Most of the loans offered or accepted here are usarous.  You can't have a legally binding illegal contract.  Likewise credit ratings, telephone #, and other banking info is useless when attempting to enforce an illegal contract.  Collateral is only collateral if you have legal right to collect it in a default which you won't if the contract is deemed illegal to begin with.  

The sad irony is that there is no federal Usary limit in the United States, only state limits (which vary from ~6% to 25% annually).  Almost all banks in the US are federally chartered and thus immune to state limits on Usury.  With no federally Usury limits a bank could offer a 3000% APR credit card but an individual lender (without a federal banking charter) can't.

One quick clarification ... when you encrypt with a public key ONLY the entity with the matching private key can decrypt it.  So what you reported here is working exactly as expected.  So yes that means the person encrypting a message CAN NOT decrypt their own message unless it was encrypted with their public key.  You can select multiple recipients.   Encrypting the message with YOUR and BOB's public keys will ensure EITHER YOUR or BOB's private key can be used to decrypt it.

http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator

Here is a hash calculator.

Take the hash of password + nonce for nonces 1 through 1000 (or until you get board).

Write down the outputs and let me know if they are increasing or decreasing in any predictable pattern.  If you could predict the output of SHA-256 it wouldn't be a cryptographic hashing function and it would have security ramifications that go far beyond Bitcoin.

Well no that isn't true.  A system in idle may draw <50W.  A system with GPU blasting at 100% load will be drawing a lot more.  How much depends on the wattage of your GPU but we are talking about hundreds of extra watts.  The cost of just those watts (excluding any system idle draw which would exist anyways) will be much higher than the value of the coins you produce.

Well that might make understanding things difficult.  Hashes are never unpredictable.

The SHA-256 hash of
will ALWAYS be

Always, always, always.  Today, tomorrow, 100,000 years in the future.  On any OS, any hardware, anywhere on the planet the hash of password will always be the number above.  If ever the SHA-256 of password wasn't the number above it would mean a catastrophic failure of SHA-256.  It would render Bitcoin useless overnight.  How could you verify tx and blocks if the hash you computed was different than what the creator computed?

"wait number?".  Yes the otuput of a hash function is a number.  Rather than try to represent than number as binary (it would be a sequences of 1s and 0s 256 digits long) or base 10 (a useless representation as no computer works on base 10 and no human can compute numbers that large in any reasonable timeframe)  they are often represented as strings (either in hexadecimal as above) or in other encoded formats (base58).

None.

8800GT is going to produce less coins than it costs in electricity.  Kinda like burning $10 USD to produce $1 USD worth of heat for your home.

The number of addresses generated isn't important it is the number of funded addresses.  A collision with a spent change address that will never be used again isn't very valuable.

So if we assume 1 trillion active addresses (10 billion users with an average of 100 active funded addresses at any point in time). The odds of finding a collision are ~ 1 in 1*10^65.

If the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 280,000 then the odds of getting stuck by lightning 12 times per year is roughly the same as creating a collision with with one of the 1 trillion active addresses.  I don't like lightning comparison because lightning is localized (not randomly distributed).  If we use the lottery example the odds of buying lottery tickets for 8 consecutive games and winning the jackpot on all 8 is roughly the same as finding a single collision.  

I would point out that the single random collision is unlikely to be very profitable.  If there are 1 trillion addresses and all coins are mined the average address will hold ~0.000021 BTC (21 uBTC - microBTC).  Another way to look at it is if we assume in this 10 billion scenario Bitcoin has replaced all global money supplies then the collective value of the network would be on the order of ~$60T (2012 dollars).  At 1 trillion addresses the value of finding that collision (less likely than winning lottery 8 times in a row) would be ~$60.  BTW fun fact that would make the exchange rate $2.857 per uBTC!

Meh.  At one point it looked like 51% would be 1 pool, then it became 2 pools, then 3, now it is 4.  You are talking about a massive collusion among people who have the most to lose if Bitcoin collapses.  Also Deepbit doesn't own the hashing power.  If they start double spending the network they can only do that once.  Miners will leave and then DeepBit (and co-conspirators) won't have the 51% to attack the network.

On edit:
http://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days

It is 5 pools to get 51% of the blocks in last 4 days and combined that is only 52%.  So if they collectively lost another 3% of hashing power to smaller pools or solo-miners you are now talking a conspiracy of the 6 largest pools.

Still that wasn't your point to begin with.  You point was an attacker could paralyze the network and reality is without 51%+ the best they can do is slow down confirmations (first confirm only) by a marginal amount.  With 51%+ an attacker can do more serious attacks anyways.

