Bitcoin has such low public awareness that the chance of your network admin being aware of bitcoin and dishonest enough to steal your wallet seem pretty low.
If the system administrator isn't aware of Bitcoin a strange program he's never seen before in his life which is sending and receiving unknown data across his network, then he obviously isn't doing his job. The first thing he'll do is find out what the Hell it is, find out that it's a form of untracable money, then realise that he can steal said money without being traced. Most people, although they claim to be honest, will steal any money they find without hesitation if they think nobody is watching. Well, I *did* recently blow away my %appdata% folder and re-download the blockchain. That's probably enough traffic to catch the sysadmin's eye. |
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It was probably my own stupidity. Unencrypted wallet only ever used on 2 PCs, ... one of which is a corporate PC...
Helpful hint: System administrators see everything. Don't put anything on a corporate PC that you don't want them to get their hands on. Such as unencrypted wallets.  Hell they may not have even had to touch my wallet. I sit in the IT area and was on lunch when this went down, they could have done it with remote desktop alone. The list of people with RDP access to my computer is much longer than the list of people with full admin access to any computer. I'd hate to not be able to trust the folks sitting < 100 feet from me all day, but that might be an unfortunate reality  |
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It was probably my own stupidity. Unencrypted wallet only ever used on 2 PCs, both of which have good up-to-date antivirus, malware etc. one of which is a corporate PC which I can guarantee hasn't been anywhere even remotely shady. Bitcoin Client was 0.5.31 win32 on Win7x64. Both were configured for RPC but had strong passwords and bindings, open ports on the router, etc. It was only a 5 BTC loss so I'm not that worried (that's the only reason I was so lax on security anyway) but I wanted to make sure folks knew what happened. The bulk of my coins are in paper or deterministic wallets, it was only my "spending cash" wallet that got nabbed. Suppose I'm just another cautionary tale now. I also just confirmed that I have an old-as-hell unencrypted backup on dropbox, though it may still contain the necessary addresses to be responsible for that transaction (I'll have to verify). In any case, I'm now considering every address in that wallet, my dropbox account and both PCs "burned" and won't be trusting them with funds until they've been wiped and re-built. Luckily I have VMs for just such a purpose  |
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Not sure how it happened yet, still investigating, but My wallet got stolen today in this transaction. If anyone has more info, it'd be appreciated. It was only 5 BTC so I'm not all that concerned, but if anyone else got ganked today you're not alone. |
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Already got a deal going with likuidxd, but I appreciate the offer. I've got you in mind if it doesn't pan out.
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Summer in Las Vegas is rolling around and as much as I'd love to keep mining, my apartment's crappy air conditioning can't handle it. I've explored the alternatives and decided it's just time to liquidate the rigs until I can find a better place to live.
I have 9 Radeon 5830s, I believe 5 are Sapphires and 4 are XFX. They've all been mining without error for months and all have been tested and run stable at low temps with core overclocked and memory underclocked. I prefer to sell for BTC directly but will consider other methods if requested and reasonable. Each card is 100 USD or its BTC equivalent, plus actual shipping at the time of sale. Please send PM if interested.
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Shameless plug: my account for any current users, go vouch for me If you're not a current user, I'll be happy to invite, I just need to follow you on twitter or something so you'll show up in my contacts. |
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I've started a Bitcoin team at the coderwall beta and am sending out invites to the team (which also means instant access to coderwall without having to whore yourself out on twitter). Any takers? Requires email address to invite so if you're squeamish about posting it publicly, send me a PM. |
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Insanely awesome, never heard of Gource before.
It's a pretty cool project. My only major criticism is that it takes some doing to get video out of it in any usable format without filling your hard disk to the brim, processing, reprocessing and encoding, but it renders using OpenGL so I just fired up a copy of FRAPS. |
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It's worth noting that the "3% fee" cited by many is highly variable.
It's commonplace, for example, for a payment processor to charge a lower fee for transactions containing magstripe data (i.e. physically swiped) than those that were hand-keyed at the store, and phone or internet transactions bring higher fees still. Also, restaurants often pay higher fees than other businesses because they commonly post-auth for a different amount than they pre-auth for (to add the gratuity).
I don't feel like scrolling for the fellow who suggested he'd write a check instead, but checks are usually processed via EFT which carry their own (albeit lower) fees. Then you pay a monthly fee for the privilege of having an account, you pay a monthly fee to rent any physical equipment you've got (fun fact: it's VERY hard to actually buy a PINpad or CC terminal) and before you're allowed to pay those fees you have to pay a setup fee.
3% is usually listed as the "average fee" but depending on store volume, transaction type distribution, time of day, phase of the moon, blood type, iris pigmentation and the fourth letter in the name of your double-paternal great grandfather's dog, it can be drastically more or less than this - Wal Mart almost certainly doesn't pay 3% for swiped card fees and the guy who owns the mom-and-pop restaurant down the street or a small internet retailer almost certainly pays more, even without factoring in the fixed monthly, batch and per-transaction fees as a percent of revenue.
