That would be a way clever scam, ship a few units out that actually cost $1500 to get more preorders before disappearing...

The setting up a run of multilayer circuit board manufacturing would be a big upfront cost, 10 or 1000, they still have to pay the setup fees, and that would be a bit writeoff to cut-and-run. It seems like they hand-assembled a few SMT boards to get them out there (they have pictures of the blank boards at their facility) and to make sure their redesign works with no bugs. After they see it works, then they submit an order for an overseas pick-n-place board assembler to manufacture them (and they have to send their recycled FPGAs to the manufacturer, who may have issues if the chips aren't taped for their assembly machine).

You could make a little board that has a relay (or multiple relays for multiple machines) that shorts the motherboard reset switch. Make it controlled by a serial or parallel port of another machine, so you don't need high tech network hardware, just log into another always-on machine or a $20 used POS laptop and send the port the reset command.

Here's a page for making easy parallel port circuits: http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/parallel_output.html#relaycontrol

Building your own relay controlling circuits

The following circuit is the simples interface you can use to control relay from parallel port:

                             Vcc
                              |
                              +------+
                              |    __|__
                            Relay   /^\  Diode 1N4002
                             Coil  /---\
                              |      |
                              +------+
                              |
                           | / 
                 4.7K    B |/  C
parallel port >-\/\/\/\/---|        NPN Transistor: BC547A or 2N2222A
data pi                    |\  E
                           | V
                             |
parallel port >--------------+
ground pin                   |
                          Ground

Pretend I just made one, hook up your reset switch leads to each machine here:

If your wallet is encrypted, and you lost or forgot the passphrase, then there is no recovery of the Bitcoins available; they are gone!

Since 90% of the concern is Internet hackers and intruders, not people with physical access to your pc, it would be best when you re-create your wallet that you write down the passphrase and store it in several places. Or just not encrypt the wallet.

Before getting started, close Bitcoin. This means making sure it is not running in the system tray or hidden either.

To delete the wallet (and lose all bitcoins in it forever), you need to manually explore to the Bitcoin data directory and remove the file wallet.dat. On a Windows PC, you can open Windows Explorer, and type %APPDATA%\Bitcoin into the location bar to change to the Bitcoin data directory. Once there, look for the file wallet.dat (it may just say "wallet" if you have hidden file extensions), and rename it to something like wallet-forgottenpassword. Restart Bitcoin and it will create a new wallet file.

It looks like that particular block is messed up in their database, the input addresses weren't decoded properly.

Here's the particular answer to why there is a wacky "balance" in that block which the site computes into a negative fee.
http://blockchain.info/tx-index/242753/faf8a4240f6989fc94bc2602147102189af4e50e08ea0d5b36462201af114a24

Compare to blockexplorer which thinks it's fine:
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/faf8a4240f6989fc94bc2602147102189af4e50e08ea0d5b36462201af114a24

The negative amount is the transaction fees earned by the miner for generating the block.

A Bitcoin transaction is made of input amounts and output amounts. To pay a transaction fee to get your transaction included in a block in a timely fashion, your Bitcoin client crafts a transaction with a larger input than output. the extra money that doesn't come out of transactions is the fee. The miner gets to keep the transaction fees of all transactions they include in a block.

The previous posters are misinterpreting the information shown about the transaction where the miner gets paid 50BTC reward + fees earned. The input is 50BTC, but the output is 50BTC plus the fees earned, so the block explorers show a negative amount when calculating the "fee" for that transaction.

It would seem the attacker used backdoor administration access that was not logged (and not publicized as being present) to reset shadow passwords and gain access. They were quite quick in withdrawing funds from slush mining pool, bitcoin faucet, and bitcoinica, but I wouldn't rule out any kind of compromise or future wallet emptying, as it seems that many think this came from inside Linode themselves using tools only their personnel would have access to on any reasonably administered system. It would be wise to go as far as considering your entire VPS file system cloned and logged into with root access, then think of what the intruder might do with the data.

Zhoutong has admitted to having 43,000 BTC stolen. That will contribute to the size of the thief's balance. If you follow most coins back, it won't be long before you find that they were in an exchange or other service where they were part of huge balances. That is likely what you are discovering, exchange and pool wallets that are not the hacker's.

Bitcoins aren't really "lost", they just aren't sent to anybody else again, because the owner lost the wallet keys necessary for sending them or lost interest in Bitcoin before they knew what they had.

The assertion that this would be a problem would be from people that think this would create a constantly shrinking money supply, and therefore there wouldn't be enough for anybody who wants Bitcoins to have them. This is not true, because Bitcoin can be divided into units so small that if the final Bitcoin money supply was divided among everyone in the world that may have a computer (1 billion), they could each have 2,100,000 base units, more than enough to do commerce.

I was going to make your site display some javascript, but I guess it's not live, as the other "alias" using that format is not showing up.

You mean like the error you get if you try to search for 50,000+ addresses at once?

The fed don't need to take up any "leeway" they gave, advertising on money is illegal. OP is 100 years too late to the idea of putting advertisements on US money. Somebody already annoyed them enough they made a law against it before we were born.

