If you intend to acquire a larger number of Bitcoin, you can send a wire to the administrator of MtGox and they will exchange that for site credit which will allow you to trade Bitcoin easily. This is the avenue I am currently pursuing.

Hey guys, I created a new FiveGrinder group, RedditAdvertising. The purpose of this group is to brainstorm and fund Reddit advertisements.

Why Reddit?
There is a large population of liberty-leaning technophiles. This seems like a perfect demographic for Bitcoin.

What are Reddit advertisements?
If you're not familiar with the system system, this cartoon describes the process in a humorous fashion. Basically, you receive views proportional to the price paid compared to the total paid that day. With this, we could target specific subreddits or the whole site for a reasonable sum, increasing the exposure as more is paid.

If you don't like my ad proposal, or don't trust me, join and create your own proposal.

It doesn't actually exist yet.

Ok, I see that you never mentioned wasted work, but you did talk about discarding work, and with my understanding of the way mining works, that makes no sense.

My understanding is that once a new block has been found, the data you're trying to hash is no longer valid.

Based on my understanding, this seems like desirable behavior, so that you are working on stale data as little as possible.

What is there to be discarded or counted? You've either found a solution with a difficulty greater than one or you haven't. There's no progress, just chance. Am I misunderstanding something?

The notion of "wasted" work is not applicable to mining. You are constantly (300,000,000 times per second on my 5850) trying to find a valid hash that is between difficulty 1 and the current difficulty. Basically, you're playing the lottery many times per second, and you immediately know whether or not you won. When a new block is found, you are actually "wasting" work until the next time you GetWork, or have it pushed to you.

Not entirely an answer to your question, as there is a $5 fee, but...

If you're in the U.S., you can purchase MoneyPark cards for cash at Walgreens, CVS, etc. They are used to refill Green Dot prepaid credit cards, but can also be deposited into PayPal. All that's needed is to encrypt the code from the card and send it to the Bitcoin seller, and they can deposit it into their PayPal account, no reversing charge worries. The only catch is that they will have to provide some info (social security#, etc) to Green Dot in order to do more than $250/year or so.

Doesn't matter... electronic currencies are easily exchangeable. Competition is good.

So, organized bank runs. That would do the trick.

Dang... I'm writing a wrapper app for some Bitcoin stuff (multiple wallets, encryption, backups, pool mining) and I'm parsing out the output to determine hash rate, accepted/rejected etc. I was hoping to be able to keep track of number of blocks found, but oh well.

dooglus,

The current round lasts until the pool finds a new block. Everyone who contributed to finding that block gets paid based on the shares, and a new round starts.

At least that's my understanding.

Hey slush, weird question, but does the server give a response to the client when they find a valid block?

That's one of the reasons I would like to allow multiple wallets, so that you could have your "savings" wallet that you rarely have to open, which would make it more secure.

I've actually got my wallet manager app working now with "dummy" wallets, which it allows Bitcoin to create and then deletes afterward. This is to allow Bitcoin to continue running and contribute to the network without exposing your decrypted wallet for that period of time.

That's only ~578 khashes/second. Doesn't seem that great. Where does the hashing happen, on the mobile phones or on Google's servers? Doesn't seem like something they'd give away for free...

Ah, trapezoidal schemes...

Right now, even if the Bitcoin client is not running, your wallet is stored unencrypted. There's no reason to make it that easy to steal your wallet. The changes I proposed would allow the client to handle multiple wallets in a manner that is more secure than the current handling of a single wallet. For instance, I've been working on a wallet manager that stores the wallet(s) encrypted, and only decrypts it to launch the Bitcoin client. The problem with this is that you cannot run as a node while also keeping your wallets securely stored. (Aside... I just realized a potential workaround - let the client create a new wallet instead of using one of the user's.)

Right on.

Hey guys, I had some fairly simple (imho) ideas for ways to handle wallets more securely in the future. Let me know what you think. Has this been discussed already?

Users should be able to manage multiple wallets.
The client should not open a default wallet when starting, just act as a node.
Wallets should be encrypted.
Users should be prompted for the password when opening a wallet.
When new addresses are generated, an encrypted backed should be copied to user defined locations.

It's barely worth it, probably even not, with a GPU miner as well. The interesting thing about Bitcoin, is that one could make the case that people are too focused on mining, but the act of contributing that processing power helps the network become stronger. Blows my mind sometimes.

Somebody joined the party... 12 ghash/sec now...

Woot, thanks. Order placed.

Hmm... the site appears to be down and I wanted to order some coffee... Is this a temporary issue? If not, can you accept manual orders?