The human mind is wonderful at detecting patterns... even if there's nothing there but random noise.



That seems like a big stretch to me to discern purpose from a password file. How would he even know that the 666th person had just registered, unless Bruce Wagner and MagicalTux are the same person?  I could just as easily conclude that Bruce deliberately tried to be user 666, but was a second too late.


I'm no expert on the MtGox password file leak, but if I recall correctly what I had read back then, a password not starting with $1$ indicates that it wasn't changed by the user at some point after MtGox changed their hashing algorithm. Or more accurately, the $1$ passwords in that region of the file belong to people who did change their password at some point after the hashing algorithm changed. If I was going to draw any conclusions from that at all, I'd say that two actively-used accounts in which one has a $1$ password and the other doesn't, are less likely to belong to the same person, since a given person would probably revise the passwords of all of their actively-used accounts on a site if they were going to revise any of them.

That's where you're losing me. I'll say that those two accounts appear to have been registered consecutively, but I don't see anything else that suggests that they were registered by the same person, and/or from the same computer, or even on the same day. Without IP logs and timestamps of registrations, how do you know that those accounts weren't registered from different addresses a few hours apart? Can we also assume that Tom Williams registered his fribit.no account a moment later?

I don't understand what the connection between those accounts is supposed to be. Can you spell it out for me, using small, simple words?   

Requiring more RAM would have no negative impact on the practicality of FPGA or ASIC mining. It's not terribly difficult to hang RAM off of an FPGA or ASIC. For that matter, the chip's memory bus architecture could be optimized for whatever the mining algorithm required, in contrast with a PC that has a general-purpose memory bus architecture.

No matter what algorithm you devise, a special-purpose machine can be designed which does it better than a general-purpose machine. It may or may not be cost-effective to design and produce that machine, but I don't think it's generally possible to devise an algorithm that is efficient on some CPU family but could not be done better with specialized hardware.

Well, duh! Everybody knows that Bitcoin Cake is a deflationary dessert. 

The potential future issue of having a single tangible bitcoin to spend when its value has become high is not much different from the issue of wanting to buy a soda and just having a hundred dollar bill in your pocket. Assuming that the vendor will accept such a valuable item in the first place, they need to give you change. They might give you change in the form of tangible bitcents, bitdimes, etc. that would presumably be created if the value of a bitcoin goes through the roof and tangible coins become popular. Or they might transfer the change electronically. Or they might decline to accept it and ask you to go change it out for smaller denominations, just as a soda seller might decline to accept a hundred dollar bill.

Personally, I would have marked the private key as a QR code instead of or in addition to an alphanumeric form. In any case, I am interested in seeing how this new coin turns out.

This is full of win!

That was djinn you wine lee hill arias, MP.

Some people like porn, and some are offended by it. I don't see how that is a gender issue, since I know both men and women who fall into each category. Any free marketplace of sufficient size is likely to see trade in some commodity that somebody doesn't approve of, but tolerating things that you don't like is a necessary cost of living in a free society.

Similarly, what does gender have to do with whether a person knows how to secure their wallet?

I agree that asking random professionals to do one's homework is childish and rude, and I also agree that people who present themselves online as women are likely to get vigorously leg-humped by immature, undersexed, socially inept people. This is the least vigorously moderated forum that I regularly participate in, so I tend to notice more of that behavior here. I would not object to this forum's moderators taking a firmer stance on people being jerks to each other here.

This looks neat, and I plan to take a look at it later this evening.

I have a feature suggestion: Add a way to scan the private key from a QR code using the webcam that's built in to many Macs. One could always plug in a USB 2D barcode scanner or read the code with another app and then paste it into the wallet creator through the clipboard, but those approaches aren't too Grandma-friendly.

Maybe a Timecube analogy would be more politically correct. Nobody gets offended if we pick on Dr. Gene Ray, right?

I haven't used Lion yet, but I recall reading that one of the changes that it introduced is hiding the Library folder in your home directory by default. That's probably why you're not finding your wallet.dat. Try googling up instructions for un-hiding the Library folder, and then you'll probably be able to find your wallet file.

Bitrebel is just a government plant whose job is to spread crazy conspiracy theories about the CIA creating Bitcoin to draw attention away from the real creators of Bitcoin. 

The real truth: Bitcoin was created by FEMA to help fund the chemtrails program. 

Obviously, I'm posting this anonymously. Since the forum has that silly 5-post minimum and time limit to get out of the noob cage, I hacked this idiot NF6X's account to post here. His computer security is really lax. 

That ML605 hack sounds delightful! I love it!

Another group at my company has custom emulation platforms with more than 50 (!!) Virtex 5 parts each. I wish I could spend some quality with one of those and make it slave away in the Bitcoin mines, but sadly, that's not going to happen. I could get away with stuff like that when I was working for a little startup instead of a megacorp, but then we couldn't afford toys like that back then.

I found the Spartan 6 LX150 boards that I mentioned previously:

http://www.hdl.co.jp/en/index.php/xilinx-series1/spartan-6.html

They start at around $700 for LX150 boards (less for smaller parts). I don't know of any cheaper off-the-shelf Spartan 6 LX150-based boards right now, but I'd love to hear about any.

That's about what they cost in single quantity, and as FPGAs of that size go, that is cheap. That price is just for the chip; it would need to be soldered onto a suitable board to be usable. It's in a 484-pin ball grid array package with 1mm ball pitch, which is a bit too advanced for most hobbyists to solder down themselves. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf development boards with LX150 chips on them are pretty expensive, partly because they support features of the device which add substantial cost to the board (such as having lots of layers in order to route out all 484 pins) that we don't need for the mining application. I don't have the link handy or remember the manufacturer's name at the moment, but the cheapest off-the-shelf LX150-based board that I've seen recently costs around $600-$700 if I recall correctly.

There's another thread in which folks are working on a fairly low-cost LX150-based board that's optimized for mining:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22426.0

Exactly how would that work?

I'll call my cryptocurrency FailCoin. It'll be even better, because I'll make the mining reward 97 coins.

My comments:

1. Creating a non-descriptively-titled thread which simply cross-posts a link to your thread in another sub-forum is asinine. Stop it.

2. If I am reading SCE's rate schedule correctly, then your service appears to cost more than my expensive power rate here in Southern California. I'll pass on this opportunity.

Looks like I missed the dip to $8 while waiting for account verification.    I snooze, I lose.