Where the hell is your IRC channel?  I've been lurking in what I thought was the channel all day and haven't seen a peep.

Does it really work in this order?  I would expect the active flag to get cleared when the partition is deleted.

I wrote up some notes on this too, including tips for automatic mining startup, but I used a linux box (booted from the CD) for the partitioning step.  It is a real time saver, since you can do it and the ext4 creation at the same time.

Each change to the system will be adopted or rejected according to whether it is beneficial or not.  Adding digits will (at some day in the future) be worth more than it costs, and when that day comes, it will happen.  Other changes, like adding inflation by rigging the generation rules, will never be useful, and so we can consider that rule to be written in stone.

This is true with any system of money, given enough time.  Bitcoins at least makes it much more difficult, since they can't just create money out of thin air, they must provide something of value for it.  And as they accumulate, they will have to provide much, much more value as the economy will no longer see the coins they are holding, and when they decide to dump, they will get much less for it.

A couple of problems with your idea.

The first is that mining must secure the chain directly, or there will be cheating.  Or at least no one can be sure that there isn't cheating, which is the same thing in that no one will trust it.

And second, what you are talking about is just money.  You might be willing to do a favor for someone you know, or that you know of.  Beyond that, they'd have to pay.  Wouldn't you rather they pay with money, which is ultimately a measure of the world's respect?

It would be pretty hard to do, particularly if you don't already know either of the endpoints.

You could get mtgox to send you a bitcoin, then track that transaction backwards to see where it came from, and follow the chains forward and backward at each point.  But the more links you have to follow, the less sure you are of who owns the address you are looking at.

It would be pretty easy to double the precision.  And we literally have many decades to plan the change.

If you really want to know, the block header includes a block version number, currently 1.  All we have to do is define a new block using longer words for values, and call it block version 2.  Then wait 10 or 20 years until the vast majority of clients have been upgraded.

Essentially every one of these threads is started by someone that doesn't understand how deep we can really go with the 8 digits we already have.  A single bitcoin will be worth something like a million dollars before the final digit is worth as much as a penny.

Ahh, I get your point now.  I haven't given much consideration to a griefer attack.  I will ponder it.

There are two ways to handle transaction risk.  Both involve third parties.  Both types of third parties exist in the real world when transactions deal with dollars.  Eventually, both types will exist in the bitcoin world for bitcoin transactions.

Type 1 is an escrow service.  These do exist for bitcoins, as well as for dollars.

Type 2 is a transaction processor, like the Visa or MasterCard networks.  You pay them a fee to accept the risk of a rollback.  These currently don't exist for bitcoins, but at some point, they sure will.  In fact, I suspect that one or more of the current major credit card systems will embrace bitcoin when it gets big enough.

If Ghost treats a USB stick as a generic block device, it should work.  It deals with real hard drives in this way, so I think it would be likely, but I haven't tried it with USB flash drives.

Never used Clonezilla, so I have no idea.

I think you are going to need to restart pushpoold with full logging on, and hope that you get enough information from the logs.

Right now, I can't tell if the problem is in get_work handing out the same work to many people, or if the problem is in check_hash (or hist_lookup) finding improper duplicates.  (both are in msg.c)

The answer is in the history elist, but I don't think there is any way to interrogate it while running.  Looks like the logs might show enough info.

I think you would need something like Ghost.  Remember that you need to clone the entire block device.

On the other hand, while shares are totally fungible, bitcoins are not, at least when it comes to LIFO/FIFO.

For each spend transaction, it should be possible, at least in principle, to figure out which of your receive transactions it/they came from.  Whether the IRS would care to enforce this, or deem the LIFO/FIFO question a matter of local policy, is unknown.

Sure.  Just plug the working stick in, note which drive it is, then plug the other in, check which drive it is.  Unmount them both.

If the good drive is /dev/sdb and the new drive is /dev/sdc, use this:


It'll take a while, probably much longer than just doing the setup.

Has nothing to do with the midstate.  The midstate is calculated on the first 512 bits, which is identical in the two examples given in IRC.  The difference is in the timestamps, which is in the second half and will not change the midstate at all.

Also, the extraNonce is in the generation transaction.  The mining client never sees it and can't change it.

I'd still just use a pool.  That way you will earn the actual value of the card for sure, which is probably more than what you would earn in the self generation lottery.

Are those the real usernames?  Now that I've signed up, I can see that you use randomly generated worker names.

It looks like someone is trying to scam you by sending in one result from many locations, hoping to earn many shares for little work.

Or is this happening to honest users?

If you can't tell, I've signed up and sent one of my workers to you.  Check your PMs for the IP and username.

Unfortunately, I'm going to be unavailable for about an hour, and it doesn't look like you can wait.  Hopefully someone else can step in and help.

Edit: usernames are random by design

I didn't mean that your card was never capable of generating coins.  I'm saying that between now and the end of time, it is pretty unlikely that it will generate any more.

What do you mean invalid shares?  Like you think you found a block, but it isn't accepted by the network because the network found a block moments before you found yours?  Or is someone sending duplicates of their low difficulty solutions to you?

Won't be worth it.

M2050 is worth about 75 to 100 Mhash/sec.
The Xeons are worth maybe 20 more.