Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

They might actually arrive before I get my 400 amp service set up at my country-house so they'll sit here idle like some of my Klondikes already are, due to lack of power to power them. I only ordered them like last thursday or something like that, maybe friday even. Or maybe wednesday. Totally shocking.

But I know from the two I already got that took like five or six months to reach this stage that once they claim they are shipped it still could be a while before FedEx actually goes and picks them up.

-MarkM-

He moaned since God was a cowboy about how godawful broke he was and how desperate he was for an ASIC, any ASIC...

Congrats cowboy, nice that someone came through for you.

Next challenge: get a cycle maker to send you an evaluation mountain-bike...

-MarkM-

I didn't vote. I stupidly ordered four BFL 50 GH units (more flexible to plug in than the larger unit maybe) and strangely they already got a FedEx tracking number for it. So FedEx presumably will pick it up some day soon and start moving it toward me.

I find it really strange and amusing actually. Whatever happened to waiting five months to five years?

At this rate I might even get it within "two weeks" instead of "two weeks (tm)". I should look up exactly what day I ordered it, It was, like really frakkin recent. Totally weird.

-MarkM-

If BFL is the only company actually shipping that is kind of ironic. (They just sent me tracking link on a very recent order  of some of their off the shelf sale units...)

-MarkM-

So is this thing available now? Ready to ship? At what price? The first post of the supposedly official thread has been blanked out.

-MarkM-

So are they available now?

The first post of the thread has been blanked out...

-MarkM-

The most frequently linked MUD article is probably http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

Taking on any more users though is going to have to wait until my new datacentre is up and running. I am trying to get 400 amp electrical service put in and the red tape is massive. (Having to get the building listed as a commercial building instead of as a residence because the power company apparently won't put 400 amp service to a residential building. Also the electrical code for a residence wants stupid little useless 15 amp outlets on every 8 feet of wall in any room that could on resale of the building be potentially a bedroom if it is a residence, so to get 20 amp circuits throughout I need to do it by commercial building electrical code not residential electrical code.)

-MarkM-

Vircurex.

You also get a discount on trading fees if you sign up using a referral URL so here is a referral URL:

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-

Digits might not actually be allowed in the three character standard for currency codes.

Also in pronouncing it I do anyway tend to say eye ohh rather than eye zero or eye nought.

So mostly it makes me think of the moon name Io, which in turn leads me to think of

https://www.google.com/search?q=Clarke+"all+these+worlds"

Of course one could also think of it as "I owe" and try to thereby relate it to debt payments or somesuch.

-MarkM-

Namecoin is not just name to IP address.

Open Transactions uses it for example as one of various possible methods you can choose to use to set up an identity.

You can use it to point people to your various accounts and aliases and nyms in various systems.

You can use it as an identity for logins.

It is a general key+data pair distributed database.

-MarkM-

The merged mined coins have always been under a bit of a cloud because of a pervasive belief that a coin loses almost all of its value by being merged mined.

That is why so many SHA256 coins cannot be merged mined, although it would not surprise me if they later add merged mining once they have mined a majority of the coins so they have overwhelmingly strong positions before all the miners who merge get aboard.

Merged mined coins have thus been somewhat of a "dark horse", nice "under the radar" opportunities; if IXCoin takes off nicely we should expect others of the merged mined coins to follow. They are a family, between them all they have explored/tested the merged mining concept. Although we still do not know where the practical limit is of how many coins one could merge at once reasonably.

The RAM-hogging problem that GeistGeld and I0Coin discovered on behalf of all the merged mined coins possibly led some to believe we had already hit the limit of how many coins one could practically merge at once. But with the fully fixed I0Coin and the "dirty fix" of GeistGeld we can already see that actually merging all eight coins seems to work fine. The RAM problems had been obscuring just how well this actually works.

Someone actually suggested recently that creating a bunch of new crapcoins and adding merged mining to them would be better than supporting the existing merged mined coins; I think that would be kind of sad, partly because that seems to me just more of the "throw-away culture", the "slash and burn", whereby fast-buck get rich quick spammers keep spamming new crap they have no intention of supporting, maybe even deliberately trying to draw support away from what was already created, instead of actually settling down to the serious work of supporting what we already have.

