If you are going to posit that theory you might as well also float somewhat the opposite:

Upon seeing that Luigi, Kneecapper, Throatcut, Sniper, and DaBossMan had all lost huge numbers of bitcoins by using his shopping interface on their MurderIncorporated.i2p site he seriously considered trying to vanish, until after days of valium and perusing the forum he woke up to the idea that maybe somehow the geek squad maybe even with or without the aid of Agent Andersen of the - oops I mean *not* of the - CIA might somehow be able to keep DaBossMan and his goons at bay...

-MarkM- (What, that could be fiction? Gosh, really? However do you come up with that idea?)

I started mining because winters here are cold and I hoped to be able to live in my country house for the winter, which would involve electrically heating it at least until I can afford to re-do the whole wood-heat situation out there.

So although electricity isn't super cheap at least until I can use enough of it to get industrial rates, I was thinking of it as free electrical heating rather than as a mining expense.

The FPGA hardware project however seems to be coming along well enough that I am dubious of the utility of investing in many GPUs other than as electrical heat, and the amount of hashes one could get by heating with FPGAs this winter planning to heat with ASICs next winter might yet turn out to be a better way to go. Maybew along with picking up cheap "obsolete" REadeon electrical heaters from people who don't want to heat their houses electrically maybe.

Maybe we can work something out, possibly even involving GMC (General Mining Corp) which is currently mobilising to obtain groupcoins and devcoins for its treasury with which to back its "GMC" blockchain coinage...

I also just pulled out one of my 5870s that seems to maybe have burned out so what to do as next hardware step has suddenly become more urgent than I had hoped it would be.

-MarkM-

I actually only run miners against daemons running on the same machine as the miner, and referring to it as being at 127.0.0.1 (which corresponds to "localhost").

Early on I did try to have my GPU machines mine against the daemons on other machines, or even simply on each other's daemons, and it didn't work and i did not pursue why it did not work.

My Fedora Linux firewalls on the machines themselves are turned off completely so it should not be a firewall thing.

I have each of my other machines specified in -rpcallowip command-line arguments in each machine's daemon-startup scripts.

I basically shrugged and used 127.0.0.1 and didn't worry about it further.

I still have no aha moment as to "wft" could be the problem and for me using 127.0.0.1 obviates the problem, so until an aha moment strikes out of the blue it is likely that even if I feel I really really need lots of mined coins on one of my no-GPU boxes I'll just do wallet to wallet manipulation or moving of wallets to accomplish it until that aha moment comes along.

-MarkM-

Does that mean the entire business, customers and all, can be bought cheap?

-MarkM-

How do you grab bitcoins from inside a secure server?

Seems like the insurance rates would have to have been sky high to cover the losses that people's friendly neighborhood hackers are showing them - or maybe not quite exactly showing them in detail - how to "explain away".

I wonder how much losses paypal, e-gold, pecunix, alertpay and so on take regularly from these same or equivalent hackers?

Hey maybe they even use sock-puppet accounts to get auctionable stuff from merchants and charge back the merchants so as to cover all the losses these hackers cause them? Maybe that'd be better than admitting these hacks are so easy, that no system, even made by security expert computer-scientists, is unhackable, that, rather, one simply has to plan to in effect "pay off" a certain percentage of customer funds to hackers?

-MarkM- (Oh wait, did I forget a <sarc>...</sarc> somewhere in there?)

52333 is the client to client p2p networking port.

It should not even be possible to assign that as RPC port as it should already be open automatically for the p2p networking.

Aha, 8332 is hard-coded multiple times as default RPC port. So if you aren't telling devcoin any different it will be on 8332 and if you aren't telling the miner program different likely it too uses 8332 so did connect.

