Platform: 64 bit Linux. It might be better to catch the KILL SIGNAL complete the current work and even catch this unlikely case. OTOH, it might not be worth the effort, since the chance of creating one is so small...

The 4way implementation is slower on my IntelCore2Duo. The 'c' implementation is about 20% slower than the one in mainline. Still, I understood from the announcement that it was not actually the intention to go faster, but simply to show how to write one. In terms of work required to get this miner to work, it is the best miner sofar. It compiled out of the "box" (git).

I would consider this experiment to be a complete success.

What exactly happens when I send the KILL signal to the program? Is there any chance that bitcoins are lost for example? The same question applies to all miner programs.

How is one going to buy let's say a car underground? Cars have to be registered, etc. Transactions above certain amounts have to be registered, etc. How is Bitcoin or an alternative system going to get around that? For digital goods one could use Bitcoin, but most  interesting goods are not digital.

I think I initially misunderstood the blocks in that the hashes that we compute are independent of the address. Now, I believe that we are looking for something like sha256 (bitcoint address + amount (I am not sure whether the value is implicit, so this value might not be there)  + <answer>) with some desired properties (of which the number of final zeros is an approximation), where + means some concatenation operator of bits.

If the computation is like that, _then_ it might work, but I don't see why someone cannot just only send you the worthless hashes (for you) and don't send those that are useful to you. By this mechanism they can bankrupt you. Anyway, I think it is a bad way to communicate with natural language only about these topics. Just write out the computations that you intend to do on the server and the client and then we can see whether it is a brilliant idea or a flawed one. Annotations on the computations as to which goal they intend to achieve is also useful for communication.

Forcing cooperation out of nodes is not easy.

I managed to get mine to "work" too. I get less hashes out of my graphics card (1400k/s) than from the CPUs (1800k/s). I am also running X, so maybe that matters (but I doubt that).

Why are the AMD GPUs so much faster for this kind of work? From the numbers I have seen in this thread they are truly crushing nvidia. Are the nvidia cards better at doing floating point computations (or at least _something_) or are they basically just obsolete? 

How can the server create winning hashes? Winning hashes are by definition hard to compute objects that are all shared as soon as they are known. In fact, you can cheat by simply having a fake miner on a bunch of different IPs (via ipv6 you can have millions) with one real miner. The real miner remembers all the previously hard to compute objects and does hard work so has the same information as the server. If the server sends a unit of work to a fake miner, the fake miner forwards the request to the real miner and otherwise does nothing.

Your assumption about IP addresses is also invalid, btw. People still have dynamic ip addresses.

I would be interested in the concept, but I don't think there is a solution.

This is fundamentally flawed. I can join the "effort" and figure out how long it generally takes to perform one unit of work. After that time I send a message "ah, too bad I didn't find anything". Then someone does find an answer and I collect.

Now, if I find the answer, I would simply communicate that to the rest of the network (not the central server) and there is no way for you to figure out that I double crossed you.

The distributed method there is now is a good way to mine. Possibly it would be better if it was easier to solve and that you would get less bitcoins, OTOH, people are still generating coins.

If you want people to develop something, come up with detailed specifications. I read the thread, but I cannot write a program deciding whether or not a given candidate program fullfills the specifications currently.

Write down things like how the UI should look like, exactly in which ways you want to interact with the device, etc. If you don't care about a specific UI, it means that an addressbook with contacts with bitcoin addresses is not included for example and that it could look butt ugly. We generally want happy clients, but we also cannot guess exactly what you are willing to pay for (which is often different from what can be made).

There is a reason people developed UML. It is because one can point at a document saying "this is how we want you to document the requirements". Now, I don't need a full UML spec and I don't expect you to be able to write one, but you should be able to write a coherent story explaining all the features such that for everyone contributing to this thread it is clear what is going to be developed.

I also recommend you to define the abbreviations that you use to make it a self-contained description. I have used bitcoin, but for example I was not aware of bu.mp (it does look fairly interesting, but also a bad idea as there is a central server). The bu.mp requirement and a gplv3 license already seem to be incompatible (read the bu.mp license agreement). I think technically you can distribute something as gplv3 and calling a proprietary API, but it's rather messy, legally speaking.

What does 'creating a transaction mean without internet access'? The way I read it is that you just want to store a transaction like 'MOVIE TICKET - 5BTC - <address of receiver> <source address>', which you can later retrieve again by listing all such transactions. That's the level of detail one needs before one starts development as an example.

That way you can say before a single line of code is written what a sane way is to present the UI for example, whether it is even possible to make it run on a specific version of Android (another thing which was not specified), whether the (unspecified) performance characteristics are even possible on device X (what is the reference device).

In short, as in most software projects, the client is not clear about what he wants and in this case there are multiple stakeholders, which requires you to get to a consensus of what you want. First figure out what you want, then ask again.

