It was right there under the name "golden calf" and "mammon".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_calf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon

Thanks for your help. The problems were related to the bugs in the IRC seed mode when machine is dual stacked (IPv4 & IPv6) like mine. I will just run with "-noirc" when on networks with IPv6.

I'm not sure if this bug is even worth fixing.

Thanks again.

Thanks. I'll leave mine running too. Thus far they weren't able to connect, despite repeated attempts. On my end ports are forwarded correctly, maybe there was some glitch in the IRC peer discovery process.

Thanks for the offer, but I don't really need coins. I was really interested in a low-difficulty mining of testnet Litecoins on FPGAs.

Do you know if the recent changes in Litecoin started a 3rd testnet?

I see a new "testnet3" directory under "Litecoin". Is this a moral equivalent of the 3rd Bitcoin testnet with a new difficulty calculation algorithm?

Edit: What I'm actually looking for is for somebody to serve the existing testned blockchain. I'm fine with mining on as-needed basis.

Thanks in advance for anyone who could serve the testnet blocks.

Why mixing the "Transgendered" in? It is GLBSE. Do you have a key on your keyboard that types in "GLBT"? 

What is the current status of Litecoin's testnet? How many blocks in the chain? I'm away from my normal computer and just redownloaded the Litecoin executable to start my tests afresh.

Thanks in advance.

I was wrong/inaccurate when I mentioned DNS. The TLS itself is more generic; but is typically used as a way to double-check the results of the DNS resolution.

I think both TLS and IPsec have some merits. In my mind the most important thing for TLS is that it can be used over Tor. This would allow Dead Pirate Roberts to publich the certificates for his cottonpath.onion family of sites and operate as a super-trusted Bitcoin peer node.

IPsec would shine in WLAN peer-to-peer situations because the IPsec protocol stack has less interdependency with name resolution. It could be a great way to authenticate mobile but non-anonymous peers.

I'm not sure if the existing Bitcoin protocol can be transparently extended to support the STARTTLS behavior. But for sure Bitcoin could be modified to support HTTP/HTTPS dichotomy of two different port numbers 80/443.

Except that TLS is geared towards client-server model and has explicit tie-ins with DNS service. Since Bitcoin is fundamentally peer-to-peer I think the better approach would be to popularize use of IPsec for securing the Bitcoin traffic.

IPsec can use PKI certificates and has the additional benefits that no source code modification would be necessary. One can secure the p2p transfer by just configuring the IPsec at the OS level or router level. The eventual modifications to the source code would be just to make it more user friendly. Understanding the intricacies of oakley.log is a very advanced pursuit.

The definition of "their own internet connection" varies. Throughout most of the Western world this typically means "household" or "office".

But say in Brazil or in Eastern Europe it could mean "our block", "our building", etc. The shared Intenet is way more popular. Thus the popularity of attack programs that spoof DHCP, poison ARP caches and flood the switches. Such trojans/viruses don't even have English versions, they are already written in their local language. Most importantly the Western antivirus tools are oblivious to them.

I've always seen everyone's else ignore info, but not my own. For me it was always empty (visually and HTML-wise, I searched HTML for something like blue on blue, etc.) Strangely it works now both in IE9/64 and Opera12/Win64 with default Spoof UserAgent ID (1 instead of 4).

I should've checked on more than one computer before bothering you. This had to be something related to my machine. Maybe the 1st full reboot in a month cured it?

Thanks in retreat and sorry for bothering you.

You have seem to put this feature in the template specific to Mozilla browser. Any chance on getting it moved to a general browser template? I managed to spoof the Opera to pretend to be Mozilla to see my ignore count. If it isn't much work, could you move it to the general template?

Thanks in advance.

“If you sit in on a poker game and don’t see a sucker, get up. You’re the sucker.”

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/09/poker-patsy/

Anyway, here's the example of how open source poker is being played.

A whale of a player spends big bucks developing a secret database engine. After 5 years this player takes one of the earliest branches and open sources it. Lets call that branch LevelDB. Suckers jump on it, spend money and energy to develop some basic tools like statistics gathering and query optimization. Then the whale brings the cold deck to the table, which gives him an instant 5 years of leadtime. It looks like that:


I'm no Google insider or anything like that. But I used to knew the people who played with the current Googlers; and I'm broadly familiar with the level of skill involved.

Before you spend to much time at the keyboard and mouse please do see the old David Mamet's movie "House of games". Remember the line:

“it was only business … nothing personal.”

