He did this because at the time it was not completely public that the two accounts were alts of each other and he was on a personal vendetta to smear me as he stated using the ACCTSeller.  He made the mistake of abusing the trust system in this way and eventually he'll end up having to account for it.  For the moment, badbear is out of town and there's nothing we can do.  Please don't derail this thread into a quickseller complaint thread, there are plenty of those and while I admit he seems to be among the most self-righteous, abusive and problematic of the "trust-rangers", this is not really about him in particular but about the general problems in the system.

How can you leave bitcoind off this poll?  My fav wallets are bitcoind, bitcoin wallet for android, and then multibit.

Cute.  But no one is accusing me.  Nevertheless I'm glad you recognize the polish in my statements.  I'm certainly not one of the trust rangers and with all your "skills and skills and skills and reputations for skills" then I'm sure you'd be able to find an example if I was known for running around tooting my own horn at the expense of others.  Meanwhile, search through your own posts for the string "my reputation" and it's pretty easy to see how fragile your ego is.

I think it was answered just above you.  They're currently in the design process for those sigs.

Yes, lets see which way that goes.  If clams start selling north of 0.01BTC then I'd certainly take some action to dig up whatever I might have left.

That's pretty much his normal m.o. from what I've been able to tell.  I think he has two modes: 1) answer accusations with distractions and 2) when not busy with doing (1), singing his own praises "I'm gods-gift to this forum, a scambuster and everyone who disagrees with me, I know why!" and thow insults at anyone who has crossed him.

Ok, some kinda sig-ad warfare happened here with CIYAM and someone else.  Anyway, from what I recall from a course taken a long time ago, we calculate variance by doing the sum of square differences from the mean  and divide that by the sample size.  Then maybe the square root of that is std-deviation?  I guess I was hoping that one of the whizzes out there would already have this for me (ie, it's a known) rather than me having to look into it.

@CIYAM I think the longest possible time is infinity.  Since we can never guarantee that the next block will be found (ie, the true distribution of times between blocks should have tails that asymptotically approach infinity (one one side) and zero (on the other)), but I'm not so much intersted in the max and min but in an empirical sampling over which we can calculate variance (I'm sure there's some such sampling being done in order to make the difficulty adjustments).

EDIT: @cr1776: thanks for those links.  Some of them have more info than others.   I'm not sure anyone actuall did the empirical sampling.  But the consensus seems to be that the distribution is asymmetrical and has a std dev of 10 minutes.  I'd consider my question more or less answered, but I'll leave this open in case anyone does the sampling or has something else to add here.

What Xian01 says is more or less exactly what I argue for in the OP.  I know that MZ thinks that default trust is saving the world, one noobie at a time, and this is almost certainly how the trust-rangers our there feel about themselves, but I'm not so convinced.  First, if someone is willing to give all their money away without looking into who/why/where etc don't they simply deserve to learn that lesson so that they can be safer in the future?  Isn't it the case that any protection they gain from the trust rangers is just temporary and delusional---ie, sooner or later they're going to have to start figuring out the world for themselves, right?  I mean just because people are noobies to bitcointalk doesn't mean they aren't rational, self-controlling adults with the sense to decide who and who to not give money to.  The idea that noobies are somehow incapable in a way that the rest of us aren't seems spurious to me.

Oh yah, I forgot that he connected it to firstbits.  I know how that works and I understand the connection now.

I know that mining difficulty is adjusted from time to time in order to keep the blocks hashing on average at 10 minutes per.  However, from my experience waiting for confirmations here and there, I also know there can be quite a bit of variance in this distribution (the distribution of time-between-blocks).  Has anyone calculated the standard deviation?

As far as I know, you can never know the number of minutes until the next confirmation.  What you can know with certainty is the number of minutes since the last block was hashed.  Then, you can make a reasonable guess as to how long until the next one based on that knowledge.  Average is 10 mintues per block but I notice a lot of variation.

I'm quite happy that the micro-stakes tables are working now.  Whenever I show up to do a freeroll, I almost always sit down at the small ring table and see if anyone will join me.  I'd say about half the time someone comes along.  The only issue so far is that I've never gotten more than 3 people before someone runs out of money and the game falls apart.

Next time you guys are at the freeroll, buy into the micro stakes 0.01/0.02 for 1 or 2 chips and multitable.  It's good for the site and it's fun for us and if we can get a critical mass then we'll have a great place to play poker around the clock!

And very curious that they aren't even interested in Sr./Hero members.  I wonder why they wouldn't want bigger ads.