US Statute 18 USC Sec. 475 (house.gov)

-HEAD-
Sec. 475. Imitating obligations or securities; advertisements

-STATUTE-
Whoever designs, engraves, prints, makes, or executes, or utters,
issues, distributes, circulates, or uses any business or
professional card, notice, placard, circular, handbill, or
advertisement in the likeness or similitude of any obligation or
security of the United States issued under or authorized by any Act
of Congress or writes, prints, or otherwise impresses upon or
attaches to any such instrument, obligation, or security, or any
coin of the United States, any business or professional card,
notice, or advertisement, or any notice or advertisement whatever,
shall be fined under this title. Nothing in this section applies to
evidence of postage payment approved by the United States Postal
Service.

I'll leave it to you to find the updated penalty in H.R. 3355 (pdf), passed into law as Pub. L. 103-322 in 1994 (protip, search for 475). Enlightening reading of how a bill is written to be unreadable by adding new phrases to hundreds of other statutes instead of being new law itself, with a senator-friendly name "Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994" (unfortunately 1994 is too early to discover from the PDF properties that it was likely directly written by and lobbied for by an outsourced prison labor company like Federal Prison Industries to boost their labor force).

---

Completely off-topic, but FPI's front company Unicor made me think of another orwellian labor company that changed it's name to avoid it's reputation.

If you have the 11.11 drivers currently installed (to avoid more reboots), you can send me a Windows XP remote assistance invitation, and I'll take a look at what's up on that PC.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306757

my email address is in a PM I'm sending now.

Namecoin is useless because you have to do all the DNS setup to make it work. It is even more useless because even if you have it set up, you have no idea what domain name to type in or where a domain name will take you (98% of those registered go nowhere).

So here's what you do - make a search engine. Set up a machine with the Namecoin DNS, and spider all the registered .bit addresses for web servers. You can include IP address links in the results and most sites (that don't use virtual hosts) will work without needing the user to install Namecoin DNS. You are now cool.

Useful Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler#Open-source_crawlers

Note: There is a link to gee.bit on the namecoin site (176.9.26.234), calling it a .bit search engine, but it doesn't work and neither does www.masterpool.eu, which is where the IP appears to be.

I'm not doing it. I was going to make a .bit site for a procrastinator's support group, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Everything starts somewhere:

Here's a trade I made around that time:
12/07/11 19:36:32    Price:0.01111000 BTC
and they were never expensive:
07/24/11 11:47:31    Price:0.02740000
06/27/11 03:45:45    Price:0.02675002

Price was about .035 - .04 BTC/NMC. (edit: added exchange prices below)

I was gonna dump all the transactions here, but BBcode freaks out because of the size and brackets.
Here's the A letters though:


[
    {
        "name" : "d/ae",
        "value" : "{\"map\": {\"\": \"10.0.0.1\"}}",
        "txid" : "f557ed50b4c5b6531c747bcc9e020a18641912829100005ccf16855bc4476a74",
        "expires_in" : 22932
    }
]
[
    {
        "name" : "d/aj",
        "value" : "{\"map\": {\"\": \"10.0.0.1\"}}",
        "txid" : "a48d1d47a83c300ca96bb33a705b2907a61b98d6d9d580a5773a74f107b31bbd",
        "expires_in" : 22931
    }
]
[
    {
        "name" : "d/ak",
        "value" : "{\"map\": {\"\": \"10.0.0.1\"}}",
        "txid" : "b266ed12592a8bf41efcf422c9aa864ceed6f73192242775f0bfde637b9ef17c",
        "expires_in" : 22931
    }
]
[
    {
        "name" : "d/aq",
        "value" : "{\"map\": {\"\": \"10.0.0.1\"}}",
        "txid" : "77d769718e039d8a02d2155f01a549a96ad2af854a99a025fb89ce81a0b5a3ea",
        "expires_in" : 22931
    }
]
[
    {
        "name" : "d/ay",
        "value" : "{\"map\": {\"\": \"10.0.0.1\"}}",
        "txid" : "0b5b2335338fcd6037f28909dffcdb3c7720757b3e5952f2bd3bfe4b6b231901",
        "expires_in" : 22931
    }
]

For your contemplation:

The names offered for sale were registered Dec 5 2011, long after the launch, in blocks 31913-31919.
The cost was 0.48 NMC per domain to register (not the 4.8 NMC it would have been around block 25100, or the 48 NMC it would have been around block 660). The seller also registered letter + number combinations, so if you want g1.bit, he'd be your guy too. They were registered because they were cheap enough, not because of incredible foresight.

Typical block:
http://explorer.dot-bit.org/b/31914

More info: The .01 NMC op_name_new transactions were done the day before: http://explorer.dot-bit.org/b/31787

OK, the fee is 50% for any shares submitted in the first (1/2 difficulty) shares of a new round. Added to a fund that is payable to shares submitted after 1/2 difficulty is elapsed. You might have figured out how to hop that a bit by the time the pool goes PPLNS anyway.

Poor choice of words...you'd better not run!

http://this-dollar-is-worth-less-than-a-bitcoin.com
http://you-cant-send-this-dollar-around-the-world-instantly-for-free.com
http://the-dollar-your-government-just-prints-more.com
http://nobody-sticks-bitcoins-up-their-nose.com

or similar (I didn't suggest my better shorter ideas, you think of them before me...), set it up to be a serial number tracker combined with Bitcoin introduction and tutorial.

Use them all to find the same simple phrase, like 1234, you should find that they each find a different one.