Amazon does offer a GPU instance, not free by any means.  I did some rough calculations awhile back, LTCwould need to be trading around $25 to show a profit, and BTC would need to be around $500.  (this was about a year ago, I'm sure things have changed since)

I use the AWS EC2 platform for all my clients' websites, and yes, it is free for super low traffic/low power instances.  I tell new clients to create their own account, then give me access via the IAM service.  Works very nicely, and I highly recommend it.

Awesome stuff there Mark.  Going to reread it now.  

I'm also glad to see I'm not the only one who has been thinking about this.

Never heard of the mturk.  I went and checked it out.  Nifty!  I created myself an account just to play, maybe earns some USD, wish it paid coins!

But yes, if there was someway to funnel human think into the mining process, that would be awesome.  Sort of like Devcoin, but much, much easier to become one the rewarded devs.

Thanks.  You're right on.  I also just finished reading some white-pages on captcha's.  This idea would never work.


We can let this thread die a miserable death it deserves.   

Very nice looking site cycloid, impressive.

I went ahead and joined the pool at nvc.khore.org with one of my CPU only servers.  I'll be watching this thread to see when your pool is up and running.

It would only be boring for those wishing to earn coins via captcha.  System maintainers, especially the popular ones, would be rolling in it.

But you did make me see a potential problem...slave labor, like I hear about in Chinese jails, guards forcing inmates to collect WoW points/dollars, whatever they are, by doing repetitive crap online.

What's the possibility of creating a currency not mined with processing power, but with human interaction instead.  Meaning that a wallet holder would receive coins each time they completed an open-sourced captcha hosted by one of many "system maintainers". 

Anybody could mine the currency, only requirements are a wallet and an internet connection.  No expertise or expensive hardware needed. Very little energy would be required to increase money supply and it would be distributed (somewhat) democratically. 

The system maintainers would be rewarded for captcha's processed and transaction verifications.

Everybody would have some to spend, hence making the economy and usage growth that much quicker.


Or is it impossible to create an unbreakable a captcha system?  I'm just a lowly SQL/HTML programmer so my knowledge of advanced captcha techniques is very limited.

I really hope gox fixes/upgrades their trading platform before they do anything else. These once-a-week DDoS attacks are bad for crypto's all around. 

I wouldn't be surprised if they begin trading all currencies like vicurex once the new non-web-based platform is proven stable.

Like others have stated, you can never be absolutely sure you're not infected, unless you're using cold storage and the container has a physical lock and is under constant trusted surveillance, even then it's not truly secure.

In the meantime, I'd recommend using an offline password manager such as http://keepass.info/.

BFL is not a typical "take your money and run" scam.  They are completely legit IMO. 

But it is a scam nonetheless. The only reason I say this is because the more you invest with them, the less ROI you'll get.  And they're pretty forward about telling this to new customers.  There's a couple threads started by actual BFL reps in their forums that explain this.  Same is true for any company that sells ASIC's, also IMO.

Your four hours goes by a lot quicker when you've checked "Stay Signed In" in your profile.

I was reading posts for about two hours last light and gained 15 mins.  After checking it, the total time increased increased in real time.  Passing my four hour mark with this post.

Funny thing is, I've been a lurker for about a year, just never created an account (privacy freak, I know, I'm getting better).  I'd say my real total time is upwards of 300 hrs.

First six letters of a crypto key.  I kept generating one till I found one I liked.  Did this about a year ago.

I'm using it everywhere I go nowadays because I'm tired of coming up with cute yet forgettable user names.  Also grew tired of people making invalid political/gender assumptions simply based upon the gramercy/spelling of some permanent username I came up with in an altered state. 

Awesome thread, wish I read this a year ago.

Might I add:
shovel scam - Those who sold the shovels made all the money in gold rush of 1849.  Or arguably BFL/Avalon today.

and
tulip bulbs/buying tulips - The false analogy uninformed economic pundits make between the Dutch tulip bulb market bubble of 1637 and the current Bitcoin market.

You can GPU mine other coins (LTC/NVC?) that are ASIC unfriendly.   I haven't invested in video cards yet.  Still CPU mining litecoins, only one a month nowadays.  Six months ago, it was one a day 

I do have a jalapeno otw, I hope, no I'm sure.  What I'm not sure about is whether or not it'll be an expensive paperweight when it arrives.  Putting out coins like my obsolete LTC CPU mining op, ie slow as hell.

OKPay has a debit card.  I just applied yesterday.  Still have to transfer USD from gox/btce to get it funded.  Not sure about fees or transaction transit time from exchanges.

I'll let you know how it works out.

I'm order #20147, considered cancelling, but didn't. 

They have a policy of allowing customers to upgrade existing orders and not lose position in the queue.  Considering an upgrade, bion lol!

But yes, it is a scam because the more they sell, the less they're worth.  Hence ponzi or shovel scam.  And this is whole problem with mining cryptos IMO.  And I got an idea to fix it...for another thread.   

I bought 20 bitcoins about a year ago.  Started mining LTC about 6 months ago.  Best ROI of time and money I've ever spent.  You've might have seen me talking in the BTC-e chat box, I'm there a few times a week.

Got a idea for another alt-coin, decided to stop lurking and create a damn account to talk about.

Also run a few e-commerce websites, thinking about writing a some php or perl libs to start accepting bit/alt coins.

I've been mining LTC on my dev web-server for about six months.  2 ancient AMD CPUs.

Grand total 105 LTC.  It used to pop out one a day, now only get about one a month (8khs).  No video on board, thinking about popping in a 7970, but it's a blade type config, and it wouldn't fit nicely in my server rack, plus I'd have to rig some kinda riser for the PCIe ports.  

I put a kill-a-watt on it and found that mining eats very little juice, so I just let it run.

Ripple's website seems VERY vague about how the whole thing works.  I seriously like the idea of a p2p exchange, but I hate that 100 billion (I think) XRP's are pre-mined.  I was about to jump in, but decided against it.

Checkout http://ripplescam.org/.