This just in to add a little color to the picture:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-27/want-outperform-market-just-trade-alongside-sec

"In other words, in a market in which hedge funds have given up on shorting stock, the best outperformer is none other than the very entity that is supposed to regulate and root out illicit market activity!"

There is no suggestion that the SEC is any worse, and they are probably better, than
regulators in other countries. Just IMHO.

Regulation:

I'm going to refer back to a point made in the beginning of the blockchain - that insolvent
banks were going to be bailed out - for a second time. Regulation had failed, and bitcoin
was a way of telling governments that they should fix the problem. With hindsight,
there were plenty of regulations, the problems were with the regulators, and with
lobbying by special interests altering the regulations to weaken the public interest,
and to provide barriers to entry.

Bitcoin will continue to grow until governments provide sound money and that means
measurement and credibility.

The problem with regulators are that there are too few, they are often inexperienced
and too trusting of the banking industry, and inevitably when challenged by retail
investors, they are placed in a position of a) defending the industry and b) restricting
access to relevant information.

Add to that, the track record of all governments of suppressing alternatives to,
particularly, fiat money. Further, bureaucracies love problems. More problems mean
more resources, more pay, more prestige, more meetings, more free lunches, you
get the picture?

Currently, regulation seems to be proceeding on a presumption of guilt: that bitcoin
has to prove innocence before being allowed to function. That is contrary to the
basis for most law and a dangerous road to go down.

There are some things that bitcoin needs. Disclosures by exchanges and the same
transparency that the blockchain provides. Much of the regulation needed for
fiat currency is inapplicable for bitcoin because safeguards are already in place.
For example, there are no counterfeit bitcoin. Most important are discussions on
good practice, and participation by the community in highlighting bad practices.

It is worth pointing out that that efforts to regulate bitcoin to date have, in my
humble opinion, made things worse, increased risk, not better.

Apple owns your hard drive. I'd distinguish between between Apple and iTunes, that's just evil.

Just FYI, on checking the estimates I made when I ordered,
bitcoin difficulty is about three weeks behind where I expected it to be.

Preordering mining equipment is somewhat like betting on a horse
race - it isn't the time taken that is important, what matters is
the order in which they pass the finish line.

I signed up to intersango, when they still had a Sterling service, and had no problems transferring money from RBS/Ulsterbank.

That all stopped when Intersango's UK bank (Metro?) closed their account IIRC.

I still move money to and from Ulsterbank, but I have to use Euros, and that is somewhat inconvenient.

I'm of the view that the UK TBTF banks should have their lending rates forcibly reduced until they downsize.
Maybe then they will learn what customer care is.

Hmmm ... seems to be running @460MH/s on my 7970 now
all I did was to take commandline stuff out and put it in the cgminer.conf file
and reduced the lookup-gap to 1
Copy of cgminer.conf :
{"pools" : [ {"url" : "localhost:9432", "user" : "User", "pass" : "Pass"}],
"lookup-gap" : "1",
"thread-concurrency" : "8192",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

Setup: Debian|experimental fglrx etc ver 13.11-beta6 AMD64
wget https://litecoin.org/downloads/linux/litecoin-0.8.5.1-linux.tar.xz
wget -c www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd-catalyst-13.11-beta6-linux-x86.x86_64.zip
(this doesn't work for me because AMD's javascript wants a popup YMMV)
wget http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/3.1/cgminer-3.1.1.tar.bz2

Installed all ok, cgminer reports scrypt is enabled, ASIC stuff is disabled.

Everthing seems to work, including mining bitcoin on the GPU, until I try to mine Litecoin.
I finally got my cgminer.conf into sort of working after I figured out that it is VERY sensitive
to whitespace around the trailing "}], in the "pools" setting.

sometimes cgminer just throws a segmentation fault, but this is the latest output:
  [2013-11-20 15:19:51] Probing for an alive pool
 [2013-11-20 15:19:51] Network diff set to 1.31K
 [2013-11-20 15:19:51] No suitable long-poll found for http://localhost:9432
 [2013-11-20 15:19:52] Error -11: Building Program (clBuildProgram)
 [2013-11-20 15:19:52] "/tmp/OCLWKsBkw.cl", line 762: error: identifier "LOOKUP_GAP" is undefined
        const uint ySIZE = (1024/LOOKUP_GAP+(1024%LOOKUP_GAP>0));
                                 ^

"/tmp/OCLWKsBkw.cl", line 763: error: identifier "CONCURRENT_THREADS" is
          undefined
        const uint xSIZE = CONCURRENT_THREADS;
                           ^

2 errors detected in the compilation of "/tmp/OCLWKsBkw.cl".

Internal error: clc compiler invocation failed.

 [2013-11-20 15:19:52] Failed to init GPU thread 0, disabling device 0
 [2013-11-20 15:19:52] Restarting the GPU from the menu will not fix this.
 [2013-11-20 15:19:52] Try restarting cgminer.
Press enter to continue:

I will have another hack at this - any advice is welcomed.

I was on the site this am 20130510. All seemed ok until I placed a trade.
The system responded with a "disk full" message, hence I'd guess it
is down until they can get some maintenance done. YMMV.

I get the same response as the OP now.

*facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm*

There I was on the train north out of Dublin, listening to a girl about the age of my youngest complaining about not being able to change her Euros to Sterling on a Sunday night, and thinking how much easier these things would be if *everyone* used bitcoin, and thinking about how after Saturdays' meetup everything in the bitcoin world seemed to be in a good place. I didn't take the opportunity to talk to those kids about bitcoin because I'd offered to put bitcoin on my daughter's smartphone and her reaction was to wonder why her dad would want *any* connection with drugs. *sigh*

So last night when I read up on the various posts and read the Blazr link I was fuming. I've calmed down overnight, and had a think about whether I should post anything about what is *potentially* a major PR disaster for bitcoin, for the cops, for Ireland's exporting SME's, and for Ireland's tourist trade. ( these two threads have 6000+ reads potentially world-wide so it may be only a matter of time )

I can't speak for the Guards, or even for the local cops, but I would expect that there would be some who are into bitcoin and I'd guess their reaction will be *facepalm* ... FWIW I had some involvement with bulletin boards way back when, and cops were involved in that community. If you knew, you kept *schtum* for obvious reasons. The real issue here seems to be a  Judge who has never heard of Die Antwoord ... JIK ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw

I have other interests besides bitcoin, hence while I was in Dublin I bought a 100g high precision LCD scale. So check that. Carries bitcoin and fiat monies around. Check there too. Mining rig pushes up electricity intake and the heat signature of the house. Check there also.

I'm *entirely* legit, and no, the idea that I have nothing to hide and therefore would be content to have a body cavity search carried out on my person is a non-starter. I've had that done by an attractive young lady on the national health and ... for the curious I might explain everything at our next meeting.

 *sigh* I'll say it again. The cops I've met are decent hardworking guys and girls trying to do their best for their communities. I'd read that the Bitcoin Foundation would be supportive of local chapters. Until now I thought that layer of bureaucracy was more trouble than it was worth.

*facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm*

Regards to all, and thanks for the chance to meet - we covered a lot of ground in a couple of hours.

That link about Blazr - bizzare - there has to be something seriously wrong about that.

April 27th at the Bull & Castle, Lord Edward Street: 4pm.  PGP signing. Anthing else I should know?

I'm planning on being there ...

Elvizzzzzzz

It was good to meet a fellow bitcoiner, we managed to cover a lot of topics very quickly,
and I discovered that there were different 'styles' of bitcoining.

I attended several shows over the next few days, but the format never really offered the
opportunity to pitch bitcoin there as a solution to problems. Where I had the opportunity to
mention bitcoin in one on one situatons I found that either there was no curiousity re that
area, or I found myself putting together a five minute explanation of bitcoin - usually
referred to as the "elevator pitch." 

There is a huge gap between that pitch and explanations of fiat currencies, privacy, and
legal issues such as censorship, all of which might be needed to encourage the wider
use of bitcoin for events like Kilkenomics.

Borrowing from Dr Michael Hudson, if you find that anything you might have done would have
produced a worse outcome, you have reached an optimal solution. 

Looking at the programme of events, Saturday seems quite full, Sunday is probably too late, Thursday may be too early, so Friday seems the best option. 

The first show on Friday kicks off at the Ormonde Hotel at 6pm.

I'm suggesting a meeting at 5pm in the Ormonde Hotel reception area.
(Saturday morning seems the next best alternative.)

If thousands indicate they may turn up, we'll have to tweak that a little ;-)

I'm thinking of buying an ASIC single. I'd probably do so today if I could find a use for the unit outside of mining for bitcoin, however, BFL's website seems to suggest that these things will never run opencl.

Just BTW, I'm more interested in getting a function like parcellfun to run faster than in cracking passwords.

So, if you know of any asic's that are developing for opencl, I'm all ears.

Otherwise, it just seems like too much risk at the moment.

I'd guess the festival organisers have invested lots of time and reputation to convince the local Kilkenny retailers to accept the Marble. In their shoes, I would not put that at risk by introducing somenting new, and to them, perhaps unknown.

The New Mexico Tea Company has several posts on the Trading Discussions Form explaining the problems and risks retailers may face when adding Bitcoin commerce to their business. Their views may help with your preparations for your legwork. 

The www.kilkenomics.com website has been updated with this years program details etc.

Seems that the dates have reduced to Thursday 1st through Sunday 4th November, with most activity on the Friday and Saturday.

I'd asked about Bitcoin, but no response yet on that.

If anyone is interested in modelling a Bitcoin economy, maybe some kind of workshop, let me know.

Just FYI - I now have bfgminer-2.7.5 as an amd64 debian package that runs on sid,
(no problems apart from something weird with patch not liking a filename)
and am working through the variables. The fan speed control works fine with my 7970,
which I need, but gpu-vddc will not alter the voltage (no big deal).

My thanks should be with you by now :-)

Thanks for the reply. That's what I guessed, it was the Debian-Ubuntu thing that caused my confusion.
FWIW the current version of eglibc on Debian|unstable is glibc_13

Hi all,

RE : Debian versions of bfgminer

I tried running bfgminer_2.6.4 on the current sid (unstable) debian distribution.
It failed with the message that GLIBC_15 not found.

I searched, but no definitive answers so far, hence before I do something stupid,
I thought I should ask.

I need something similar to bfgminer for its fan speed control BTW.

The programme will run from Wednesday Oct 31st to November 4th
The full programme details will be online "before the end of September"