Wow. That explains a lot. I didn't realise that.

I am indeed mining SCRYPT. Many thanks for that reply.

Hi

I've just spend all day looking at the viability of various mining options. At the moment I've just played around with an old graphics card to "get the feel of everything". What's confusing me is this:

[1] - As a rough reference, I am mining Worldcoin with an olf NVIDIA GT-220 and getting about 1.2 K/Hash per second using cgminer (cudaminer reports 10 KH/s)

[2] - If I check my card on this and other sites,

[2] - This comparison chart shows the cards performance as 10 MHash/s (Mega instead of Kilo)

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#Nvidia

[3] - To confuse me even further, the pool's website reports my worker's performance at 21 KHash/s

I'm confused by all this because I don't know how to estimate another graphic's card's performance against my current one. For example, a USB Block Erupter Sapphire is spec'd at 333 MHash/s.

Can it really be true that the erupter is 333 x 1000 (333,000) times as fast as my current card ? (i.e. It is 333 MHash and mine is 1.2 KHash ?

If anyone can help me out here I'd be most gratefull !

Pete

Ok, I got a bit further. My miner is now reporting that it's connected and reports a hash rate of about 10 Mh/s. (I didn't realise I needed to drop back to version 3.7.2 to do SCRYPT mining).

Looking at the other hashrates on the pool, it seems reasonable (though at the slower end). But I'm still not registering any activity on the pools stats or on my dashboard. It's still on Zero.

I've had it running for over an hour now.

Merchants are not going to give 2 hoots what "coin" the customer uses, anymore than they care what credit/debit card you use today.

Another thing - and I don't think a lot of people appreciate this - forget about a "fast transaction time" making any coin attractive for use at POS systems.

No retailer is going to be doing blockchain transactions at a POS. They will use clearing houses to get transactions done instantaneously as they do today. So, whether you're paying in Bitcoin, Peercoin, Worldcoin, Litecoin or anything else, all transactions will be instantaneous. They won't be hitting the blockchain until your respective clearing house (Visa, Maestro, whatever) processes the hits on your account coming in from supermarkets.

Cryptocurrencies in general are not intended for POS use - they are *money*. POS systems deal with numbers in accounts, a very different thing.

For a glimpse of the future, look at today's exchanges like BTC-e and Cryptsy. On there you can spend BTC, LTC, whatever - all the trades occur instantaneously. It's only when you park your funds at the end of trading that you actually carry out a blockchain transaction. Thats how retail will work in the future if cryptos ever get near a POS system.

ok, thanks. Maybe hashrates below a certain level just don't register.

Hi

Can someone help me out here ?

I've started mining (WDC) with theblocksfactory using cgminer and a .conf configuration file.

My miner seems to connect ok and I get regular messages like this:

**** Stratum from pool zero detected new block *****

But - my hash rate is always on zero !? (I mean absolute zero - not just a low amount)

Specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Dui @ 3.16 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GEForce GE 220

I've added the scrypt=true setting to the .conf file but can't think of what else to try.

Any ideas ?

Yes, I think there's only 1 kind of blockchain transaction.

I think you're all missing the point here.

If cryptocurrencies ever end up being used at the point of sale, don't think for a moment that those transactions are going to be hitting the blockchain directly.

Look at how todays cryptocurrency exchanges work. You can spend BTC, LTC,  PPC, XPM, WDC - whatever. All those trades are instant (if your not on cryptsy ! ). They have nothing to do with the confirmation time of the respective coin.

That's because your not actually doing blockchain transactions - your spending from a cryptocurrency account.

That's the way the retail economy works today out in the real world and that's the way it will always work. Transaction clearing houses like Visa and Maestro get the "trade" out of the way quickly for the vendor, then clear the transaction through the banks over the next few hours. It will continue to work this way except that instead of USD accounts you'll be spending BTC / LTC whatever on your credit/debit card.

