Some mining rig photos: I went through with my plans for a mineral oil cooled setup. :-)







What you can't see here: The USB and power cable is rising up to the top, as I placed a nail there above the whole setup to run the cables along that. This is an attempt to prevent oil from trickling through the cables. So far the oil stays where it should, hopefully that will last.

All in all it seems to work fairly well. I would like your input though on what is an acceptable temperature to run the FPGA at. First I tried running without a fan and the oil would slowly start heating up and after about 30 minutes the thermometer showed 46 deg C (you can see in the picture that the thermometer is measuring in the middle of the heat sink). At that point I stopped and added a fan. It's not really helping all that much, but it is keeping the setup at about 43 deg C right now.

On the other hand I have yet to see a single invalid share. The system has been mining for over a day at 200 MHz (per FPGA) with 0 invalids. So would that indicate that I can risk a slightly higher temperature? I would really like to run this completely passive.

I was also thinking that this might be a good excuse to play around with 3d printing a little bit and maybe build something that would increase the surface area for the oil to cool down and maybe even have some kind of circular setup driven by convection. Although if I do that, which seems like a fun project, it would probably be just me guessing how to do that rather than being based on actual physics. =)

We are still coordinating how to best do the transfer of ownership from a technical perspective. But for the moment these URLs and addresses indeed continue to be valid and should stay that way during and after the transfer.

Hey there!

Thanks everyone for all the interest in the site. It's great to see people valuing the service! I'm happy to announce that I found a great team of people to take over the site. The fine folks at bitcoin-central.net will be running Instawallet starting from next Monday. More details in the announcement thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67602.0 .

I'm happy to announce that the team at bitcoin-central.net (the first open source bitcoin forex) is going to take over instawallet.org as of Monday next week!

Davout and his colleagues are highly motivated to maintain the free service available at instawallet.org  since they believe it’s a great way to demonstrate the usability of the technology. I am happy that Instawallet has found a new home and that I can entrust it into the hands of such a capable team.

I understand that, following this acquisition, they will be announcing soon some new exciting bitcoin developments they have been working on for the past few months.

Meanwhile you can use the service, deposit or withdraw, as you see fit. Please note though, that the site's performance might be a little spotty with occasional downtime over the next couple of days as we are performing the transfer. After that it should perform much better again.

For those who may not be familiar yet with Instawallet (launched in April 2011), here is a reminder of the original announcement:

With the large of number of transactions at the moment, it might take several hours if not up to a day (for the transactions to confirm). Please just give it some time, it will reach you eventually.

To me it sounds like you are saying that you have used this wallet for exactly two transactions. One of 1 BTC and one of 3 BTC and that they somehow disappeared. Is this correct?

If so it doesn't really match with what the blockchain says ( http://blockexplorer.com/address/1CZvUSJ5P4b39eNs2zazitQENzfLm3c5CK ). This address has received 32 transactions and a total of more than 140 BTC.

If you are unaware of that, it looks to me like you have fallen victim to some kind of phishing. If you are aware of that, please give me a little more detail of why you make 32 transactions and then only mention 2 transactions to me. It doesn't exactly make it easier for me if I don't know the whole story.

The wallet with this address shows quite bit of activity, with a number of deposits and withdraws. There is one 4 BTC deposit which has been withdrawn to this address 1K75PFN4eQRCoZtuqj37WU2qvU3etjyD1S with this transaction: http://blockexplorer.com/tx/a2cbb3a0a05c3405233158037a6396a38f3428f4a7a12b67bd86ac1b54434fef

I can't see anything wrong with the wallet. Are you sure that you are the only who has access to it?

Definitely. At the very least people will always be able to get in touch with me via e-mail and by providing the Instawallet link and a return address I will sent them their funds. I will give it a few weeks to see for how many remaining accounts this will be necessary.

I have decided to shut down Instawallet for the time being. More details at www.instawallet.org . It was a great experience creating and running Instawallet, but at the moment I don't have the time and resources to continue to support the site. Thanks everyone for your support throughout the history of the project!

Full quote from the site:

Thanks for the kind words! It makes it much harder to announce the following, but I'm afraid I have to stick to it:

I have decided to shut down Instawallet for the time being. More details at www.instawallet.org . It was a great experience creating and running Instawallet, but at the moment I don't have the time and resources to continue to support the site. Thanks everyone for your support throughout the history of the project!

Hi there! Sorry to hear that you are experiencing problems with the site. If you tell me the Bitcoin address of your Instawallet and describe your problem a little bit more I will look into it. (Either post here, or send me a private message or an email - my email address is at the bottom of the Instawallet front page).

Instawallet is indeed under high load these days. It should not result in any lost coins though.

Thanks for pointing that out. I will reply to that person in that thread.

Instawallet is indeed under high load these days. It should not result in any lost coins though.

Hey! I got my X6500 a couple of days ago and am looking into setting everything up now. First off: Awesome product! So cool to see how you guys have put this together and continue to improve on it!

