Nicely done!

It actually has some commonality with my own upcoming open source project - so will be forcing me to get cracking even faster on it.  


I believe that such approaches will give the end users a lot more say in what gets done. Provided that the project itself is still "managed" I don't see anything wrong in this but I think you will be up against a bit of "culture shock" from the developers (as an example I have already tried offering 20 BTC to try and get a small feature added to Bitcoin itself with so far not even a single response).


Cheers,

Ian.

CNY is not actually pegged directly to the USD - HKD is which is why they are now worth a fair bit *less* than CNY.

That date just happens to be my birthday.

I think this idea (or something similar) is indeed something that would benefit Bitcoin.

You can apparently generate a private key that has to be combined with another one in order to work (I think this might be something to do with point multiplication), however, I don't know if that would work in the way you are wanting to (as I think the other involved party needs to have sent you a public key before you then generate the private key).

You can find this method in another thread (from memory etotheipi and/or JoelKatz discussed this) which at least is suitable for one person to generate a vanity address for another safely.

You might be interested to take a quick look at this (59 secs): www.ciyam.com/videos/User.html

The approach I am taking will let you create a Blog or Forum in under 5 minutes without having to write a single line of code.

In all likelihood we are going to see the emergence of at least one or two other Bitcoin currencies (such as LTC) that will be "silver" compared to "gold" (and these may well have closer to infinite supply).

So such scaling is not really going to matter that much as I'm pretty sure a very large proportion of the world's population do not have any significant amounts of gold also (i.e. think of Bitcoin as being digital gold).

P.S. Welcome aboard!

Only problem that I can see is it mentioning that Apple changed the character code to display as a Euro sign instead (is that still the case?).

Other than that it would get my vote.

Certainly this is of concern.

If there aren't already vanity addresses in real use that only differ in case then I would think the result should be a case insensitive match (with the oldest address being retrieved of course), however, if there are such addresses already being used then one would probably require that the matching itself be case sensitive (so 1bbb would never return 1BBB).

Quite likely this is due to a different character collating method being used by the DBs in question (even if they are using the same RDBMS you can still have different collation methods which determine the ordering).

If you buy and sell anything with enough volume you are of course going to "manipulate" the market. There is nothing illegal about that.

It can be a bit frustrating dealing with cmd.exe and escaping - for "" characters you basically need to use a backslash (gets more complicated if going through a batch file) and for other characters (such as >, <, | or ^) you need to escape with a ^ character.

Example:


Will match a line such as follows:

... </p>", ...


Cheers,

Ian.

Just a little more to add about how the simplicity of buying and selling at the right time can make money.

1) In the stock market crash of 1989 a good friend of mine managed to double his entire investment virtually overnight (we were teenagers then so I didn't have any money involved).

2) Before the dot.com crash my friend and I managed to double our money buying and later selling shares in Sun Microsystems (turn around approx. 6 months).

3) During the years of the post 2000 property boom in Australia my friend and I easily doubled our money on most investments (and in fact quadrupled our money on plain land investments in a matter a months before the greatest part of the boom cycle ended).

4) During the time of the big influenza scare (2005) I was able to make around 300% in 3 months by buying and selling shares in a company called Biota.

5) The same friend predicted (almost to the month) when the GFC would happen and had moved most of his investments into gold and gold (and other mining) stocks prior to the crash (which basically doubled in value within 2 years).

I don't claim to be any financial guru but without a doubt "timing is everything".

Agreed 100% (and note that I am not currently involved with this or any other schemes on this forum).

I think if I get some more free time I will have a play at what I'm suggesting (with much smaller amounts) to see how I can go (have already actually been doing something along the same lines but with vastly smaller sums successfully for a while now).

Of course in all likelihood the system being used would be more complicated than what I outlined (just saying even such a simple idea can at least in favorable circumstances meet the criteria of what is going on). I would assume such a more complex system would also have standing "positions" for both buying and selling to reduce the overall risk (i.e. hedging).

You may be quite correct (I admit I have not done the math here) - this is simply my guess at how this could be working without involving any sort of illegal activity (or being any sort of ponzi scheme).

Sure - would have to agree with that (has zero risk been stated in regards to this scheme/system?).


Stability is of course *not* what you make the profit on - but compared to forex I think the fluctuations in the price of BTC are quite large.

Also to a fair extent any sort of investment that is not just putting money in the bank to get a fixed return is gambling isn't it?

My understanding (which may be wrong as I haven't studied this that closely) was that profits were paid out per week rather than per day - so in that case one would not need to do that everyday.

I think that could actually be a very real posiblity (and is a rather simpler and less sinister explanation than most others). Anyone who has done options trading knows that volatility == great profits (and of course great risk).

I have watched the price move up and down > 10% in a single day on Mt. Gox - so if one was was careful (and it was mentioned about how much effort needed to be put in) to be buying and selling even only once per week it is still quite possible that a 10% return could in fact be made just doing this.

It would also make sense why the returns would only be in BTC and the preference would be for people to keep their main investment locked in as the basic idea would be to sell BTC at a high point (in USD most likely) then buy it back again at low point each day (or week I guess) removing the gains in BTC as they are made. It would also explain the desire to get more on board at a controlled rate as this could not scale up too dramatically without undoing itself (due to being the main buyer/seller in the market).

Although Bitcoinica has been credited much for the recent stability it could make just as much sense that a scheme doing exactly this would be keeping the price fairly stable (but not quite as stable as interestingly enough has actually occurred since Bitcoinica has ceased operations).

I had actually thought of doing the exact same thing but have so far been too lazy (and do think there would be a fairly big risk in leaving a large amount of funds on Mt. Gox although perhaps this could be minimised by keeping BTC offline in between the sell and buy cycle).

You can do all the bitcoin related work using "bitcoind" which can be called from any language that allows "system" type calls (so which language you want to use is really not so relevant unless you are wanting to use a library interface).

Regarding using bitcoind you might be interested to have a look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list.

For handling "users" with the one wallet you can use "accounts" although bear in mind if you are going to actually run a "hot wallet" you will likely need to learn more about server security than about programming itself (you are probably well aware of this point with all the events that have happened in recent months).

Also if you are interested in the possibility of building Bitcoin web apps in C++ then you might be interested in my up and coming open source project (PM me for details).


Cheers,

Ian.

I am happy to now share that I purchased ciyam.org thanks to NameTerrific and Zhou's help.

Great - will be trying out the patched software shortly - not sure if you or others had noticed my bounty offer but if possible I'd really like to also be able to explicitly specify a "change" address (RPC only would be no problem).

The reason for wanting this additional amount of "coin control" is for non-profit orgs to be able to use the blockchain as a true "public ledger" that can be searched via blockchain.info or blockexplorer.com from a single address.