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Bold words from a company that has HIGHER fees than Paypal!
Also Bitcoin currently pays ~250k USD to miners per week (6 Blocks per hour per day per week * 350USD at a rate of 5 $ per coin). In half a year this amount will halve, meaning that miners will either give up making the network vulnerable or need real transaction fees (which are currently too small to care about).
For me it's a bit too much government bashing and too little actual information. To "just use Bitcoin" to transfer money, you need to buy them - from a japanese website that looks like a stock exchange and doesn't accept my Paypal or Credit Card! After that you get hit by AML laws until you are allowed to withdraw the money you sent "so fast"...
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Not to forget: As difficulty increases, GPU mining will be slowly driven out of business if the exchange rate doesn't go up. It can change quite a bit over time - how will you tell your customers that next month they will only get 50 Cents instead of one Dollar for the same amount of work + uptime?
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What everyone here seems to forget: You're dealing with an open pseudonymous accounting system! EVERY transaction is public, you only have to find out which are the ones by pirate!
Has anyone actually tried tracking a few input transactions to pirateat40 and finding out his combined BTC holdings and money flow?
Yes. I have done some of that. What I found is that the total (realistic) maximum of all coins sent to Pirate (based on some non-public information) is actually pretty small. Care to send me the hashes of a few transactions to or from pirate addresses? Doesn't even have to be public. It would be nice if you could label them like "to GPUMAX" "from GPUMAX" or "to BTCS&T" etc. This goes of course for anyone here who wants to know more about pirate's operations - just collect transactions + public addresses of him and then do the research in the chain. One could also start to do research about the payouts of dividends each monday (just link forum posts and donation addresses in signatures here with users and check who sent them BTC on monday morning) to find more accounts even without getting any data from his "investors". Also please give an estimate of "pretty small"... I personally believe he just invests in the MMM Ponzi. Payouts there should be enough to leave him with even some profit after the crazy rates he gets here, and as long as they pay (which they currenty do) he'll pay as well. |
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This scanning is lower-level than what happens in Armory, so you are mainly using C++ objects. You can find a full list of all the methods in BlockObjRef.h and BlockUtils.h. Please ask questions if something isn't clear, or if you want to use some functionality not exemplified here. I'm currently trying to write a program that connects multiple addresses to "entities". If there are 2 (or more) inputs used in a transaction, I assume that these belong to the same person. Atm all I want to do is to get a transaction and then get a list consisting of either ["Mined"] (if it was a coinbase) or the input address(es). My code so far: def getListOfInputAdresses(tx):
allAddr = set()
for nin in range(tx.getNumTxIn()):
txin = tx.getTxInRef(nin)
if txin.isCoinbase():
return ["Mined"]
else:
if txin.getSenderAddrIfAvailable():
parent = binary_to_hex(txin.getSenderAddrIfAvailable()) #<-- Hash160
allAddr.add(parent)
return list(allAddr) getSenderAddrIfAvailable() however seems not to catch a lot of input addresses, compared to your "count all addresses" that just counts the txouts I get only a fraction. I already read the comment // Not all TxIns have sendor info. Might have to go to the Outpoint and get
// the corresponding TxOut to find the sender. In the case the sender is
// not available, return false and don't write the output but I'm kinda lost after calling txin.getOutPoint() - how do I then get to the OutTx object again and how do I know which of it's (possibly multiple) output addresses is the input address I'm looking for? |
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Well, to sum it up what I've read here so far:
Pirates's income sources are at the very least unclear. They could come from selling BTC offline at a premium, be nonexistant (= interst comes from deposits --> ponzi), from GPUMAX customers, from money laundering/drug trafficking/other illegal stuff, selling goods other than Bitcoin at a hefty premium, from his private money ( --> charity), lending Bitcoin to others and charging high interest, day trading on some exchange/Bitcoinica, investing in another Ponzi scheme that pays even higher and is still running (e.g. the russian Mavrodi one).
What makes it likely that it's a ponzi:
* Huge interests, far above even the BTC inflation rate (which is also not small...)
* Source of income is unclear
* He could borrow these coins cheaper than the interest he pays
* People say it is
What might speak against it being a ponzi:
* Even though a lot of people are begging to throw money at him, he doesn't take it all
* He owns GPUMAX, a site that pays out real money to miners and that's nontrivial to operate
* He (supposedly?) gave his personal information to people investing in him, so he would be easy to find and prosecute
* People say it isn't
Nobody has yet published a money trail or tried to get the list of adresses pirateat40 actually owns or controls (by tracking payouts from BTCS&T, GPUMAX, payments to both services...), all of this here is pure speculation as only pirate knows what pirate does.
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In the end I guess it can be summed up with "LURK MOAR!", right? As soon as you actually buy something, you get penalized, if you bid just 1 Satoshi off the current bid or buy, you have high chances that someone else will take the bait.
What problem shall a fee structure like this solve? It seems to me that it will bind more money to unfilled offers than necessary. Especially since offers on GLBSE are always backed by some actual amount of BTC in an account (I cannot put up a "Buy 100 of ABCD @ 1BTC" offer if I don't have 100 BTC not frozen in my account) this might give some huge order books but fewer trades imho.
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So a strategy to get shares would be to bid 1 Satoshi lower than the lowest ask and hope for someone holding shares to eat up the 0.5% fee?
I would still favor a clear: "0.5% on both sides of every trade or transfer of assets above 20 BTC total volume OR a flat fee of X BTC per 30 days for the 'high rollers' that provide liquidity." - this would have the best of both worlds. Small investors have only 0.5% fees and if you want to go big, you have to have a volume larger than 200 times the monthly fee within that month to be worth it - if the fee is 5 BTC for examplethat would mena, if you plan to move more than 1000 BTC per month on GLBSE, you're better off buying the flat rate, and you will also benefit smaller investors with more liquidity in the market.
