BFL please give josh a raise a quickly as possible. Because this is awesome.

payments have always been... iffy at best. sometimes they work for awhile and other times nothing. Manual payouts have never worked for me. I stopped mining here long ago due to the inability of the pool op to keep the hotwallet filled.

I'm not sure it's malicious in nature, my suspicion is that he's been borrowing from the earning to buy hardware... and has gotten screwed due to increased difficulty. Easy mistake to make with avalon and asicminers flying around at such inflated prices... but highly unethical to borrow such funds from pool users.

I wouldn't say it's all that drastic... but this forum is known for being cynical. Insisting that a software vendor use escrow is laughable. On the other hand, there are plenty of trusted members or mods who wouldn't mind verifying that your code is clean and works once compiled.

I for example would offer to take your code & binaries... verify that it does what it says (and only that) and then post results (including checksums of the compiled binaries to reassure users who can't read code). Assuming it checks out and is legit... I would then pay your standard rate for the software+source... since I would like a copy of for my personal use.

But if you don't want to use me for that - there are dozens of others who would perform such a service for you.

Everyone says that miners contribute 'such a small amount of btc' that it doesn't affect btc prices but I'm a miner - and I notice patterns. I tend to sell my btc (hey gotta pay electric bills!) on the third tues or wed of each month. That's the only time I sell... It's when I am able to the most (on average) for the entire month.

As asic tech becomes more available we are going to see the price crash - no sane miner is going to sit on BTC made in a short period of time when he can sell it and recoup it's purchase cost. Since difficulty is a reactive process... we'll see ~2 weeks of coins entering the wallets of miners in a shorter timeframe. This will have a negative effect on price. But only in the short term. Once the miner has 'ROI' he'll revert to only selling the coins he needs to pay electric and saving the rest... or spending them to buy goods and services in the bitcoin economy.

That being said: If miners have an effect on price... then I wouldn't expect it to vanish ever. This is what we mean when we talk about 'adoption' there must at some point be enough transaction fees to replace and exceed the block reward (it may not happen during this block reward, but I'd expect it at after the halving and before the next one). If this doesn't happen then bitcoin will fail. Miners secure the network and if the economic incentive to do so vanishes so will most of the miners - reducing the security of the network and eventually leading to the failure of bitcoin. I would expect it to grow over time as velocity increases and more and more transaction fees are packed into each block.

~

As for adoption, I think we're in solid with the black market and organized crime... at this point all we need is porn to adopt it as a primary payment method and that will be all it takes. IMO grow the mainstream as much as we're able - but don't forget that porn should be the market we chase. It's been responsible for the so many technical advances and tends to carry them from 'geeky' to 'mainstream' in a very short time period.

That's why I got mine - as a "here's something to help you get started" xmas gift for all the cousins 

I think you missed the boat...

https://products.butterflylabs.com/fpga-upgrade-trade-in-for-bf0025g.html

That's one way to do it.

Another is to replace existing gpus with these (aka sell gpus that already earned themselves out) use the profit from that to buy usb devices. Net effect - keep your hashrate - lose most of the electric cost. That's what I've done. Sure they're overpriced if I were using them to grow my farm but replacing gpus means these earn themselves out in a ~3 months based on power costs.

I guess we could try to find out if he's mining litecoin or not.

From the website I can't tell if it's an actual visa prepaid card or something else. If it's legitimate visa I might be able to help you out with that. I'd want at least a 11% markup on converting it to btc tho.

another avalon product... just what we needed more 'new' but already outdated tech.

 

Just watching and waiting...

first of all let me say this. scrypt coins are a suckers bet in the long term. no digital process can be designed that cannot be completed faster/better/cheaper on customer hardware. Once prices rise on to an attractive point - someone's going to get around to making an asic or fpga and the entire alt-coin goes tits up.

That being said: If you're mining ltc - you shouldn't be buying more of it. Either hold it as an 'investment' (which is moronic imo) or sell it for btc as fast as you mine it. It's going nowhere long term and well fail completely if it ever becomes worth anything or ( once bitcoin is mostly asic based) the bitcoin devs get around to shortening the block generation time (and this has to happen to make bitcoin usable for POS applications in the real world).

