This thread is full of so much failed mentality.

Almost every arguement you can make to a taxi driver about bitcoin, you can also make for literally every other digital payment method. Not only is it impractical to use bitcoins in a taxi (not microtransactions, not long distance), without using a payment processor to relieve him of the horrible risk of driving around all day with his bitcoins potentially fluctuating wildly in value by god only knows how much, he would be setting himself up to potentially lose money, and by using a payment processor of course he'd be paying a fee.

Where is the good arguement here? Stop worrying so much about who is accepting bitcoin and start worrying about who has them.

Everyone thinks it's a chicken/egg problem,  but it's clearly not. The reason why taxi drivers don't accept bitcoin is because no one uses bitcoin.

The blockchain-wallet scanning should be O(log(n)) in the number of addresses in your wallet.  If you have the RAM to try it, I'd be interested to see how long it takes to do the scan and collect the balances, but I would guess it's less than 5s.  As for the wallet format:  there are no arbitrary limits on how big the wallets can be.  I have had 500 addresses in one of my wallets before, without problem -- there are no artificial limits.  Perhaps you will be able to help me find the breaking point for wallet sizes.  

I'm having a problem with PyQt and py2exe in Windows.  I have a MSVC++ runtime error when trying to install the pywin32 module, which linked but not actually needed by my software.  So I can comment out the imports and the software runs fine, but py2exe complains that it needs it in order to make the executables.  it's going to take a little bit more work (and maybe switching systems), before I get an executable made.   I spontaneously got an exe built once (so I know it works), but for some reason I couldn't repeat it...

For now, I still have some dev left before officially making exe's... maybe I shouldn't have posted so soon  (remember, releasing next week)    But I'll put up build instructions tonight or tomorrow, and plan to have a Windows exe built by next week.  For now, I still have some pretty important bugs to quash before I would trust this software with anything but testnet coins...

wow people have actually found two of these. I take my had off. 

I think everyone answered the theoretical part of this question sufficiently   The heat generated by a computer is going to be identical to a coil-based electric heater.

However.. What has not been touched on is perceived warmth.  You may be a bachelor, so this might not matter much to you... But those with wives and girlfriends will know how this works!  Assuming you have an identical power draw on both your furnace and mining rigs, I would still say you are very likely going to have to augment with the heater.

A furnace designed to create heat and move air (in theory in an efficient manner) is likely going to "feel" a lot warmer than an mining rig of the same wattage.  This is simply due to air movement and distribution throughout the house.

One thing I did was stuff my mining rigs in the furnace room, and open the cold-air return duct so they blow warm air into it.  I then set the furnace to just run the fan 24x7, even if the burner (gas here) isn't running.  End result was an extremely hot laundry room, and a slightly reduced heating bill.  I run around 6kw worth of gear, but honestly have no clue how many BTU my furnace is rated at.  I did ponder stuffing mining rigs into the cold air ducting itself (right before the burner intake) - but then realized the fire risk probably wasn't worth it!  Note to anyone contemplating this (or running wire through a heating duct) - smoke is the most hazardous part of a household fire, and putting things that burn toxic fumes into your air vent system to ensure all the fumes get quickly distributed throughout the house is an extremely poor idea.

Now, had I designed the house ground-up to be "mining rig heated" then this would be a different story!  It's very easy to neglect air distribution and simply focus on the raw math though, and modern HVAC systems are in general very efficient at taking created heat and distributing it to where it's needed.  Mining rigs not so much.

-Phil

For all practical purposes, you are of course correct. However, I seem to recall from highschool some decades ago reading about irreversible deformation and iirc, not all energy was transformed in to heat. I would assume the electromigration taking place in side our chips would fall under that. I suppose its like 0.0000000001% (if that) but just curious if thats correct nonetheless?

Highest bid 7 (Sorry for misunderstanding mistype on my part scheduled to end Monday at 6pm. PST)

I'm one of those developers!  I'll be releasing a client in the near future, and I can pretty easily support Firstbits.  And with the full-RAM version of the client (that holds the entire blockchain in RAM), I can resolve a firstbits address in 0.5 seconds without contacting any server... pretty slick

I went to the firstbits site but didn't see the technical information I needed to be able to implement it.  Any links?

Btw, my client will have a completely decoupled blockchain interface and wallet.  In fact, you don't even need to wait for Armory to be released, because you can already use the full-set of blockchain tools that I have, written in C++.  https://github.com/etotheipi/BitcoinArmory/tree/master/cppForSwig  It's a ton of code, but it can all be boiled down to a small interface of a couple-dozen calls.   It can do a full blockchain scan from cold boot in about 20s (collect all tx for any address directly from disk).  PM me if you have any interest in leveraging it.

I suppose you are right. It is just one consideration people should have when dealing with an exchange.

I simply am listing the issues that have come up on the board, and note that if the errors outstrip their profits than their balance sheet will not line up, hence the possibility of a run.

@plogank was wondering how this could be spun negatively. If I saw my bank making mistakes that made it lose money, I would pull my money out, especially if it wasn't backed by something like FDIC protection.

I don't know if I would call this bad mouthing. I am just voicing a concern that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. Really I think that mtgox does quite well for itself with all of the volume, and most likely it's profits make for a balanced budget. But I also wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong in this assumption.

In other words: I reserve the right at some unknown (maybe non-existant) date to say "I told you so."

I have the benefit of never being able to be proved wrong

You see it as, hey great customer service. I see it as a system that is poorly automated, and fraught with human error. They make enough money that they don't sweat the small stuff, and that is cool and all, but I am always wondering if it will come to light that their errors mean that they do not actually have as much in the way of bitcoins or cash to meet the balances in their accounts.

Things I have seen
* The major hack which they "rolled back." How much they lost is unknown.
* Large pools of money they shift around between single addresses (suggesting to me a human activity rather than an automated bitcoin management system)
* The time they sent a large sum of bitcoins into oblivion (I forget how much)
* These errors where people are credited extra

Maybe they make enough profit per transactions that money slipping through the cracks is no big deal, but if they don't a run on the bank is a possibility.

What's really scary to me is how quickly people put a negative spin on things.  This is not the only negative response I've had when I shared this information.

Genjix's libbitcoin will contain firstbits. He went on a tangent removing the '1' prefix, which has subtle but incompatible implications. I believe he's returned to your implementation. FreeMoney and Puik had a short conversation about order within blocks. It should be possible to find real-world test cases.

An exchange can't get around it as far as I can see. This is why you should only keep coins in the exchange for a limited time while doing an exchange. Get them back to the safety of your wallet once you are done.

Your wallet should be the safe place for coins, and an ewallet provider should not be trusted with plain text private keys. Ever. It would be the same as everyone in a city giving a homeless man their cash to hold onto in a cardboard box that he occasionally might walk away from (but his cat will watch it for him). If it disappears, either he made off with it, his cat made off with it, or someone got around his perfect security (duct tape). No one will ever know what happened.