Right now, I go through every few months and tick the few new local subforums to ignore from New Posts. There's no checkbox for "Local" as a whole, which'd be nice. Not a big deal, though.

Go below $50, you're going to find a ton of buy pressure. I suspect a good few would clean out their retirement accounts at $30.

Relax... OP is clearly non-native English speaker. He probably just grabbed audiotapes from NYC or something and thought he was bonding with the community.

Errrr.... What? Were you having problems before the clean install with new/different cards? I've never heard of that.

Is the restart problem only happening when mining?

"Random" restarts or program exceptions, generally the first thing you want to look at is the RAM, both because the sticks are prone to being the first component to fail, and because it's super-easy to take all out but one, and if the problem persists, try one of the other ones.

You have it backwards.  Workers are generally paid the same per hour whether they're productive or not. If they fail, they get overtime on Saturdays and double-time on Sundays. Factory management gets around the inherent moral hazard of that scheme by having employees work upward of 70 hours on the average week and providing the legal minimum of days off, where employees'd do just about anything to get out of working weekends without needing to pay what's deserved, because the employees literally feel they're being paid by not being paid.

@ OP, if mining is gambling, electricity providers are most culpable, since they are effectively the provider of plays in the mathematical lottery. They take the money, and if the player wins, he continues buying more plays until he busts (or cashes out). If you're actually looking for a serious answer, there are plenty of legal resources for any country over a few dozen citizens in size. Mining isn't gambling in the US, for example, which could be found with about 5 minutes on Google. Well... unless you can't get a dozen tax lawyers to agree on how to file taxes as a miner, but I'm sure every Bitcoin miner has spent thousands to figure out how to report hundreds a year in temporary income.

I think of it like this:
You're about as likely to find Avalon's address in use as if Avalon stored their cash in a wallet buried in a landfill. By giving the public key, we know what the wallet looks like, but this is not very helpful. But - what are the odds of finding *a* wallet in any landfill with coins in it if we have highly-efficient garbage-sorting robots?

Let's say there are 500,000 wallets in landfills containing money. Let's say there are 100 "treasure hunters" with four garbage-sorting robots each, each sorting through 8m objects per second. In total, the treasure hunters are able to sort through a total of 3.2b objects per second out of a total of 2^160 objects. We know there are roughly 500k wallets in existence, effectively the wallet pool when trying to find *a* money-filled wallet to 2.92e+42 in our example, or 292,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (+- a couple zeroes!), so our chance of finding a wallet-filled address at any second is 3,200,000,000/292,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or ~1.095e-33(%).

Hooboy these numbers suck. Let's try monthly percentage. %/sec*60(to get to /min)*60(to get to /hr)*24(to get to /day)*30(to get to /month) = ~2.838e-27(%) or..... .000000000000000000000002838%/month (+- a couple zeroes, again).

Let's change our example up, though -- just for fun. Let's say miners have decided it might be worth more to start these kinds of "treasure hunting" pools once GPU-mining kicks the bucket for BTC. It gets REALLY popular, and there are now the equivalent of 10,000 treasure hunters with four 8m/sec garbage-sorting robots each. Bitcoin gets more popular, too, and there are currently 25,000,000 money-filled wallets in landfills.

(2.92e+42)/25,000,000=5.8460065493236116728147393308651e+40 (effective "landfill pool" [address pool] after factoring in # of cash-holding wallets)
5.8460065493236116728147393308651e+40/320000000000=5.4738221262688166832958186847263e-30 (%chance of pool finding address per second)
5.4738221262688166832958186847263e-30*60*60*24*30=1.4188146951288772843102762030811e-23 (%chance of pool finding address per month)

or..... ~.00000000000000000001419% (+- one zero),  0.00000000000000000017028%/year, 0.000000000000000008514%/50years, 0.000000000000008514%/500kyears

.... And all that math (none of which I'm sure of!) just goes to show..... shit's probably pretty safe... until dedicated ASIC address generators hit the market at 1/1,000 the price of what it'd currently cost to do the same work. Then it may only take a few billion years. 


