Bought some Poker$ from Freemoney. Will certainly do it again once I go all in with a pair of fours again, with the statistically obvious outcome

And because he/she/it are always trying to beat the system and get some more free BTC, the end result will be voluntary turn in to collect the bounty :p

What do you mean productive? I'm doing the buying part in small scale for myself already, and the selling part shouldn't take too much of my time. If this adds  to the offer bitcoins provide and gets more people to join, then I'd say it's pretty productive.

If you meant profitable, yeah, that's not what I'm after.

Well, I can't do that for bitcoins legally without getting into the market of itunes and the like, and this is not something I'm eager to do... really! CDs, on the other hand, are physical licenses to the music, and as such easily sold as used items. And the price per album is more or less the same as mp3s from itunes, and with a little work could be brought down.


Scavenge for used electronics? Is that still useful these days? I have some computer hw laying around, cd units included (they should all be working), maybe I should make a list and send to you Or put everything on biddingpond...

Hey,

I usually buy a bunch of music CDs from amazon UK with prices ranging from £1 to £3, to which I then get ~£2 p&p added. I thought I could open a store selling these for bitcoins, if there is interest. Of course I'd have to add yet another p&p fee to it, but the question is:

- Would you buy music CDs at ~200BTC (shipped, current exchange rates) and if so,
- What type of music / band / artist would you like to see available.

Thanks

I still don't have a perfect grasp of the communication tokens used in bitcoin, but could we not extend the bitcoin proxies ever so slightly to accept another type of payload, a message? This message would be encrypted using the recipient public key and probably a hash of the transaction in question. I'd make completely separate from the blocks, storage wise, probably storing only messages for the last 24 hrs or so on each node.

Of course, to avoid DoS attacks the message needed to be sent after the transaction and be somehow cryptographically connected to it, so proxies can:
1) ignore any bogus message that doesn't relate to a specific transaction
2) find a message related to a specific  transaction (only important on the receiving address, but non-proxy clients would ask the next node, I guess)

I was just reading the faucet drainer thread and it came to mind that no one was brave enough to say they're from Spain

I'm from Portugal, btw.

Which one of you is the butler?

But that is only as good as the trust you have in the distribution channels, which are being discussed in other threads. If a compromised client was to be served as an upgrade, and most running clients would be using this version, then a new chain would replace the old one. What would happen when, after some time, the attack was disclosed and new clients with the real block chain signatures were run? Would the old (real) chain still be alive and replace the bogus one?

Did you see http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=528.msg4923#msg4923 ? That might be the problem... I had read somewhere about python urllib and bitcoing not playing along, but curl had no issues. Can't find that thread though.

Well, kudos to you for trying. Now if I can just get your code merged with the old cuda version on my macbook pro, I'll be a happy camper

SHA256 test started
70293
found solutions = 70293
total hashes = 139463136
total time = 222110 ms
average speed: 627 khash/s

So slightly better, but still far for good... As for AMD vs Intel, on my Mac, which is an intel i5, the performance boost was almost 100%, so maybe some compiler thing? I did have to remove the -arch i386 from makefile.osx to have it build on osx 10.6, but there's no such flag on linux' g++ and I'm pretty sure the 64bit g++ will not compile 32bit anyway.

datla@bah:~/src/bitcoin/bitcoin-cruncher$ ./test blocks.txt
SHA256 test started
70293
found solutions = 70293
total hashes = 139463136
total time = 235480 ms
average speed: 592 khash/s

I'll send you the obj file now

At the risk of getting this thread way off topic, I have to agree with NewLibertyStandard. I'm not a native English speaker, and while I do have a lot of exposure to English on my everyday's work, some terms, such as the one in the thread topic, get me thinking: "Hmmm, I wonder how it is that bandits make out."

I don't like these thoughts, mind you, so I'll just distract myself by typing './bitcoind getinfo' on the console over and over again, and wonder in vain when is it that the pesky number of bitcoins will decide to change!

I've tried the git branch and results stay the same, almost half of what the vanilla svn can pump out. I'm running Intel and not AMD, but I am on 64bit:

Linux bah 2.6.32-22-server #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 14:34:48 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Anything I can try to help and debug this?

Why would you assume they hate it? The problem, afaict, is just controlling it. It's hard, almost as hard as the drug market. If they find a way to prevent anyone from gambling online without their approval and scrutiny, then you'll see online gambling on government sponsored ads everywhere (with a disclaimer saying "gamble responsibly" in very small letters). The same applies to bitcoins in general, it is just something they don't control which means can't easily tax, which obviously is seen as a threat, especially when they have a concurrent thing, which is controlled and taxed by said governments.

I believe there's a huge difference between porn (which is art, weather you like it or not) and poker (or, as the governments like to put it, gambling). Basically, gambling is highly legislated, and online gambling even more so these days. The sites need to keep records of everything and while BTCs could be seen as 'play money' that would only work to a point, I believe.

Porn, on the other hand, is just art (so as long as all those involved are at or above legal age, of course) and, "no dear, of course I don't browse those stupid misogynous sites" but I would certainly pay in bitcoins for that because... ahem... I want to help the economy pick up.

It would also rock at poker, sure, but I don't think any of the established sites will want to venture a government action because they allow 'anonymous money' to go in.

I'm trying on a Q6600 running 64bit linux (ubuntu server) and it makes things slower there, so not 64bit only. And I'm running on my mac laptop which sports an Intel i5 (also 64 bit OSX 10.6), which great speed improvement there, so not AMD only.

Yep, definitely the wrong thread... I'll paste it into the correct one. Funny thing is I wasn't even following this thread and I'm pretty sure I did post it while looking over the other one. Ah well, go figure.

I'm not an American, and thus the IRS system is deeply different where I live, but still I really think that kiba put it right: toy money. You could trade monopoly money for groceries, if the owner of the grocery store would feel so inclined, and for low volumes it's just a 'loss' he incurs, much like giving away eggs or bread.

But when your business takes a loss, the loss, according to the IRS, isn't just yours, it's everyones (if you believe in the IRS and its credibility on using collected money is a different discussion), Basically, you don't pay taxes for (some part of) your earnings because you've offset the positive income with the sale of things you had bought (and thus spent money on) for, well, nothing of value.

If the practice of turning goods bought with "real" money for "toy" money becomes something of volume, you don't only skip paying taxes for the goods you sold for BTCs (which is ok, I guess) but you also further lower the IRS slice by reporting on the spendings for material you bought and then magically disappeared without rendering profit.

You can sell products in exchange for services, but in this is inherently different as these services you would pay for if you didn't get them in exchange for goods, making the delta of the operation the same (in theory).

This whole discussion of multiple hard linked currencies seems to me to have some technical merit, in terms of the resilience and redundancy of the system, but not so much in the economical side. It's just like when the Euro was introduced, and all local currencies were hard linked to it. Basically the local transactions were still in the local currency, but it was no longer a "real" currency, it was just a token of "worth x Eur" which you could trade both ways knowing that the value would always be the same.