That last thing you suggested is a bit complicated, I'll read it again, but you don't want to put people off with overly intricate rules. (Maybe I'm just slow too, I'll reread)
It's not as complicated as it may seem at first read. Basically it's just making sure the whole cake is distributed on that draw, regardless of there being no 1st prizes. I like the 1000 / 2BTC + 500 / 5BTC for those 'guaranteed jackpot' idea... would that deter you from playing? Yeah, i'm back to leaving as-is I think. This is fun and charitable for me, not hoarding my precious coins. A large jackpot would grow the bitcoin community much faster. 360 to go!
[need signature of lottery details]
sig of lottery details... hmmm, that's a great idea. * nelisky pushes sig to top of todo list |
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I started posting in the other topic but I'll repeat here, this thread seems more specific to the topic.
The main backup improvement will be a pre-generated pool of keys and a rescan at load to scrape missed transactions from the block history. Then a backup will last forward for a long time.
I was starting to post the same idea you said nelisky.
Yes, I saw your other post and I really like the poll of addresses, but we still need a way to easily back up when those get all used, don't we? I know the address space is huge, but there might be applications that deliver thousands of addresses per day.
How about a json-rpc command that locks the wallet, flushes it, copies wallet.dat to a location you specified, then unlocks it? That would be a smaller project than the pooled keys, so maybe it could be done first.
What's the simplest portable way to copy a file? Is there something in Boost?
What should it be named? maybe:
backupwallet <destination>
Great on all accounts, name and implementation approach. As for the file copy, why add to the boost dependency? I for one would love to get a core lib with very little deps. In C++ you can just use standard file streams, can't you? Something like http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet2306.htm (out of a quick google, didn't try but looks correct). To put the cherry on top, why not add a trigger that makes the copy whenever there's a change to the wallet? Well, this would depend on file locking to work properly and that sucks on windows iirc. Been a while since I had to code there  |
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Bitcoin Watch has implemented a way to check all details of a block, including the hash we will be using for the lottery: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=928.0This is a good way of confirming the result is correct for users that don't wan't to/can't recompile bitcoin with getblock. Now you don't have to take my word for it Major thanks to Bitcoin Watch. |
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Wow, a trust linking system that doesn't require any personal data, that is freakin' awesome. Kudos to you for thinking of that It does sound a little daunting at implementation. You mention p2p distribution, which makes it somewhat complex. A centralized, community controlled site would work too, no? I like this idea a lot. I've been trying to think along these lines too and keep getting stuck with actual implementation. Is there a framework out there for a true centralized, yet community controlled site? Theoretically if we were to build the Trustbook, it could eat its own dog food and the most trusted members could be elected to have access to sensitive things like DB's, servers and such. I think this would help considerably as we set up more and more bitcoin websites/exchanges/businesses, as it would give a way to both verify the trustworthiness of the owner/operator but also the authenticity of that person as well. The most important feature in 'community controlled' is, imo, trust. And trust is gained through disclosure. Think about my lottery site, I am actively preventing suspicion by providing everyone with as much information as possible, including the distribution of bets, so when I say there were 5x2nd prizes, that information can be checked against data that existed before the winning result was chosen. On the same train of thought we could do accounts based on alias + public key, and allow people to choose their trusted parties (or untrusted, +1/0/-1). If we then disclose the alias trust linkage, I'm sure that all the smart people around here could detect suspicious movements. How could this system be broken? If I create 100 users that all trust my real user, then that user has +100, but none of the 100 fake users is trusted by anyone, so no profit there. But if my real user get trust points from the community, and I trust the 100 that trust me back, this would be slightly different, unless I don't care about who else trusts you, unless they are already in my web of trust. But I digress, and I need to work |
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Wow, a trust linking system that doesn't require any personal data, that is freakin' awesome. Kudos to you for thinking of that It does sound a little daunting at implementation. You mention p2p distribution, which makes it somewhat complex. A centralized, community controlled site would work too, no? |
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Maybe if there is no 1st place winner, the 1st place win pool goes into the 2nd place win pool. If no 2nd place winner, down to 3rd place, etc. This might get more people in invest in the lottery in the early stages, rather than just wait until there are thousands of btc up for grabs, and not such a losing proposition.
That's a pretty good idea, I think I prefer it to the rollover. But what about in the long run? You don't want to see very large jackpots there? You are the ones in charge though, if you prefer blend down to rollover I'll just do it... but read my previous post, might be a good middleground. |
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I don't know how much various actions hit your server. Maybe before going to 4^16 bet space you could do 2-5BTC tickets, that would keep the number of tickets in your database low, while still being affordable for pretty much anyone to buy a few.