This just reads like joking. Is Mike Hearn a member of core development team? Disk seeks a finite resource? Inform International Union for Conservation of Nature! Probably again the Asian are the culprits and use up the endangered "disk seeks" to produce some traditional potency medicine!

1) Blockchain is stored in a raw file with no structure. On top of it this file is maximally fragmented (for an append only file) due to the way it is written by a mixture of stdio.h/iostream.h calls.

2) The current blkindex.dat is treated like a valueable transactional storage with logging while being just an index, something that a proper database recreates with a "reindex" command.

3) No interprocess locking protocol thus far beyond the single ".lock" file.

I see many years of reinventing the wheel ahead of the Bitcoin core development team. I wonder how many more years until they reinvent the ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method, IBM had that since around 1960) and figure out that the index could store unspent transaction scripts until they are spent and purged from the index.

Edit: And how many more years until the discovery here that the transaction key space is uniformly random by design and thus cannot be used alone as key. Then how long until the discovery that transaction space is clustered temporally and widely known generational garbage collection is applicable to Bitcoin?

I see an invisible hand steering the Bitcoin development. It is a hand of an expert in padding the billable hours and lines of code.

This is more complex than just "view the frontpage".

The DDoS defense is dynamic both with respect to the source and with respect to the destination.

So you are having the situation where only certain API URLs get protection but not the viewed-by-hand URLs (destination filtering).

Your experience will also depend on the current global DDoS botnet density estimate computed by IP address (source filtering).

To compund the above Prolexic doesn't disclose the details as a matter of policy. This is because they always have botmasters buying their service for their own machines to reverse engineer the Prolexic's defense strategy.

Was anyone getting HTTP error codes eg. 429 or 504? Or just Prolexic's standard timeouts due to dropped TCP/IP packets?

No. Prolexic defense costs big bucks; bitcointalk.org is running bare in Networklayer's Dallas,TX facility.

Use robtex.com (or something similar) to check the IP address.

Mt. Gox is setup behind the anti-DDOS proxy from Prolexic.

Any spike in viewing/trading activity is treated as a DDOS by Prolexic and "successfully blocked".

This will keep happening until Mt. Gox implements professional trading protocols, not various ad-hoc stacks over HTTP/HTTPS.

I'm not much of a poker player, but here is the explanation: the verbal slipups like "I" vs. "our company" or "he works for me" vs. "he works with us", etc. are a "tell", especially in the fin-serv racket.

Dude, you earned exactly zero brownie points for this observation. I know that and everyone who reads my posts also knows that already:

JDBound is a trooper and we mutually agreed to delete our posts where I uttered ex parte stuff.

Thanks for the thoughtfull and informative post.

I'm completely not worried about BitInstant. This is a duo where Charlie is more of a face+mouth and Gareth is more of a cortex. I applied a fraction of a psi pressure to them when they first shown up here and Gareth's answer made them pass with flying colors. Please click over to the following thread from about a year ago, it is just one page to read and it is a beautifull example of how to answer due dilligence questions.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38914.msg476286#msg476286

In addition to the above BitInstant has a completely different risk profile from the customer's point of view: the customer funds are in BitInstant custody for less than an hour on the average. I have a hunch that if there are any problems Gareth is the dude who isn't afraid to put on sleve protectors and do the accounting.

Now lets compare the above with the BitFloor's reaction to a mild pressure: a major nonlinear blowout. (The really interesting parts were deleted by Maged.)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93502.0

Here you have a founder who professes complete ignorance of GAAP, isn't concerned about segregation of the accounts; basically calls: "lets commingle our funds until we are sore". But the most important difference is the risk profile from the customer's point of view: the sale of market-making seats on some completely opaque exchange platform. It would be completely insane business decision to buy a seat (become a market-maker) at BitFloor.

Anyway, as somebody else already said: I don't have an alpaca in this race. But I have a hunch that people will put their alpacas to the races on the BitFloor. And those alpacas will get a haircut so deep that it will go all the way to the bone, not to the skin.

Then you would have to forever pay mechanical royalties to some pizza chain and the cute daughter of laszlo.

Alpacas will sign off all their royalties just for some tasty grass.

I concurr with the above. Please avoid portraits of humans.

In order to increase the artistic and collectible value of the bitcoin banknotes it should have the drawings of alpacas and scenes from the life of alpacas.

Alpaca is the spiritual animal of Bitcoin, because alpaca socks were one of the first physical products sold for bitcoins.