Ugh. How exactly does one set up a clean PC, and keep it that way then? I take more precautions than probably 98% of the general population but I'm positive that's not enough.

That info is on the wiki page for CSRF. Basically the server side needs to put a unique token on each page and check for the presence of it on postback. Also doing an HTTP Referrer check helps a lot. There are other things as well but those are the main two.

The noscript add-on says it has "limited" CSRF protection. I'm not sure what that means.

Is there a firefox plugin that will Is there a firefox plugin that will make each tab have it's own session? That would take care of the problem.

They are sold out on almost all sites. Any that do have them have them at crazy high prices.

Micro transactions to pay for what exactly? So far bitcoin has been used for: drugs, cheap way to make money (mining, which is dying soon), and speculation.  Not even that restaurant in NYC that started accepting bitcoins has conducted a single transaction using bitcoins (as of 6/17/2011). The only reason it will stay alive is for Silk Road, and even that use is now dubious due to the fact that you have to be tech savvy and go way out of your way to use it and still be anonymous. I like bitcoin as a decentralized currency, but not as a tool for drug and smut peddlers.

If anyone really wants to see bitcoin succeed they need to put efforts into enacting more trade using bitcoins. Mining doesn't help the bitcoin world because even if there were only 3 guys doing CPU mining, the difficulty would adjust so they could produce all the bitcoins at the same rate they are being produced today (with the most power aggregate super computer in the world).

Edit, my calc's were a smidge harsh, but still pretty much made sense

1x 5830's = 260Mh/s
40,000Mh/s / 260Mh/s/card = 154 cards
@5 GPU's system: 154 GPU's / 5 GPU/sys = 31 systems
31 * $1,345 = $41,695

+ deposit + rent + AC + fans + electrical installations + internet + racks + networking equipment + KVM's + surge protectors


If you are making a profit with your current total of 15 GPU's you should consider yourself really lucky and just mine those until it's no longer profitable. Then put all your money into Plan B.

I can't tell if your post is a joke, or a scam or if you simply haven't thought it through.

How can the computers you described only cost $900? Even if you had all the other parts and only needed to buy the 160 5830's needed to reach 40GH/s, you'd spend about $180 per GPU. One hundred sixty Radeon 5830's at $180 a piece. I suppose that's about the going rate for that card right now, if you could even find them for sale. Now you need to assemble all the other parts for 32 systems: Athlon II X4's, 4gb ram, DVD drive (pointless for mining), cases, motherboards, 1200W power supplies, fans, and PCIe riser cables. The case you linked to won't hold 5 GPU's without mods. Add $ for that, even if it's just shelves to prop up the cards.

Parts:
mobo   $130.00
PCIe extenders   $30.00
ram   $25.00
PSU   $180.00
case   $40.00
hdd   $20.00
DVD   $20.00
cpu   $80.00
Fans   $20.00
Total: $545 without video cards
Total with video cards @$160 each: $1345
x40 = $43,040.00  just for the machines alone.

Good luck getting all those parts and the video cards, for that price in under a month. The price of a bitcoin has already fallen from $20 to $15 and it's only been a day since you made this thread. Counting on the price to stay steady is crazy with something as a volatile as bitcoins. The difficulty will adjust more than every 14 days. More like every 8-10 days. At that rate the difficulty will have already increased AT LEAST 3 more times between now and when you finally get up and running (this assumes you are able to raise money and get your operation up and running at an above average speed). So by the first week that you are up and mining, electricity will already be 87% of your revenue (assuming bitcoins are still $15 at that time, which could go either way). After your 10th day of mining electricity jumps to %135 of your revenue. From then on out who knows what happens. People will begin to drop out of mining so you drop out so you might put your operations on pause or just keep mining with the expectation that you might lose money for a while while you wait for people to drop out.

Also consider that 40x of these rigs, is going to put out about 29,000W of heat. I'm basing that of actual measured power draw from my own system with 2 5830's, extrapolated to 5 cards. That's 115W/sqf, which is in datacenter territory. You should research what spec of AC you actually need to cool off this kind of heat. And be careful to not use more than 80% of the max amperage for each electrical circuit.

Good luck finding investors who will invest in a plan where the #'s already exceed your planned costs, and that will begin to lose money after about 10 days of getting the operation up and running, and only get worse from there, or stay near a barely break even point. Then how are you going to deal with liquidating your "company" when you go under? I'm assuming you're going to either start an internet gaming center or sell the PC's.