Is your disk access particularly slow compared to your mining speed? Every time it starts trying to construct a block, in each thread it is doing that in, it looks up who to contribute to. It would probably be a lot better for it to load the entire receiver_*.csv into a cache in memory if it doesn't do so already. (I didn't look what receiver.h actually does, I just made calls from main.cpp that naively look as if they might well be being satisfied by means of going to disk over and over and over again. (Oh wait, also going to disk was not threadsafe in Qt too so I'd see four errors when four threads tried to mine, so at least back then it sure did not seem as if receiver.h was using a cache...)

-MarkM-

I don't see a port number there, what port number would poclbm.py default to?

And what port did you set devcoind to use for RPC ?

(It might itself have a default, if so probably 52323 or 52332, whatever the normal variation is between networking port and RPC port.)

-MarkM-

The fee you configure or specify on the command line is the unit used, so for instance probably if you had configured 1.0 instead of 0.0005 the transaction that ended up with 0.001 fee would instead have ended up with 2.0, the transaction that charged you 0.0015 would have cost 3.0 and so on.

Basically, and in theory, if the system determined there are enough penalties (coins only received recently, a send of 0.01 or less, a total transaction size measured in kilobytes...) to add up to three times MIN_TX_FEE, you get charged that many times whatever fee you had set.

Once upon a time someone got really weirded out by having the client say the fee would be 0.02, so they re-configured to make 0.02 the configured setting. The client then said it would be 0.04! So they configured to 0.04. The client duly claimed it would be 0.08! Etc.

Grok?

-MarkM- (The CENTS thing confuses it further, of course...)

Wow, the depisit insurance is actually paid for by the banks!

Amazing! I always figured they let the taxpayers take care of that for them.

-MarkM-

You mean the Lazarus Long approach (issue currency enough yourself for people to buy what you sell) won't work? I always figured that guy was smart.

-MarkM- (Theatres issue enough tickets to redeem all available seats, why can't farmers issue enough tickets to redeem their produce?)

The block explorer might not be quite as simple as it appears at first glance, because even if the generic explorer doesn't actually "break" on anything in devcoin's blockchain it is possible or maybe even likely (? not sure ?) that some small amount of customising might be worthwhile regarding the things we do differently.

sacarlson apparently ran into some gotchas in applying it to BEER and WEEDS, but maybe those have by now been genericised or were due to things he does that we don't do.

The hosting is a factor too of course; the reason I didn't slap up ABE on my own hosting is one needs the daemon too and my current hosting would not permit that (I'd have to upgrade it).

Still, I expect what you already see running is mostly all there and mostly just needs its hosting upgraded somewhat, which should start being feasible once devcoin exchanges start coming online.

-MarkM-

Last version I looked at it still used CENT in some fee-related calculations instead of MIN_TX_FEE, I cannot recall exactly which cases but some cases the fee is therefore defined by the constant CENT instead of the constant (or was that a variable?) MIN_TX_FEE in the code.

-MarkM-

Did we buy all not-already-bought bitcoin.* and bitcoins.* domains yet?

If not, howsabout we buy all those bargain priced ones before worrying about ones people are squatting on.

-MarkM-

P.S. Of course we already picked up all the freebies like bitcoin@gmail.com, bitcoins@gmail.com, bitcoin@yahoo.*, bitcoins@yahoo.*, bitcoin@hotmail.*, bitcoins@hotmail.* and so on, yes? If not what for are we looking to spend valuable coins when we haven't even done the free stuff "homework"?

Depends on the quantity and the price you're willing to pay.

(I certainly don't plan to throw devcoin away at some insanely low rate like "200,000 per bitcoin"!)

-MarkM- (Hmm, bitcoin 50 per block, devcoin 50000 per block. 50:50000 = ? )

P.S. Oh waitasec, isn't bitcoin crashing right now and devcoin rallying?

What, you're not going to be paid in Bitcoins?!

-MarkM-

There already are blockchain based currencies that do not decrease the number of coins minted per block. They will continue adding more coins forever.

So far though the people who go on about actually wanting inflationary coins have managed to pretty effectively avoid all these new blockchains.

I wonder why.