If you have 51% of the hashing power you can double spend the network to death anyways.  For economic miners as the block subsidy declines and transaction volume increases the incentive to include more transactions increases.  The trend has already begun. 

http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees-usd

Daily tx fees have increased from ~$10 per day to $250 per day over the last year.  If that sounds like a lot the subsidy is ~$80,000 per day.  So fees pay about 0.3% of the network cost.  If we assume that over the next year the subsidy will be cut in half, the tx volume will quadruple, and avg fee per tx doubles that 0.3% will be more like ~5%.  No serious miner can ignore 5% of potential revenue.


Right now the high subsidy, and low tx fee volume creates a distortion in the market.  Larger blocks take longer to propagate and that creates a significant risk.  Say there are 1,000 tx waiting.  By including the 100 highest paying you could improve your revenue by ~0.2% however if doing so increases your orphan rate by 1% you lose revenue.  The "bottom 900" tx are even worse.  They may increase the orphan rate 2%+ but only contribute 0.3% more revenue.  The subsidy decline will make better align the needs of the network with the economic needs of miners.  The distortion of the high block subsidy will be solved with time.

TL/DR:
It is a minor "issue".  Higher tx volume, higher fees, and declining subsidies will make excluding paying tx uneconomical in time.

No unavailable is just a placeholder as they are disabled.   They will be up as quickly as possible.  I wanted to get them up last night but I crashed.  60 hour weeks + another 4-5 hours a night coding FC4B.  I just want to do a little more testing on the development server before promoting them to production.  The new site provides a better platform for showing funding info.  Currently funds availability is only shown when selecting a payment option but some improved display options are coming.

TL/DR: "Soon".

Mystery solved.   Remember the default keypool is 100 tx.  So you need to make backups at least once every 100 txs (I would say once ever 50 to be safe).  You can however extend the keypool.  For example bitcoind -keypool=2000 would make the keypool 2000 and reduce the frequency of backups (at the expense of a larger wallet).

In time hopefully the reference wallet will go to a deterministic model.  Unique random private keys are simply to "fragile".  It is to easy to lose coins.  A deterministic wallet would always be safe if the seed is saved or backed up.

Yes.  Regrettable but we had people blatantly selling coins and directing the funds to other persons bank accounts.  We can't allow that kind of behavior as regardless of Bitcoin's classification that would make us a money transmitter.

Need a little bit more info. What url? When? What action were you trying to take?

The ability to delete an entry will be added.  We should have support for accounts in the name of a business within a few days.

Yeah I wouldn't really call it "mastermind".  When your plan requires the abject stupidity of others in order to work it is hardly a mastermind.

Pirate borrowed BTC and sold them for USD.  TL/DR version he was massively short (probably the shortest short in the history of Bitcoin).  He had no way to pay the interest obligation at the current exchange rate.  However 500K BTC is pretty easy to pay off if BTC fell to say $0.10 USD:BTC.

So:
a) Pirate had no end game, he was just as delusional as his investors
or
b) Pirate was the worlds worst ponzi operator but lucked out that he found a group of people more idiotic than him who ALSO didn't really mind losing millions of dollars (actions speak louder than words here).
or
c) Pirate's "plan" was to tank BTC exchange rate and thus massively devalue his debt.  Doesn't matter if the plan was dubious or not.

So a couple things:

1) When you mine @ slush (or any pool) the funds go to your pool account.  You then need to transfer them to your wallet.  So login to your pool account and see if the funds are there.

2) 340 KH/s is nearly worthless (and almost certainly worth far less than the electrical cost and wear on your computer). At 340 KH/s the "expected return" is ~ 0.000143333 BTC per day (no that isn't a typo). 

3) When mining in a pool the minimum unit that is payable is a share.  At 340 KH/s you would expect to solve roughly 7 shares per day (many miners solve 7 shares per second) however there is an element of chance involved.  Given you will only solve 7 shares per day on average it is possible you could go days (or even weeks) without solving any or you could solve a lot more than 7 in one day.

4) Having a throughput that low makes it difficult to troubleshoot.  Remember there is a random element to mining so it is hard to say if it is just bad luck or if you have something screwed up.

What Stephen said.  

I find an analogy helps to understand what "change" is and how it works.

Say you want to buy a candy bar ($1) from a store.  You open your wallet (fiat wallet) and inside there is a single $20 bill.  What is the min amount you can pay?  It isn't $1; you can't rip up 1/20th of the bill and give it to the cashier.  You need to pay $20 and since you only owe $1, the cashier gives you back $19.   In traditional fiat monetary systems only the central bank can (legally) produce new bills, so bills are in fixed denominations.   Your transaction may look something like the following.


