user2029: I'm interested in setting up a P2Pool node (which requires running bitcoind) to run a little mining pool for myself. Before you ask, nope I'm not even trying to break even, I know I'll lose money on this. Just want to play around and get a feel for how these things work.
My question is: I hear over and over again that it's important to take security precautions with bitcoind and wallets, but I've had trouble teasing out exactly what those security precautions are. If I have bitcoind not accepting RPC calls (as is the default), is there any danger to using the out-of-the-box unencrypted wallet?
If the information helps, I'll probably run the node in EC2, and have a cron job that frequently transfers any bitcoins earned through mining into an account in an exchange so I can play around with that side of things as well (so I'm not worried about large sums of bitcoin building up in my bitcoind wallet).

user23123: Turning off RPC will prevent that particular attack vector, but if the coins are on a machine connected to the internet, that's a lot of vulnerabilities and attack vectors to consider.
That said, if you're running a node on EC2, you're not going to generate enough bitcoins to be worth stealing. If the point is to figure out how everything works, I wouldn't worry about the bitcoins you'll be mining since it'll be so little (at most $10 per year).

2029: <p>I'm interested in setting up a <a href="http://p2pool.org/" rel="nofollow">P2Pool node</a> (which requires running <code>bitcoind</code>) to run a little mining pool for myself. Before you ask, nope I'm not even trying to break even, I know I'll lose money on this. Just want to play around and get a feel for how these things work.</p>

<p>My question is: I hear over and over again that it's important to take security precautions with <code>bitcoind</code> and wallets, but I've had trouble teasing out exactly what those security precautions are. If I have <code>bitcoind</code> not accepting RPC calls (as is the default), is there any danger to using the out-of-the-box unencrypted wallet?</p>

<p>If the information helps, I'll probably run the node in EC2, and have a cron job that frequently transfers any bitcoins earned through mining into an account in an exchange so I can play around with that side of things as well (so I'm not worried about large sums of bitcoin building up in my <code>bitcoind</code> wallet).</p>
 23123: <p>Turning off RPC will prevent that particular attack vector, but if the coins are on a machine connected to the internet, that's a lot of vulnerabilities and attack vectors to consider.</p>

<p>That said, if you're running a node on EC2, you're not going to generate enough bitcoins to be worth stealing. If the point is to figure out how everything works, I wouldn't worry about the bitcoins you'll be mining since it'll be so little (at most $10 per year).</p>
