"Nadsat", droog? Only Alex and his droogs govoreet nadsat, as far as I can viddy.

I'm not sure I understand? Did this happen when you tried to fund your MtGox account with bitcoins? If so, you have to click the button and get a new address every time. If not, then help me understand what happened.

I was solo-mining until the most recent difficulty increase, but since then I've been floating between various pools - mostly dbitcoin's and slush's. FWIW, I've made more with btcmine than I have with mining.bitcoin.cz, but that's probably because I went for the "per share" option right when btcmine started. I can afford the quiet periods in btcmine right now, but if I was in your utility-bill position I'd probably look at mining.bitcoin.cz instead - it's much more steady. With one 5870 I've been averaging 2.5 BTC per day, varying between just over 1 to just over 4 BTC in any given day.

I suspect if I moved to btcmine, and waited for, say, a couple of weeks to a month, I'd see similar averag results - just with a lot more variation. (Ignoring difficulty changes, obviously).

(Just to annoy everyone: I made more CPU solo-mining back in October than I have from GPU pooled-mining!)

Where's the option for "I want to learn about Chinese breakfasts because it makes my nipples all tingly? :-)

Seriously though, I think this will resolve itself of it's own accord. The students are going to quickly work out what gets results (supplying a demand) and what doesn't (spam). If people are prepared to pay for jokes and recipes, more power to both buyer and seller. I'm prepared to pay for certain things (bitcoin-promotion things), and I'm enjoying some of the *cough* humour, and the recipes have been interesting.

If nothing else, it's the weekend! Time to let our hair down!

Re: "Give less" - assume the average time to find a block on btcmine is 1 day, there are 10 miners, and each miner achieves 100 shares a day. In the average case when the block is found after exactly 24 hours, there are 1000 shares. Right now, we've gone, say, three days without finding a block and there are 3000 shares. For each miner the ultimate reward will be the same (50 BTC / 10 miners), but for each share the reward will be much less (50 BTC / 3000 shares vs. 50 / 1000). As dbitcoin says, in the long term this evens out - but right now it's hard not to look at the reward per share and think of all that electricity... :-(

I've noticed that certain words are capitalised, and others aren't, without any apparent logic (like the "kiddys" [sic] example above). My theory is that there's a hidden code at work, and bobR is communicating with nefarious forces. Actually, thinking it through a bit further, you could probably cram quite a bit of data into "spelling mistakes" etc... C'mon, bobR, time to come clean - your linguistic skills are actually far better than we've given you credit for, and you're using this forum to transmit highly secret information in plain sight!

Subversion, a version control system, has a neat approach: any script or executable can be run when certain events occur: Subversion simply looks for a script or executable with a certain name. It allows for a limited number of parameters, so - transferring Subversion's system to Bitcoin - something like "2.37 bitcoins received in account 'From mining pool' with address '175tVkmMKwwEppDRNnBY2SnTzFUmJJhzZ7'" might trigger a script named "bitcoins-received" that checks the account name, and if the account is called 'From mining pool' the script would then send 2.37 BTC to another address, and then email a Hotmail account, play an mp3 file, or do pretty much anything you can think of...

What I like about Subversion's approach is that we're not tied to any one scripting language: having Python, say, installed doesn't become a requirement of using Bitcoin for anything other than "basic stuff".

There are open offers, and jimbobway has been paying for smiles and laughs. I think there's great potential here, but the sudden influx has come of a bit of a shock to many forum posters.

Weird. If you check the source, the page loads with the time hard-coded to proper-UTC. I haven't looked any further yet, but I assume there's some JavaScript wizardry that then ticks the time on. I assume that's where the discrepancy occurs - the JavaScript must be doing something odd in your case.

Edit: there's a function, updateUTCTime, that seems to be using local time to derive UTC. Seems a little long-winded and potentially error-prone. I seem to recall JavaScript having UTC handling built-in... but it's been a long time since I used it. I'll dig further...

Edit 2: yup, the Date object has UTC methods. This is untested, and it's possible dbitcoin has a good reason that I've not thought of for doing it the way it's done, but if it were me I'd start by looking at replacing...
with...

Looks OK to me? I'm seeing 18:47, which is correct.

Is bobR a troll? I suspect probably not, at least not deliberately. My feeling is that there's a communication skills/social skills issue here. If that's down to immaturity, maybe it'll change in the future. In the meantime at least we can all get a guilty laugh out of the endless rants.

Should bobR be banned? Hell, no. Banning stuff should always be our last resort. Advertising illegal products and services on this forum was recently banned after much soul-searching - but there's a world of difference between tolerating something with real-world consequences for site admins, and tolerating an annoying poster.

You may find the price comes down once 6990s start hitting the gamers' rigs and they start selling off their old 5970s!

What are the $ prices of 5870s like? I got a 5870 in the UK not that long ago, and there were some real bargains to be had if you were prepared to wait for them (I paid £130 second-hard from a dealer, but I've seen prices range from £110 to £210 on ebay).

Two AMD Opteron 6128s will get you 32.4 Mhash/s: that's the best result for CPUs listed on the wiki's mining hardware comparison list. One AMD Phenom II X6 1055T will get you 15.84 Mhash/s.  In contrast, 1 AMD 5870 GPU will easily get you 324 Mhash/s - 10x what the 2 6128s would deliver, and 20x what 1 1055T delivers. A 5870 is probably considered entry-level now for GPU mining - a 5970 will be almost twice as fast. And that's before you consider that it's relatively easy to use more than one GPU.

There's always bitcoin-otc.com. I've done BTC -> GBP that way recently (britcoin.co.uk being a very, very recent innovation). I'd be surprised if there wasn't some interest in BTC <-> AUD on bitcoin-otc, given the apparent numbers of Aussie bitcoiners on this forum.

(Come to think of it, I'm sure I've seen someone here offering a BTC <-> AUD service... BTC -> AUD via various banks including Westpac, and AUD -> BTC via a local/regional/state bank).

Edit: bitcoinmarket.com does BTC <-> AUD. (via: noagendamarket).

I think I'd add 5 or even 10 BTC! (I don't have dacoinminster's coverage requirement, but I'd throw in an additional 10 BTC if it made most major Chinese news sources).

Oh, and I strongly agree with dacoinminster's sentiment - we'd be foolish as a community not to see this as a golden opportunity to promote bitcoin in China.

Any other orders you wish to give us, oh wise and benevolent ruler?

I'd certainly be OK with the students using Google translate initially, though I'd hope that they'd at least check the results and edit where necessary. I'd also give the results a quick pass through it, though I wouldn't trust it (or me!) enough to pass judgement - I think that should fall to a native speaker (Nefario? Any other takers?)

No worries, I only remembered from a bored weekend a while back skimming through off-topic!

Back on topic (for Project Development) couldn't we use this situation for an additional bit of bitcoin promotion in China (and Chinese-speaking communities)? Do we know how well-known bitcoin is in China? A few things I can think of for Nefario's students to do are:

a) Translate a good English (or other non-Chinese) introduction to bitcoin into Chinese.
b) Develop a plan to promote bitcoin, using the text from step a.
c) Implement the plan from step b.

Elsewhere people have promised bounties to Nefario's students for funny pictures, some involving bitcoin. These could be used as well. Anyway, I'd be prepared to pay a 5 BTC bounty for each step above - though I'd need help with step a, as my non-English language skills are non-existent...

Edit: translation provided by larry, bounty paid.

To be fair, Nefario did warn us.