What is notable is that CBX is going through a security audit in a public manner. This says more about thier mind set and approach than can be said of any other btc exchange.
Looks more like opportunists feeding off the Mt Gox hack. Again, this is not question about if the site can be hacked, but rather when it gets hacked, what can they do for you? |
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From campbx.com...
"Tested according to U.S. Government requirements"
I seriously doubt anyone will be impressed by that, it's more like a seal of certainty that lulzsec will breeze through the security measures in five minutes.
Fancy logos and certifications aside, any site can be hacked, what is more important is how hack attempts are dealt with from the user point of view (are losses covered?).
BTW:
Site running PHP/MySQL - Pass
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Nagle is a troll, don't inflate his ego by replying.
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I made a simple python json script to read from the BTC Guild API using the key found under "API Settings" in the user account at btcguild.com. #!/usr/bin/env python
import sys, simplejson, urllib
API_KEY = 'insert your api key here'
API_ARG = 'api_key'
URL_BASE = 'http://www.btcguild.com/api.php'
class BtcGuildError(Exception):
pass
def stats(query):
url = URL_BASE + '?' + API_ARG + '=' + API_KEY
result = simplejson.load(urllib.urlopen(url))
if 'Error' in result:
# An error occurred; raise an exception
raise BtcGuildError, result['Error']
if query == 'all':
return result
else:
return result[query]
def main():
if len(sys.argv) == 2 and (sys.argv[1] == 'all' or sys.argv[1] == 'workers' or sys.argv[1] == 'user' or sys.argv[1] == 'pool'):
print simplejson.dumps(stats(sys.argv[1]), indent=4)
else:
sys.exit("Usage: btcgstats.py <all|workers|user|pool>")
if __name__ == "__main__":
main() Set API_KEY to your own and run the script. |
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[16/06/2011 20:21:48] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[16/06/2011 20:22:01] Result 000000002f4255ac... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:22:06] Result 00000000956163ae... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:22:08] Result 000000006244c69e... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:22:15] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[16/06/2011 20:22:42] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[16/06/2011 20:23:08] Result 0000000068e4507d... rejected
[16/06/2011 20:23:08] Result 00000000e2b80025... rejected
[16/06/2011 20:23:09] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[16/06/2011 20:23:10] New block (WorkQueue)
[16/06/2011 20:23:13] Result 000000003717b83f... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:23:25] Result 00000000706aa557... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:23:28] Result 00000000edf564dc... accepted
[16/06/2011 20:23:37] Warning: work queue empty, miner is idle
[0 Khash/sec] [859 Accepted] [23 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)]
v1.50 did not restart for two hours... Seven other miner instances worked fine, one of them on the same GPU. Could it be something with the socket connection? anything we can do to help debug? I'm assuming you are running Linux? $ sudo sysctl -a | grep tcp_keepalive
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 7200
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 9
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl = 75 Those are the default kernel parameters when running Linux (Ubuntu 11.04). First one gives keeps the TCP/IP connection alive for two hours (7200 seconds) without ack (eg. if you pull the network cable), second one is how many times it will try to reconnect/probe, and third one is how many seconds it will perform each probe. Only after all this is done will the application (python binary in this case) get the socket call terminated when the TCP/IP connection is bork. I've only had the hang you describe once so far, all other times phoenix handles this. I think it depends on how the connection is broken against the pool, and somehow bypasses the exception handling in Phyton. Anyway, to change the kernel parameters dynamically (until next reboot) you can issue this command. sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=60 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes=3 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl=10 This will give a reconnection after one minute (60 seconds), and do three probe attempts lasting 10 seconds each. To change permanently you can edit /etc/sysctl.conf (as root) with your favorite editor and add these lines. net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=60
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes=3
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl=10 Let me know if it seems to work for you. |
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Its very much needed for me as i want to monitor temperature of my cards.
If just just want a quick script for temperature monitoring, you can use something very simple like this: #!/bin/sh
while true
do
aticonfig --odgt --adapter=all
sleep 10
done Just put it in an executable file and run it, should spit out the temperature every 10 seconds. ...or you can use 'watch' like this: watch -n 5 aticonfig --odgt --adapter=all Updates every five seconds (-n 5). |
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Regardless of the problems with my implementation, merchants will not enter this marketplace if they have to change their prices daily - and in the current market, daily wouldn't even be often enough! There is no reason that anyone anywhere should pay 1 BTC for a shirt and then twenty minutes later see a price tag of 0.8 BTC and then 1.4 BTC twenty minutes after that. The issue still remains that this market is too volatile for real commerce and if the only people in the market are the speculators, who thrive on volatility, there will likely never be a sufficient decrease in that volatility to make this a worthwhile mechanism for most businesses to transact in.
