Faster block conf times leads to a higher rate of orphaned blocks, increases the likelihood of dishonest folks from succeeding in double-spends in certain circumstances, and creates a larger blockchain.

A confirmation is not a guarantee of authenticity. Decreasing conf time proportionally decreases the "value" of the confirmation. Decreasing confirmation times would be accounted for in services requiring confirmations, where required confirmation times would be increased to completely negate the decreased conf times. (for example, Gox requires 6 confs -- reducing conf time to 5m would result in Gox requiring 12 confs)

... That said... to compromise the Bitcoin network back when the six-conf suggestion was suggested, it was dramatically less expensive to have double-spends confirm. Three confirmations is now more than adequate for all transactions under hundreds of thousands in USD. Going beyond is really just (inadequately) protecting yourself against a fork. Maybe it is time to discuss lowering the target conf time?

ETA: Devs may also be trying to encourage Bitcoin transactions to occur internally on central servers to keep "casual" transactions off the blockchain... OTOH, they seem to be in general consensus that the block size should be increased in the near future. I'm sure one'll come in soon and tell us what's up.

What the Hell? They stopped producing Final Fantasy once FFX was released, and even that one's pretty questionable. Once I played FFX-2 for a couple hours, I haven't been able to buy or even play anything Enix has put out. "Dress power"... ugh.

- And all this social media integration can kindly go fuck itself. Who wants a god-damned "share" button on their controller? If they had every single PS3 owner to ever exist sit in a giant focus group, and Sony asked them what feature they'd like to see in the PS4, exactly zero people would say "gosh, I really want controller real estate dedicated to uploading unedited gameplay videos to my friends on social media sites with a bunch of advertisements, because LP videos are just way too high-quality as-is."

I'd be shocked if MS actually kept that creepy Xbone spy-cam shit, but they're a pretty shockingly-grotesque company... .... It's so nice to be able to toss garbage at all sides for once. Nintendo is receiving the biggest volume of shit by not even being mentioned. They just flail around, anymore. The Wii U was an undeniable failure on the scale of Sega's Dreamcast... and the hardware devs at Sony & MS are still trying to emulate the Wii's "innovations." Maybe these assholes can get together and have a button to record stuff people want to watch -- friends flailing about in front of a television with screwed-up facial expressions and total focus like they have late-stage Huntington's. (real Huntington's isn't funny at all, sorry I couldn't think of a better example)

I declare a counter-boycott, with a .0005BTC value threshold for relays! Push the dusty bastards to LTC!

Well, your decimals are commas. 

Needs localization to account for, I'd guess.

A winner and loser had already been determined. BFL was at a huge advantage in canceling the order since they have a massive backlog and have dramatically increased the price for newer orders. BFL also gets to set an example of people who treat them "disrespectfully," similar to CG. Xian already made a bet on BFL and held it for a long time, with intention to hold it to completion.

It's not a perfect example, and sorry for threadjacking. I totally agree with you, fwiw -- just being an ass. 

That sounds like a big handful of lawsuits waiting to happen... 

The drones are so close to being able to "be their own entity." 

They forced a refund because Xian kept publicly complaining about them.

Why should CG not be allowed to force a refund of the bet on the same grounds?

I always get emails asking me about BTC HYIPs. It makes me 

This is not true. Just look at BFL and that Xian fellow.

All CG would need to do is refund the BTC and the contract is void because Bitcoin. Since no coins were given to CG, CG can void the contract at any time just by saying so. The only possible way for CG to scam would be to take OP's BTC, lose, and then keep his BTC instead of refunding.

Yeah. Maybe I'm just stupid, but it always takes me 5-10 times to get the VanityGen settings right in command line, and I forget in what order I need it to be in each time I want to generate something.

Just make sure you're using the ocl variant and are using the GPU to generate or else you'll be sitting around for a LONG time unless it's 2-3 characters long. Doing case-insensitive generation saves a TON of time, too. I believe there's a version out working for Avalon FPGAs, now.... or maybe that was a dream.... There is supposedly a vanitygen pool somewhere which I guess is able to generate the privkey without the miner knowing it (or maybe he does) -- I haven't looked into it.

If registrar is uncooperative,

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/

Google might be willing to take it off search results and cancel any ad campaigns.

You're using some pretty fucked up calculators, friend.

The scale does function the same as how Bytes are measured. KH/MH/GH/TH (KB/MB/GB/TB)

1200KH/s would accumulate practically nothing, 1200MH/s would get you a few dollars-worth per day.

Should always be regarded as a scam. These aren't hard to generate. You can get a 2-4 letter identifier in an address with a CPU within a day or two, and 2-8 characters with a modern GPU. More than 8 characters generally requires a lot being thrown at it, though. Aside from the huge scam potential, the amount requested on the site is exploitative.

Yep. The fan should be going full-throttle when the GPU's dangerously hot, but sometimes not.

This just in:

Current-gen and next-gen consoles ARE PCs with most functionality stripped out by difficult-to-disable software. Tired of corporate proprietary shit trying to fuck me in the ass. These corporate fucks... Windows 8 RT. Release a phone with Windows on it, and you'd expect to at least have the primary reason anyone fucks with Windows - the enormous collection of software released for it. Nope. The RT stands for ReTarded, and it only runs ReTarded software. At that point, I'd rather have Palm OS.

Go away, one-time-use proprietary hardware architecture. I will never touch you, and will look at you only a decade in the future when you're emulated (no, not emulated with infuriating DRM restrictions on the "Xbox Two," asshole). I don't want your "smart" phones, your creepy spy consoles, or your goofy fruit logos. You utterly disregard past contributions, and promise to support current contributions' existence only until the end of your few-year lifecycle, or try to double-charge us for old contributions we bought way back when the dev company existed. I hate you, and we will never reconcile. 

Heat + time = degradation. Watching a video technically shortens the card's life span, but most electronics will fail due to manufacturer defects before actual electromigration effects. I incidentally ran 7 5850s when GPU mining for roughly a year, and none of them failed even though they ran 100% 24/7 overclocked. The important thing to do is monitor temperature of the cards and try to make sure they're never going above 80*C. Work load and degradation don't go directly hand-in-hand -- it's the heat from the work load which you need to watch.

There are a few ways to lower heat... the easiest for enclosed computers is to just take the side of the case off. You want to clean it every couple months, and if you have heat problems in Summer, might want to consider undervolting it. You can often undervolt the card 20-30mV without needing to underclock it for stability, reducing heat (extending the card's life), increasing efficiency, and not impacting performance at all. Alternately, can use a box fan, or just not run it while it's hot out.

To prevent lagging, you want to lower the intensity (or whatever sounds similar in the mining program of config file, in some of them it's called "PRIORITY" or something else) to somewhere where the graphics aren't "stuttering" but you're still getting a good hashrate. Incidentally, this will probably also significantly reduce the heat output.

Your miner is probably mining on the CPU instead of the GPU. (It's been a long time since I used GUIMiner -- assuming you have up-to-date drivers, you should see options to mine either on the i5 or the AMD card in the "dashboard" tab)

Or you're mining a Scrypt coin like LTC, in which case, your 5850 will mine dramatically "slower" than mining something like BTC.

ETA: Looked at Triplemining -- they only do BTC. I'm going to assume it's mining either on the CPU, or you're running a computer with integrated graphics on the MoBo which GUIMiner is using to mine instead of the 5850. The simplest fix as far as troubleshooting goes, would probably be to download the BitMinter client @ http://bitminter.com/ and let us know if it starts hashing faster.

One of the things some coin-mixing services do to ensure timely service, is give a cut of the revenues to large holders who pump clean money in during times where there's too much dirty money (or, at least, a low volume of people mixing a lot of coins). The government would have to offer better incentive, and it'd get expensive fast.

Cooperating with dubious entities for no reward, though, is unrealistic. 90% of non-regulated businesses volunteering information for free to INTERPOL is right around a 0% probability. Governments need to go to people they already have by the balls and just sell it as a "cost of doing business," which naturally creates more pressure on entities to stop submitting to regulation entirely. It might actually be most cost-effective to just buy the mixers, where governments "happen" to figure out what goes where. Either the services are outed individually, or mixing is generally considered unsafe, the latter being the greatest win.

There are a few I could read, but have no reason to since all major Bitcoin news is reported in English. I left a couple unchecked, but there wasn't much of value there... I don't plan on any meetups on the other side of Earth, and shipping rules out most commerce.  It might be nice to be able to be able to check Local to ignore all the subforums without a hundred clicks, then just untick the one or few wanted.

Satoshi was probably the same alien race which gave batteries to the Egyptians, and stealth plane designs to the USG. (not sure what they were thinking on the latter)