So, let me see if I understood correctly. You people are ok with sending USD (since BTC is not accepted) to a guy you don't know, running untested code? Without even checking country of residence, name/address, checking that he has a company that operates legally, investigating means of litigation and costs for said litigation?

Well, in this case, everybody please send me all their money. I won't even lie to you, I am telling you to your face that you're not getting them back. (Note: this is a joke, I am not a scammer and no, I don't want your money.)

You are basically starting a share based company. If in regular companies, shares are proportional to invested cash, in your case shares are proportional to invested work/effort. The rest (voting process, timeframe to pay the dividends) are irrelevant.

You start with the assumption that all work is equal. I believe this is wrong. Should a kernel developer be paid the same hourly rate as the cleaning lady? Do they work the same (same effort)? I dare you to tell a developer that a social media expert deserves the same hourly rate. Protect your face and man-parts

You also believe that work = hours. You will find that in enough number of cases work = results, and time is irrelevant. Who should be paid more, the salesman who gave one phone call and brought you a 5000 BTC contract or the salesman who worked 10 hours, gave 1000 phone calls but signed no contract?

Unless you trust everyone involved or they all work in the same location where they can be supervised, cheating on a timesheet is easy and it WILL be done. On the first public proof, you will have a rebelion on your hands.

What you want to do is do a job evaluation study to decide a hierarchy of jobs, determine who is going to be paid on results of by the hour, and so on.

In the end, it will be your decision based on the trust in Bitcoin. You can continue to mine at a loss, stop mining but keeping the rig, or just selling the rig. You could also decide that buying Bitcoins for cash is easier/cheaper than mining.

So ask yourself: Do I think Bitcoin will succeed? If no, sell everything, cut your losses. If yes, keep mining if you can afford paying the electricity for a few months. If you can't afford the electricity, stop mining, sell your rig and buy Bitcoins with cash.

You should also consider selling and buying products and services for Bitcoins.

It's useless. It's impossible to manage and impossible to check (how do I know you're not evil and just want to block a good guy?). And for an attacker it's trivial to change IPs and DOS you again. And the fun begins when you're getting a DDOS. What are you going to block, the whole Internet?

Nope. "We're all living in Amerika" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheymxgfHUw

I don't know yet if I'm ready to launch such a product, the market share in general and GLBSE in particular are pretty new to me. Anyway, I definitely don't have enough BTC to invest in such a venture, but I hope that there experiments that I'm proposing will be useful. I would definitely buy shares in a loan company using this business model.

As for price drops, I think the risks should be included in a scoring system. For example, bonds could be valuated at 95% of maturation price, shares from new enterprises at 20%, shares from established businesses with a good financial record at 80% and so on. I'm not an expert on these, so I don't know.

If you don't already have some shares, then yes. How about this process:

* You want to borrow 1 BTC from me, and I am asking GLBSE shares as warranty.
* In evaluating them, I will use the current bid price for your chosen shares and I will let you know how many I need.
* You send me the shares via the GLBSE interface, I send you 1 BTC.
* When the load expires, we reverse the transactions. If you don't pay back, I keep the shares.

I suggest you buy LIF.B shares, they seem to be a very legit business: http://lifunds.com/index.htm . I also own a few optimalbitcoin shares, but the price doesn't divide right for such a small amount as 1 BTC. So, using LIF.B as an example, you should buy 8 LIF.B shares, current ask price is 0.12 so it will cost you 0.96 BTC. For me, these 8 shares would be worth their bid price, for a total of 0.784, but I am willing to take that risk, since it's an experiment and you are established on the forum.

Risks are as follows:

* for me:

- if I send you 1 BTC before getting the shares, you can disappear.
- you don't pay back, I keep the shares, but I might not be able to sell them for 1 BTC and I either have to wait to get dividends off them, or sell them at a loss.

* for you:

- if you send me your shares before you get 1 BTC from me, I can disappear with your shares.
- even if you pay me back 1 BTC, I can keep your shares without returning them.

Since I am not an old member and have zero public feedback, I think your risk is larger than mine, so I am willing to be the first to send you the BTC and shares.

Of course, a loan company could create a very nice scoring system based on there price/market movements/past results, and include other means of influencing the score. But that's a story for another time.

So, what do you think?

Jonathan, you're upset over nothing. IBB has public rules, it's the first post in a sticky, you should have read them. You want BTC, he wants your ID, if it's not acceptable, you don't borrow from IBB. I don't think sending ID's to strangers is a good idea either (see below), but, as you wrote yourself "Forum reputation doesn't mean anything." and you're a faceless nickname just like everyone else here. If you think you're abused, you are wrong.

As for anonymity, I am not paranoid and I have no problem giving my name, photo and so on, but I wouldn't send my ID to anyone. That's why I wrote this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41369.0 . If you care to do a short experiment, I would play with a small value of 1 BTC if you have some GLBSE shares to use as warranty - no other requirements. 0% interest, I just want to see how this would work.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I'm asking:

"We can haz internashunul shipd?"

Really cool! Thank you (for the service and for the changes).