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You could basically redux the entire article to this one statement: What creates the jobs, Hanauer astutely observes, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company's customers. Rich people make businesses but those businesses must provide goods and/or services. The economic health of the nation creates much of the demand and that demand drives prices which drives jobs. To imagine job creation as independent of the economy is foolish and to imagine the economy as a top-down hierarchy rather than a tangled hierarchy is also foolish. Those insinuating that "the rich create the jobs" are grossly oversimplifying a system which has proven extraordinarily difficult to simplify. |
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I think those dismissing this as not a scam from the fact they put on a semi functional demo are overlooking a few things: 1) They have yet to ship any boards 2) Their numbers do not match their claims 3) They claim to be incorporated but have not provided a business license 4) Since they are not legally incorporated and they claim to be they are an illegal organization 5) They could have just made up a couple boards they thought would get the numbers they claimed (and failed) to try and show they werent scammers 6) They keep on bouncing between Bitforce Labs and Butterfly Labs as a name (seems odd) 7) Their so called business address is actually residential  Even if they are "legit" they could still go bankrupt and no one gets anything 9) As mentioned in the previous post by someone else the power numbers are way off - the whole benefit of fpga boards 10) If they can produce the boards with the numbers claimed they can just run off with the boards, close shop and not ship anything (Paypal buyer protection is a joke and wont protect you from this) 11) With a $26k box for preorder they have a lot more incentive to keep people believing that they are legit in the hopes to get some orders (big money) for this It is still way too early to say this isnt a scam. I have been fooled by more elaborate scammers before. Your 8th bullet point looks kinda... shady... YEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! |
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From the wikimedia response previously linked to: This has been interpreted to mean that we do not accept "artificial" currencies Artificial... As opposed to what? Natural organically grown currencies, no hormones no chemicals? Free-range dollars? Just because one country or another throws their weight behind something doesn't make it "natural" You are preaching to the choir. I know, I'm just imagining a literal money tree and protesters arguing over what fertilizer to use on it... Thought it was a fun mental image that deserved sharing |
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From the wikimedia response previously linked to: This has been interpreted to mean that we do not accept "artificial" currencies Artificial... As opposed to what? Natural organically grown currencies, no hormones no chemicals? Free-range dollars? Just because one country or another throws their weight behind something doesn't make it "natural" |
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They have emailed me saying that the Rig Box has additional performance improvements, being 32 clustered boards instead of 1 single, that enable it to reach 54 GH/s.
Does that make sense to you? Do 32 GPU have 54x the performance of 1 GPU? Do 32 CPU have 54x the perofrmance of 1 GPU? If 1 board was capable of 1.7GH wouldn't it make sense to just apply those magical unicorn optimization and make the single board 1.7GH too. They could sell it for 70% more right? Unless 70% higher revenue per sale is a bad thing. Yes it makes sense that 32 specialized boards can run together and achieve improvements you wouldn't otherwise get with a single board. You are going to need to explain that a little further. Best guess of what he's going for here: Scenario 1: You're using FPGAs. Each board has one FPGA that you're utilizing 80% of. There's not enough room to fit anything useful in that remaining 20% unless you're using a large array of many FPGAs in which case some logic could be crammed into the extra 20% that might be useful in tandem with other "wasted" space. Scenario 2: The data on the site isn't entirely accurate and the cards in the larger rig aren't *exactly* the same as the single rigs. What I said in Scenario 1 about wasted FPGA gates also applies to wasted PCB space. |
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so they can also be used to mine say SolidCoin not only Bitcoin etc. )
There's a fundamental misunderstanding here about how and why FPGAs are so good for Bitcoin mining that I don't even have the time to begin addressing, but I'll say this much: Only two algorithms have been chosen thus far for mining Bitcoin and its associated forks: SHA256 and sCrypt. sCrypt is used for "CPU friendly" currencies and is CPU friendly explicitly because it uses more RAM than is typically available in on-chip cache for both GPUs and FPGAs, but not more than is typically available in L1/L2 cache on your CPU. FPGAs are a poor choice for sCrypt mining for the same reason that GPUs are: they require too much on-chip cache. That said, if the BFL boxes turn out not to be vaporware there's only three options for what's inside: an FPGA, an ASIC or some kind of existing SHA256 hardware. In all cases but FPGA the device will likely only be good for the one purpose of its design. Even if they are FPGAs it's unlikely you'll be able to accelerate sCrypt with them since sCrypt was explicitly built to avoid such acceleration. |
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Another email on its way.
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+1 for Gavin's comments. I'm not in Bitcoin for speculative value, I'm init for its fundamentals. The fundamentals haven't changed so I'm still in.
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