This might interest folks out there or might not, I dunno.
This is more geared to sci-fi/gamer nuts but hey, everyone can join in.

If you had to choose between living at the colony in Aliens or living in vault 101, which would you choose and why?

Post your answers below.

MY ANSWER: The Aliens colony because of it's structure and location.

Claimed. Thanks. You gave way too much info. Try to make it harder next time.

Ahoy!

Invite send!

Morons are like roaches.  You can step on millions of them but they always come back.

European default still seems much more likely in medium term.

This will spur China to start squawking a bit more about a new reserve currency. Whether or not they actually start selling dollars remains to be seen.

I think what prompted downgrade was not fundamentals (those have always been crappy) but the fact that the political process to get debt ceiling raised was so dysfunctional and default was actually floated as a legitimate possibility.

There is no safe haven at the moment, where are people going to move that much money anyway? Expect a PM pop and $2k target by fall for AU.

I highly doubt that you will want to run the 300mhs that long after the year is up. But im willing to gamble on that. I get to bring online more hardware, you get my existing hashing power. Then I sell more, and repeat. Works out pretty well. Even if I only sell a few contracts, everything is payed for and eventually I have 1 machine with 4 5830s running until people grow tired of mining.

not yet

Let me tell you why I mine with free electricity. I have my mining rig at my families company. The company have a fixed level electricity cost, they consume a lot of electricity and the mining rig is a small part of it. A real example of how you mine for free. I can promise you that there is many more examples of this in the world. We are talking about a world with more than 6 billion people.

The points you make about utility are valid, but the mistake you make is in thinking that This iteration of crypto currency will be the one that becomes the standard. I see Bitcoin more as a trial run of the crypto currency protocol, a way to see the strengths and shortcomings. The very fact that this is all open-source makes the possibility, in my mind, that a subsequent iteration of this system - likely one backed by a company with the ability to provide branding and a concerted and effective marketing effort - will be the future. Bitcoin's name has been tarnished beyond repair - you can argue this all you want, but you and I both know it. There is just no incentive by any interested party to waste time undoing negative perceptions when the code can be copied, tweaked and polished to provide the safety and convenience Bitcoin has always lacked and something which the Bitcoin developers have yet to address despite the passage of so much catastrophe. It is unforgivable that an update to the client has not been made which provides an encrypted wallet. Unforgivable - and a testament to the failure of the "community" effort.

Mods please delete this thread . If you are trying to use silkroad forget about it, the DEA has enlisted their "cyber" division to watch over orders and shipments. No one uses Silkroad anymore, just forget about it please and stop telling your friends and making threads about it.


Thank you.

A better analogy is this one:

A certain town has 500 people. You suspect that maybe some of them are psychic. So you ask each person to try to correctly identify the suits of some cards they cannot see. Of the 500 people, you find 3 that did extremely well in the test. So you say that you suspect those 3 are psychic.

But, of course, they could have succeeded merely by luck. So you decide to do a new study. You'll test those 3 people. But wait, someone already did that. So you'll just check the previous results. Lo and behold, the data shows that those 3 people succeed way beyond what you'd expect by mere chance, perhaps the chances were only 3 in 500 that they could do that well by chance.

You cannot use the same data both to decide which pool to accuse of cheating and to validate that same accusation. Some pool has to have the worst luck, so bad that it's hard to believe looking only at that pool that its luck was that bad due to mere chance.

Assuming the network as a whole is constant isn't entirely accurate though.  Looking at the charts at bitcoinwatch can show you the network can vary quite a lot.  One pool's up/down does not mean another pool is having the opposite.  However, the odds of consistently solving blocks faster than expected at a difficulty are the same as consistently taking longer.

I spent the last week going over the changes I had made to pushpool, trying to find some simple change I made that would've caused it to not push valid shares upstream to bitcoind, and I've come up blank.  I replaced the pools with stock pushpool [outside of db-mysql.c and a long-poll disable bit] the other day and it changed nothing.  Other pools are running JoelKatz's patches so I have no reason to believe that is causing any issues either.

Software side issues are ruled out.  The only thing itching in the back of my mind is the way the servers have been split up to run against their own bitcoind + wallet, but that shouldn't mean anything, especially when we've been doing the same thing for a long time and have shown ups/downs regularly in luck.  Splitting miners [and making sure they come back to the same server with results] across 6 smaller pools should have no difference in variance from all using one large pool as long as each pool is running different headers [receiving addresses] for the hashes.

The arsbitcoin.com pool's 800 BTC buffer is interesting. It looks like that pool is only 1/6th the size of BTCGuild.com.

Is there a way to find out over what length of time those 800 BTC were accumulated?

This statement is nonsense.  A bitcoin itself might not have any intrinsic value, but the bitcoin platform has plenty of fundamental value.  The author is dead wrong on this point.  The issues will get resolved in time, effective defenses against theft will be crafted, and bitcoin will survive.

At this point, we can write off Bitcoin as a failed experiment. It's worth thinking about how a different distributed digital currency might be made workable. A few problems which have to be solved:

• Mutual mistrust between buyer and seller needs to be supported. This is the toughest problem. Right now, sending Bitcoins is not tied to receiving something in return, and is irrevocable.
• The double-spending check system has to be as least as fast as normal credit card processing. Waiting minutes for the block chain to update is unacceptable.
• Some price stability is needed. Value shouldn't change more than 1% per week, worst case. 1% per month would be better.
• A better way of launching the currency needs to be developed.

There's an approach to mutual mistrust that might work.  First, as with credit cards, there's a need for an "authorize" and a "capture" stage. In the "authorize" stage, A indicates that they intend to send value to B. This locks up the value from other use by A, and B receives a reliable confirmation that A has that value. In the "capture" stage, the value is actually transferred to B. A has to authorize the "capture". 

That's the normal case. The hard cases might work as follows:

• If A does an "authorize", and then does nothing, a "capture" automatically takes place after some number of days. So sellers don't have to nag buyers.
• If B cancels the capture, that's an agreed cancellation of the transaction, and the value becomes available to A again.
• If A does an "authorize" and later cancels before a "capture", the value becomes available to them again after some number of days. This is the tough case, and it puts B at risk of the buyer backing out after shipment of the product. To discourage backing out, when A does this, they are no longer anonymous to B, and B can publicize the cancellation, which affects A's reputation. Also, because cancellations aren't immediate, A's value is tied up for days, so they can't do this too often.

Discuss.

online poker is rigged!

Fucking freezers, how do they work?