Sounds like the original Prosper.com before government regs and the reccession strangled it.  Look into the trials and tribulations of that site, and be fully aware of what kind of legal quagmire you're stepping into before you proceed.

I think, perhaps, you misunderstood my point.

Take responsibility for what?  Calling something what it is?  Regardless, a 1099 would still be required, even when a commodity is being used for said trade.  The IRS expects you to report any kind of transaction wherein the trade value, as measured in US currency on the open market, would exceed their arbitrary numbers.  It doesn't matter if you are actually trading in US currency, another currency, or a commodity.  Not to say that it isn't easier to successfully avoid filing a 1099 if no form of currency is (publicly) traded, but that doesn't apply to Bitcoin anyway.  All transactions are public, it's just difficult for anyone to ever be certain what any one person actually has traded.  If two tradesmen agreed to trade a new toilet on the electricians house for a new deck light at the plumbers house, they still haven't avoided a taxable event, even though they both might honestly believe that the government has no legitimate say in the matter.

I'm guessing that you want to run a client upon a machine that you don't consider secure, and don't want any of your private keys exposed if said machine were compromised with/without your knowledge.  If this is what you want, I don't think that it's possible.  I'm pretty sure that the private key is neccessary for signing the special transaction at the top of a new block that creates those 50 new bitcoins, forever exposing the keypair used on your non-secure machine to potential theft.  There are certainly ways to make that more difficult via software, such as an encrypted wallet, but there probably isn't any way to be absolute.

I won't hazard a guess, but just a couple of weeks ago, the 'Dash7 consortium' submitted a standard to ISO for interoperatibility between devices from different manufacturers, leapfrogging the 'ZigBee alliance' by a decade or so.  It certainly looks like they mean to monetize this in consumer devices, whereas the ZigBee alliance seemed more concerned with capturing a major vertical market such as 'smart meters' in the utilities industries.  Either protocal could have done well for both a distributed bitcoin network or a distributed p2p messaging network, but the wavelength chosen for Dash7 is notablely better for both these uses than ZigBee, which mostly competes with everything found in the 2.4 ghtz unlicensed spectrum.  The fact that, unlike 2.4 ghtz, 433 mhtz can penetrate water and concrete means that reception isn't significantly reduced in the pocket of a sitting owner and a pedestrian walking past the pub has a few seconds to connect and pass a block to/from a patron of said pub without a hickup.  Also, commuters heading the same direction on the freeway could pass blocks between cars or buses almost as easily as between riders on the same bus.  Drivers heading the other direction couldn't pass anything, but the 'bursty' nature of the protocal allows the guy driving slightly faster in the commuter lane to be in range of a driver in the slower lane for several seconds, and that is more than enough to pass a transaction or two.  Those same two drivers caught in a traffic jam could fully update a new client started in a third car before the mess is cleaned up.  The key is that Dash7 is designed for devices in motion relative to one another, and connects in a quick p2p fashion and transfers the appropriate data rapidly (relative to it's bandwith) so small packs of data have a high probablility of a complete transfer before the two devices leave range.  This is unlike how either ZigBee or WiFi work, as they both set up a 'session' before any data transfer occurs.  As quick as WiFi is in bulk transfers, you can witness the session overhead in the amount of time it takes for your laptop to connect to the Internet when you go to a new coffeshop.  It takes up to seven seconds for my laptop to connect to a wifi router that it's never seen before, and averages 3 seconds for a connection in places that I've been before.  ZigBee is better, but sessions take time to setup.  This would be acceptable in most public venues where patrons spend more than a few minutes sitting still, such as that pub, but excludes the passing pedestrian and the passing commuter in the next car on the freeway.  Also, most people do not have their wifi radio on their smartphone turned on while inside their pocket watching the game at the sports club, the thing just eats the batteries too fast.  Both Dash7 and ZigBee, on the other hand, use so little in the act of simply listening for other devices to talk to, to announce their presence that the cellphone's main system requires much more to simply be on.  So much so that most people probably wouldn't even notice the drain of a Dash7 radio running on their cellphone, and are therefore much more likely to leave it running; particularly if they understand that running it 24/7 is required for their p2p messaging client to be able to save them money anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7

A new player in the low power wireless communications realm is soon to hit the mainstream, so they say.  I've been waiting for years for a ZigBee enabled Android phone, but it's never come to pass.  I don't want some clunky add-on device, so I have been waiting.  Near-field magnetic communications aren't as sexy to me, but if a light/mobile client is developed that can use Dash7/WiFi/NFC to connect to any other such device for direct PeerDevice-to-PeerDevice transfers, automaticly or on command, then real world bitcoin transactions can become commonplace regardless of how readily available the Internet is for a particular buyer and seller at a particular time & place.  The client could automagicly attempt to update it's blockchain anytime an open WiFi hotspot is available (and the user is willing to drain the battery, wifi is a battery killer on a smartphone).  Yet, DAsh7 is intended to be slower, but with significantly less power; so a Dash7 radio inside a cellphone can reasonablely be left on under normal daily charging conditions.  (not everyone will do this, but many would)  So a client could passively query the Dash7 devices that it could reach every minute or so, and finding new ones, could attempt an update in either direction.  At a max transfer rate of 250 kbs, this wouldn't often be quick, but would keep even those smartphone users without any data service relatively up to date if they frequent public places.  Powerusers on the train would spend the better part of their commute updating the clients of the less well healed users, without ever knowing or caring that the trade has occured.  The same for trips to the local pub, the ball game, or any other place wherein the public mixes anonymously for more than a passing few seconds; airport & hotel lobbies, resturants, any kind of theater, etc.  Even during a widespread loss of connectivity event, such as a city power outage, Dash7 enabled mobile clients should be able to transact with just about anyone, and still mix the record of the transaction across the city population in such a manner that odds are high that double spending would be extremely difficult, and the odds are also high that the transaction will find it's way to the Internet and back to the main blockchain before the sender does.  Dash7 also has the potential to become a form of 'citizens band' version of instant messaging, with the advantage of intended encryption, and rather than pay way to much for text messaging services for cell phones that they rarely talk upon, teenagers might move en masse to Dash7 enabled devices.  Due to the encryption, the 'bursty' data design, and the automated nature of Dash7; the datagrams might not be distiguishable among a crowd even with nation-state resources.  Said another way, although an agent with the right equiptment and resources could record every Dash7 transmission in any given area, there might not be any way to definitively distingish the datagrams of a bitcoin client from a Dash7 PeerDevice-to-PeerDevice message forwarding client.

I can't find any holes in this plan, but I'm admittedly narrow focused when I'm new to a promising technology.  Please, if anyone can find errors or other issues with this, poke some holes in my ignorance.

I'm afraid so.  They used to be very popular, but were banned in 1984, and the date shouldn't be lost on anyone.  They were banned because they could be used to hide, or even launder, large volumes of cash from the IRS.  There are still a few small nations that permit their trade, but only a few, and none with a solid tradition of respecting the property rights of foreigners.

Worth trying 'undelete'.

What is the current threshold, and how does a client know to pay for this in advance?

I am aware that a closed application could do just about anything.  But there are sound reasons for preferring anonimity beyond paranoia.  This list is pretty anonymous anyway, since we really don't know who each other are, but you can still converse with the author.  If you don't trust his code, don't use it.  Collective bounties for opening code is a valid method.  I would wager that there are a number of ways that the total amount sent to the author's encoded address could be tallied.  Just tracking the transfers to that address, either donations or generation commissions, can be seen within the blockchain by anyone willing to write a program to do so.  If he agrees to a price, and refuses to comply, then you can be dick.

I propose that that number of months be 1440.

Wow, that's paranoid, and rude.  Dude, we are not talking about some shady third party, you can ask the programmer the how and why right here.  Nor do you have to trust him or use his code.  You could do it, and open source it if you like, if you have the skills.  For the time being, however, the code belongs to he who wrote it, and he can dictate the conditions.  The client is open, but for now, the gpu code is not.  If you want to help to make it so, someone could make an offer of a number; after which the code is open sourced by the author, whether that number comes from the gpu client or from regular donations.

How about 50K bitcoins from all sources or one year after the release date, whichever comes first?

Try selling something to someone in the community.  Or, if there is nothing that you can make particularly well, get a job and buy some bitcoins.  If it were easy to generate bitcoins, the system wouldn't work.

Based only on your 'texting' style of writing, I'm guessing that you're an adolecent, so a job might be hard to come by under normal circumstances.  If so, and the accumulation of bitcoins (to purchase stuff online or whatever) is your primary goal, try and find out if there are any computer and/or Internet related businesses near your home.  If you are so lucky, try offering them your services as a 'co-op' to the Internet companies or an "unpaid" tech apprentice to the computer companies, and ask for access to computer-clock time as a benefit.  ISP's are a very good choice, as they need cheap/talented young help on a lot of what they do to maintain the hardware uptime, and are likely to have vast amounts of off-hour CPU cycles.  Don't think that any bitcoins that you get out of the arrangement are the more valuable of the benefits, for you would almost certainly learn some technical skills that will prove more valuable than any paycheck.

Be upfront about your intentions of using the company's resources to generate bitcoins for yourself, never be cryptic about your goals with the companies, or you will never make it near the hardware.

Is there some way to tie the GPU portion of generation to a screensaver-like start/stop?

Thanks for the warning, I was considering buying one of his Virgin Mobile cards.

I've been looking into this CUDA versus FPGA thing more, and it seems to be an ongoing debate even within the high-performance computing industry.  But then I found this little tidbit....

http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/papers/FCUDA_extAbstract_ICS09_final3.pdf

These guys figured out a way to automagicly map a FPGA with GPU-like 'stream' processors suited for the type of excecutions that a particular CUDA program uses.  Which not only allows a program written in CUDA to be used on a GPU to run on a FPGA without modifications, but also saves space on the FGPA by not implimenting functions not required for the CUDA program in question.  Potentially permitting more "streams" than would otherwise be possible.

I wonder how long it will be until some major GPU manufactuer such as Nvidia puts a FPGA on a graphics card?

Currently, however, a CUDA capable graphics card in a modern gamer system would be the best cost/performance value; if only because one still needs a graphics card anyway.

Going out of your way to buy a dedicated graphics card, in addition to the one required for a modern system, such as a 'Nvidia Tesla' card, is probably not a cost/performance advantage over a FPGA card bought for the same purpose and encoded with CUDA capable stream processors.

YMMV

would the shipping also be expressed in bitcoins?

To a point, yes.  The trick is knowing where that point of dimishishing returns begins, and how it varies.


It already is.  I know from private conversations that a statisticly significant number of long-time forum members are Canadians.  At least one of whom has been selling off last winter's heat bill.  If there are more people who generate bitcoins in the northern hemisphere (which is almost certainly the case) one would expect to see a seasonal component to the difficulty.  At least once the difficultly reaches a mature balance in the future.  This is an effect that several of those distributed.net type people have noticed before.  Their overall computational power trends slightly up during the winter months in the northern hemisphere.

This is a calculation that depends highly on who you are and where you live.  I live in an area that recently had a 10%+ residental electric rate hike, to about 8 cents per KWH.  This is only slightly more expensive per btu than using natural gas with a 90% efficient gas heater versus a 100% efficent electric heater.  So the price difference for me to run any computer full tilt during the heating season, which is most certainly longer than Southern California, is about half a penny per kilowatt or less.  I don't even know anyone who bothers to shut down their computers from September to May to save money.  There's also someting to be said for the soothing white noise of a (good condition) cpu fan as the beast in the corner crunching numbers keeps your bedroom a couple degrees warmer so that you can turn the house thermostat down to 69 degrees at night.  I can't prove it, but I would bet that I actually save energy doing this, because otherwise my wife would insist on turning up the heat.

Certainly, if the receiver is willing to trust that his own client is up to date.

At least as well as the credit card companies can promise that the person who is holding the card didn't steal it.

Quicker, actually; since the Point-of-sale system within the store could check that address against it's own client in milliseconds.  Credit cards are usually assumed to be good for orders under $50 anyway.



Bluetooth in the register.