The site is down for me right now, getting a server timeout.

I don't think being in the US is a deal breaker if you are trying to create a completely legal exchange. The first step would be talking to a lawyer to find out what you need to make it legal. Keep in mind that this might entail only serving US customers and getting all their info, address, SSN, and the like. It will probably also require a veritable slew of permits and proof that you are complying to various regulations. But that is for the lawyer to sort out.

And whether or not it is a currency, you will be dealing a lot with currency and banks. Given that, you will still need to jump through all the currency related hoops.

It might, I don't expect the rally until sunday/monday.

I don't want to bulltroll, but I feel like the post-weekend raise should be pretty good too. The "crash" is in the past and we survived, and news has been pretty hot lately. I've also got funds that should clear very soon, hopefully I get to buy in before the prices move beyond what I'm willing to pay.

Really doesn't seem like that big a site. But it is 1,085 in the US according to alexa. Have they published rational?

And seriously, you're calling website dealing in conspiracy theories a CIA honeypot? How meta-crazy can you get?

Haven't cash anything out. Put a lot in. I'm in it for the long haul. I figure if there is even a tiny chance that bitcoins go big, I want every last one I can muster. It might die, but if it doesn't it might go really big, $10,000/BTC big.

But I have used bitcoins, see my sig.

We've had a lot of trolls. Your title sounds trollish and is old news. Sorry if we came out of the gates swinging.

Oh I understand now. They are just trying to destroy the pool, not make money. Well, honestly, since most pools pay proportionally the pool would just have a very unusually low rate of block finds. I guess if it lasted long enough some people would leave the pool. If they were doing pay-per-share the brutally bad odds may drive them out of business. I suppose it would be a sort of evil attack.

I think you get the evil mastermind award. We'll name it the MacRohard attack.

The payout address is baked into the work. If the evil pool changed it, they couldn't submit the hashed to the good pool. If they don't change it, then submitting that hash to the network would pay the original address, which belongs to the good pool. It doesn't work.

Fair enough, sorry I misunderstood.

Yes, the address that the block reward will be paid to is already baked into the work that the pool sends to you. There is no way of changing it without changing the hash, which would ruin the "good" hash. The system is clean. No way to mess with it, no trust required. Besides hoping that the pool pays you your fair share that is.

You could hold it back, but why?

Yes you are right, it is unlikely that they will maintain such luck. But it is just as unlikely that they will go on a dry spell, as originally suggested. Most likely, they will continue creating block at about the rate they should given their hashing power.

Someone said "They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...". They are not likely that just because they've had some good fortune.

Someone also said "Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time." That isn't how probability works. One has no reason to follow the other.

No they check your share by doing that one hash, on the server. Just a single one. Even a crap card can do 5,000,000 hashes a second, so they have no problem checking all the hashes themselves. Basically, we search for sort of rare hashes, and submit them, they check them, proving that we are doing work (because they are indeed sort of rare) and sometimes it'll be a really rare hash that solver a block. Then everyone gets paid by how many sort of rare attempts they sent.

Because we only submit rare ones, they don't have to do very much work at all, we already weed out the vast majority, and they satisfy themselves that we really did work because otherwise we wouldn't have rare hashes to show them.

All well known stuff. All good for bitcoin. And it will always be anonymous enough if that is what you need. Just like cash. Cash is plenty autonomous until you stick it in a bank. Same with bitcoins. If you need to convert it to USD, you aren't anonymous anymore. Really it is a failing of other currencies, not bitcoin.

Well, glad to see I'm not the only one who understands this. I thought this was common knowledge. Kids stuff. I found it odd that people were arguing with me. Welcome to the internet.

You submit all of your share back. The shares are blocks that work at the "minimum difficulty", but not necessarily the "current difficulty". You get paid based on how many valid shares you produce compared to others. The shares can and are checked, and they prove you've been doing work. They don't just trust you on it.

The minimum difficulty requires several million hashes. The way we usually denote the current difficulty is by dividing it by the minimum difficulty to indicate how many shares you'd need to find, on average, as opposed to how many hashes.

Yes. In all honesty the 50% stuff is overblown. Especially when you consider that no big mining pool would do anything to damage the value of bitcoins. Any manipulation would be easily viewable, it couldn't go undetected. If an outside group wanted to destroy the system they could muddle the waters and hurt things a lot with > 50%, but there is no real posibilty of "forging" new coins or "stealing" coins you own (at least not the ones with a significant number of confirmations). Even if they only have a few confirmations, they can only be returned to the person who owned them before you, they cannot be sent anywhere. Nothing to help people make a profit (unless they are shorting bitcoins.)

If a large pool started trying to "rebuild" the block chain backward, it would get noticed sooner or later, people would leave the pool, and some things would have to be sorted out. But your coins would be mostly safe. Any coins you received during or slightly before the attack may disappear. The attack could happen almost as easily with 51% as with 49%, it all depends on luck, and for it to really work you would need 60-70%, maybe more.

Worrying about the attack is just for the purist who want to ensure nothing can go wrong, even if minor. Securing our wallets is much more important.

If an outside attacker had more power than the entire network for long enough to rebuild everything, and continued attacking any attempts to reboot, then it could be the end of bitcoin. That is why we reward our miners, they secure our network from such an attack. And it is quite secure right now. It would take a _massive_ effort to overthrow the network. And it gets 30% harder each week.

Yes, but it is just like rolling a die. The probability will reach a natural distribution, but just because you got three 6's in a row doesn't mean that you are more likely to go on a stretch without 6's in the future.

You aren't mistaken. The original poster was probably just talking in karmic terms.

I thought mining pool could simply check the nonce I send with their block hash to ensure it is a valid share (at the minimum difficulty), proving that I'm doing work. I don't think they need such tricks.