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1 USD/month would mean a free game every 2-4 years or so...  Not something most parents would accept to let junior keep his PC on full throttle each night... Also there is already a service like this - with huge 30-40% fees and without the (against TOS in most cases) gaming part - operating for about a year already. You load a miner and get paid in fiat over Paypal... Also I hate the idea of patents in the mining sector... especially in the USA where software patent trolls nearly sue you if you use a "graphical user interface that takes input from users and displays output depending on inputs". |
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Will this venture be listed on GLBSE, MPEX or somewhere else?
Will you accept BTC deposits to GPUMoney accounts instead of mining too?
Will your mining client be open source - and will it only do BTC mining or "other calculations" too?
Can I run e.G. a BFL Single as well with your client? In the end it could just work like this that you give me a BTC address and anything that arrives there (via mining, transactions...) gets pulled over to your site and credited to my account. Then you'd just need to create a fancy GUI mining client + pool where users only need to input their payout address and done.
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What everyone here seems to forget: You're dealing with an open pseudonymous accounting system! EVERY transaction is public, you only have to find out which are the ones by pirate! Has anyone actually tried tracking a few input transactions to pirateat40 and finding out his combined BTC holdings and money flow? Unless he's really smart by using the CoinControl branch and very careful not to mix private keys in wallets, sooner or later it might be possible to link all or most of his accounts together... this might then give better ideas on how he operates actually and we could also see money flows to several known sites (Bitcoinica, MtGox...) - if they are there. Also it could show if he really uses mainly funds to pay out investors (warning: he probably will pay some investors from funds, that isn't proof it's a ponzi though! Bitcoin works that way...!) or something else (like mining income, coins coming from MtGox...). Edit: It might be an interesting topic for researchers (like http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html) to graph pirate's money flow(s)... just saying! |
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"Linux 11.04" - wow, I still have 3.3... I guess you want someone to crack passwords or similar stuff then? (like http://gpuhash.com/) ~1.5 BTC/day seems like an ok deal though, but I doubt it would be worthwile to reconfigure miners, test out whatever software you want them to install etc. for ~20 Bitcents per day more than mining itself (calculating 100% PPS, if you do merged mining or GPUMAX, you might even be at a small loss here). |
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great work. on glbse the new charts are much better then the ones on 2.0 They need tooltips though! It's really hard (especially on GIGAMINING currently) to figure out exact trading prices. Another feature request (again): Trade and dividend histories in a simple CSV format. I wouldn't even care if they only get released/updated every 24 hours and the most recent data has to be pulled from twitter, but for longer term statistics these are really necessary. Of course in the end I hope you'll get an API similar to MtGox where you can for example specify to get every data until a certain point in time. Also: Pre-set times for dividend and buyback orders + an API for them. These could also be announced in the interface ("Upcoming dividends, Upcoming forced buybacks"). |
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If difficulty rises, it's nearly always better to have a lot of hashing power as fast as possible (--> GPU). - Most important: USD per MH/s when buying
If it is stable or goes down, it's better to have the most efficient miners possible. - Most important: MH/s per Watt when running
There are also better GPUs for USD per MH/s than 7970s I think.
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Or we would use the PPT method of 1.00 issue and 1.35 (as an example) face value?
I personally also think issuing bonds at a starting value of 0.1, 1, 10 or so and then maturing at 0.1337, 1.337, 13.37 etc. is easier to get, but apparently in the "real world" it's the other way round. It might just be a bit hard to explain to common people why a bond starting at 0.75 and maturing at 1.0 has a profit of 33.3...% and NOT of 25% for example. It seems though that you might get more "respect" from the "pros" if you have a clean face value and some weird starting value... |
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Am I blind or something?! Where do I find the current fees charged if I'm logged in on GLBSE? It's not in "Terms", on "Transfer" there's only the fee for transfers and anywhere else I've looked I didn't find anything... Edit: Ok, right after posting this, I found it...  The only way to see the fees is if you already intend to buy something and go on an asset page. If you want to check the fees first you can be as lost as me. Also - 0.4% fees were announced, 0.5% fees implemented. That's a 25% increase(!) - why try to kill the liquidity that anyways is the thing that generates income and is most needed on GLBSE atm in my opinion? |
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What's supposed to be the starting price of every share?
See OP: price: cut-off will be set at IPO day at (5-day 1MH/s average of other mining bonds) - 10% discount Current average should be something about 0.35 BTC per MH/s, I'd expect the IPO to be around 0.3 BTC, like nearly every other 1 MH/s bond out there (except for Puremining, their prices are crazy!  ) |
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I would suggest that you just mine for the fund for X days (maybe 100-120 days or so?) and treat it as a mining contract investment...
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It's similar to MtGox behaviour for example.
If I sell 1 million BTC right now down to 2 USD, I would fill orders for some BTC at 5 USD, some at 4 USD... otherwise the ones putting up the buy orders are in a huge advantage (expect to buy 100 BTC @ 5 USD but get them for 200 USD).
Also: Let's say, bidding gets really crazy and a few freaks bid 100 BTC per share but they get sold down to 1 BTC anyways. They might then start to complain that they should get 100 shares, since they most likely want to have a big amount of shares as opposed to having a big amount of money left.
With the current system you get the maximum amount of shares and the seller gets the maximum amount of profit.
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As long as mining bonds return more than 1% per week (they currently do and will for the forseeable future - until difficulty grows to ~2.5 million - continue to do so) you can get profits and after that just buy back your bonds or invest elsewhere. Nice idea!  |
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