If your plan B were more profitable than mining why would you not just jump straight to plan B? I'm guessing it's because you expect a bunch of strangers online to pay for your hardware so you can actually do "Plan B". But if Plan B is as well thought out as Plan A, you should assume there will be a high probability of that plan failing within the first 45 days. Would the cash from liquidating the hardware be split evenly among the bondholders? Or do you for some reason get the privilege of keeping the hardware and/or cash and leaving the suckers, i mean, investors, high and dry?

Note: i assumed 260Mh/s per 5830. I guess if you overclock you could get more than that, but you'd also be using more electricity and generating more heat so that would only at best buy you about another week of operating before you start losing money.

Do some basic research before posting this question. The info is very easy to find in this form and on google. Start here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/

Too complicated and doesn't sound like you know enough to pull it off and make it worth anyone's time to participate.

The main thing you didn't address is cooling. How will you cool that area? And do you know how many circuits are in that room, and the amps/voltage on each one? Your cost of electricity?

It is theoretically possible to do this but it doesn't sound like you know enough to do this without someone teaching you everything.

I probably missed the thread where TrueCrypt was shown to be useless. Can you describe why? is it simply that as soon as you mount an encrypted volume its contents become vulnerable?

AND, can you  please give an overview of proper security measures one can take (without becoming a security expert)?

Ah, I miss
Ah, I must have skipped the part where he said that. Sucks to be him then.

Are you sure you deleted it permanently? I don't know about this in too much detail, but sometimes when you delete a file the computer doesn't actually overwrite the bits on the hard drive. It just erases the pointer in the file system that says "wallet.dat starts at this hard drive sector, and is X sectors long" (over simplified, but enough for the purposes of this discussion).

Try to avoid doing anything that will write new data to your hard drive, so if possible avoid using the computer at all for now, and use a laptop for the following: Do a Google search for "how to recover deleted files" and/or "undelete files in Windows" (or whatever your OS is).

I think you will be able to find programs that will read your hard drive and allow you to recover "deleted" files. Second, if your wallet.dat was in a Dropbox folder, you can just get a backup of it from the DropBox web UI. One thing I do is create a small TrueCrypt volume and move my wallet.dat to that volume. Then I create a symbolic link (windows 7) from Users/Capitan/AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin/wallet.dat -> TrueCryptVolume:\wallet.dat. Then I unmount the TrueCrypt volume. The encrypted volume is stored in my DropBox, so even if someone hacks my DropBox account they would still just get an encrypted copy of my wallet. This also has the benefit of creating automatic version history of my encrypted wallet in case it ever gets deleted.

The only downside is that I have to mount the volume whenever I open the client, but I pretty much never have to do that unless I want to send bitcoins somewhere else. Theoretically I could keep the volume encrypted and unmounted for 20 years and log in 20 years from now, and the Bitcoin client will read the block chain to push all the Bitcoins I received during those 20 years into my wallet. I don't think I'm ever going to mount that volume in my current PC again, because I'm paranoid about security after recent posts on this board. I will have to set up a new secure and clean one on Linux and mount from there the next time I need to open the wallet.

OK that makes sense. that previous statement was misleading because he said they are "mined at the same rate". That poster should have said "the hashing rate stays the same".

This seems wrong. If that were true then what would be the point of having "difficulty" at all? I thought difficulty affected how long it took to solve a block?

I do know basics of how a computer works, but that doesn't make me a security expert. I don't want to become a security expert, and I don't want to spend hundreds of hours learning about security. In an ideal world I would, because yes, that is an interesting topic, but as it turns out I have other things to spend my time on.

Not everyone can be an expert in security. That's an unrealistic request. It would be nice if we had people who knew security giving out useful, actionable advice rather than "that sucks. learn real security. compare the hashes of all your .exe's by hand".

I guess I'm still frustrated because I don't know what mistakes the OP made (besides using Windows in the first place), and therefore I don't know if I'm making the same ones too.

Can you provide any advice as to where one might begin learning about this? The OP claims he took all the basic precautions: AV, behind a router firewall, windows patched up to date, etc.

What Version of Windows was OP running? The  link to infostealer.com that someone else posted only lists xp, NT, and 2000 as applicable OS'es. So Vista and WIn 7 are not vulnerable to that particular exploit?

Yes, it should. I don't know if those are dual-slot cards though, so you might have to work through some issues if they are.

Also, it's more like 1,200Mh/s, isn't it? I thought a single 5770 did about 150MH/s? IMHO it's not worth it unless these cards are $50 each. Even then you just end up getting discounted hardware, that would take several months to pay itself off.

There should be a sticky on the topic of total hashing power, difficulty, and how they are calculated, and how the stats are skewed shortly after difficulty changes.

Agree. On top of the competition for mining, exchanges, and other related business, there should be more competition for public faces of the community.