The idea of namecoin is intriguing.  It's just like bitcoin except you can also spend them to securely register a domain.  It's like times in the past when people used stamps as a defacto currency because they had an intrinsic value - the value of getting a letter from A to B.  Namecoin has an intrinsic value too - the value of an irrevocable domain.  

Now if nobody cares then namecoins are little more than an interesting curio.  However if they "take off" then who knows where they'll go?

Isn't the whole point of namecoin that your ownership/control of the domain is cryptographically secure - as secure as the blockchain.

Therefore nobody can "steal" or "confiscate" your domain?

Seconded.  Claim made, still waiting to actually log back in.

I was thinking about the issue of protecting bitcoin wallets recently.

My thought was it's not enough to "back up" our wallet.  You really need a "bank" (for want of a better word, it's one we all understand).

You want to be able to send your coins to a wallet that you KNOW can't be compromised.  You can send coins from your bank to your 'daily' wallet (much like you'd withdraw cash from an ATM). 

Depositing is easy.  It's the withdrawal that's hard, because any hole in the security would potentially allow someone to steal your coins.

You could create a client that can only send coins to a specified address or addresses.  But unless the wallet itself is secure you're still vulnerable.

I'm sure people that are smarter and have more experience than me in security have already mused this over, no doubt someone is cooking up a solution to this already.

Don't we have a board dedicated to Mining?

Firstly, LOL.


Secondly... Decoy hidden volume.

So two hidden volumes in your truecrypt container.  Or even "n" hidden volumes.  

Problem is, as you're tortured and reveal the passwords to the hidden volume and second hidden volume, you need to have more and more "sekrit" stuff in them to make it plausible when you say "that's the last one, I swear".

Oblig?

http://xkcd.com/538/

I store my truecrypt container that contains a hidden volume that contains a wallet backup on it... does that count?

I'm Spartacus!  I mean, "the bitcoin loser".

I work for a stockbroker, and I can tell you that at least on equities exchanges, trades can be and are cancelled.  It's a big deal, you can't just say "oops changed my mind", but it does happen.

Normally a cancellation requires the consent of both parties involved.  And generally the "beneficiary" of an erroneous trade will consent, but not always (search the news recently for the fat-finger error on a Japanese exchange that the broker was forced to deliver upon).

But this is MtGox, not the NYSE, and they make their own rules, so if they decide to rollback a trade then you can complain to the SEC... oh that's right you can't.

The only question I have is - "how?"  Unless MtGox were quick enough to disable withdrawals on accounts once the fit hit the shan, if any of the "suspect" btc have been withdrawn, then there is not much they can do I don't think.

I know I was a "beneficiary" of the crash... I had some bids in the market a good distance from market price, hoping to grab a few cheap btc if the price dipped this weekend like it did last, and all of my orders were executed.

Interesting times...

I've used it twice.  First time went off with no problems but was very slow.

Second time there was a hitch, after a week the money hadnt' appeared in my mtgox account.

Emailed mtgox.  Emailed Technocash.  Got it sorted the same day.  So I can't complain about their customer service.

I believe they've made a tweak to their systems to make it a little smoother.

In my mind, the profitability in mining namecoins comes from the future increases in price.

Assuming the namecoin:btc price follows the namecoin:btc difficulty, then with increased hashing power going into namecoin to chase the "easy money" (assumption) then the namecoin:btc ratio will get closer to 1:1 than it is now (about 15:1).

Which means that priced in btc, namecoins will get more expensive.  Making them worth diverting a few MHash.   Not to mention that namecoins actually "do something", giving them an extrinsic value that should (in theory) drive their usage and growth.

That's my theory, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

You are correct, namecoin addresses are supposed to start with N.

Are you running the latest version of namecoin?

You can use the namecoind.exe to generate a new address.  Type "namecoind.exe help" (make sure you have namecoind.exe already running in the background) to get a list of all the commands. 

This is awesome!

This is just like the youtube video I saw the other day.

Some dude (solo miner) had noticed that it takes him minimum of about 2 days to solve a block. 

So his "solution" to the "wasted" time was to switch to pooled mining for 2 days each time he solves a block, and then switch back to solo mining.

I set it up last night to have a play.

No dramas, followed the namecoin wiki to configure namecoind.exe.  Ran it from a command window.  Took a while to download the blockchain - you can see the progress by the growing blockchain file.

Then opened another command window and ran some namecoin queries eg. "namecoind.exe getinfo" (or something like that).

It showed the progress of the blockchain download.

Then I created a new "Other" miner in guiminer, pointed it at a namecoin pool and away it went.  Woke up this morning and had 2.something namecoins.  Next step - sell my namecoins for btc, I guess.

If you have the grunt you could probably mine solo, I've only got about 200MH/s.

I use a tunnel, works fine.

I like this idea, however maybe it's a case of walking before you run?  Surely the flexibility of PCIe makes it useful in may cases, and adapting that to an all-in-one arm/linux unit is a small (and logical) next step.

I know I have two computers with spare PCIe slots that I'd use to start with, test it out, make sure it all works well.  Unless the arm/linux all-in-one miner is cheaper (by some measure)...

I think that not everyone who would consider buying an ASIC miner will want to have a dedicated machine for it - just like today not everyone has a dedicated GPU mining rig.

I'm running an Athlon 64 3200+ with my 5770, and the only "problem" I had is that OpenCL isn't supported in Windows XP, so I had to upgrade to Win7. 

This, times 10.

Was a fat finger error by a mod - thread is now unlocked.

You are a conspiracy theorist nut.  My profile has an email, I just choose not to show it publicly.  I don't have a website of my own.  You want my TFN? (That's tax file number, closest Aussie equivalent to an SSN I believe).

Tool.