Mt. Gox isn't soliciting investment nor offering equity to non-accredited investors.

I received a PM from SierraDooDah in reply to my previous message.  I did reply back to the PM with a PM.

It might make sense to actually put that on the site, no?

For your cutoff time, is that the timestamp of the block that the transaction is included in?

It appears you are pricing the target at some level that varies to some degree from the previous close.   For instance, the FB is priced about 1.5% above the Friday close.  The cutoff time is after the market has already been open for a half hour.  A speculator would be self-imposing a handicap by wagering before the market opens.   But the target price is made well in advance.  As a result you are likely to have large amounts of bets on one side, causing an imbalance.  I presume you do not plan to always take the other side, so how to you balance the bet / hedge?

Specifying that you have a 0.5 BTC limit is ineffective.  WIth a digital currency that can be used anonymously, you have no idea how much wagering a single party has made through multiple 0.5 wagers.  As a result, you have no limit as to how much wagering occurs.

This really seems to be a system that can be gamed.  The only unknown is how much in losses the house will actually pay out.

Perhaps you might wish to refine your bucket shop concept before going live.

Are these your first withdrawals from Mt. Gox to this account? (i.e., were they faster previously?)

If you are already at a Walmart with cash (presumably to buy the gift card) you are just feet away from being able to send cash through BitInstant.

That's pretty good.  It protects the paper from the elements a bit, but more importantly it protects it from getting discarded.  At the same time, it isn't something you'ld be tempted to open up to use unless you really have a good reason.

Great work!

Here's a thread on the topic:

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=36316.0;all

How about getting some beta testers before the press release?

What I want to know, so the recipient gets a link that can be used to claim (withdraw) the bitcoins?
Is that secure?  E-mail is not secure.   Messages transfer in clear text.
As soon as it is realized that data redeemable for anonymous digital currency are floating through the ethers in your messages, thieves will be sniffing for your messages.

So, if this is what you are doing, probably this approach will require some further thought?

Also, in the developing country, oftentimes both the merchant and the customer only have feature phones.  The ability to send to another person's mobile (SMS text message on both ends) would be a useful feature.

[Edit: This service from WalletBit uses WAP, not SMS text messaging.]

Solve that and you'll have the first "M-Pesa, bitcoin edition".

Is it completely stuck on 182,553 or just going really slow?


You might try deleting the entire blockchain and have it start from the beginning again.  Now that you are on v0.6.2 it should be quick (few hours).

Yup.

I'm not sure the use case for this.  It doesn't solve the problem that Certified checks do:
 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_check

There is one approach that might work.  

I wonder if this would be useful.  Consider a third party that prints a bitcoin check.  So I order one and send it to you.  As the buyer, I know the Bitcoin address of the check.

You get this paper bitcoin check (which shows me as the "Pay to the order of" on it).  That's just cosmetic but will make it so that this paper ins't really traded person-to-person like a physical bitcoin might be.  So the check would have the private key under a hologram and that would let me verify that you had added funds to it but have not yet spent it.

There's nothing stopping you from spending it, but at least I can be pretty sure the funds weren't traded away, and thus that you still have them at any one point in time.

At the same time, you retain full control of the bitcoins at all times.   The only risk is if the check printer couldn't be trusted to not have kept a copy of the private key, but that's a different risk that can be marginalized.

There might be reason to be paranoid.

There haven't been reports of any physical thefts occurring yet, but you could be making yourself a target if you do this.

The operating system knows if the device is plugged in.  If your system is compromised, the attacker knows then that you leave your Yubikey plugged in.  Also knowable is your IP address (and probably your physical address using some account you access), and probably known is your balance at the exchange, and your username/password there as well.

This makes a physical burglary to become more likely as doing so would likely be successful in acquiring the bitcoins.

If the attacker / thief doesn't know where your Yubikey might be (e.g., do you carry it with you on your person, or is it kept locked up, etc.) then a risky burglary is less likely to occur.

I like its angle of approach better this time.  We can do sanity checks along the way ... like,   how many more people are using bitcoin today as a currency versus a month ago when the exchange was nearly $1 less?

And the answer appears to be, a few more.

So here's the chart that to me, matters more:

 - http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular

Does it end up being a CAPTCHA site?  I know after resetting the password it will not accept login with a new password until it brings you to the page with the CAPTCHA and login properly from there.

I wonder the reason behind the business decision to limit bets to 5 BTC, even those in the under 32,000, under 64,000 range.

That certainly limits the automated martingale bots.

On the surface I would presume this is to lower their risk to variance and let their wallet grow bigger so that they can offer larger maximums on the higher payoff bets, particularly those at the "less than 256" and lower range.

Other reasons might exist too though.  There's been nearly three-quarter million dollars worth of bitcoins wagered through SatoshiDICE since it began.  There aren't many online gambling services where you can go down to 7-11, give the cashier $500, and before you've even left the store pissed it away by making a losing bet online.  So maybe this low limit is a way to prevent the service from being used in this manner.  

Gaming machines were invented by engineers (well, first by a car mechanic, then innovation from engineers).  But these machines didn't immediately become wild successes until they were improved upon by psychologists.

Here's an article describing dopamine and gambling:
 - http://www.zimbio.com/Parkinson's+disease/articles/PvPlIdIItCp/How+come+Slot+machine+game+Gambling+Considered

5 BTC maximums are more likely to ensure its players keep coming back.  Thus SatoshiDICE is doing something it needs to do especially considering it only has a period of time before it is likely to face competitors taking the exact same approach.

Chart showing how many days per block.



Charted from this data:
 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc

Running from the current block and estimating the target of one block every 10 minutes, means there are a little over 183 days to go.  That puts the date for block 210,000 to early morning on December 9th.

The wager on Bets of Bitcoin agrees (nearly 3:1) that it will not be after December 9th:
 - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=312

That's an inaccurate description of what multisignature does, but great to see the purpose of multisignature be described to a wider audience from this article.

2012-06-08 Arstechnica.com - Bitcoin as the Net's Wild West
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86306.0

And I would bet it would be pretty risky for someone using SITME to obtain dollars and then turn around and sell them at a profit without being "authority" ("authorized" ?) as well.

There are a few threads regarding Bitcoin and Venezuela.
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=58699.0;all
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83790.0;all

With the electricity there being offered so inexpensively, mining could be done quite profitably.  Of course, the electric rate is low because it is subsidized.  Some GPU models are starting to sell pretty cheap because of poor performance on a Mhash/J basis but at the same time will still crank out a respectable number of hashes.  Now that there is an exchange in a neighboring country (Colombia, ... well in Brazil too but Colombia's is probably the easiest to do business with) even if there's no local buyers yet for bitcoins some of the mining proceeds could be converted and used to pay for the electric bills or perhaps fund further expansion.  With the upcoming drop in the block reward, there will likely be a glut of these GPUs on the market.

But a large mining operation is probably risky, as this thread post specifically addresses:

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80350.msg890901#msg890901


You NAILED it!  $BCOIN is the ticker symbol used on StockTwits for Bitcoin.  

Anyone selling any BACON?  I need BACON!   Bolivars for bacon ...  anyone?   Perfect!

If you can't find a trade here, you can always buy BTCs and use them to buy a NewEgg egift code:
 - http://btcbuy.info/

Well, I'ld bet Jered of Tradehill (Chile) might disagree about that being first.  And Mercado Bitcoin too:
 - http://www.mercadobitcoin.com.br

But from the sounds of it this Colombian exchange might come in handy for exchanging at the border too.


 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86276.msg948813#msg948813
 - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-07/chavez-losing-out-to-benjamin-as-venezuela-seek-dollar.html