Wow thanks, I do still have access to it.  You should never delete a wallet, even if you've spent what was 'in' it.
I appreciate the donations, but nobody owes me anything.. I generated my share and I spent it, it was just at a time when the value was lower, but so was the generation difficulty, and the block reward was 50.

Laszlo

Thanks for the kind words guys.

The pizza thing was a lot more popular than I thought so I made good on as many trades as I could.  Other than a little bit of single digit change, I spent everything I mined.  As you all know, the difficulty rises to adjust to hashing power, so eventually the mining wasn't worth it for me.


As far as I know I was the first to release a GPU miner.  I contributed the hash meter back then too, that's what the screen shot was all about.  I used to maintain the Mac OS builds but others have taken that up now.  It was a fun project and I learned all about OpenCL.  I can't find the thread on the forum anymore but you can find it in my web dir ( http://eclipse.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/sha256.cl ).  That was back in May 2010.  Maybe there were other people who were doing it in private too, though.  For a long time I had been looking for a reason to learn how to write a shader, and this was a great project for it.  The way I looked at it, I was helping out with an open source project, and I was making pizza with my code.

You guys will laugh now but I mined everything with an nvidia 9800 GTX+ on Mac OS (hackintosh, another scene I used to help out in).  I ended up getting 2 AMD Radeon 5970s with the bitcoins I was mining, but at the time, the OpenCL libraries from AMD and nvidia both were really buggy and I never got it to work right on more than one GPU.  The same code that would work on the nvidia on linux wouldn't work on windows and vice versa.  I was trying to make a generic OpenCL miner that everyone could run on all 3 platforms, and I spent months tweaking different kernels for each GPU, but I was also working two jobs at the time and so I never finished it.  I ended up just leaving bitcoin on the back burner for a few years, then it exploded and people started asking me about the pizza trades.  Every time the value goes up on exchanges, people email me asking me to comment on it, but really there isn't much more to tell than what I explained here.

This is the old GPU mining release I made for Mac OS, probably won't work anymore though: http://eclipse.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/Bitcoin-MacOSX-Intel-svn-75-opencl-2010-05-10.dmg

Pics are still in the same location for anyone interested.  I didn't trade bitcoins for the child - she's my daughter, Amy.  Only the pizza was traded.

http://eclipse.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/

I heard from one person who bought a house with their pizza bitcoins, indirectly, by trading it for cash first.  Apparently it was a lot of hassle with the bank due to AML and just their general distaste for currencies they don't control.  I wish I could say I did the same, but the pizza didn't appreciate the same way as the bitcoins

At the time, Gavin had a bitcoin 'faucet' that gave out bitcoins for free, and a few people were trading them for less than a cent each, but nothing serious.  You can probably find all the old posts on this forum still.  I was learning OpenCL programming and mining bitcoins with a video card so the pizza was a good deal for me.  I couldn't have known that my pizza trade would end up being such a big deal, or that so many others would become interested in bitcoin and thus drive the value up.  The people I traded with didn't know it was going to explode either, they just took a risk - spending their 'real' money to buy some guy pizza in exchange for some internet Monopoly money. 

Laszlo

I spent it all on pizza long ago:  https://blockchain.info/address/1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4

3-4 years ago there were less than 100 people frequenting this forum, and I was pretty happy to trade 10,000 coins for pizza.  I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time.  I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.

Laszlo

You should check out ntp.org if you're interested in accurate time keeping.  The built in windows time sync will not adjust your clock if it's more than a few minutes off and you have to bring it within tolerance by hand first.  A better choice is to use the NTP daemon and start it with the -g option which allows it to make a large adjustment at startup.

No, it wouldn't make much difference if the IRC network was compromised.

It is just used to get a list of hostnames to try to connect to, but you only need to connect to one real node in order to be able to receive the majority block chain.  It is just one of many methods used to find other nodes - the address messages broadcast on the bitcoin network are the primary means, and once you've been connected to the network the client keeps a local cache of the addresses it has seen.  The ones it sees on IRC are just added to the list.

Just so everyone understands..

* LFnet IRC network is primarily used for bitcoin - a few others and I maintain it and we're all bitcoin users. 

