You say it's for research only, but at the end of your video you say the bitcoins in the address are "stolen".  You little comic shows your true intention of just stealing people's coins.  If you were going to do this, why would you announce it?  Wouldn't you just quietly steal all the bitcoins you could find?  It makes no sense. 

And then to top it off, if it really is for research, why wouldn't you just donate the knowledge to the development team to help fix the security hole that you're claiming exists?  You have the possibility of earning more money in donations from the community by providing a fix for what you're trying to prove is a security flaw.  Hell, I'd donate bitcoin to you if you were doing this for the good of the community.  But 2BTC for a copy... it makes no sense.  If it did what you say it does, and it could have very well be proven in the profanity-laced and almost tourettes-like video, why wouldn't you be charging more for it.  2BTC is chump change if this is legit.

Something doesn't add up.  Just my $0.02.

-Fuse

All horseshit aside, to clarify all of this:

It seems that any reused Bitcoin address is potentially vulnerable to attack because right now there is no way to know if it's close to a rendezvous point?

But addresses that haven't been reused are safe, but only because the public key for that address has not been broadcast yet?  As soon as the public key is broadcast by spending from an address it becomes vulnerable?

I've been noticing rumblings of this before from a privacy point of view, but it seems now we have even more reason to stop reusing addresses.

On re-use of addresses.

I can think of a few scenarios where one must re-use addresses.  Lets say for example Wikipedia decides to accept donations in Bitcoin.  They put up a donation address.  Should they generate a new donation address every time someone visits the donation link?  They probably should from a security point of view.  Seems inconvenient for donators that have saved the address in their address book. 

Our own Bitcoin Foundation re-uses its donation address as well.  https://blockchain.info/address/1BTCorgHwCg6u2YSAWKgS17qUad6kHmtQW There it is on blockchain.info 556 transactions at the time of this posting. Looks like address re-use to me. I wonder how many people who are either members or donators to the foundation tell people in the forums not to re-use addressess.

All of you who have an address in your signature for tips and such are also guilty of address re-use.  Basically any address that is publicly advertised for business/charity or what have you will be re-used.  This goes for all those that generated vanity addresses specifically to have a visually unique address for personal or business use.

If the solution is don't re-use addresses then this makes things inconvenient.  Does anyone really think that the masses are going to stick with one address per use?

Can someone tell me where I am going wrong here?  I can't see stopping address re-use as a solution to this potential threat.

I believe the first time a brute-forcer breaks a large bitcoin wallet he will inadvertently or by intent, also break Bitcoin and by extension crypto-currencies.  Confidence in this budding technology is already precarious.  Any notion that one's coins are insecure will not be met well by the masses.

These findings of weakness in the blockchain should be brought to the developers attention and we should be calling for some solution to this issue as soon as possible.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256


I, Greg Maxwell, do hereby promise to pay 50 BTC to the first person that
provides the discrete log of _any_ of the following randomly generated
200,000 secp256k1 public keys. This offer is open until 2014-04-01.

None of the below public keys have been used on the Bitcoin blockchain as
of the time of the creation of this offer.

04abb9239d3a5131de45b977807c62bf879119b05c3da33e37d8e7be0901985ce73b6ca6dff5b97 34d1225ce0120bbe023066669c29e23d3ea82de9a57dd259b63

Quoted. (is the april fools date intentional?)