That's one longshot of a hope.  Imagine that I have a vanity address with one of those real word prefixes that this person has "squatted" on.  There's almost no chance in hell that the rest of our addresses are the same, and who types in vanity addresses by hand (there's still the long non-mnemonic part), and even if you did type it in by hand and make a typo, really long shot that your typo'd version is even valid, much less another person's address.  Finally, why would the squatting help?  If this guy has the key for some many vanity addresses, why make it public that fact?  Why not just wait till someone else sends something there and then move those funds?

It is quite possible that I don't see the entire picture here.  But from what I can tell, the forum moderators are wanting to grrow some sort of organic network of trust where they don't have to moderate it, it basically self regulates based on participation of many people and their activities.  However, I think that one thing that's getting in the way of that is that not many people actually participate, ie, they just see a trust warning on some people and take that as ground truth.  Then we have a lot of drama because others are working to be trust-rangers, jumping through all kinds of hoops and loops in order to be known as scam-busters who keep the boards safe from the bad guys.  But a small collection of trust-rangers isn't the same thing as that large, organic, unmoderated trust system that saltyspittoon mentioned upthread.

Several folks have said that if trust were opt-in rather than opt-out that that would be dangerous---it would remove using trust system as a crutch certainly, but they say that even the crutch is better than nothing before you know how to walk.

However, there seems to be near universal agreement that the actual text of the warning could be changed to both a) be more informative about the actual state of affairs and b) be more inviting to learn how to use the trust system for yourself.

Theymos, lets have "negative trust" warning changed to: "This person has received negative feedback from someone in your trust network."   That message is far more reflective of the actual situation and provides an invitation to figure out exactly who is in your trust network and why.

Micro stakes ring game currently kicking with 3 people.  Join us and lets set the record!

Yah, hillarious that it was reenabled on april fool's day. Nevertheless, you were bound to notice avatars being back sooner or later.  The accounts on here went from only a special few having one, to nearly everyone having one.  A real explosion.

I think you can ask the same thing about "vanity" license plates used in the USA (maybe elsewhere?), that is, you can ask what the point is.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_plate

But I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by "makes it easier to track down your BTC".  If you mean in a good way, as in perhaps you can search a little easier on blockchain.info or something like that, you might be right (but I think you're still going to have to remember the nonvanity part somehow or another, unless they have a "search for prefix" or something like that).  But if you mean that it makes it easier for someone to brute-force your private key, I don't think you're correct at all.  The search space for btc addresses is waaaay too large.

Got it.  I have to say your involvement in CLAM actually brings a lot of credibility that a lot of the alts just don't have.  I'm pretty sure I've got at least one more address which was funded and whose CLAMs I haven't dug.  I'm watching and waiting for now.  Cheers!

This thread is just to give folks interested in scripting primedice's api a little help to get off the ground and going.  I'm just showing a few shell scripts I've used to log in and send bets etc.  These are expected to be run on a UNIX like machine with grep, sed, curl.

So, first thing you have to do is login and get your access token.  Here's a little script that logs you in and saves your token in a file called "token".  Use this script with your actual password and username as arg1 and arg2:


All this does is use curl to POST your login and then filters the output with sed.  The last line just prints the token to STDOUT in case that's useful for another program that calls this.

I'll show you guys one more, you can use this to send a bet using three args, the amount, the target number, and up or down ("<",">").  Note that because < and > are shell redirects for filedescriptors, you'll have to enclose the up/down in quotes.  This is the script:


Again, the assumption here is that you ran 'login' already and have your access token stored in a file called 'token'.  The script prints out "true" if you won and "false" if you lost.

These basic scripts aren't really even scripts.  They're just one liners to do the work of forumlating the curl command for you and keeping track of your access token.  I've used them to write some betting algorithms in perl.  I don't want to get too far into this, but some folks have asked me via pm for help in this so I thought this might get them started.  If you wanted to write a true bot then you'd want to do something more than use sed to filter all the output from a particular request, you'd want to use a json parser and keep track of all the data that comes back each time and update your local record accordingly.  The idea here is just to get you started if you want to play around with the api but need a few examples to get going.

Hope this helps you guys!  Have fun and safe betting!

EDIT: Realized that I should say that to use this code you'd probably want to cut-n-paste the lines into a file and then save it and make it executable.  For example, if you called my login script "login" then you'd say:


And after that you could run it with:


And similarly with the "bet" script, save it, make it executable, and call it with three args:


^^ that's a bet of 10 satoshis on under 50.