I see a lot of people reaffirming that I've spotted a problem and telling me that my solution is stupid, wrong or communist but not a lot of people stepping up to do anything themselves. So until someone has a better idea and wants to implement it, stop complaining about my imperfect solution.
I recently started to accept Bitcoin as a merchant, and it was the same day BTC went from 18 to 31 and then dropped off pretty low against the USD due to heavy sales.  So what I did was making the order processing partially automatic; the customer select Bitcoin during checkout in the online shop and gets information how to proceed in the order confirmation email automatically. When we receive an order I browse through the recent currency trade stats/graphs for the past days and reply with an offer via email which is time limited depending on how big the BTC currency fluctuations are against US Dollar. This is also a good way to get experience with BTC, and maybe at a later stage implement fully automatic handling. In addition to this, in a way to even out the BTC currency losses when customer "gets too good rate", we keep some of the customer payment in BTC (eg. like 50%), and exchange the rest to USD. Since I believe the Bitcoin will increase in value against the USD eventually, even if it takes a month of swinging up and down, half of the customer payment will then increase enough to cover any losses we had at the time of purchase. To survive as a merchant these days you have to improvise and adapt, this is nothing new for us. I think the people worried mostly about currency fluctuations are miners here in the forum, funny that they seem so concerned about merchants. My advice; when the the rate drops down, stick with your Bitcoins, don't panic. Hasty decisions are rarely good. |
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But this only works because we have the Dollar as a relatively stable benchmark. Without such a standard it would be much more difficult to really judge how to fix your prices. You would always have to match it against your purchase and restocking prices. While this would be possible, it opens up lots of potential problems which are hard to handle. Because of this, bigger companies often use futures and the like to protect themself against such currency risks (which do exists in fiat currencies, even if to a much smaller amount an primary in international trades between different currencies). Now imagine, everybody has do do something like this because of much higher currency volatility.
If there was no currency to relate to there wouldn't be any BTC fluctuations. That's why I also suggested only selling 50% of BTC received from customers. Perhaps some day we can keep 100% in Bitcoins and get rid of currency like USD, but then it has to grow a lot first. |
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The core idea of (modern) fiat currencies is to provide a stable exchange media which is required for every stable economy. This is done by having an independent organization which controls the amount of circulating money to stabilize it. While it's still possible to speculate with fiat currencies, it's less profitable because of the artificial stabilization through a central bank which often goes against the market. As the result the currency is much more stable which makes trading etc much more predictable if done with a fiat currency. Which in turn leads to economic growth.
With Bitcoin we see what happens if currencies are subject to heavy speculation: The value is changing rapidly, and this makes trading and any kind of accumulation (which is necessary if someone plans bigger investments) with the currency very risky. And this will probably prevent the use of Bitcoin for it's primary use: Trading. People want to trade and people want to speculate. But only very rarely they want to do both at the same time with the same thing. If you have to take currency fluctuations into account to find the right time to buy things, this isn't what most people are willing to accept. As a result they will probably stay at some fiat currency for trading and use Bitcoin for speculative purposes only - which may kill Bitcoin in the end.
Any idea how to overcome this problem?
I recently started to accept Bitcoin as a merchant, and it was the same day BTC went from 18 to 31 and then dropped off pretty low against the USD due to heavy sales. So what I did was making the order processing partially automatic; the customer select Bitcoin during checkout in the online shop and gets information how to proceed in the order confirmation email automatically. When we receive an order I browse through the recent currency trade stats/graphs for the past days and reply with an offer via email which is time limited depending on how big the BTC currency fluctuations are against US Dollar. This is also a good way to get experience with BTC, and maybe at a later stage implement fully automatic handling. In addition to this, in a way to even out the BTC currency losses when customer "gets too good rate", we keep some of the customer payment in BTC (eg. like 50%), and exchange the rest to USD. Since I believe the Bitcoin will increase in value against the USD eventually, even if it takes a month of swinging up and down, half of the customer payment will then increase enough to cover any losses we had at the time of purchase. To survive as a merchant these days you have to improvise and adapt, this is nothing new for us. I think the people worried mostly about currency fluctuations are miners here in the forum, funny that they seem so concerned about merchants. My advice; when the the rate drops down, stick with your Bitcoins, don't panic. Hasty decisions are rarely good. |
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Greetings from Bangkok! I'm a merchant who just started accepting Bitcoin, and also considering mining as a hobby, all this hardware makes me drool. My humble request to get on the "whitelist" is because I want to share my ideas how to handle the currency fluctuations as a merchant, in particular replying to this specific post. |
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Greetings from Bangkok!
I'm a new Bitcoin merchant also considering mining as a hobby, all this hardware makes me drool.
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