Der Bear hat's schwear 

Onkel Paul

Ich hoffe der Laden hat Bitcoin akzeptiert? 
Aber im Ernst, lokale Läden mit gutem Sortiment und Beratung sollte man meiner Meinung nach wenn möglich bevorzugen - ohne Umsatz in Geschäften vor Ort geht die Umgebung ziemlich den Bach runter.

Onkel Paul

Du meinstest vermutlich, dass die Preise steigen. Alles andere wäre jetzt mathematisch sinnlos und der gängigen Bedeutung des Wortes entgegengesetzt.


Das würde ich so unterschreiben. Skeptisch bin ich bei der ökonomischen Lehrmeinung, dass Deflation mehr oder weniger zwingend die Wirtschaft zusammenbrechen lässt. Wahrscheinlich wird kein überflüssiges Wachstum mehr produziert - was ich angesichts der endlichen Ressourcen nun gar nicht mal so schlecht fände.
Auch bei Deflation werden Leute Geld für ihre Bedürfnisse ausgeben - das oft zitierte Beispiel sind Computer und Unterhaltungselektronik, wobei es da nur so halb stimmt (die Geräte werden ja nicht einfach billiger, sondern eher bei ziemlich gleichen Preisen leistungsfähiger). Aber auch wenn ich morgen mein Brot 5% billiger bekomme, werde ich doch nicht heute darauf verzichten, Brot zu kaufen und zu essen. Wenn ich morgen verhungert bin, habe ich nicht mehr viel davon, dass meine Bitcoins dann mehr wert sind...

Onkel Paul

What have you tried to get bitcoins sent to you? They don't appear out of thin air. Someone needs to send them to your wallet address.

Onkel Paul

No, for XRP you don't need a trust line - they are the built-in currency, and you can send and receive them within Ripple to any account.
It's strange that weexchange didn't just send the XRP back when they got them - this would be appropriate behavior for a gateway when you send them something they cannot handle.

Onkel Paul

Not directly, but going through a gateway.
All external currencies in Ripple (fiat or crypto) are actually stored at gateways, the ripple ledger only stores who controls which amounts of these.
For example, to send BTC to Ripple via Bitstamp, you need a Bitstamp account where you send the BTC first. After that, you can withdraw the BTC to the Ripple, and use the BTC.Bitstamp within Ripple to trade against other currencies.
Alternatively, you can send BTC using dividendrippler.com which is a gateway that only holds crypto currencies.
Or you can deposit cash using zipzap and exchange that into BTC or whatever currency you want.

To withdraw money from Ripple, you need to go the reverse way. For BTC, there's a payment bridge operated by bitstamp which you can use to send BTC to any BTC wallet address.

Onkel Paul

Using a separate address for each payment is actually a good practice, as it enables you to know exactly which customer has paid (if you provide your service after payment, it's more or less a necessity to do it that way).

Unless you expect incredible amounts of transactions, bitcoind should do just fine. One thing that you should do is to regulary send the coins to a cold wallet address which is not controlled from that internet-connected server. That way, your loss would be minimized.
If you're really paranoid, you might set up the wallet on a separate machine so that it can only communicate with the main server through a narrowly defined channel. In such a setup, the wallet machine would only communicate freshly generated addresses to the web server, and would inform the web server about incoming payments to such addresses.

Onkel Paul

The blockchain is being updated all the time. You simply can't make it read only.

Onkel Paul

Yup that's an old site that was made by someone who had a competing business model, so he didn't like ripple at all.
Some information on that site is blatantly wrong (or incomplete to the point of being misleading), some is outdated.
The author of that site (TradeFortress) had another site where quite a number of people lost their bitcoins to a hack. He has since then basically disappeared from the forum. I won't make any accusations, but you might come to your own conclusions...

Onkel Paul

Basically, yes, this is a bitcoin forum.

However, there is an altcoin subforum where ripple discussion is ok, although there are a number of forum posters who violently disagree that anything related to ripple is ok :-)

Onkel Paul

Don't we have enough Piece of Shit coins already?

SCNR

Onkel Paul

Eher heute.
Die Frage ist nur: Vor oder nach dem Abendessen?

Onkel Paul

XPM is special since its computation is at least somewhat useful (although the debate is open whether cunningham chains as they are produced by XPM mining are actually useful now, having more data available in the mathematical field of primes where there are still a number of open questions might be helpful one day) compared to the double-sha or scrypt or more convoluted algorithms used in other coins.
The other interesting thing is that the total amount created is not fixed, but the amount created per block goes down as more mining power is thrown at it (this is not new but still is something where XPM is different from BTC et al). I don't know whether this model is better than bitcoin's fixed upper limit, but it's at least interesting. However I feel that since XPM does not yet have a strong market it's probably not possible to see compare these models.

Onkel Paul

The image that you're using to adapt the BTC price to the exchange rate will not work with this forum, as the forum uses a caching image proxy, so once you've saved your post the image is fixed.
Better to state an USD value and an exchange upon which you base your BTC price.

Onkel Paul

Looks like someone is still active - I just got mails on some bets that I won :-)

Onkel Paul

Some things to think of:
1 - it must be hard to generate one block, but cheap to verify. I doubt that the simulations in this context can be easily verified.
2 - difficulty must be adjustable to keep block rate mostly constant. Of course, you could adjust the simulated time for each unit, don't know how well that would work.
3 - each block must depend on the previous block, i.e. it must not be possible to perform all or part of the hard work before the previous block is known.

I have a gut feeling that most grid computing efforts don't fit these constraints well.

Onkel Paul

Whom did you trust for BEK inside Ripple? They should be the ones who send the real coins to you when you want to withdraw.
If they aren't willing to do this, you trusted the wrong people.

Onkel Paul

edited: I just saw the beginning of this thread: http://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=389663.0
Looks like you need to PM durnkenWiz to withdraw your BEK. Good luck - I don't know whether I would trust a gateway operating like that...

I had one or two bets that were due 1st of December, and which were resolved a little later (a week or so).
Overall it seems like the site operators don't put much effort into it anymore, which is pretty sad.
Hopefully they will increase their activity - there's a lot of money to be made :-)

Onkel Paul

Instead of clearly explaining
- what you did,
- what you expected would happen,
- what happened instead,
you claim that Virwox stole it (what? EUR or BTC?).

It seems your main problem is that you are trying to do something and it does not work as you thought it would, probably because you misunderstood something.
0.002 bitcoins will most likely not fix this.

Onkel Paul

Highly suspicious.

Never execute binaries from dubious sources, especially when bitcoins or other valuable stuff is concerned!
I haven't analyzed the files yet, as I'm not a windows security expert. It would be very helpful if someone else could run them in a sandbox and tell us what they actually do.

Onkel Paul