(someone should correct my math)

Right. The client gives "the blockchain" the public key when it's used, and that key is always out there from then on. There is no pruning in the full blockchain, but the number of people using full blockchains is decreasing as new pruning methods are introduced to the different clients (this is a moot point, though, given there are public, searchable, online blockchain copies). There are no mechanisms to prevent clients from making the same address. It's practically impossible to generate a specific address, but it is much more possible to discover already-used addresses when generating indiscriminately. There are programs out which generate enormous chunks of addresses, and check them against the blockchain to see if they've been used. If there's a match, the private key is added to a log. AFAIK, they have not yet been successful at stealing anything. You should generally not re-use addresses for significant amounts of coins because of this on top of a couple other reasons.

What the fuck, guys? Y'all are going to let that end the thread? 

The client's frequently updated. Constant re-building/re-packaging for simple tweaks is insane, and all of the program resources are stuffed in the executable. Devs don't want to add any type of plug-in system (even just for graphics). Either the tweak(s) need to justify someone building their own independent client around those tweaks, or a moddable ("official" or not, "safe" or not) client needs to be released. I can't wait for one to come out and see what happens with it!

Jewish people owned the producers prior to WWII. In labor camps, they were producers. It's a common misconception.

The US as a whole is in a similar situation insofar as that, and a much less extreme version of fate will likely be shared. Though.... that falls apart pretty quickly -- US citizens probably won't be starving en masse, though the many foreign manufacturing companies taking over failing US businesses probably won't be employing the sick, gypsy, or elderly any time soon, and a close-enough-to-bankrupt USG will take away the social safety nets..... no cattle trains, though.

Definitely no executions, low-value high-mortality medical experiments, or starvation of the fit, either... as a global community, we're smarter, now. We know how valuable producers are.

In the US, third parties don't really push this as much as they should, but the US is not just a de facto Two Party system, it is encouraged through most states' laws ("to prevent confusion among voters"). It's extremely expensive and otherwise resource-intensive for third-party candidates to get on the ballot in most states. If the party doesn't pick up somewhere between 1-5% of votes in a state in the previous election (and it resets each cycle), they're not allowed to get on the ballot without tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures. Third party campaigns are mostly a battle to get on the ballot, and much (sometimes all) of the funds donated are going toward that instead of any type of marketing. While Two Party candidates are out campaigning, Third Party candidates hitchhiking to different states to collect signatures.

While there is a Libertarian Party, Constitution Party, Green Party, Socialist Party, and a handful of others -- they can receive millions a year in donations, but still not even appear on the ballot in a given state. The Libertarian Party in particular seems to like measuring their success by how many ballots they get on instead of how many votes they pick up, because that's the metric all the time and money's being spent on, while other third parties are lucky to get on the ballots of a small handful of states with relatively lax ballot laws.

Ballot laws are generally less intense for Congress, but the donor/volunteer pool is also much smaller for congressional seats, and third parties are largely seen as a joke in the US, so even if they got on the ballot, the same "oh, I can't vote for him because he'll never win" mentality will persist. People in the US rarely vote for who they think is the best candidate, but assume there are two viable candidates and that they must pick between those two to not waste their vote ("lesser of two evils" mentality).

Not that I know of. In the event of an account breach anywhere, it's standard procedure for the clever ones to try those passwords on password management services and, of course, email accounts. Account breaches somewhere else should always be considered when wondering how credentials were taken -- that's all I was getting at. 

Theymos.... do you ever consider admitting to yourself that someone in a position of authority (such as yourself) is more appropriate to judge the trustworthiness of other individuals involved in the transaction precisely because you don't give half a shit about them? It's easy to "care about justice" as a juror... but it's much more difficult when you have a gun to the head of your wife's murderer. When it's a puzzle, it's easy and objective. The worst thing you could do would be to allow those involved in transactions to rate others -- to give them the gun.


/devil's curious advocate

Dammit... Now I want to see it. Milk crates are a step up from a lot of off-the-shelf enclosures, but they still suck. How bad could it be? Was it like a big plastic box with a couple fan holes?

Forget cooling the air unless you live on or in the sun. It's much more cost-efficient to just blow more air (or liquid) in from outside over the heat sinks. You want heatsinks with lots of fins made of a material very able to conduct heat, you want effective thermal paste (I hear mayonnaise outperforms a fair number of proprietary pastes...), and you want a lot of air moving over the heat sink. You want to move heat, not create cold -- no reason to snub the fine ambient-temperature air you already have (again - unless you live on or in the sun).

The absolute last thing you want to do is restrict airflow to the device, even if the air which is still able to move over the device is colder.

Couple more escrow transactions finished up, so I'll bump.