Another reason that direct blockchain transaction will never be used at the point of sale is that they are far too inflexible. Doing the sale from an account through a clearing house allows for all kinds of problems to be resolved befor the transaction hits the blockchain - e.g. reversals, refunds, revisions. They also provide value added services like insuring the transaction, use of store cards etc etc.

That was my point in an earlier thread I made about coin transaction time. I don't really see the point in so called "fast coins". A 10 minute blockchain confirmation time is way fast enough. At the moment the banks take hours or days to clear transactions.

Hi Folks

I am a professional eCommerce systems developer and this is something that has been bothering me for a while regarding coins which are promoted as being "fast".

The only advantage I can see of a coin having fast transaction times is for use at POS (Point of Sale) terminals. However, if cryptocurrencies ever get near supermarket checkouts, I think it's very unlikely that people will be doing actual blockchain transactions right at the checkout.

What's likely to happen is that transaction clearing houses like Visa and Maestro will handle the transaction at the point of sale and then carry out the actual "underlying" money (in this case blockchain) transaction as they do today.

What people need to understand is that there is a whole industrial layer *on top* of the real money system which takes care of buffering the waiting time away from the customer at the point of sale. That "clearing house" layer also has time to resolve problems like the occasional delay etc.

You can see this today - when you pay for your supermarket goods and leave the place, the transaction won't show up in your bank account for a while. That's because the supermarket POS systems are not actually doing the money transfer - only sending a number to a server which instructs the clearing house to debit an account. This process is extremely fast. It also allows for problem resolution without bothering the customer. cryptocurrencies are never going to get near this level of "smoothness" and performance because crypto's are doing everything at once - they are both handling the point of sale support AND doing the underlying money transfer.

So my thinking is that there's very little advantage in pushing transaction times for "cryptos" below the level of a few minutes because they're not going to be manifesting themselves at the point of sale anyway. That "clearing house" layer is always going to be needed.

What I think is that there are 2 optimal transaction times for "cryptos"

[1] - sub 5 minutes is very good because it competes well with banks doing "real" money transfers. It's also a reasonable waiting time for email confirmations for internet transactions.

[2] - sub 1 minute MAY be good for certain limited things like buying a train ticket at a station platform

[3] - pushing it further than that is a waste of time. POS is never going ot be doing direct blockchain interaction. Even 30 seconds is far to long for a supermarket queue and the vendor is exposing themselves to far too much risk in having to support the full underlying money transfer

So I think coins, having got the transaction times down to sub 5-minute, should just forget about performance and concentrate on socio-economic issues (like distribution) and reliability.

Pete

Hi

Please, please please could we have this feature. A button (albeit password protected) that says PRINT PAPER WALLET !!

It's a statistical certainty that noobs who don't know about the dreaded CHANGE ADDRESSES are going to loose coins. Guaranteed.

****************** Standard Noob coin loss procedure *****************

[1] - acquire some coins (say 5 bitcoins)
[2] - spend a *tiny amount* of their inventory (say 0.2 bitcoins)
[3] - copy their address and do a dumpprivkey, create paper wallet
[4] - feel "safe" cos they've now got their paper wallet which they regard as their *primary* backup
[5] - get their wallet trashed somehow or migrate to a new wallet using their "safe" paper wallet
[6] - import the paper wallet to the new wallet, only to find they've almost nothing left cos Satoshi client sent most of their funds to a change address without telling them and they didn't realise they needed to do:

wallet passphrase xxxx 600
listaddressgroupings
dumpprivkey (for each address in listaddressgroupings)

All this misery could be avoided with the single most important command ever instituted in a wallet:

PRINT PAPER WALLET

... that recursively dumps all the private keys corresponding to the addresses in listaddressgroupings

Cheers

Pete

You might be interested in this post I just made. The thread kind of got buried in the tsunami of new threads.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=357397.0

Folks - I realise this may be a bit of a controversial post since people might think I'm spamming against Quark. I'm not, I am a genuine holder of a good few Quarks. I'm on the fence regarding Quarks and the 'scam vs people's currency' debate, but I think the idea and objectives are good and they deserve to be given a hearing.

