BCE has stated that he has a lot of Bitcoins so he has no plans to mess with the Bitcoin network.  But I think it is a good idea to introduce at least one new alt coin chain per week in order to keep him busy killing them off - sort of like the whack-a-mole game

BTW I am "doing my part" and turning on all of my idle miners and running them "just in case".  Don't know if my piddly amount will help but there you go.

O well I have decided to spread my hashing power between the big three plus my favorite small pool (BTC Mine).  I have been monitoring them and they are up and down and up and ...  But on the average I am hashing at one or more at all times.  Good enough for today.  They will eventually get tired of wasting their power on the DDoS and go away.

Well now that is interesting.  I have connected my miners to Slush, BTC Guild and Deepbit and they are all three down as of now, so I moved on to a smaller pool.  I am monitoring the "big three" and I cannot connect to any of them at this time!

Converting the number of hashes to petaflops is a controversial issue.  The cacluation done at bitcoin watch is considered "high" by most.  However using it for the sake of argument the Bitcoin network would be about 137 petaflops.  If we take even 1/4 of that as the real number the Bitcoin network is pretty darn safe from an outside attack.

Here are some numbers for other distributed networks (from wikipedia).  Since Bitcoin only does integer operations it is hard to compare apples to apples:

BOINC – 5.634 PFLOPS as of April 4, 2011.[4]
Folding@Home – 5 PFLOPS, as of March 17, 2009[5]
As of April 2010[update], MilkyWay@Home computes at over 1.6 PFLOPS, with a large amount of this work coming from GPUs.[6]
As of April 2010[update], SETI@Home computes data averages more than 730 TFLOPS.[7]
As of April 2010[update], Einstein@Home is crunching more than 210 TFLOPS.[8]
As of June 2011[update], GIMPS is sustaining 61 TFLOPS.[9]

Also there is a thread here somewhere discussing all this and attempting to claim Bitcoin is the largest for the world record book.

I am connected to deepbit and the miners are all still running.  However the web site does appear to be down at this time.  There does seem to be an intermittent communication problem between my miners and deepbit.  They may be under attack (again).

If the two largest pools were really down the overall hash rate would have dropped a lot.  So I expect the pools are running but they are unable to report back their results (back to Bitcoin Watch) due to some other web site issue/attack.  Since Bitcoin Watch cant associate the hashing with any pool it lumps the remainder of the current hash rate into "other".

So I belive the "other" just represents the normal hashing activity of the pools.

Is he really gone?  Is it really over?  

I have verified that Mt. Gox works with and automatically detects both the mini private key format and the hex format.  The last time I checked it still did not work with the "standard" WIF but I will check it again in a few days.  I filed a bug report with Mt. Gox but they have not even assigned it to anyone yet, let alone gotten back to me.

The pool is now 8.00000462 because there were two "wrong" ammounts:

0.0000042 from 1KPR5YvwrBqSvfjzUvFDi5EPhPC6CMPKvG 

0.00000042 from 1Mi2bgbRs1xEWWA3gXgoj3CR9SCDYc3amq 

Since they did not pay the full 0.25 BTC I assume their entries are invalid.  If either entry wins you will have a "riot" on your hands

Why anyone would do this is one question.  Making sure these entries do not count is another.

Fantastic!  I will check it out later today.

Sorry Tycho.  OP fixed.

Wasn't sure.  Did not have the expertise to tell the difference - that is why I posted here.  If it is just a simple redirect issue then they can/should fix it.  Better safe than sorry.

The Mt. Gox site now autodetects the private key format.  It is working for hex keys and mini private keys but there currently is a bug in the WIF conversion.  See:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46908.msg561163#msg561163
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46908.msg561803#msg561803

Not until AFTER you enter a password in at deepbit.com!  I can't tell if it is a phishing site or just bad programming on the part of the deepbit.net web site.

While on this subject, my parents wanted to invest a small amount in Bitcoins as a long term "just in case" they ever become worth a lot someday play.  I went to another one of my favorite sites, bitaddress.org, generated a paper wallet for them, bought the number of Bitcoins they wanted using my Mt. Gox account and then sent the Bitcoins to the public address of their paper wallet. 

I then handed them the paper wallet in an envelope and they plan to put the paper wallet in their safe.  If they want to buy more in the future they can just call me and I can add more to their account.

My parents are not that computer literate and don't know the first thing about public/private keys but they do understand the concept of a "numbered account" and they are happy to have something physical to put in their safe.

BTW I also gave them a few physical Bitcoins to play with and show their friends!

I have purchased many physical Bitcoins and use them for gifts, to pay for lunch with friends and to just get people interested in them.  It is now easier than ever to "cash in" the coins if you want to.  You just peel off the sticker and import the mini private keys directly into a StrongCoin account or directly into your Mt. Gox account!  I just tested the new private key import function in my Mt. Gox account with very positive results.  See my post here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46908.msg561163#msg561163
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46908.msg561803#msg561803

You can buy the physical Bitcoins here: https://www.casascius.com

See this thread for more technical info:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41892.0

If you have any questions about the physical Bitcoins let me know.  I am even more fired up about them than the StrongCoin site.

Have them or help them open up a StrongCoin account.  This is an online wallet.  There is no installation.  I use it and it works.  Once they set up an account they can generate a key pair and give you the public key.  Then you can send Bitcoins to them any time you want and they can spend them at any time they want.

Check it out at strongcoin.com.

If you have any quesitons let me know here or PM me.

Please take a look at deepbit.com.  It looks like a phishing web site but I am not sure.

If it is a phishing web site then how can these guys be taken out? (turns out is probably is not a phishing web site)

If it is not a phishing web site then who would we need to notify in order to get the redirect fixed?  (answer is Tycho)

Therefore you can unplug your computer from the Internet while you generate you private keys if you want to.  They private keys are then encrypted by a password.  One nice feature is the system helps guide you to a stronger password as you enter your password.

Also on the one hand:  Our security was so piss poor that we go hacked and lost a bunch of your money - sorry guys.  We do not have the resources to fix the holes in our security so we are leaving town.

On the other hand:  Give us a bunch of personal information - we promise that even though we admit we have done nothing to fix the holes in our security your information is safe with us, no, really, we are serious.

"Auto sweep" also works.  I added 2 more Bitcoins to one of the addresses I imported via private key.  The amount was then automatically swept from the imported private key account and transferred to yet another new account inside Mt. Gox.

See http://blockexplorer.com/address/13MsUf2Nnowoj8gdZBfBSyBJzVcC1R7hZA

After sending 4 opened coins (2 using mini key and 2 using hex key) and then sending two more Bitcoins by sending them to one of the opened coin accounts using the "auto sweep".  My Mt. Gox account shows:


Very nice new feature!