Using the pool block finding for a four day period lets the chart show some other pools' block finds. Ozco has 22 blocks (@ +12% luck) here vs Deepbit's 162 (+3% luck), so ozco's hashrate is still a bit less than shown.

The smallest pools not relegated to "other known" have three block finds. "Unknown" is mostly the mystery 0-TX miner, with more blocks found than ozco, although there are surprisingly a lot of single-block solo miners still.

120VAC was a joke, whoosh. Using 9 volt batteries isn't in itself a measure of safety - stun guns run on 9v batteries.

I've got them up too:

http://we.lovebitco.in/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar
md5: 91e2dfa2af043eabbb38964cbf368500 *bitcoin-0.1.0.rar

http://we.lovebitco.in/bitcoin-0.1.3.rar
md5: 9a73e0826d5c069091600ca295c6d224 *bitcoin-0.1.3.rar

What is more annoying is that all Bitcoin releases before 0.3.24 were just deleted from sourceforge. Why?? Here's Linux 1.0.0 from 1994, they aren't trying to erase their history...

(new links updated)

"Major breakthrough" might be something significant. The NSA also has a classified budget for hiring the best mathematicians.

For example: NSA modified the DES specification to be more resistant against differential cryptanalysis (but with recommended key sizes that were possibly within their cracking abilities), two decades before these techniques were publicly known. AES is supposed to be DC resistant; however the NSA might have identified a technique that is still secret that would allow a lower barrier to analysis than full key size and current public knowledge would indicate in the rijndael AES candidate, and let it go through. There is already public cryptanalysis that cuts two bits off the brute-forcing of AES: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cryptanalysis/aes.aspx

I think the circuit you will have to search for is the "shock" circuit. How much can you charge up a capacitor without stopping the heart... Of course you could just hook participants up to 120VAC.

You might even consider an electromechanical setup for such a game, a windup timer, light bulbs, go old-skool.

Relevant link.

That is a good point. If you have 1000 BTC in one address and you want to send 10 BTC to someone, you have to send the whole amount and get change back. However you are still sending a 1000 BTC input.

The Bitcoin client does not encourage accumulation of large balances in one address though. It automatically gives you a new address to use for incoming payments (or at least it did before the 0.5 changes). For the bit-rich, it may be advisable to examine where your money is in the face of such a change, and multi-send your mega-balance to 10 other addresses at one go, or create spending accounts and savings accounts.

The Bitcoin client could manage such multi-address balances even better for the minimization of fees; we already know it ignores age, and tries to assemble a transaction that results in the smallest change from the existing address balances in the wallet. Sending change to multiple addresses in a graduated fashion (ie, your change is 500,250,125,62 from the 1000BTC input above), informed by the amounts currently in the wallet addresses, may prepare your wallet for lower percentage fee sending in the future.

I don't see a better way though, a per-transaction fee would currently have to be excessively high for the desired significant contribution to block rewards, punishing small payments and small balance holders unfairly.

In a typical 24h period, over 500,000 BTC is currently being transferred. 7200 BTC in 144 block generations are being produced. An average of 3500BTC is transferred per block. And about 25 BTC total per day are being paid in transaction fees. From this thread, we see we may want transactions fees sizeable enough to encourage inclusion of transactions in blocks, to make someone only interested in profit reconsider their wholesale omission of transactions.

A transaction fee is rarely required now, with so many old coins on the mature network. You can let 5 BTC sit in your wallet for a few days and you can spend them without fee. The current fees are only an anti-spam method, enforced only for small transfers of recently transferred coins, and will do little to eventually supplant mining rewards.

First, we may want to revert to the original Satoshi client's fees for low-priority transactions (and set a future block in the client where the old rules will again be enforced for relay and mining). It looks like the change to 0.0005 BTC per KB fees (v0.3.23) was unenlightened.  When the fee change was made, Bitcoin had a price trajectory that looked like this:



Secondly, I think it is time to also consider a percentage transaction fee.

A mandatory fee, to encourage inclusion of transactions in blocks beyond the anti-spam measures, is probably desireable, to the point where it becomes a not insignificant amount per block. 5 BTC per block or better may achieve this goal. To target 5BTC per block, by evaluating recent transaction history, this percentage would only be 0.14%. A percentage will not discourage microtransactions (developing nations, etc), and may be accompanied by the minimum fee, or only take effect for amounts above the minimum fee.

We know also that the mining reward will drop to 25 BTC by December. If we want to encourage blockchain difficulty to have the same resistance to attack it does now, knowing that Bitcoin isn't going to magically take over the world, we should strive to put transaction fees on a course to supplement and eventually replace coin generation, as we know will be required. Right now, if we consider 25BTC from fees to be the target for the next four years (replacing the 25BTC mining reward), we need to look at a rate similar to the percentage mentioned above.

Fees may reduce the amount of daily transfers, but this will also discourage the blockchain bloat we are currently experiencing (1GB to 1.5GB in four months). I've got a feeling much of that 500,000 BTC a day is moving around just because it is free...