I am also reporting that 2.0.0 works great with my setup. My 100+ lines of scripting for overclocking/monitoring/tuning the cards are now deleted and the fancy startup script I wrote was replaced by a one-liner

Mining will always be "worth" it. It might not be proffitable for the current miners, but there will always be people willing to mine, even at an operational loss:

* believers in the system. If you dedicate a few hours a day to make Bitcoin succeed, you can pay a few dollars to keep a machine running all the time.

* businesses who are involved in the Bitcoin economy. If transactions stop, they can't do business, so they will keep e few GHs mining, and if mining at a loss, they will recover that from their proffits.

* people who don't pay for electricity/hardware and/or whose costs are already covered. I have a few servers in datacenters. Tha hardware and monthly costs are already paid for from the other operations, so it doesn't cost me anything to leave a miner running. Even if I only make 1 USD a month, that's proffit. Also, next time I buy a server, I might even get a system that will take two mining-worth GPUs.

I don't know how selling real estate works outside EU/Romania, but here, when you sell a house, the notary has an evaluation table that is used for tax purposes. If your declared value is less than that, you pay the value in the table, if it's more, you pay taxes to the value you declared. The table values are close enough to the real prices as to not have any incentive to lie. Who would risk years in jail for lying in a notarized contract to save a couple of euros?

No matter how you put it, 2 and 3 are illegal. I am in favor of changing the rules, not go around them. If taxes were lower and fair, nobody would think of ways to avoid paying them.

It is not possible. It can be made difficult with complicated hardware tripwires, but in the end someone with physical access will be able to compromise the system.

At least here in Romania (so, I guess al of EU), they are. You need to get an key+token from a certified company, but after that, digital signing is the same as signing a paper. I don't personally know any contract signed this way, but, at least in theory, me and another party would be able to save a pdf with a contract, sign it both with our electronic signatures, and it would hold exactly as it would on paper. Most common usage here in Romania is to sign income/etc/etc declarations that need to be filed monthly/trimestrial/yearly by companies.

Quoting from http://digisign.ro/en/services/electronic_signature

Run this in a terminal window:


You should see something like this:


If so, and aticonfig --list-adapters shows both cards, then it's active, so try to start a miner on it.

Question/request: can you display on the website the exchange rates for other currencies other than USD? Fake-ordering something just to get an email with the price is hard and a misuse of the system (and I only did it once, I promise! ).

You are assuming that most people using Bitcoin are trying to avoid paying taxes. Sure, those exist, but they wouldn't be paying taxes anyway. Most businesses based on Bitcoin seem to be regular, tax-paying companies that simply hate the banking system.

Bitcoin's first purpose is skipping the banks, not skipping the tax office. In this context, the IRS will *LOVE* Bitcoin - if companies have more income/proffit, there's more to tax. If I were to pay 3% less to the banks, I would decrease my prices by 2% - have an edge on the competition while still making more money. IRS also gets more taxes. WIN-WIN-WIN (me, customers, tax office). Ta-daaaa

OP, what you really want is a IP remote power device. You can get a dedicated one, or some UPS-es will have this function. It's safer than running any software solution, and it will definitely cost you less than development for what you want.

Also keep in mind that cold boot attacks are easy enough for someone who know what they're doing, so you should make sure that there is at least a 3-5 minutes time frame between the moment that you power off and the moment that someone has access to the computer. Thoroughly secured computer case with no external USB/CDROM access, and having the room secured with a heavy metal door will do. Also, no windows, basement is perfect.

On the other hard, if you need that kind of security you're either completely paranoid, or involved in some deep illegal stuff. Either way, you should get help or "help"

I didn't see this discussed until now, so I was wondering if someone thought about accepting/offering shares/bonds as a warranty for loans? I was reading IBB's thread and the conditions required. All of them make sense, but some of them are really hard (my personal least favorite is 200 posts on the forum). On the other hand, if one could provide some digital assets, wouldn't that help with the "scoring"?

Let's take an example: I don't have 200 posts on the forum, and I don't like sending my scanned ID to strangers on the net. Not that I don't trust IBB, but I know enough about security to understand that my scanned ID can be stolen by a virus/hacker, or confiscated by some agency in a different country.

On the other hand, I have a few GLBSE shares that I am willing to transfer to IBB as a warranty. Let's say I am willing to provide 10 OPTIMALBITCOIN shares. They were bought for 0.8 each, current bid is 0.75 and current ask is 0.9. They will be worth 1 BTC on december 1st, unless the company goes bankrupt.

I am not a scoring/loans specialist, but evaluating the shares at 0.7+ seems right. I send the 10 shares to the lender, I get 7 BTC for my 10 shares, if I don't pay back I lose the warranty. Sounds fair IMHO.

This might even evolve into a real scoring system: registered more than 2 months: +1 point; more than 100 posts on the forum: +1 point; shares could have their own weight: bonds, 100% of market price, divident paying shares, 50% and so on.

What do you think? Would that work?

Edit: any kind of digital asset would work, of course. I'm just using GLBSE share as an example, because that's what I was experimenting with.