I should note that I did breach contract in an older BFL pre-order contract. You can look it up in the sheet if interested. It was a pretty serious breach, but I believe I gave appropriate compensation (one party-member openly disagreed, for the sake of full disclosure). I initially attempted to cover this up simply through omission, but came clean about a week later, about a day after disclosing it with friends and asking advice on how to rectify the situation. What I did was completely unprofessional and immoral. Since, escrow funds were transferred over to another agent. I don't want to give details for the sake of their privacy.... maybe they'd be interested in discussing it if you're interested and ask them directly.

If they choose to release details, open discussion about it in this thread is totally fine by me. The self-moderation was only to keep one particular character assassin out of the thread -- flaming (or honest criticism) from anyone else is fine, though, unless you start posting a bunch of assumptions about minimal information on my family situation. 

To prevent these kinds of situations in the future, I'm now fairly familiar with Casascius' BTCAddress tool for n-of-m sig escrow transactions if you're interested in giving that a go. It's relatively complicated (but also not particularly technical), and I'm not willing to walk people through it (promise me a few dollars' worth and I probably would spend an hour with you, though, since I'm interested), but if you want to go that route, that's possible, respected, and still completely free of charge.

Amerifag alert!

4 less reasons -- kiwano melons, durians, guava, and kumquats are already imported in the US, even in a lot of chain supermarkets. Some of the others are imported to urban areas where there's enough of a market. They're generally about the same price per pound as "common" foods out-of-season (except potatoes, since they cost about as much per pound as top soil). Formerly-exotic fruits and veggies are becoming big business as the US transitions from extreme consumption of processed food to extreme consumption of raw food. However, the US (kind of counter-intuitively) will always be a processed food stronghold so long as population density, on average, remains fairly low, where farmers ship to distributors who don't give a shit about a thousand or two people scattered around on a bunch of farm land. I've heard people say there are tons of farmers' markets popping up, but they must all be in California, because I still see them shutting down and replaced with something like Dollar General - and good fucking luck finding any fresh produce in those dustbins. I have to trek 50 miles for the really good stuff, with chain supermarkets still being 10 miles out. - But for a lot of it, almost nobody needs to travel 5,000 miles to experience another culture anymore.

A necessary arguably-detrimental feature of Bitcoin is that all transactions are published, so everyone can know where everyone else's coins came from and went. Coin mixing helps prevent people from knowing where your coins are coming from and going, especially for reused addresses.

For example, if you're running a Respectable Business and play SDice with the investments, you want to mix the coins when you get them, have them go to a separate wallet where you send to SDice, then mix any winnings again and have them pop back into the "business wallet." Then, "Oh, look, we made 10BTC this week."

Alternately, maybe you're buying illicit goods, but have all your funds on an address attached to your name somehow. Using a mixing service, you can send your coins there and have them go where they need to be to buy what you want without anyone knowing anything except possibly that you sent your coins to a mixing service.

Or maybe you just want a sense of privacy.

It's tethered to prevent completely unpredictable drift, and the lower the balloon, the better (as far as balloon drift). Wifi balloons are set up in a mesh setting to help ensure reliability, though service may certainly go out in strong gusts. Balloons will very likely need point-to-point directionals as well as the omnis to maintain a reasonably reliable Internet connection. I'm hoping the directionals will be able to obtain enough range where there's a fair amount of redundancy in the balloon network. (that is, each directional hits at least two balloons, and probably many more -- maximum reliable range on an omni ballon in the forest is probably about a mile in diameter, where two directionals pointing at each other with full visibility can go up to 15mi)

In cases where service is subject to frequent outages, free/slow ad-based service can be given. This way, they can still occasionally connect at better speeds than dial-up, while only needing to "pay" when they're able to use the service. Going this route, they shouldn't be able to complain much, while those closer to the center of the ballon's tether point should always get reliable Internet no matter how far off-center the balloon is.

Redundancy problems can be kept at a cost-effective level by using only one or two directionals per balloon, instead of 3-8, with the idea being that they don't all need to connect, but should all have at least two good signals to use if one's blowing too far off. It's a highly-kludgeable system.
 
Multiple tether points in high-priority customer clusters might help relieve this problem, too.

Night poses an obvious problem in need of answers, though... I don't have any "balloon experts" to help me. Active upward propulsion isn't a complicated technical problem, but might be costly.

[also reserved]