If you change your account to PayPal micropayments, you pay less in fees for purchase below $8, but pay more in fees for anything above that: https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/

With that, the fee is $0.05 + 5%
Without that, the fee is $0.30 + 2.9%

Without it, if someone sends you $0.40, you receive $0.09 and PayPal gets $0.31.
With it, if someone sends you $100, you get $94.95.

The cost of doing business with PayPal is much higher though, trading or selling virtual currencies is against their policies, and will likely get your account balance locked at some point. Fraudsters will buy your bitcoins with stolen cards or charge you back. I would not go there.

Perhaps you should re-think what you are saying here? Nobody gets sent any BTC, the raffle prize is what is shipped (such as the BFL single). The raffle organizer keeps all bitcoins people send him to buy raffle tickets. The raffle organizer has promised to ship the prize to a winner at the end of the raffle. However, to defraud, he just buys many fake tickets, essentially for free, to reduce the chance of a legitimate winner. If he wins himself, he doesn't have to ship the prize to anybody - even if the ticket sales and picking method are done by someone else. If he doesn't win himself, it cost nothing extra to attempt to defraud all legitimate entrants, and he does what the raffle promised, ship the prize to the winner.

I saw you misunderstand this potential fraud method earlier in the thread (anyone else, and I'd say spread disinformation denying this fraud method), so I'll clarify. A raffle operator who buys his own tickets buys them for free, because the money goes out of his pocket and right back into his pocket. If he buys half his own tickets, there is a 50% chance that his fake entries will "win", and he will get to keep the raffle ticket earnings plus not have to ship the prize to anyone.

Real: I earn 200 BTC in ticket sales, and send the prize to someone
Fraud: I earn 200 BTC in ticket sales, and 50% chance I send the prize to someone

In all cases where I recommend disclosure as an anti-fraud mechanism, it is something that you can't make hundreds of for free without detection, such as your forum account here.

-1 for saying "golden nonces".

Miners would see network connections to somewhere else than their pool, and would earn less than expected. The majority of mining software is open-source, so you would have to be distributing an exe that is made with different source than you have published. And even if 25% of all Bitcoin miners were using such software, it would take half their work being diverted to equal the mystery miner's hashrate.

I think it is most likely that an independent party has spent the money to make an ASIC farm, and found it easier to implement without including transactions. Becoming 20% of the network is about where you would find maximum profitability - if you doubled the total network hashrate yourself, you would only be earning 50% as many bitcoins per Thash.

When mining, you are doing a brute force hashing of everything that will go into a block. The merkle tree you are hashing includes the address that a block will pay out to if it is found, along with a "coinbase", which is per-worker information added by the pool to make a miner's work unique. You are also hashing all the transactions to be included in the block. Mystery miner's blocks have zero transactions, they are different than a normal pool's blocks.

Because of the pool-specific and worker-specific data included in a block, you cannot simply pick out certain hashes like one that solves a block and send them somewhere else, they would still pay to the original wallet's address as that information is embedded in what is being hashed. If the miners were getting altered work, they could not send it back to the original pool as the shares would be invalid, they would not be hashes of what the pool was requesting.

In order to steal work, the attacker would have to pWN the pool. If you can get into deepbit and silently get 10% of their block finds to pay to your wallet, that's better than just stealing their wallet once. As about half the pools here have been compromised at some point, we see that getting in is possible, but rootkitting and altering pool software to make a continuous undetectable diversion of mining rewards would be more difficult.

A yet-undetected botnet seems difficult to believe, it would be on the scale of Zeus2. I have seen no bitcoin bot alerts since Sept 2011 and those were naive trojans. CPU mining my Core 2 Quad (probably faster than the average internet-connected computer) gets 11mhash/s; to get into the 2000ghash/s the miner is likely doing, they would need 200,000 such fulltime botty machines. A CPU+GPU bot would need fewer, but I have a feeling that systems with GPUs running mining-capable drivers that can hash faster than their CPU are in the minority, if we were to survey all Internet-connected machines worldwide.

Having worked support, I must deflate you a bit. All your phone call did was add your information and "Call Reason -> Other" to a database in Hyderabad, India, that will never be looked at again.

These are sad times. See, about 20 years ago, I was able to call ATI and actually talked to one of their engineers at length about my problems with their card and they were able to identify the bug with their card (ATI Graphics Ultra Pro - I found a link). I had his extension number. When I did support myself for another unnamed PC component manufacturer, I was one phone call away from engineers, and was able find, identify, and resolve compatibility problems, and turn them over to QA and deployment. Nowadays, support is an outsourced cost center who's only goal is placating the customer by reading a script and hanging up on them as fast as possible. Of course, computer users on the whole are a lot dumber now, too.

Now you are:

dirty bomb plutonium palestine abduct anthrax yemen al queda jihad plane truck train liberate occupy

That purchaser used up the supply of people willing to sell their bitcoins below $5 each.

They are creating a neural net to model your brain. Once it achieves consciousness, they can just ask it what password you would have used.

Hrm...
"According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. "

If you stare at the center of this for 60 seconds, you'll get brain damage:

Now I might think it's resizable: