This isn't true at all. I'm not sure what kind of libertarian/voluntaryist you are, but there are many voluntary ways to have IP. First of all, IP can simply be enforced through a DRO mechanism if the society recognizes it as protected property (which is just as arbitrary as real property if you think about it). Even if the society doesn't accept it, I could have it so that before I give my book to you, I have you agree to a contract that you will not copy it and sell it or give it away or distribute in any fashion, and again I can use the DRO if you violate this.

Your statement makes about as much sense as "An non-violent act (squatting on someone's homestead), needs a violent act (the enforcement of property rights) to be stopped." This is a pretty solved problem in the voluntaryist community.

(Crossposted from newbies, since I could only post there before)

Like many here, I'm trying to get a handle around the bitcoin economy, and where it is going. One of the important factors driving price is the difficulty level. This is an indication of how long it will take a computer or pool to find a block of bitcoins. The difficulty level is set every 2016 blocks to set the rate of finding this amount to be 2 weeks. Thus if there is more computing power coming online, the difficulty rate will increase.

This gives another comparison point: the cost of entry. Many people are seeing that bitcoin mining is profitable and are purchasing their own rigs. In fact, with a modest investment, someone can suddenly get a passive income of a few hundred dollars/month. However, it's actually not the case that you get dollars/month and instead you get btc/month.

Add into this that you can, through an exchange like Mt. Gox, instead purchase btc, there is an interesting equilibrium that can be found, showing the relationship between bitcoin trade price, MH/s price, and difficulty level.

I'm going to pick specific values, because it illustrates this much better. Let's assume that
Cost of a bitcoin = 17 USD
Cost of 1000 MH/s = 900 USD

Therefore 1000 MH/s is about 53 btc

At the current difficulty, 1000 MH/s gives about 1.3759203893 btc. So now what we try to figure out is at what difficulty change rate will this pay back 53btc? This isn't easy (I don't know the closed form for it), but it can be found by finding how much one would earn in this difficulty period, and then the next period, and so on and so forth. One key aspect is that you have to adjust the size of the period to the assumed difficulty change. Thus if you assume the difficulty change is 25%, then you have to adjust the period to be 11.2 days. When putting this into a spreadsheet and extending out several periods, it is easy to find the bounds of this.

In this case, we end up with an average change of around 36.2%. At that rate of change, purchasing the 1000 MH/s system will yield about 53 bitcoins over its lifetime.

Now this does simplify a lot out. For example, it doesn't take into consideration the cost of electricity, space, infrastructure, etc. For another, it assumes a perfectly barrier-less entry into bitmining which is close to true, but there are still capital requirements and risk management that can act as barriers.

However, 36.2% represents almost an upper bound when assessing the difficulty change (given the exchange rate stays the same).

So what can we draw from this?

If the rate of difficulty change goes above this amount and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to purchase systems and instead it makes more sense to buy bitcoins. This will drive up the price of bitcoins, lowering the btc per MH/s cost for a mining rig. It is possible the difficulty could fall if people come offline, but this is doubtful as it will still make sense to run an existing system.

If the rate of difficulty change goes below this point and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to buy bitcoins and instead it makes more sense to buy a system. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes up and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to mine than buy. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes down and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to buy than mine. This will slow the difficulty rate.

If the dollar cost of a mining rig goes down, it makes more sense to mine than buy. This could have the effect of lowering the btc exchange rate or increasing difficulty or both.


This is just the basic analysis for now. There are some more interesting things that come out of this equilibrium relationship that I'll post on if there's any interest.

What version of the client are you using. My understanding is that old clients do have miners in them, so that might be why you are seeing this. I am using 0.3.32-beta and there is no miner.


That's correct, but at the same time I encourage you to download and try it just as a proof of concept to understand how it works. I think doing these steps is worth it.

Personally, my feeling is that wherever there is a large amount of money to be had, there will be international hackers trying to get at it. Mt. Gox allegedly had a SQL injection attack which are typically pretty easy to test for as a hacker (and embarrassingly easy to guard against both at an input filter level and the base database level). Occam's razor eliminates the spooks this time.

Besides, if we are going to blame a government, why not the Chinese or North Koreans? They stand to lose more from a decentralized currency.

1) The official Windows client does not mine and is only for transactions. You need a separate mining application for that. In fact, you can pool mine without installing the Windows client, but you can't get your payments until you have an address.

2) I know you don't want a guess, but you really did not give enough information. My guess, though, is that you have a dual core and have -threads=1 or some some thing. You will want 2 threads to use 100% CPU.

