There is good and bad, and then there is evil.

You don't put a wallet or USB anything in an ATM, duh. You send BTC to the one time address it gives you, and get your fiat or buy physical bitcoins from the cash dispenser. Or feed it your cash and give it the address to send BTC to.

Jan 2, 1980: "There's no limit in sight"
Jan 23, 1980: "It was inevitable"

Gold peaked at over $800 in 1980 dollars, and was down to $250 by 2000.

That's a fun idea if you like federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11528

Look for yourself, who is leading, who is following?:

Look who else is showing up at Sibos:

Antonio Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer, Citi
Uday Goyal, Founder, Anthemis Group SA
Shamir Karkal, CFO, Banksimple
Darrell MacMullin, Managing Director of PayPal Canada, PayPal
Venessa Miemis, Social Technologies Researcher, Emergent by Design
Donald Norman, Co-founder, Bitcoin Consultancy Ltd.
Heather Schlegel, CEO, Purple Tornado
Stan Stalnaker, Founding Director, Hub Culture / Ven Currency

We've got a bunch of companies trying to get the biggest cut of the pie and fees, and then Bitcoin, which doesn't want your money or fees at all (and for which anyone can be a speaker or expert), it just works.

I gave my example as a fair price for $->BTC, to think of it as simply buying bitcoins for your friend by proxy (even if it comes from your own account balance and you aren't immediately clicking "buy" on an exchange to replace the ones you are selling.)

In the case above, you have just added a second layer to bargaining over investment value, and the value would really be what both can agree on, so there is no "right" answer.

Bargaining for bitcoins would be like bargaining on the price of that house, and factors that affect perception of what would be a fair price:

• how much has it historically been worth?
• do you think the value will go up in the future, or are prices on a long decline?
• has it unreasonably appreciated, was it bought cheap and it's now selling high?
• is the property a better investment than holding onto the cash?
• is nobody else buying?
• how badly does the person need to sell?
• does the seller want that currency (dollars? stock options? bitcoins? gold bars?), would they want a premium to take an unconventional currency?

Currency exchanges have values that are instantaneous and transmitted around the world, and transactions that take place in one currency can be instantly valued and priced in another. You are basically asking a similar question to "if I was in a back-alley in Ukraine and needed to exchange currency, how much is it worth" - it depends on how much they like dollars there, and how bad you need to eat.

There isn't much of a spread between buys and sells on mtgox. You can look at the Clark Moody realtime data and pick a price between the bid and ask. Right now it would be between 5.85596 and 5.87499.

Note that mtgox has a 0.6% fee for buying bitcoins, and a 0.6% fee for selling them, so they actually get 1.2% per trade. Look here where I bought them, you see that for my 4BTC purchase, I actually got only 3.976 BTC (and the seller only got $18.72 instead of $18.84):

Thu 15 Sep 2011 In    BTC bought: 4.00000000 BTC at $4.71000    4.00000000 BTC    8.07465636 BTC
Thu 15 Sep 2011 Fee    BTC bought: 4.00000000 BTC at $4.71000 (0.6% fee)    0.02400000 BTC    8.05065636 BTC

(See how clever, mtgox takes the fees from the currency you received, so the fee is actually higher than they say....)

Important, of course, is how much bitcoins are worth to you; if you aren't selling them at the current prices, why would you sell to a friend? Your friend also shouldn't pay more than the going rate either though.

I would say the correct price to sell your BTC in person is the same price you (or your friend) would instant pay on an exchange to replace them (the ask price for buying that many coins off the book * 1.006036). For your friend it's easier to give you the cash than to give mtgox all his info and transfer money and wait, so you are still providing a service for zero fee.

There is now a higher transaction fee block than the first response to this thread:

The block who generated the most BTC ever is block 139,896: it generated 66.20996865 BTC!

from the pident factoid page.

Another: There are 2,105,813 different addresses in the block chain.

And sadly: Recent blocks generate, in average, 50.06200364 BTC, including transaction fees. (you cheap bastards...)

To actually read the question posed and attempt to discover a solution: is this a dedicated mining rig? The first thing I would do is look at the CPU usage to see if you are being bitten by the CPU bug on all non-11.6 ATI drivers. If the mining CPU usage is 100%, than any other CPU usage on the computer that takes priority will idle the processes of the miners.

Secondly, using flash to watch videos (Youtube, etc) will put the GPU into 2D clock mode and make it run at half the speed. You need to disable hardware acceleration on any video player software; in flash, you right-click on the window and uncheck the hardware acceleration box.

Beyond that, more information is needed - where are you even seeing the hashrate change in software? I've noted phoenix to report varying hashrates every refresh, and with the -a 100 option you can average the hashrate display to remove the ups and downs.

No, the point is to create forum spam to keep bumping this useless thread and getting people to click on the original poster's links for just the promise of a payment.

Incorrect, that is what a salt is for. If simply the plaintext password is what is hashed and stored in a password database of 5000 users, then after I have brute forced all possible eight-character-long password hashes, any user accounts that used a password that length or less have been cracked - anything from "myLogin1" to "G0odPW69" have been found if any user has used a password that length or shorter. However, if the plaintext password plus some extra data (salt) that is unique per-user (and even mildly complex) is hashed to create the stored password hash, this means I have to brute force the password space for every user account individually, since there is no correlation between the hashes of users. Instead of being able to quickly find the weakest passwords in a database of 5000, I would now have to brute force crack every account.

I think a thank/like/karma system would be better. We should reward those that make helpful relevant posts, good posters get more moderation power (like a web-of-trust), and serial trolls' accounts will quickly disappear into unseen oblivion when you set the threshold to "ignore dummies". In many cases there's an unfortunate correlation between post count and banality of the content of those user's posts. Quality = Time on forum/quantity. Solve for quality.

I would refer you to this post.

Like writing a check against my bank account, you can no longer say that the dollars in the check are the same dollars from my dwolla deposit or my direct-deposit paycheck. They don't have serial numbers any more in the bank's computer.

The only way you could make the statement that D received some of the currency funded by A would be if D > B + old balance, then the funds from A would be required to fulfill the transfer. Otherwise, there is a kind of deniability. You could also say that the input payments are spread out and co-mingled, so D is 1/2 of A and 1/2 of B, so it's all dirty money, etc.

The connections between different addresses are always transparent though, you can see which address has been sending to who.

I have some extra beer coins, I'll send you some for .2 BTC each..

 I will lower the bar: I'm willing to have cash mailed to me even by disreputable people!

Each bitcoin address has a balance. The amount of bitcoins per address is what is stored in the blockchain. There is nothing that ties individual payments to particular "coins", so in that aspect, Bitcoins don't exist. Someone pays me, their balance goes down and mine goes up. I pay someone, my balance goes down. There is no notion of which coins were used.