I just noticed the other thread on bounties, and it doesn't seem like there are any bitcoin bounty projects that are particularly far along. I'd be happy to consolidate efforts.

Isn't it just another Ponzi/pyramid scheme?

Why pay miners for calculations that don't secure the hash chain? These "random" hashing calculations are not random -- they add computational effort to the public hash chain, preventing double spending attacks.

You're welcome to do all those things if you want, but it doesn't help secure the hash chain. That's what miners are paid for.

Just don't be holding IXC when the music stops.

Update: And it looks like the music just stopped.

No harm in having a little fun. Just remember, 100% of your 'investment' is at risk.

Win/win. Nice.

I would be extremely wary of offering BTC for IXC. I fear the price is a nonsense price made up from a large number of small transactions and as soon as a large number of asks are placed, someone will wipe them all out with a large dump of IXC, dropping the price to near zero and raking in the bitcoins.

Typically a higher voltage setup is more efficient because the current is lower, thus I^2xR losses are less.

It depends on the number of clients, but 200MB is normal. Note that the number under RES or RSS is the most useful measure of memory usage. 300MB seems high if it's not a mining controller or hub. (Mining controllers have to keep track of every work unit issued until the next block is found.)

The client will give you transaction IDs. You can then paste them into block explorer. The output address that isn't the one you sent to is your change address for that transaction. (Assuming the transaction has at least one confirmation.)

This isn't a huge problem for two reasons:

1) The people who hold a currency will be incentivized to mine it at least enough to get the difficulty back down.

2) Alternative currencies can have any rules they want for when and how difficulty is adjusted.

The alternative currencies, at least for now, are not particularly likely to inflate the supply of bitcoins anywhere near as much as they inflate the demand. Any additional attention placed on virtual peer-to-peer currencies will spillover into more interest in bitcoins.

It's not difficult in principle. Exchanges could advertise a particular exchange rate between two known currencies, then another client could accept that offer. The exchange would then present a signed contract "You send X bitcoins to Y address by time T, and I'll send Z namecoins to address Q (with backup address R)."

The client accepts the contract by validating the terms and the exchange's signature and then funding. The exchange then completes the deal.

If an exchange cheats a client, the client has proof. If a client funds late, the exchange refunds to the backup address.

The biggest problem I see is a client holding onto a contract and then deciding whether to fund it based on movements of the market. There are a lot of ways to fix this. For example, you could have contracts that always permit the exchange to just refund the money. The exchange could build in an extra cushion to cover it for this eventuality. The exchange could require the client to make a non-refundable 1% deposit before it issues a contract, and so on.

I know a lot of people have informally offered bounties to get various things bitcoin-related done. What I'd like to do is start a project
specifically to organize bounties. The primary aim would be to make badly needed usability improvements and fix bugs in the bitcoin client.  

I can commit at least some of my time and will put my reputation behind the project. I can provide hosting for the project web pages.

What I'm asking for at this time is primarily a response on whether people are interested, whether my basic plan makes sense, and whether there are any other people who are willing to take on larger roles in the project. Also, if this is duplicative of other efforts, I'd prefer to combine forces than have two projects.

Here's the basic idea:

1) All project records would be completely open. All project funds would be held in accounts with well-known bitcoin addresses. All payouts would be documented: amount, recipient (possibly by psuedonym), and reason.

2) The project would take suggestions for most wanted bounties. The primary goal would be improving the bitcoin client to make the client more useful for ordinary people, especially those unfamiliar with bitcoin internals. But improvements to other bitcoin-related open source projects would be acceptable too. Bounties could be awarded in stages: First to offer patch, first to submit pull request, changes accepted into mainstream client, and so on.)

3) Donations would be primarily through a small number of fixed addresses and separated by purpose for project transparency. Plans for project
termination would be pre-arranged (perhaps donation of funds to a charity chosen from a list, perhaps refunds where possible). Each address would have a focus, for example one address just for client usability bounties, one just for client bugfixes, and so on, so donors could focus their donations on their areas of interest. (Probably no more than 5, for sanity reasons.)

The project would be strictly limited to improving bitcoin-related open source projects with an initial primary focus on improving the usability and
security of the bitcoin client and a secondary focus on other improvements (such as bugfixes) to the bitcoin client.

Hopefully, I could transfer most of the day-to-day control and decision making power over the project to a group of voting members. Sadly, I would have to make myself ineligible for claiming bounties.

The biggest issue for me is the security of holding other people's money. If anyone knows a better way than transferring coins to offline encrypted
wallets with emergency key backups printed on hidden sheets of paper, I'd love to hear it. Perhaps I can find three trusted people and give them each 2/3 of the key as an emergency backup in case I get hit by a bus.

I'll make a new post suggesting the outline of the project as I envision it and seeing if I can find other people interested in doing it too. I have a lot of big ideas, but I'm not sure I can commit the time needed to do this all by myself. I don't want to derail this thread.

You're welcome. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions that you don't think warrant a post here.

"Other exchanges are almost as bad" doesn't sound like a very good sales pitch. Simply put, you give me much less information. How will you make that up to me? Hiding my own transactions from others is only a microscopic benefit to me.

I think you miss my point. Presumably, if I have bitcoins stuck in your exchange, I can transfer them out instantly. But if I have cash stuck in your exchange, it's going to take me on the order of days to get it out. That's a risk I have to take to sell on your market. I wouldn't take it blind.

I might be willing to transfer some bitcoins to your exchange, try to sell them for well over market price, and wait a half hour. If I succeed, it's worth the few days it'll take me to get the cash back, maybe I'll try to buy way below market price. If I succeed, at least I can get the coins out fast. But I wouldn't be willing to sell at anywhere near market price on such an exchange, since the risk would be too high.

Create an account on github. Follow the instructions in the sticky post on how to create a pull request, but stop at the point where you work on the code. Then take a bit to look over the organization of the code generally. See that it uses Boost, see that most of the core code is one directory. The net code is in net.cpp, the RPC code is in rpc.cpp, and so on.

Then look through the list of bug reports on github:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues?sort=created&direction=desc&state=open

See if anything moves you.

It takes a buy at $10.00 and a sell at $10.12 to break even.

Commission is (normally) .65%, so:

I buy 10 bitcoins at $10 each, cost is $100 plus $0.65 commission.

I sell 10 bitcoins at $10.12 each, I get $101.20 and pay $.55 commission.

Sell-Buy: $101.20 - $100 = $1.20
Total Commission: $1.20

Result: Breakeven

Yes. Some versions of the bitcoin client have a built in miner that's so slow as to be basically worthless.

I think so. You have a single +12V rail, so you don't have to worry where the power's coming from. And your power supply can provide up to 984W on that rail. Each card is rated for 330W max, so that would be 660W for the two cards. The remaining 300W should easily cover a minimal system.