Yeah, but facebook doesn't tell sheeple that they're being sold to advertisers, except in their ever-changing privacy policy that nobody ever reads. If they were more open about their sheeple-selling practices, there would be no problem, except for the fact that sheeple would no longer join them in flocks.

Um, 5000% is 50 times, not 5000. Which is it?

Yes, they're selling you to advertisers. They openly admit that. That's the whole point of free bitcoin sites.

Of course it's possible, since all transactions are public. It's possible to trace a particular coin's entire transaction history all the way back to its generation and look for transactions known to be illegal. It's also possible to go the other way, and look at a particular illegal transaction and find out where all those coins are now.

The real question is what should be done about tainted coins. I personally think nothing should be done about it, except investigate illegal transactions as soon as possible after they are discovered. Preventing people from using tainted coins would harm innocent people more than it would harm criminals, since criminals are likely to launder their coins (putting them in the hands of legitimate users) before anyone even realises the coins are tainted.

I, for one, am perfectly willing to buy/accept tainted coins, in the same way that I don't care that at least half of the notes in my wallet probably have traces of various drugs on them, simply because I have no way of knowing whether the person paying me is really involved in illegal activity, or just happened to receive money from someone who was. I don't want people's money to be made worthless just because they may be a criminal. That's not how a civilised society is supposed to work, and goes against everything that Bitcoin stands for.

Come on people, keep it together.

No. They give you exactly what they promise, which is not very much. Basically they're only useful for testing if your Bitcoin client is working.

Has your Bitcoin client fully synchronised? You will not see your coins or be able to spend them until it has. Try looking up your addresses on blockexplorer.com, you should see your transactions there. If not, were you using Tor? As marked pointed out, most Tor exits are banned by the faucet sites.

This is true, but hinges on the assumption that you can convince gamers that it's a good idea to mine bitcoins even when the value of the bitcoins mined is nowhere near enough to cover the increased electricity costs, as is usually the case with a machine not specifically designed for bitcoin mining. This is why the thread turned into a discussion on mining profitability. If mining with gaming machines is not only unprofitable, but causes people to actually lose significant amounts of money through electricity costs, then nobody is going to do it, simple as that.

To all those complaining you can't the address input isn't clickable, it's not supposed to be clickable:

Removing disabled from both btcinput and send_btn causes it to... still not do anything. Absolutely nothing happens when you input an address and click send. I really don't understand how it's supposed to work, when the relevant inputs are disabled in the HTML source, and still don't do anything when they are enabled.

EDIT: On closer inspection, it does do something when the inputs are enabled: it produces this in my error log:
I am not impressed so far.

The rise in difficulty from the increased hashing power will reduce the number of bitcoins per gigahash, keeping the price stable.

More efficient mining produces more hashes for a given amount of energy. Nobody says "I'm going to mine at X MHash/s, regardless of how much power it takes", they say "I can spare X kilowatts, how many MHash/s can I get from that?" There is a clear incentive for people to mine efficiently, which is good, because there is only so much energy available to secure the network, so more efficiency = more security.

Yes, they are contributing hashing power, but they are consuming a disproportionate amount of electrical power, of which only a finite amount exists in the world, and somebody at some point has to pay for that electricity one way or another. People should not be encouraged to use electricity inefficiently. That's just wasteful and stupid.

Nope. When you get right down to it, mining is a business: you verify transactions and secure the network, and you get paid for providing this service. Since the barrier to entry is practically nonexistant, it is an extremely competitive business, and anyone who can't mine efficiently is just not going to make a profit from it. The incentive structure in Bitcoin is designed to encourage people to mine as efficiently as possible, since this provides the maximum security for the network. That's what mining is all about: you get paid to secure the network. Do a better job of securing the network, and get you paid more. There is not, and will never be, any incentive for people to mine inefficiently, since that doesn't help anything.

No, they would just stop mining and sell their rigs. This would in turn cause the difficulty to decrease, and the remaining miners make more money. Difficulty adjustment will always cause the cost of bitcoin mining to (on average) be equal to the value of the bitcoins mined.

There is no mining cartel. Anyone who wants to mine can do so.

Nobody's going to generate and hold bitcoins if the power bill increase is drastically more than the value of their bitcoins. They might be willing to mine at a slight loss for various reasons, but if the losses are substantial enough, they're just going to quit.