I think 2-5% to charity is good, and I prefer cycling through the best ones as opposed to choosing less and less worth ones over time (like someones blog).
I like a draw every 1000. You could make it longer when there is no rollover. Tickets are a better deal when there is more in the pot, so it will attract bets faster when there is seed money. It might make sense to let it grow for longer whenever it starts from zero.
It could be synced up next time to go at block 78000 then every 1000 from there, but go 2000 if the pot was emptied out after last draw.
Right, in a nutshell keep the 3^16 until we exhaust most of the betting space. Raising the ticket price is actually a great idea, funny how it didn't ever cross my mind. I thought about lowering so people would buy more tickets thus improving their chances of winning, but the pots would invariably be smaller. I'll adapt the code to cope with different ticket prizes, and open the next draw. I'm inclined to go 78000 / 5BTC *if* the first prize gets moved over, and 78000 / 2BTC if someone wins it. For now it's ok to experiment, but I want this automated so I need to get a set of rules down. As before, everyone's help is appreciated: - make draws at 1k block boundaries for primed pots, 2k for empty ones - 1k draws @ 2BTC, 2k @ 1BTC - If the pot reaches *SOME_NUMBER_HERE* a special draw, at the next 0.5k boundary is held with tickets @ 5BTC, where the total pot is guaranteed to be distributed like this: - For every prize without winners that amount is distributed by the prizes with winners, keeping their relative proportions - for example a 1000BTC prize pool would pay 500 to 1st, 240 to second, 240 to third. If there is no second the 240 get divided 162 / 78 added to 1st / 3rd. - with the same base as above, no first prize would add 250 to each 2nd and 3rd prize pools What do you think? What could the *SOME_NUMBER_HERE*? Should we do time span instead?
I'm a bit confused. Why do you say it isn't secured properly? Isn't that kind of an important thing to fix?
Was just trying to be sarcastic. No web server is ever fully secured, and in this particular case I only have the basic walls, I'm not being paranoid. Well, not about penetration, but the hardware failure does get me kind of nervous, after the story of the lost 9k BTCs, so there I'm maybe a little over the top, with RAID10 + on site backup + off site backup. But hey, today it's 120 BTCs, which I can cover from my (virtual) pocket, but tomorrow... |
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This reminds me of a movie of which I don't know the original name, but covered the viral approach in helping people out and getting them help other people out in exchange...
Perhaps you are thinking of the movie, "Pay it Forward"?  Just looked it up and... go figure, that IS the name of the movie!  "Amazing coincidence?" - he says while while blushing ever so slightly. |
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So what kind of warning do admins get from bitcoind? Is there something we can grep from debug.log? Or will rpc calls raise some specific error? Is there a way to locally force this to happen, for unittesting services?
getinfo has a new field that shows any alert messages or other errors that would be displayed on the status bar. The rpc methods return a json-rpc error with the error description "Safe mode: " followed by additional text specified by the alert. I added the switch "-testsafemode" for you. SVN rev 145. This stuff is very new and may still be subject to change. Perfect, works great for me. Thank you. |
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You know what would really help me as a buyer? If I could filter out all the 'Ships from USA, no international' auctions. I see stuff I like at a price I'd pay, only to find seller will not send to me.
Is that possible? Just Europe / USA / Everywhere else would be good enough (for me).
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What is the error the RPC calls return? And more importantly, how can I simulate this? Can you add a flag to start the server in degraded mode?
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The fw payment should be done in any particular order? The 3 addresses posted after mine? Any 3 addresses posted after mine? Any 3 addresses?
Is this viral or pyramidal? :p
Ok, thinking this through, it only gets interesting if we do pseudo-random donations (viral style). I say pseudo because I'll send first to the people I like, then to those I don't know  |
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The fw payment should be done in any particular order? The 3 addresses posted after mine? Any 3 addresses posted after mine? Any 3 addresses?
Is this viral or pyramidal? :p
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This reminds me of a movie of which I don't know the original name, but covered the viral approach in helping people out and getting them help other people out in exchange...
My address: 1Mz6PNnCJ1cwVK3qaH66QtCko5oNaHN4a
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@nelisky
I congratulate you for homeschooling your kids.How do you find the free time to do it?
I may have mislead you to believe I play an active role, my wife does all the hard work In all seriousness, I work from home, we travel a lot, my wife is dedicated to education in many ways, and thus is the perfect educator for our kids. But they will be going to regular school this year, as they are now teens and, quite frankly, we have done our share. Now they have the tools to 'survive in the wild' or so we like to think. It is part of the process I guess. |
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And education, and the environment. It's a sad truth, we're mostly all sheep. But all it takes is a good sheppard....