-MarkM-

As it seems to be Bitcoin that is the one speculators flock to, I guess "speculatorcoin" here means Bitcoin, and, yes, it therefore is the case that "speculatorcoin" developed the software that some "stablecoin" or other might choose to use.

I find the idea of destroying bitcoins that are spent to buy "stablecoins" very weird though, because I imagine that being able to "back" one's newfangled "stablecoins" with Bitcoins might be rather useful.

It is rather a pity that it is Bitcoin that has so far filled the role of being a "speculatorcoin", I wonder if it is almost inevitable that whichever coin "the masses" are most aware of will fall into that role? I had often imagined that real bitcoins might be or become far more valuable than the various pocket-change coins used by kids for pocketmoney and by consumers for day to day out of pocket spending. It even seemed that the more "complicated" and "mysterious" real bitcoins are the more the common masses would drift away to pocket change coins of various kinds, leaving the truly valuable "actual bitcoins" to the major pillars of the financial world, the big edifices that "back" the various pocketmoney systems.

If the people who had hundreds of thousands, or millions, of Bitcoins choose to "cash out" to fiat and walk away, they would basically be treating the whole system as a ponzi scheme instead of truly demonstrating by their own actions of "backing" it using such fiat that they are able to get for it that they were and are serious about supporting it as a real currency, the currency of the people who minted it, sold it for fiat, and thus now have huge hoards of fiat with which to "back" it.

Alternatives would seem to me to look a little more serious if they retained any bitcoin they aquired to hold in trust as "backing" for their new coin than if they destroyed bitcoins they aquired.

Most of the players who seem serious about the various new currencies they have had me working on for them seem to agree that they want to aquire plenty of any blockchain based coins they can, so as to have a nicely variegated treasury with which to "back" their favourite type(s) of coin.

Indeed part of why they do not like the types of markets that Bitcoin seems to regard as standard or normal is such markets deprive them of the ability to choose who they buy from or sell to. Not just for prejudices along the lines of "We are the Elves, Orcs are enemies, therefore we will not sell Elfincoin to Orcs nor trade Elfcoin for Orccoin" but also things like "we see no evidence that you have been retaining the fiat you have been aquiring and putting it back into the system therefore we do not want to sell you any more fiat".

-MarkM-

tl;dr ok but the cloud must not be able to spend or transfer your coins.

Okay, fine, for that then we need basically cash certificates you can fit on your handheld portable device or some other means of preventing the cloud from ever being able to spend your money or transfer it to anyone who does not have your private keys.

Maybe some kind of deterministic wallet might work, a means of taking just one private key, the one associated with that specific device while that specific device is in your possession not someone else's possession, and from that re-generating any portion of the set of private keys your identity plus that device's identity when combine can generate.

That way the device need not actually remember any of the keys it comes up with except as a matter of convenience to save the trouble of re-generating the first [however many in total you+it have actually used] of the keys it+you can result in.

It could maybe use your fingerprint or retina or a passphrase or whatever plus some extra data you put in the device plus any unique to each device data a manufacturer might have already provided (like the codes ethernet cards have for example).

Give it only the means to sign, so the cloud never gets to know the private keys the device uses to sign.

Hmm I wonder if something along these lines might be what the physical key thing MtGox now issued does?

-MarkM-

What would you use as collateral?

Afterall if someone is going to extend you credit so that you can short-sell, they will need collateral that they can margin-call against, won't they?

How far down do you think bitcoins will go in the next 100 days?

Would you be willing to split the difference, that is, for example if you think it will go down 10%, settle for only realising half that: 5%?

Do you have enough collateral, such as bitcoins you have already mined, to secure against margin calls?

How much collateral would that actually take?

-MarkM-

devcoin-qt has mining disabled deliberately because the file-getting code to get the receiver files, or maybe the file-reading code to read them, doesn't seem to play well with qt's threads. devcoind though only uses boost's threads, which seem to work okay so mining should work with devcoind.

You do have to catch up with the initial blocks though I think before mining will actually start.

-MarkM-