account, and transfer money to anyone (within the EU, afaik) with no transaction costs (at least within the country, afaik). The same mechanism goes for online shopping. It's safe because it uses 2-factor authentication (you log on with a password, but need to get an SMS text with a special code to make transactions) and somehow people manage to not fuck this up and get hacked out of $8000--oh I'm sure it happened, but nobody's dumb enough to blame the currency/exchange system, there.

[ConceitedCode]

The biggest issue I see would be updating the block chain for the wallet between uses. Seems like it takes longer and longer to update. Moved my wallet to a new computer last night and it's been going for the last 5 hours.

[pilgrim689]

A workaround: the device you connect to has a bitcoin client running just to keep the block chain up to date. The USB key, upon connecting, syncs that block chain with the one stored on the key. When you connect to a new device, the block chain from the key is synced onto that new device. Depending on how often you switch device / how often you use the key, this might or might not be a useful workaround :P.

[nwh]

Even synching the block chain that is a few hours old is irritating, days or weeks old would be a nightmare.

[cookiecaper]

If you download the blockchain from the P2P wallet client it always takes forever. You should download the blockchain once, put it on a USB drive, and then copy it into .bitcoin before you bootstrap a new machine with a wallet.

There are also sites that offer downloads of tar'd versions of the blockchain, or torrents. Pretty much anything is going to be faster than downloading via a bitcoin client.

[tripzilch]

This thread appears to have a download/torrent for a recent version of the blockchain data. It's about 4.7GB, apparently.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

So does that mean if you're not using BC via a wallet service, it requires at least 4.7GB of disk space in order to do its thing? How is this amount of data expected to grow in the future?

[lmm]

It's going to grow hugely (at least as long as punters keep using bitcoin); there's an expectation that clients will switch away from using the full history sooner or later, and there are mechanisms prepared for remaining reasonably secure with shorter histories.

[sliverstorm]

Hah, so eventually only a few people like central power figures in the bitcoin community will be running with the full blockchain eh? Probably my favorite thing about bitcoin is how, despite its explicit goals, the more adoption it sees the more it looks like it will turn into the same old thing we already have.

[lmm]

I remember a friend making a similar comment about EVE online: you set people loose in this anarchistic, libertarian blank state, give them a few years, and... turns out they'll band together into gangs with leaders, that develop into communities with formal governance processes; neighbours helping each other out grows into insurance syndicates....

We've already seen people wanting an authority to compensate them when their bitcoins are stolen; bitcoins are meant to behave like cash, but an FDICed bank account is much more useful than cash for most people. That said, as long as the full feed remains open to anyone who has the spare compute power/disk space and wants to connect up to it, there's still a big difference from the existing financial system.

[nwh]

That's not even a large portion of the blockchain anymore. The full thing is 7GB now, and most of the large transactions are in the very recent bit.

[unreal37]

Nothing possibly could go wrong downloading the blockchain from a torrent site....

[Groxx]

This is basically true, actually. It'll either work or it won't, and you're just out of the bandwidth if it fails verification. At the absolute worst, you won't be able to accept any blocks from the network as a whole if it's fake, because the hashes won't line up. IIRC the official client (and most others) also include a hard-coded hash part way through the chain to help ensure you're on the correct one up to that point.

That's of course assuming there isn't some exploit in your client, due to e.g. unsafe reading of the file that could allow it to execute arbitrary code hidden in the blockchain file.

[tripzilch]

According to the thread I linked above, the software verifies the data during import.

[psionski]

Blockchain.info wallets are pretty nice, they do client-side encryption with separate log-in and spending passwords (so your private key is encrypted inside an encrypted .json file and the first password decrypts only the outer layer).

You also get email (or dropbox or file download) backups that you can use in other Bitcoin clients in case something bad happens to blockchain.info.

[jerf]

"Also, I'm not 100% sure if that hibernation trick is actually possible, I've never really seen it on multi-boot systems and I wonder why, but from what I understand about hibernation (RAM gets saved to HD, restored next boot) the components are there?"

It is possible, I've done it. If you're on a multi-boot system with Linux and Windows, you can freely hibernate either and boot into the other, as long as they completely don't touch each other. Neither can even mount the disk images of the other, let alone start changing things, or you face effectively-guaranteed corruption. Be careful with shared SD cards too. (I had it so Linux would never auto-mount those anyhow, so it was OK.)

The biggest objection I'd have to your plan is mostly that you'd also need some sort of backup plan, I don't think USB sticks are generally designed to store thousands of dollars' worth of stuff on them.

[tripzilch]

That's really cool. Any particular software or packages you used to achieve this?

Also, while it may be a bit of a detour for your data, using DropBox you can at least work on the same files without too much hassle--although... you're going to get the "conflicted copy" stuff if you don't wait until everything is synced up. And if you have to wait, that defeats the purpose of having a seconds-quick OS-switch hibernating trick. How about if they share a local network drive?

> The biggest objection I'd have to your plan is mostly that you'd also need some sort of backup plan, I don't think USB sticks are generally designed to store thousands of dollars' worth of stuff on them.

Good point. How big is the "valuable" part of BCs data? As long as you don't need to work with it, you can store it anywhere, encrypted.

[DanBC]

ASUS EEE PC had a 5 second Fedora boot in 2008. This was with an SSD; into a graphical desktop with disk and cpu idle; network manager was ready but the network wasn't up.

(https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/)

As for looks - desktop wallpaper with instructions and big red borders.