I completely disagree. Often these simplifications completely misrepresent the product or result in descriptions which are so vague that nobody can understand the product.

There should be laws such that 99% of commercials are forbidden, because they suggest all kinds of things that are easily falsified in a lab. Take the Windows operating system for example. _All_ versions have been marketed as if they are secure operating systems. Sometimes they used the phrase "more secure", which doesn't mean a whole lot. The fact is that all operating systems released by Microsoft contain fatal flaws. In an ideal world consumers should be able to return the product even if just one marketed claim doesn't hold up.
Yes, it's because the sales people never needed to develop real skills.

That should have given a different error message. The problem is that there is no such thing as setup.h below /usr/local/include/wx-*.

I got my 2.9.0 now from wxwidgets.org, removed the old installation in the correct way, but I still get the same error. From my point of view it is simply not correct C++ code in combination with the makefile.unix for Ubuntu, and I don't think Ubuntu is doing anything non-standard, that is outside of the Linux Standard Base.

I think you need a banking license to be able to do this in the EU. Basically you are asking to temporarily keep other peoples' money (e.g. mob money) on e.g. my account. If there is no need for a banking license or the costs for such a banking license are low I could start a company doing this. I do understand your crypto talk.

Let's take an unlikely, but possible scenario. Suppose I get 10M euros in my bankaccount within a few months, it is not impossible that some bells will go off somewhere and that they temporarily freeze my account or find some other excuse to take the assets. I think everyone considering this would be concerned about some Russian mobsters paying a surprise visit however in that case, which is understandable because of course they want their money back.

Also, what kind of fees are we talking about here specified in EUR or US$ as I am not familiar with the RUB? Do you know any European bank which has an automated interface to its banking services which does not require human interaction? I of course would want to monitor my account myself and authorize everything, but that should not require me to type lots of numbers manually.

I do have the technical skills to automate it even without such official interfaces, but my technical skills are expensive.

It's very interesting. If nobody ever spends a Bitcoin there is no economy and no value, only scarcity which makes people think there is value.

The smartest strategy is indeed to hoard all and wait for the _others_ to spend, but if everyone keeps a few thousand, you basically end up with a very small community of cryptogeeks and still low value.

At least that's my amateur economics opinion. It could even be the case that there are simply 100 criminals on the forum trying to make people believe there is actual value in these things, drive the price up and then quietly exit the market. Next year they could be telling stories on tv saying how they made millions off a bunch of idiots from the Internet.

I understand that creating bitcoins was pretty easy in the beginnning. In fact it seemed like it was really easy to find bitcoins considering there are already so many, at least when I look at my generation speed (CPU only, 2k hash/s). Is that impression wrong? How can I be convinced that the starters of this network didn't do a big precomputation before starting the network? I suppose it must be possible to see the balance of everyone in the network considering there is a global history. Is that correct?

Yes, I stated in my post that I could build and run the demos included with wx.

Yes, afterwards it was ok.

I suppose it depends on where you live, but in an area where power supply is stable, I think keeping everything in memory and writing it in one go would be best. It's not like it's the end of the world when your machine crashes. Your wallet should be on non-volatile memory of course.

I still have the problem of building the application, which is also bad for adoption; many people don't like it when they are running black boxes. Can someone look here?  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1898.0

The CPU usage was expected when generating hashes, but perhaps I was not clear there. The harddisk activity gives a bad impression, imho, for first time users, especially if it is a tiny fraction (100MB) of the available internal memory on the machine. So, by default, I would recommend only doing something with the harddisk if there is some real work to be performed (i.e. does not fit in RAM or user sends KILL signal to application).

"Our web server code has a bug in it-- thanks for helping us find it, and sorry to inconvenience you! We'll fix it as soon as we can." was the error message.

 I got my first 0.05 bitcoins. So, apparently it did work. I suggest you only show an error message when there is actually an error from the point of view of the user.

How many statustypes are there? I think it started at 0/unconfirmed and now it is at 4/unconfirmed. From a UI point of view just showing the probabilities would be simpler, I think.

To do that one needs to know the requirements of the application. I was suggesting to put this logic into the application, but it appears that after running it for some time, it stopped attacking my harddisk. It's now just frying my CPUs, but that's ok.

I would like to know what it was doing to my harddisk before. I suppose it is some kind of syncing to the rest of the nodes, getting a semi-complete history of the network?

I didn't presume anything (note the question mark). I was asking a question and it seems a smart way for a criminal to spam. In one context it is an honest mistake and in another it is not.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Running bitcoin feels like its indexing my harddisk. I will probably stop running the client, because of that. I don't mind the CPU usuage, but its seek behaviour is ridiculous. Isn't there some way to keep more in memory data structures and only write them to disk when the program is stopped or when there is a lot of date to write?

What are the harddisk requirements anyway?