Anyway, on to the subject of this post:

I just saw a sell order on Cryptsi for 500,000 (half a million) Quarks at a price of 92 BTC. The order was there for a few minutes and then got cancelled - maybe because they realised they couldn't offload it and would have to bleed it out.

Now this could both good and bad for Quark the way I see it.

THA BAD (OBVIOUS)

 - it's an illustration of what the 'scam' accusations are saying (there are whales around ready to dump and destroy the value)
 - half a million Quarks is a huge portion of the total (around 1/500th of the *entire* quark supply)
 - never mind all in single wallet, but all in a single ORDER

THE GOOD (NOT SO OBVIOUS)

 - the fact that that trader was not able to get even close to offloading their inventory is evidence of Quark's economic strategy working

If you watch Bill Still's video interview with Kolin, he states exactly this, that the idea is that a 'whale' will never find enough buyers because they are well distributed.

If Quark's are to succeed (and it's a genuine attempt at proliferating the coins, not a pump & dump), then there's a heck of a PR job to do. A point that doesn't seem to come across at all in the debate is this 'whale mitigation' property that Quark has.

This just doesn't come across at all - the only place I've seen it is when Kolin mentioned it to Bill in his interview. Even then I didn't quite understand it myself - the sound was so crap and the description not really fleshed out. I'm also thinking that maybe this is something Max Keiser understands and that that's why he's not so worried about the early mining aspect.

If this (Whale Mitigation Property - 'WMP') is a serious mechanism of the coin's market strategy then it needs to BE SPELLED OUT IN LARGE LETTERS TO THE CRYPTOCURRENCY COMMUNITY, the same way as Brother John F and Joe Snip have attempted to spell out the scam aspect of it.

As I say, I'm on the fence myself about the merits of early mining. I can see advantages and I can also see why people want to run a mile from it, but all I would say is:

Let illumination rather than accusation prevail !

cheers

Pete

That's just the tackyest thing I've ever seen - and I say that as a Quark holder.

Its trying to be a "Bitpay" lookalike but actually it's a 1-page website with an html form processing 3 orders a day (manually) with a 20% surcharge and a middle man (someone in a bedroom with a PC and a phone it looks like). "Think small" is the inspiration behind this.

How about just going straight to Amazon yourself and buying the stuff with money.

I hope they take this down before it gives credence to the "scamcoin" label. The "tackcoin" one might be following close on it's heels.

Who knows - sometimes "tack" sells .....http://www.poundland.co.uk/

nelisky -

Thanks again for all that detail. Now I remember change addresses from when I first studied Bitcoin months ago. I'd just forgotten about them.

The thing that caused me alarm was that the blockchain.info balance for my wallet address didn't agree with what I thought I had in there. The difference must be accounted for by the change addresses. I've also just read this article which was very useful.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c9xr7/psa_using_paper_wallets_understanding_change/

The only thing I'm not sure about now is if all the change addresses share the same private key or not. (I presume they don't so you need to do a separate paper wallet for each). I like to keep a paper wallet but now I realise it's not the end of the story just to keep the public and private keys offline - there's all these change addresses as well.

This paragraph definitely applies to me but I think it's worth posting here for others:


Finally, apologies to readers of the thread for the (hopefully) unnecessary alarm in the subject title.

Hi nelisky

Thanks a lot for the reply. What you say starts to make some sense. So the wallet also uses internal addresses that I can't see ? Does that mean I can't load my (paper) private key into, say Multibit or I won't see those balances ?

I think agree, I need to sync the wallet in QT and take stock of everything.  The wallet says there are still 2 transactions from April that are unconfirmed - that's another thing I don't understand. I didn't think the wallet needed to be fully sync'd for the transactions to get confirmed.

Looks like it's going to take a week or 2 just to sync the wallet - I'm now totally paranoid about even downloading bootstrap.dat.

toknormal

Hang on - I've just realised that the 5.12 is the balance of an old April transaction, which according to my wallet at the time I sent the 1.3, was still unconfirmed. (I haven't had my wallet synced in ages).

