My Radeon 5850 cost ~$200 and hashes around 80 times faster than my CPU (240mhash/s). You don't NEED a 5970 to get a huge improvement over CPU mining.

Would it be possible for the clients, and thus the network, to determine that no blocks have been generated in X time, and to decrease the difficulty by Y amount?

Backing up so often is not necessary. The only truly important things are your private keys. The way the client works is that it keeps a pool of ~100 (customizable) unused private keys. That way, even after a few transactions your backup is still valid. This allows you to only backup when X new private keys are created, X being some number between 1 and 100.

I'm not sure of the product's status, but perhaps Diaspora?

If you're purchasing a video card for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin, two things.

1) You might be better off straight up purchasing Bitcoin through an exchange
2) I'd recommend an ATI Radeon 5850 or higher

I find it difficult to answer your question when you don't provide a single example of a business that screws over their customers without the government's help.

Exactly. Of course, this system breaks down when the person doing the screwing has lobbied the local, state, or federal government to increase the licensing requirements.

Would you care to support this statement? Bitcoin has value by fiat no more than gold does. Nobody is forced to accept Bitcoin for payment of debts, as they are dollars. The only entities that accept Bitcoin are those that value it as a currency.

I have never used or created an authentication system with a case sensitive username. Case sensitivity makes sense for passwords (entropy), but not for usernames. Should BitterTea and bittertea be considered two separate identities? does not seem right to me.

shortly after I made my previous post, I received another password reset email. I assume someone used my username from the forum to try to reset my password. but now that I think about it, the password reset feature uses email address.

This is incorrect. Fees are small and optional but widely used currently. In the future, assuming an increase in the usage of Bitcoin, they will (most likely) be larger and mandatory if you want to have your transaction confirmed in a reasonable amount of time.

You know what would be an interesting mod (and way to fund a server)? Have the server require registration, with some database holding user information. Each user is given a Bitcoin address, to which they can send Bitcoin. The server can then use this money to fund operations, and the user gets the equivalent amount of in-game Bitcoin. This can be used as a medium of exchange in the Minecraft world. Essentially, you're donating to run the server, but you also get an in-game currency for use as well. I envision them as physical Bitcoins, and I think it would be kind of cool.

Hey Slush, I just found myself slapping my hand upon my face palm first trying to log in to the site. I was 100% sure I was entering the correct password but it kept getting rejected. I reset my password and was having the same issue. Turns out the username is case sensitive. Is that necessary, or unintended?

edit... Thanks for trying to reset my password, whomever that was. Why would you even bother?

Based on this formula, you should receive one share every 6 hours on average.


Shares are "blocks" with a difficulty of one, and your hash rate is ~190000 hashes/second. 1 * 4294967296 / 190000 / 3600 =~ 6.25

So 10 hours without receiving a share is not crazy. Additionally, Slush's stats are delayed by a couple of hours, to prevent pool abuse.

There are many facets to Bitcoin's security. One of those is the protection against double spending. The way Bitcoin prevents this from happening is by using a confirmation system. Once your transaction has been added to a block, each additional block generated on top of it decreases the chance that you can double spend the coins from this transaction. Six additional blocks is considered quite safe, though as a receiver you could choose to acknowledge payment earlier. Since the network generates one block every ten minutes on average, six blocks is about an hour. This is probably what you are experiencing.

In short, don't worry. This is by design, is one of the core security mechanisms of the currency, and is one of the trade offs for using a decentralized system. If you use MyBitcoin (or some other future Bitcoin aggregator), transactions between members are instant, as they are not written to the block chain. The downside to this is that you must trust MyBitcoin.

Looks like BoA has branches in 44 states?

http://locators.bankofamerica.com/locator/locator/branch_and_atm_locations/coverage.html

I used to use them, but I recently moved all my money to a local credit union. I feel better about myself, though I really do miss their online banking system.

Block chain size? Network traffic? Just guesses.

If that's the case, I'd recommend attempting to communicate this in a different manner. Rather than stating "A little less law is a good thing, but never none at all.", you could have said "I find a little less law more palatable, but not no law at all". I've recently been trying to retrain myself to think more along the lines of E-Prime. I find it tends to decrease the amount of negative reactions to opinions, when it seems clear that is what I am expressing.

Hmm... I suppose an argument could be made, but I would consider voluntarism more an offshoot/cousin of anarchism.

Bitcoin is not free (gratis, as in beer), transaction fees are an integral part of the system and they will only get more important as the generation subsidy gets halved over time. Perhaps a more important distinction is that there is no central collector of the fees. The best explanation I've heard is that across the entire Bitcoin network, there is a lottery held, where roughly every 10 minutes, one person gets to be the central banker and print 50 Bitcoin for their work toward creating a new block. Though now that I say this, I don't think this is a good explanation.

Every 10 minutes or so, one person wins the lottery and finds a new block, which they fill with as many transactions as possible in order to collect the most fees. While the Bitcoin network is still small and these fees are not a great incentive to perform all of that hard work, they are additionally given 50 newly created Bitcoin. As the network grows and more transaction fees are available, this additional incentive is no longer as necessary, and is halved every four years or so. Eventually, the additional incentive is next to nothing, and the only reason miners exist is to collect transaction fees.

I think it also might be an important distinction that Bitcoins are not actually stored on any one hard drive. The only thing that must be protected against corruption and theft is the key that unlocks the Bitcoin, which are really "stored" in the block chain, across the entire network.

I also did a dirty installation (are we talking about Windows? I am), and I didn't notice this problem until after I renamed these two files, and now I see the same problem after restoring them. There seems to be some "ghosting" of windows on top of the Bitcoin client. I'm not at home so I didn't get to look into it much, but it seemed strange. Maybe I just need to reboot. Anyone else getting this?