I have always instead advocated supporting what we already have; we do not seem to have enough developers and support staff to even just keep up with the maintenance  of and infrastructure around the original coins, so continuing to spam out more seems counter-productive... it just spews out more and more work for those who do the real work of keeping things going, keeping up with latest code and fixes and so on, building infrastructure... The get rich quick crowd are damaging all that already exists and creating un-tenable workloads for the community.

Sure we are behind on keeping all the merged mined coins up to date. We won't get any less behind by piling on even more coins. Lets take care of what we have before trying to increase our workload even more.

The vast majority of the people spewing out new coins have shown no inclination to actually do any of the real work of keeping things running and keeping things repaired and keeping everything up to date with all the latest fixes and so on. To me that casts a big shadow over all their crap about new coins being needed. It is bullshit, they are just slashing and burning.

-MarkM-

mkdir obj ?

(Aka, does the dir named obj even exist? A lot of newbies fail to include such a directory in their repo.)

-MarkM-

I suspect that Mircea Popescu, as in Mircea Popescu's Options Emporium (MPOE) might suggest that the fluctuations in price aka volatility of exchange rate thing is actually a finance thing rather than purely a business thing.

Aren't options supposed to be the financial world's answer to such "problems" ?

Isn't being caught out by a change of price aka exchange-rate really just a symptom of a failure to properly hedge oneself with an appropriate array of options?

Oughtn't payment processors and such be able to offer a stable price across a span of time by proper employment of options?

-MarkM-

Yet a former scammer, r3wt or some such handle, is even now developing a free open source exchange.

I wonder if he even knows of the bounty.

-MarkM-

Vircurex is showing IXCoin as having less difficulty, but more hash rate, than DeVCoin.

Likely we are just seeing variance, it is not estimating the hash rate of one or both coins quite right, maybe because one or both changed difficulty and it has not had enoguh blocks to average out to discover approximate actual hash rate.

-MarkM-

Nova, Bitcoin, and being derived from that also Devcoin, is MIT or BSD license not GNU copyleft.

So a lot of folks hereabouts come from the side of Open Source where it is fine and dandy for corporations to hold back code, they are free to use the Bitcoin - and Devcoin - code in their own proprietary projects, even release binaries without their modified source and so on.

Satoshi evidently chose that approach in order to maximise acceptance by capitalists / capitalism, if he had made his code GNU possibly a whole lot of its major adopters would have had to first re-write equivalent functionality from scratch precisely because they have no intention of releasing their code.

I believe that Unthinkingbit did not / does not restrict the Decoin project's concept of Open Source to only the somewhat infectious GNU license, BSD and MIT also are acceptable and I think things like Perl's creative license, the Apache license and so on.

So do expect a lot of folk are not going to use GNU license and of those some or many might fully intend to go on to make their own proprietary services based on their own improvements of what they initially released as "Open Source".

You might notice for example that so far there are no good working exchanges, Ripple gateways etc etc etc in open source; the policy seems usually to be to release a broken sketchy version as open source but keep the real thing that actually works proprietary. (Which is kind of what the GNU Affero (sp?) license aims to try to put a stop to.)

I think to a lot of people / companies hereabouts "Open Source" is mostly just a marketing slogan, they release some broken stuff to get some marketing bonus from the use of such terms/slogans but are all about profit thus have no intention of actually enabling competition / competitors by giving out their real working robust production code.

-MarkM-

Where are you trying to buy? I use Vircurex and there are usually a few thousand that position themselves right near the top of the sell side of the order-book.

-MarkM-

It makes no sense to have a pool just for IXCoin, it should be a merged mining pool merging all the coins.

Even GeistGeld is no problem to merge now with the fix that rsnel did to it.

-MarkM-

Nope. I have no idea who they are.

A Nigerian Prince? Russian Mafia? I have no idea.

No linked-in profiles, no company registration, and a script that has a look a little too similar to the Russian scammer exchange.

I think I'll let someone else be the first to lose all their coins to this latest new gang...

-MarkM-

Okay but who are they themselves?

They do have a nice conservative selection of coins, maybe we can persuade them to include the whole merged mined family of coins, so they can be a one stop shop for people who merged mine?

-MarkM-