I have a few newbie questions, it would be great if someone could help me out:

1) I plan on using this power adapter: http://www.amazon.de/Schaltnetzteil-5-000-stabilisiert-60950-profitec%C2%AE/dp/B000NZO28I/ref=sr_1_2?s=ce-de&ie=UTF8&qid=1329685887&sr=1-2 (sorry, the link is in German). Would it be safe to run that one in the 12 V setting? Because somewhere it was mentioned that it was important to make sure, that it would definitely not output a voltage higher than 12 V. I don't have the equipment to check that. Is this a big risk or basically just applies if I get the cheapest of cheap power adapters?

2) Can I use one of the older (lower mhz) bitstreams for testing? Or are they somehow incompatible with the current mining software?

3) What is the highest mhz bitstream that can be safely used _without_ a fan? So just the board with the standard heat sinks in place.

4) If you run one of the higher-mhz bitstreams (180 / 200), would it be possible to cool them by simply submerging the board in a container with mineral oil? And would such a setup still require a pump or maybe a fan that cools the oil? Or do you think that it could work completely passive?

Thanks in advance!

Seems like a good suggestion.

I'm sure there are better/more efficient ways to achieve the green address goals if you manage to get some required changes into the Satoshi client. I didn't really look at this option too much, because my impression is that the whole green address thing is somewhat controversial and a number of people are not convinced that it is even needed, so it seemed to me that it would probably not be accepted by the dev team.

That's why I looked at solutions that would work with the current code base. Maybe some would consider this as "broken by design", I like to think of it as "pragmatic".

But I currently don't have the time anyway to continue working on this, as some "RL stuff" has gotten in the way. So sure, if some superior solution makes it into the code base then I'm all for it.

Awesome! :-)

When sending between Instawallets? No, it does not reveal the address in any way. It doesn't hit the blockchain at all, so it isn't visible from the outside. It's just changing the balance in the database for the affected Instawallets.

I sometimes see people doing stuff like this: "Outside -> Instawallet A -> Instawallet B -> Instawallet C -> Outside". I guess they want to launder these coins, or something. There is really not much point in moving funds around inside Instawallet like that. The coins that are finally send out from Instawallet C aren't more mixed or something than what you would have gotten from Instawallet A.

The reason is that receiving from green addresses in general is not implemented yet, so it's also not available for this specific address. I want to do this properly, be able to manage the risk and limit the damage if a green address that I accept is compromised for some reason. Unfortunately I currently don't have time to work on it much, as other obligations keep me busy.

What are you trying to do though? If you send to another Instawallet without forcing it through the green address the system will be able to do an internal transfer and it will clear instantly.

But: Wouldn't the hacker be in a position to simply display a different Bitcoin address? One which isn't at all connected to those two private keys, but instead a different one for which he has the private key. How would you notice if you don't have an independent and secure way of computing the Bitcoin address of the two private keys, which brings you back to the problem of operating on a compromised computer.

Cool project!


I have also started to think that this will be necessary for the foreseeable future: Convenient tools that allow to _transfer_ using Bitcoins, but to _store_ using fiat (which requires a third party). Bitcoin's volatility isn't going to decrease anytime soon. For that we need a lot of volume, but as soon as we have that, it will probably just ignite Bitcoin bubble #2. So I don't see it calming down anytime soon.

The whole "lower fees for customers" argument is pretty meaningless, if you keep things in Bitcoin. What does the 0.0005 BTC transaction fee help you, if a 10% price swing between buying Bitcoins and using them makes your cappuccino much more expensive?

So we need to engineer around it: Keep things in fiat and exchange for Bitcoin just in the moment you pay. The receiving side will probably do the same thing and convert back to fiat. Bitcoin is then just a neutral mechanism to exchange money digitally. I am a little worried about the overhead cost though. To make this feasible we need efficient exchanges that have both low fees and low spread.

I played around a little bit with Mt.Gox to see what the typical total cost would be if you pick a random time and want to buy Bitcoins at the current exchange rate. So I compared a "lossless" conversion at the current exchange rate to what you would actually get if you take Mt.Gox's fees and the spread into account. Mt.Gox's fee is 0.6% (if you don't have any discounts) and the spread usually adds another 0.25% to 1%. So let's go with 1.5%. Keep in mind though, that you probably have to do this on both sides of the transaction: Customer with USD -> Bitcoin -> Bitcoin transfer -> Bitcoin -> Merchant with USD. You are already at 3% there - not a lot of room to work with. Hopefully this can be improved by more competition between exchanges (lower fees) and more day traders (lower spread) over time.

I actually played around with jQuery Mobile a little bit. I might do a mobile version of the website using it at some point. Although it won't be possible to integrate the camera with a web solution, which is pretty unfortunate.

So another option would be PhoneGap + jQuery Mobile to roll native applications for multiple platforms. That is also something I'm considering, but I don't have specific plans at the moment. And then there is the question, whether an app like this can make it into the iPhone app store. Has anyone more details on this? Are there actually Bitcoin apps which have been rejected or is there just a general assumption that Bitcoin wallets might get rejected? If so, on what basis?

So yes, there is a chance I'll come up with a mobile solution. It's not at the top of my TODO list at the moment, though.