Is this all an issue to do with not having my wallet synced or unconfirmed transactions ? Now I'm confused.

E.Sam's post convinced me I'd had my wallet compromised because the symptoms were so similar.

Any blockchain experts that can throw light on this much appreciated !

Hi

The other day I was transferring 1.3 BTC to BTC-e. After a while my wallet became unresponsive and I had to force quit it. In the end I force quite the whole machine (a MacbookPro).

The scenario that this poster described is exactly what I experienced: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266813.0

.. except mine wasn't anything to do with Bitvanity. What I suspect it might have been is that I downloaded a torrent of bootstrap.dat to get my wallet up and running quicker since I haven't used it for ages. I also had Skype open for a bit (mad in restrospect, I know).

Anyway, I know see this unrecognised transaction on Blockchain.info for 5.12 BTC leaving my wallet the same day I sent the 1.3 BTC. (By the way, I sent the 1.3 BTC while my wallet was unsynchronised - does that make a difference ?).

https://blockchain.info/address/13QiFz64rWk2mHiVFKjn1ahNLnqA9xzMrL

Now I'm cautious about opening my wallet again in case the rest flies out if it's been comprimosed. I feel a bit gutted about this. Any recommendations appreciated.

toknormal

P.S. I'm running Bitcoin QT v0.8.5 and the wallet was password encrypted (fat lot of good that did).

Hi Folks

As a newbie, I'm only allowed to post here.

However I'm not a newbie when it comes to software development or implementation and I feel real sorry for those guys at MT Gox who have advanced the cause of Bitcion massively in the last few days while at the same time taken huge amounts of flack from commentators on this site.

I know what its like implementing industrial web systems and you absolutely sh*t yourself just getting it live, nevermind trying to cope with 1000 times predicted demand spikes. Whatever the politics of Bitcoin and exchanges are, you can be sure there were a load of grafters paddling underwater and not getting any sleep at that place just to keep the site alive and I think they did a great job. Whether Mt Gox disappears or improves after this, they will have done a great service to the cause of Bitcoin by acting as honest brokers through one of the most demanding episodes of the currency anyone has ever seen.

We need to separate the politics of things from people. I've got 20 years of software development experience and all I know is that over the last 3 days something went 'right' at Mt Gox. You people who are moaning about how bad they were do not know how wrong it could have gone - you are complete ignoramuses who do not appreciate what it takes to keep an operation like that up. It's not their fault they're the only only major exchange around - they are doing you fuckers service and have fielded a massive demand in the Bitcoin currency when there was nobody else around to do so.

Please tell me - now that the 'spike' has turned into a steady BCT bull market that you would have preferred them not to have existed. As a newbie, if it hadn't been for Mt Gox I would have never got into the BCT market. They processed my order quickly and honestly and I stayed in BCT even when it crashed well below my entry level. Their messages and user interfaces are informative and timely for newbies (like the one about checking for the green lettering on the URL address bar at logon). You can be sure there are thousands of others like me and MT Gox deserve some credit for servicing them rather than the unbelievable BS they're getting off this site. The people criticising Mt Gox seem to think it should work like Google - well they should try paying for Google. MT Gox is trying to do something very difficult and they have pulled it off as far as I'm concerned.

The ignorant F*ckers on this site, on the other hand don't know a good thing when they get it. For all that I love Max Keiser, he should be thanking Gox as well for holding up as they did rather than saying its a "weakness".

I hope that any sympathetic forum subscriber who's got full forum rights can post this message to the main message threads on behalf of us "newbies" so that those dunderheads clamoring for Gox's demise can get their heads in order.

Best Regards

Pete

b.t.w. In case you think I'm some kind of Gox agent or something - I'm not. I'm a regular guy but from reading the forum messages I'm sure that won't satisfy many. Doesn't matter because I've said my piece and I might as well be a Gox 'er because I can imagine what they've gone through in the last few days - hammered by your enemy and hammered by your friends at the same time.