We do this everyday so we don't really think about how it works or the limitations.  Now lets imagine for a second that some system existed which allowed the cashier (or anyone) to securely destroy any authentic fiat money (bills) and print replacements in arbitrary amounts, while preventing double spending, counterfeiting, and ensuring that at all times the amount of money created is exactly the same as the amount of money destroyed.  Since new bills can be produced on demand there is no need to limited them to just $10s and $20s, one could produce a $18.94537208 bill or a $483,389.27 one if they wanted to.  In that case your transaction may look like the following.


This modified system is how bitcoin works.  Rather than bills or notes the network tracks inputs and outputs.  All inputs are a prior transactions outputs and the network ensures each output can only be used (spent) once.   Spending is just creating a transaction.  Your input is a prior unspent output and you can't spend part of it (like trying to spend half of a $20 bill).  So you spend the full value of the input by sending some to the intended receipient and some back to yourself.  Your wallet hides and abstracts this.  It continually scans the blockchain looking for unspent outputs involving your addresses. When your wallet reports your balance is 130 BTC it means the collective value of all the unspent outputs assigned to address you have the private key for total 130 BTC.  This is similar to someone saying they have $130 in their wallet, more than likely it isn't a single $130 unit but the collective sum of all the bills in the wallet total $130.

In the case of your transaction ( http://blockchain.info/tx/0a1c0b1ec0ac55a45b1555202daf2e08419648096f5bcc4267898d420dffef87 ) you took a 10.89 BTC unspent output and spent it.  10 BTC was directed to your friend, and 0.89 BTC directed to an address you control, the "change".  You can't only spend 10.00 BTC out of a 10.89 BTC anymore than you can spend $1 out of a $20 bill.  The entire 10.89 BTC unspent output of some prior transaction becomes the input of this new transaction and in the process produced two new unspent outputs which have a combined value of 10.89 BTC.  The 10.89 BTC input is now "spent" and effectively destroyed because the network will prevent it from ever being spent again.   Now value was lost or created because there are new unspent outputs which equal the value of they "destroyed" input.

As Stephen indicated, in this case the fee is zero but if there was a tx fee it would be the difference between the inputs and the outputs.  (i.e. 10.89 BTC input and 10.88 BTC output = 0.01 BTC fee).  When a miner solves the block all the inputs of all the transactions are added together and all the outputs added together.  The difference is the fees in the block and that is added to the value of the coinbase transaction which has the miner's address.

Did you miss the bolded part?  Or did I misunderstand you and you have a rainbow table of all  9,967,884,244,759,920,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations of a 12 digit passphrase and 64bit salt values?  I guess "desk" is the name of the planet which you converted into a supercomputer. Sweet.  I will start using 128 bit salt values (only those larger than 2^64-1) and make that precomputation worthless.  Now if you have a solar system sized computer and started precomputing MD5 hashes millions of years before it was invented well then you might have me there.

The components of security fit together to support the other elements. Looking at only one element is dubious.   While you may have a rainbow rable of MD5 hashes you don't have quadrillions upon quadrillions of rainbow tables one for each of the those password sets and a unique 64bit salt.

It is highly unlikely they recalculate the difficulty on every single page refresh.  Both sites likely calculate and STORE the difficulty periodically (say once every hour) and page refreshes simply pull the stored value.   Unless both sites use the exact same timestamps and have the exact same blocks in memory at the exact same time they are going to get different values. (Different Input -> Different Output).

It is a little unclear from your post if the coins have already been sent.

If coins already HAVE been withdrawn (sent to your bitstamp account):
There is little bc-casino can do if funds have already been sent. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.  The funds went to bitstamp but not to your bitstamp deposit address they went back to the address bitstamp sent them FROM.  You should get all transaction details from bc-casino and KEEP THEM A SECRET.  Bitstamp got the funds so they (at least in theory) can fix it by crediting your account).  Dont' share any details on deposit or withdraws as someone else could use that to claim it was them.

If the coins HAVEN'T already been withdrawn (sent to your bitstamp account):
Don't withdraw. Period.  Your bitstamp account won't be credited.  Period.  You need to contact bc-casino and see if they will allow an alternative method to withdraw.

Tip for other noobs:
ALL SHARED WALLETS WORK EXACTLY THE SAME.  instawallet, every single bitcoin exchange, coinbase, a certain marketplace which begins with S, most other services which accepts "deposits", etc.   A good rule of thumb is that unless your are 100% positive that an ewallet uses individual private key you should ASSUME it is a shared wallet.

Exceptions:
blockchain.info - not shared (safe for services which return funds to the address funds were sent from)
strongcoin  - not shared (safe for services which return funds to the address funds were sent from)