British Programmer living in Andorra

http://uk.flightaware.com/account/join/ Come on guys.  I’d expect better than this!

Following on from my post about BitCoin Banks I suggest some developers with banking security-level experience start a project to develop software whereby Banks can build systems to handle BitCoin.   Maybe a donation from one of the many publicly-owned banks of the base source code could be made to ensure the demise of banks as we know them today, as a little thank you and payback for comprehensively ruining the world economy. An Open Source project such as this would be very profitable for its developers as premium services can features are usually part of the project such as this.  It would be run very similarly to the Open SSL project. So this would be an open source project to provide the storage, transmission and manipulation, control of Bitcoin by any institution e.g. a bank, or one of the new generation of BitCoin banks that I envisage will be starting up. It will have  routines to perform the process above which would be Open Source and will b...

For the purposes of this post I will refer to Bitcoin as an example of all crypto-currencies as Bitcoin was the original, but the following applies to all derivatives of it. I have just been reading about the failed bitcoin exchange  Mt. Gox   and a bank called  Flexicoin  Bank, it was robbed and has gone bust and it occurred to me that it would be interesting for a large commercial bank to start a Bitcoin operation, probably as a separate entity. My reasoning is thus:  Since Mt. Gox and Flexicoin simply didn’t have the resources to secure their systems in a manner sufficiently effectively to prevent the hacking, only people in Bank or similar companies that have track records for this kind of work can reasonably attempt it. They would be able to deploy the highest levels security, as their security team as part of their development team, which would be familiar with attempted hacks into the accounts and systems and would have the techn...

We moved to Andorra in the summer of 2011.  I'd bought a 1 year old Land Rover Discovery 3 car with left hand-drive the summer before, with the prior knowledge that I could import it into Andorra when we gained residency as it would be less than 3 years old (or certainly less than 5 which is a special exemption that they give to car owners that are changing their residency, even if things did drag on a bit...). I had the V5 Registration document, and the invoice from the dealer that I bought it from.  What could possibly go wrong? The car was 2nd hand, so there was no VAT to consider or claim back.  The price I got from the dealer was a good one, and I didn't want to buy new, as you can generally get a excellent car for a serious discount if you are prepared to have one with a couple of tens of thousands of kilometres on the clock. If you are bringing in a new car you should look at this blog  [update:JAN-17 now deleted but available via wayback machine; info...

Today’s post is a theoretical method of a way to reduce spam in email. An extension to the SMTP mail protocol that will allow transfer of a very small amount of Bitcoin in the message transmission process which would alleviate spam. Part 1: The Problem. To break this process down: 1)    We have email, which is transmitted “under-the-hood” by the SMTP protocol which is a transmission protocol, language if you like, communication standard between computers on the internet. 2)    We have spam, which is unsolicited email. We’re all familiar with this, various mail use drugs or millionaires from Nigeria who wish to send us millions of dollars, there’s various permutations, and it’s very annoying. You didn’t ask for it and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. 3)    Then we have Bitcoin which is a new crypto-currency which came out in 2009 and it’s a digital means of transmission of monetary funds. Again, it’s a fiat currency. L...