3) You shouldn't CPU mining is good for a proof of concept, but the electricity costs of running your CPU at 100% are higher than your btc revenue. You should never do CPU mining. If you really insist, I've had good experience with rpcminer-cpu.exe in my own POC.

4) The security risks are minimal since it is outgoing connections, but there are still some. I don't really want to go into a long discussion on this, but you have more risk from your operating system than from this one utility. I'm not sure if you can solo mine offline, but you cannot pool mine offline and the only way you will see anything appreciable is if you pool mine on deepbit with PPS.

5) No

6) It is not worth it. It is too slow. If you do not believe me, run rpcminer on deepbit and see how much btc you get. A few days of this won't break you.

7) Don't know. This part is still a little abstract for me.

8 ) This is easy. Go to http://www.deepbit.net and sign up. Then you run your miner like this:
rpcminer-cpu.exe -url=http://deepbit.net:8332 -user=%USER% -password=%PW% -threads=2
If you don't know how to run command line stuff, you might want to use GUIMiner instead.

Once you have 1 bitcent (my guess is this will take two weeks or so), you can cash out to the address in your Windows client.

Is it possible that you have a keylogger on your home system? It is a little strange that they were able to go out to all of these systems, although if they got your email, that would explain it.

They really wouldn't know. To their individual perspective, you could be turning off your miner to play a video game or watch a movie. They really wouldn't have any visibility into it.

On top of that, I think they don't care if its an open system. If it's an invite pool, they might get pissed if they found out.

Like many here, I'm trying to get a handle around the bitcoin economy, and where it is going. One of the important factors driving price is the difficulty level. This is an indication of how long it will take a computer or pool to find a block of bitcoins. The difficulty level is set every 2016 blocks to set the rate of finding this amount to be 2 weeks. Thus if there is more computing power coming online, the difficulty rate will increase.

This gives another comparison point: the cost of entry. Many people are seeing that bitcoin mining is profitable and are purchasing their own rigs. In fact, with a modest investment, someone can suddenly get a passive income of a few hundred dollars/month. However, it's actually not the case that you get dollars/month and instead you get btc/month.

Add into this that you can, through an exchange like Mt. Gox, instead purchase btc, there is an interesting equilibrium that can be found, showing the relationship between bitcoin trade price, MH/s price, and difficulty level.

I'm going to pick specific values, because it illustrates this much better. Let's assume that
Cost of a bitcoin = 17 USD
Cost of 1000 MH/s = 900 USD

Therefore 1000 MH/s is about 53 btc

At the current difficulty, 1000 MH/s gives about 1.3759203893 btc. So now what we try to figure out is at what difficulty change rate will this pay back 53btc? This isn't easy (I don't know the closed form for it), but it can be found by finding how much one would earn in this difficulty period, and then the next period, and so on and so forth. One key aspect is that you have to adjust the size of the period to the assumed difficulty change. Thus if you assume the difficulty change is 25%, then you have to adjust the period to be 11.2 days. When putting this into a spreadsheet and extending out several periods, it is easy to find the bounds of this.

In this case, we end up with an average change of around 36.2%. At that rate of change, purchasing the 1000 MH/s system will yield about 53 bitcoins over its lifetime.

Now this does simplify a lot out. For example, it doesn't take into consideration the cost of electricity, space, infrastructure, etc. For another, it assumes a perfectly barrier-less entry into bitmining which is close to true, but there are still capital requirements and risk management that can act as barriers.

However, 36.2% represents almost an upper bound when assessing the difficulty change (given the exchange rate stays the same).

So what can we draw from this?

If the rate of difficulty change goes above this amount and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to purchase systems and instead it makes more sense to buy bitcoins. This will drive up the price of bitcoins, lowering the btc per MH/s cost for a mining rig. It is possible the difficulty could fall if people come offline, but this is doubtful as it will still make sense to run an existing system.

If the rate of difficulty change goes below this point and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to buy bitcoins and instead it makes more sense to buy a system. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes up and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to mine than buy. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes down and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to buy than mine. This will slow the difficulty rate.

If the dollar cost of a mining rig goes down, it makes more sense to mine than buy. This could have the effect of lowering the btc exchange rate or increasing difficulty or both.


This is just the basic analysis for now. There are some more interesting things that come out of this equilibrium relationship that I'll post on if there's any interest.

I had this trouble as well. I was using poclbm and apparently every time it would find a hash, it would flake out with a verification error. I changed to rpcminer-cpu and after I successfully found my first hash, it was listing properly.

You need to wait until you get a hash before it will reflect that you are working. On top of that, if your software isn't working right, it might continue to do this.