* I am a regular bitcoin contributor.  I'm also the guy that bought the 10,000 bitcoin pizza in case anyone is wondering.  I'm a moderator on this forum, I maintain the Mac OS build and I wrote the original GPU miner (http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/opencl-v2-svn-95-2010-06-30.patch)  - I hope that's enough credentials to prove to anyone that I'm not some BOFH IRC admin

* We will make sure the #bitcoinXX channels are not 'taken over' or anything like that.

* The IRC servers have been configured to limit the number of records returned when a client joins #bitcoin and issues a WHO request.  This greatly reduced the bandwidth and memory requirements.

* We use and monitor IRC and will keep an eye on the #bitcoinXX channels.  The channel modes will be locked to a reasonable normal setting like #bitcoin is today.

I would like to add an option/preference to disable IRC in the client.  It should be on by default, since that's the whole point, to bootstrap new users, but then the user should be able to switch it off.  There will still be plenty of people who leave it on to provide booting to others, but not everyone needs to do that; especially if you don't have the inbound port open.

I also think that alternative bootstrap methods are a good idea, but it should be possible to switch it all off once you're connected to the network.

Thanks,
Laszlo

Hmm I can't reproduce the problem on my 10.5.8 machine..

the output of 'otool -L' produces this for me:



I think otool is from the development tools but this shows all the dependencies.  All of those are standard frameworks that are part of a base install as far as I know.  The graphics dependencies and other odd looking things are brought in by wx-widgets which can be built with support for those.  They could probably be hacked out, but since those are part of the standard footprint on that OS, they don't add any external dependencies.

Laszlo

So at this point, would a client that has not upgraded also have the correct chain?

No sorry I don't have any of those for sale.

If someone takes the ip address method to the next level it really should be changed to provide some kind of security, like agree on a password/address or something ahead of time.  Sending to an address and creating the key automatically provides no authentication and there's no recourse if it went to the wrong place; the intended receiver is unaware you even tried to send anything.  It is trivial to proxy it and MITM that kind of activity and with the value of bitcoins rising it might just be worth doing eventually.

I consider the ip address sending a local testing feature more than a production level feature in the way it is currently implemented.  One possibility that could work is if the receiver provided a public key (address) to you first and you used a combination of internet address and public key.  It is not as convenient but the alternative is to just send it to the ether and hope nobody grabs it before it gets to your target.  If anyone has used liberty reserve or something similar you know it is certainly not convenient to log into and such, but when it comes down to a choice of losing your money or dealing with an inconvenience I think most people would prefer the latter.

Great idea, thank you for providing this exchange service.

It's been a while since I posted this.. I will sell it for 900 BTC OBO.  If nobody is interested I'll just put it on ebay or something.  I have more stuff like this for sale I might try posting too.

Well I didn't expect this to be so popular but I can't really afford to keep doing it since I can't generate thousands of coins a day anymore   Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already but I'm kind of holding off on doing any more of these for now.

Sorry I've been kind of MIA lately.. I will try to look into these problems, thanks for the detailed information.  I think it would be nice to enable the Command-H method of hiding the app.. the tray thing probably doesn't make much sense for Mac OS.

All of the actual network protocol messages will have to have the values byte swapped where appropriate and the number handling functions, etc.  It's probably not worth it for the mediocre hashing performance you would get from a sparc.. it looked like a lot of work when I tried to do it for PPC.

The Quicktime message is because it's 32 bit only but it isn't used anyway, it's just linked in by wxWidgets.  I believe if you disable the 'media control' features with configure it won't link them in, but I don't know off the top of my head what the right options for that are.  I noticed that even disabling the 'debug_flag' with configure, the latest svn of wxWidgets still pops up the assertions.  I'm not sure how to disable it completely, maybe I'll dig around in the wxWidgets code.  The 2.9 release of wxWidgets doesn't look very good on mac for me, so I used the latest from their svn.  They are doing a ton of work rewriting it with Cocoa.

If you're using another JSON-RPC client that you wrote you can take care to protect the password, but using the bitcoin binary as the client and passing the password on the command line has the same issue as starting the daemon with it.  It's still visible to every user that way.

So both the server and the client mode invocation need to use the file and not accept the password on the command line.  Generally programs like this refuse to start if the mode on the file isn't 600 or something like that, because that means other users can read it.