Perhaps. But it's been one hell of a ride!

No worries, mate. I didn't take it as an invitation to a fight Just putting my view out there. FWIW, I agree with yours as well. It's a tough call, and the one I would make is not the one they made. Doesn't make either of us wrong, and I'm not in charge.

Overall, I think it's the best pool out there. Granted, I've not been long in the game. But Eligius shines over the ones I've used or tried to use. The only other one I really like is Bitparking. Eligius is better.

Well, speaking solely for myself here, I never intended to point fingers.

I am selfish and consider it a virtue. It is to my advantage for the operator of the pool to be financially invested in it's success. Which I think he is anyway, but primarily as a miner rather than an operator. He seems to feel otherwise, and I'm ok with that, but it's my personal opinion that I would be served best if it was his job, rather than his side job. So, it is to my selfish advantage for the pool to make a profit, and therefore I think that while it was a good introductory phase to be feeless, it's now more advantageous for all of us if it were operated for profit.

The above kind of reads like an indictment of Wizkid's performance to date, so to clarify, I think he's doing a great job with the time and resources he has. Imagine what he could do with more time and more resources?

I do think some people got a bit self righteous here, and they were probably more who you aimed that towards. But I figured I might as well put out my rationale.

Luke-jr has in fact already stated that prior to the voluntary fee system, some of the large miners were already directly supporting eligius to some extent. I thought I was almost from the beginning (I'm very much on the other end of the spectrum with my 80 GH/s rig), but WK had not yet implemented the feature. Either way, I think value for value is just and moral, so I contribute. If you, or others, feel differently, that's all well and good. I try to practice what I preach, or not preach it

Hope that makes sense.

nothing. USD would be historical.

Ok, gotta preface this with the caveat that I am not a programmer. To some extent, I was back in the early 80's, but that's ancient history. The longest prog I ever wrote would not fill the comment section of a modern source.

That being said, the blockchain's data is a data set. How it's stored is important, but not as important as the data themselves. It is my layman's understanding that it should be possible to import all the extant data into an entirely new blockchain structure, if that was the intent. As an analogy, you can take an Excel spreadsheet and import it into a Lotus or OpenOffice spreadsheet, and all that changes is the formatting, even though the underlying code is incompatible.

But frankly, the blockchain is probably the most robust part of bitcoin, or any alt based off of it. In all of the attacks, glitches, assaults, and general fuckups that have occurred in the five years of Bitcoin, the blockchain has emerged unscathed. It's the programs that interact with it that have had problems. Even then, from what I've seen, most have been minor. Even this thing that Gox is using as their latest excuse appears to be something exploitable, if you have the resources, but not extreme. Frankly, Gox has been spreading confusion and delay as their standard operating procedure for the two years I've been involved in Bitcoin, so I don't even know how much credence to put in this. Bitstamp and BTC-e both thought it worthy of investigation, but were only paused for a short while. Gox has been having "technical difficulties" with withdrawals for as long as I've been a member here (a little less than a year), and I seem to recall them doing this kind of shit back before that too.

The same could be said of your computer. I all but guarantee that all of it's components are "outsourced". That's a quibble, at best. They put it together well. I have heard lots of bad stories about the technobit boards in other applications. Good ones, too. Just like anyone can slop together a computer, but doing it right takes some finesse.

Besides, I always knew technobit was the real deal. Watched that project from Klondike onward

OP updated.

Thanks, wizkid, your indirect answer answered my question. There are more than just you directly involved.

I'm cool with that. Didn't need any more detail, as I'm simply curious. The "veiled question" was subliminal, I guess. I didn't actually mean it that way. I find the concept and implementation of pools to be really interesting. I'm considering setting up an alt pool on my own string. But your answer is cool as well.

I favor a fee because I think you guys earn it. But it's your game, and your call.

READ. He said they offered him shares as compensation. This is rather commonplace in corporate business. It's a way of insuring a level of dedication to the project, as the value of those shares is tied directly to the success of the company, thus inspiring the individual to work FOR that success.

Steve Jobs had a salary of $2.00 USD per annum at the time of his death. His compensation came from shares. Do you think he was likely to screw up the company on purpose?

Just got one question for you, actually.

How do you keep sane with the FUD and general hate on Bitcointalk? I'm mostly an observer, and I still want to reach through the screen and strangle people.

Ain't yet heard a bad word about you from anyone even semi legit.

Yep. And a few hours ahead of the estimates too. Dammit.

What I always tell my son: "Patience! If I can fake it, you can too!"

Ok. I'm trying to set up my AMT 80 to solo mine an altcoin. Specifically, Opensourcecoin, at least for testing.

Somehow I'm fucking up the CGminer config, or else the ocoin.conf. Not sure which.

Anyway, I need to know the proper way to set this up in CGminer. What I have done is set the config to my wallet computer's IP + the port listed in my .conf file, then the user and password that I have in the .conf file.

Cgminer always says "pool down or slow" and fails over to Eligius. WTF???

Not necessarily. One of the key attributes of a thing to be used as currency is scarcity. Mining, the analogy all of these alts and BTC itself are based off of, is indeed rather random, arbitrary, and capricious. I used to mine gold as a hobby. Would like to do it again, too. My biggest profit was ONE 1.4 oz nugget. I just plain got lucky on that one. There were weeks where I got dust, and overall I probably lost money on the venture, were it not for that one nugget. But that gold still went into circulation. ONCE THAT HAPPENS, then it's valuable as currency in a general sense. Miners, whether physical or digital, PRODUCE the currency. That they also spend it is somewhat irrelevant to it's utility as a currency.

makes sense.

I actually have a couple of questions regarding the ownership of the pool. Is it just you, or is it you and Luke-jr, or some combination of others I'm unaware of?

I don't actually care much, just curious. The only way it might matter directly to me is in whether or not you have the ability to make unilateral decisions regarding the operation of the pool. I know that it's basal software was Luke-jr's project, but I don't know the extent of his involvement. (No, I don't have a problem with him. I wasn't here for the rivalries that seemed to have colored the interaction of him and CKolivas and a few others. Probably wouldn't have been involved any way).

It's a fully open source project. As things happen, people will fix them. Other than the transaction records, it would seem to me that practically everything about it could be changed if necessary and desirable. It is, after all, a consensus based protocol.

EDIT: Pulled the trigger too fast

As to a superiour currency coming out, well, that's more external than the strengths or weaknesses of the protocol. It's more about getting the currency widely accepted. To my mind, THAT is the biggest weakness of Bitcoin right now. It's still "geek currency". Being a geek, that's cool with me as far as it goes, but for it to retain value, or even gain, it must become "every man's currency". Contrary to some of the nuttier advocates, I don't see it beating out fiat currency. (as desirable as that is). However, it works very well as an adjunct and an alternative. In the physical world, you have cash as an irreversible and easily exchanged anonymous currency. In the digital world, you have bitcoin and it's derivatives. (Yes, I understand that the transaction record is not 100% anonymous, but it's close enough to be viable, if you are cautious).

I would like to see bitcoin payment available at Wal mart. When that happens, Bitcoin has gone mainstream and any issues with the protocol will be sorted quickly.

FTFY

Can't afford to do this right now, but I like the concept. I am donating a percentage, however.

Odds are that Wizkid is working on the stats page, or has taken it down to speed things along. Those were the cases last time the page was down. As long as you're still getting shares in your miner, you're good.

Ya damn rascal! Oh, wait...


Sorry, couldn't resist