Not directly. It is good for Bitcoin, though whether Bitcoin solves economic problems is a whole 'nother story.

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Are you serious? The whole point of Bitcoin is that nobody can generate it out of thin air (since that would cause its value to drop to nothing), instead it requires substantial computer power to do so. The fact that people without substantial computer power cannot generate bitcoins is not a "threat", in fact it is the main source of its value. Think about it: why would a merchant accept Bitcoins if he could easily generate some on his computer?

There's no problem if FPGAs take over (in fact it's a good thing, because it reduces the energy requirements of securing the Bitcoin network), because there's a free market for FPGA hardware and software. Anyone who wants to mine with an FPGA can go out and buy one for a fair price. No problem.

It's not magic. The few nodes that are connected to the Internet have to pay the bandwidth costs of the entire network, which for most Internet services increases in proportion to the size of the ad-hoc network. But, and this is the cool part, the Internet bandwidth used by a (full) Bitcoin node does not depend on the size of the ad-hoc network - you still download the same number of blocks and relay the same number of transactions regardless of how many ad-hoc peers you have. Each node could connect to hundreds or possibly even thousands of other nodes on the ad-hoc network (which doesn't cost anything and the only limit is how much bandwidth the hardware can physically handle) while simultaneously attempting to connect to a handful of nodes on the Internet (if and when a Bitcoin-friendly Internet connection becomes available).

I'm not 100% certain it would work either (as you say, each node needs to be in close proximity to another node), but this is exactly the sort of application that ad-hoc networks are good at, so I think it has a real chance of success. Remember, the ad-hoc networking is in addition to the Internet connection, not instead of it (and in fact it's completely useless without it), so even if the ad-hoc networking is a complete failure, it still functions as a regular relay node.

Matt, I got further than you did when it came to the question of why they need to sell fast. Apparently they need to sell fast at any price in order to pay their employee's salaries. They got angry when I pointed out that the only way this makes sense is if the company is completely broke (they can't sell their mining rigs either, for reasons which they refused to explain, so we'll just have to draw our own conclusions on that point). They said I can't judge their business methods because "every one can not judge who is wrong or not,cuz everyone nog god". Then I told them I was an atheist and they apparently didn't believe me:
The conversation ended shortly thereafter. I guess you have to be a beliver to buy bitcoins from them.



Except klamm, obviously.

Damn, looks like your fingers are faster than mine. I was just about to say almost exactly that.

It is necessary and can tackle the problem of the Great Firewall if these devices form an ad-hoc network in addition to connecting to the Internet. Then as long as at least one device can connect to a free Internet, that node can relay everyone else's transactions. It's brilliant.

8 connections (3 bars) is normal if your firewall doesn't allow incoming Bitcoin connections, but you don't need incoming connections to download the blockchain or send or receive transactions, so this isn't the problem. The spinning icon indicates that Bitcoin is still downloading the blockchain (or trying to), it will change to a green tick when the blockchain is fully downloaded and up to date. What block is it up to now? As long as it's not stuck on one particular block then there should be no problem, you just need to give it more time.

MPEG4 version 2, which may or may not be in an FLV wrapper depending on which file you downloaded (YouTube doesn't like to make this simple).

The standard way is to send to multiple addresses in one large transaction instead of multiple tiny transactions (this is why sites like dailybitcoins.org have a payout delay - it allows them to accumulate payouts for multiple users and send them all in one transaction). You will still probably have to pay the anti-spam fee, but the fee per output will be much smaller on average (because you have more outputs per transaction).

You can, of course, modify the source code to send transactions with no fees at all, but these transactions are likely to take an extremely long time to get confirmed, and may never even get confirmed at all, causing your users to hate you (to put it mildly). This one falls squarely in the "don't do that" category, and I only mention it because you might be tempted to do it on your own, then get upset that nobody warned you it was a bad idea.

Unfortunately, the only way to distinguish small amounts from spam is to include a transaction fee. Otherwise anyone could send small amounts to themselves repeatedly to bloat the blockchain, and nobody wants that. As a result, virtually no miners will process such transactions unless an appropriate fee is included.

As I understand, the fee you set in bitcoin.conf is for the transaction size (per kB) fee only. The anti-spam fee for low-value or low-priority transactions cannot be changed (nor should it, since it is required by most if not all miners (I think)).