I think most of the advice is off on completely the wrong track. Instead of trying to fit your idea into the existing framework of "how to make money" why don't you fit it into a different framework where you make more money off everyone being able to use your idea and/or service.

If you're having trouble finding the path to profit off your idea... maybe it isn't a great idea... or maybe you just lack business experience. Either way - at some point you're going to have to trust someone or you'll end up doing all the work yourself.

That's the right way to go about it.

encrypt the wallet.dat - then encrypt the file with 3rd party encryption software and that can go to online storage.

If he does - this might be the best trolling we've yet soon on bitcointalk.org.

I vote troll 

Granted - but the problem with all security software is... it doesn't catch new stuff... first the virus has to be documented and a definition distributed for it... before the AV software is able to prevent an infection.

Just an example:

In the past 6 months there's been a FBI virus going around - it took all of 2 weeks to get a good def written and now all major AVs block it. About a week after that, the makers changed the methods used and updated it say DOJ instead of FBI... that one took almost a month to define and about 2 weeks later they pushed a new version (changed DOJ to ICE). And there still isn't a good removal method for that one.

fbi - wasn't present in sm. infection was a rundll.exe loaded item in a temp folder - and had a shortcut in windows startup folder.
doj - is present in sm (and causes reboot to normal mode). also loading through a runonce entry. removal be booting to smcp and creating a temp admin user that could then be logged into to remove.
ice - present in sm (and blocks use), breaks the machines ability to boot into smcp, recovery console and system restore partitions. Only way is recovery console off a cd/dvd or pulling the drive and cleaning it on another machine.

All of these virus ask for moneypak in varying amounts and threaten arrest and prosecution for illegal activity (child porn) if the user doesn't 'pay the fine'

The big 3 AVs (yes there are only 3 legit av networks and they all shares defs with each other):

Norton: can catch FBI & DOJ but can't stop ICE.
Mcafee: can catch FBI but not ICE or DOJ.
Eset: active methods got FBI and DOJ. was able to remove FBI even without a def. Doj was a able to stop it from loading (but wasn't able to remove until defs came out). ICE still flys right by it tho.

~

my whole point is - there's lag time between when a new virus deploys and the AVs catch up. The only really secure way is via a USB bootable optical media with wallet already on it - or a handheld device that has never done and will never do anything else.

I'll offer 9.5 btc @ $111 per - moneypak only.

PFFT - Macs are less secure than everything exactly because of this bad information that has been marketed by Apple. I do virus removals for a living. OSX is ~15% of the market right now (and that's being very kind) but more than 60% of the virus removals I do are on macs. Mac users are generally clueless about computer security because it's 'well known' that 'macs don't get viruses'. They always seem amazed and confused when I find and remove whatever infection they have.

My advice would be - get a real os (there's nothing wrong with mac hardware, you can run freeBSD or other linux on it just fine). Or if you don't want to bother learning about computer security - get a nice android device and keep your wallet on that.

At the very least - get some sort of security software on your mac and/or some help to track down the infection.

I can't believe you're trying to sell it man. You had the foresight to get an early order and now you don't have the foresight to leverage that into a massive gain... then again - I suppose if you can sell it for this silly price you might be able to do almost the same thing with asic generation two devices.

Deepbit is one of the oldest and most reliable pools it is also feature rich. It has higher fees than most other pools because of it's stability.
IMO it's a great pool to start on.

Eventually once you're able to learn more about how mining works you'll want to explore other options (to lose some of the fees).

The only pool that compares to deepbit for stability is eclipsemc.com (and it's also feature rich) - but you won't really notice all the advantages if you haven't mined for awhile and tried out inferior pools.
Another good one is eligius.st - but you really won't see optimal profits here unless you've got a very large hash rate as it's purely proportional.

As an aside - I keep my original deepbit.net account on my list of backup pools just in case everything else is down (which I've had happen a couple of times over my years of mining). IMO It's better to pay higher fees than have no mining going on at all.