My wife & I homeschool our two kids, I know what you mean. I see you do We have done the same for the past few years, and have even joined in with a group of people to open an alternative school, but it's quite a struggle. Even those who consider themselves alternative are way more biased than they think, and in a frightening, so are we. No, I live in Portugal. You probably will do alright in Portugal when the US comes to grips with the fascist state they are (there, I fixed that for you).
Truth that. I really meant to say "when the US becomes an *openly* fascist state". Our government sucks, our system is always in the verge of collapse but we still are very down to earth people and the truth is that we are years behind most every other country which, in my personal opinion, is a major bonus. And the beaches where I live are great.
A government always on it's deathbed is ideal from the perspectives of a libertarian. Far better to deal with an agent of the state that is always one screw-up away from the unemployment line than an agent of a nanny state with nearly limitless resources. I think most Europeans don't understand 'libertarian' but you guys might still call us 'liberals' since that term was never corrupted so in Europe. We don't tiptoe around knowing things will collapse, mind you. Every single one of us knows the thing is dying and we "blame the government", we "blame the EU", we "blame the immigrants", in a nutshell, we "blame everyone else". But while this is really bad for the country, as very little gets done, it does provide kind of a safeguard if you're trying to live an alternative life. I do go to Brazil often enough and have very dear friends there, so if you ever need to quickly escape I can make your arrival easier  From an economic view, Brazil is probably the best place to be right now. They not only have a growing economy, unlike everyone else, but they also still accept that people will do business with people, not just with taxed businesses. It's a reality they don't fight. They even have a name for people who run local businesses without having an formal business. We call them illegal, they call them informal... it's beautiful. Sounds like my kind of place. Yep. Things will change as their economy grows, I guess, but there's a set unspoken way of doing things that is cultural. Financial overlords go to great lengths to overpower and effectively transform cultural traditions, so as to use them to their own benefit (think Coke - why is santa dressed in red again?) so the danger is always there, but I have hopes the whole global system will collapse due to excess awareness from the people... one can always hope! |
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So, as many others, I need to backup wallet.dat. And since this one is on a server, I need it to happen unattended. And because this server is being used by the lottery, I must not shutdown bitcoind.
So far I just copy the file over, and do it often so I can outlive one corrupted file. But this is not ideal, as I should backup after every transaction (sent, right? no new addresses are created on receiving a transfer ) or after everytime I create a new address.
For that I thought about instead of copying the file I could use db_dump to dump it's contents, using the -r flag just in case. Would that work?
The ideal solution would be an rpc call that would either:
- flush and lock updates until a new rpc call (any call, didn't need to be an unlock command) would come over
- flush and cp wallet.dat to a side file
- flush and dump through jsonrpc. If each key would come separate in an array, we could then call this with 'lastseen=X' to just get new keys
Could this work? Which would work best?
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I love this idea.. but, the site is down.  . Not any more, right? I'm experimenting with mongodb replication, which implied a db server restart, sorry about that. |
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It's not that bitcoins are worth less, much the opposite, but this goes against what most everyone is used to, or has been taught is "normal".
What almost everyone has been taught about Economics is *wrong*. And education, and the environment. It's a sad truth, we're mostly all sheep. But all it takes is a good sheppard.... Not at all. I'm a native Portuguese speaker. I do have a *lot* of exposure to English, in its most varied forms, though Do you live in Brazil? If so, can I come an live with you if the US collapses into a fascist state? I'm presuming, of course, that Brazil is well enough beyond it's own oppressive past that it's no longer at risk of a relapse. No, I live in Portugal. You probably will do alright in Portugal when the US comes to grips with the fascist state they are (there, I fixed that for you). Our government sucks, our system is always in the verge of collapse but we still are very down to earth people and the truth is that we are years behind most every other country which, in my personal opinion, is a major bonus. And the beaches where I live are great. I do go to Brazil often enough and have very dear friends there, so if you ever need to quickly escape I can make your arrival easier From an economic view, Brazil is probably the best place to be right now. They not only have a growing economy, unlike everyone else, but they also still accept that people will do business with people, not just with taxed businesses. It's a reality they don't fight. They even have a name for people who run local businesses without having an formal business. We call them illegal, they call them informal... it's beautiful. |
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What would that do for this idea?
http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ with which you can encode strings and urls and the like, and finding a reader for mobile phones with webcams is really easy. Maybe we could even develop a specific app for doing that, paying bitcoins to addresses captured using qrcode or another 2d barcode schema, by passing the address to mybitcoin or something. It could take bitcoins to the outside world (literally), people! |
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