Bump to let you guys know we're opening #MC2 on freenode if you wanna hang out, I'll be in and out this weekend and probably most weekends, and some weekdays.

Let's see... 150,000,000 keys per sec on a 7970, or 1.5 * 10^8 k/s.  There are maybe 1.0 * 10^8 Bitcoin addresses with unspent outputs.

If I remember right, the complexity of addresses is 2^128.  So, you have 1/(1.0 * 10^8 / 2^128) = 3.4 * 10^30 keys as the inverse of your probability for finding any private key to some unspent output (or basically, your reduced search space after accounting for all keys with unspent outputs).

That's (3.4 * 10^30 k / [1.5 * 10^8 k/s]) = 2.3 * 10^22 seconds to find a single private key to spend a random address' Bitcoins with a single 7970.  

That's only 52,000 * the age of the entire universe, so you should find one pretty quick!

Somewhat related (as we got a big shoutout in this article): we're still looking for devs for MC2.  If you can code in Go and are interested, please come to irc.conformal.com, #mc2.  SSL certs required to log onto this server.

I'm also opening #mc2 on freenode, to expand our reach.  I'm at work today and am out tonight, but I'll be popping in and out this weekend.

I should be at the Texas Bitcoin conference too, but unfortunately not at the Miami conference.

Because the amount of ETH is based on the amount of BTC people initially invest

Borderline fud...  Vitalik dropped out of the University of Waterloo to pursue cryptocurrency

Looks like you didn't change the version number, so I can just use a BTC address of mine ? 17bmYcP6Vio6c1gnyPsaDSv4B11SLe81Ab

tl;dr

It doesn't matter whether the Ethereum people make it 10000 BTC per ETH or 0.0000000000001 BTC per ETH, because both the amounts mined and the amounts deposited in the developer fund are proportional to the number of ETH bought, not what their price was.

For instance, let's say it's 10,000 BTC per ETH, and 500 BTC is given to Ethereum and co.

0.05 ETH (500 BTC / 10,000 BTC) is then given to the preminers investing (0.225 X), and in the first year and every year after, ~0.09 ETH (0.400 X) will be mined by miners.

In a way it's as if Ethereum is just saying, "If you can't understand our premine distribution scheme, don't invest because, to you, it's now more expensive.  Except it's not."

(tbh I didn't read what he wrote either, but I assume this is what he's talking about)

So, how are these networked?  Do you have to use the ethernet cable, or can you USB connect to a windows/linux box and mine externally with cgminer?

I haven't gotten anything yet and I live pretty close to CIARA.  But I'm batch two.

I'll be putting these out to pasture on the PPC network as soon as I get them, I guess.

Yup; most explanations of this are really confusing so far, so I'll try to explain it again

Sender gets stealth address, generates a Bitcoin address based on this

Sender uploads a pubkey and nonce (secret which appears as a bunch of random characters) to the network via OP_RETURN function, and sends some money to the generated address

Receiver scans the blockchain for pubkey and nonce that allows him to generate a private key to the address the sender created and sent funds to, and then he claims ownership of the address

Important stuff:
1.) No one aside from the sender and the receiver can possibly know where the money is going, because a new, random address for the receiver is generated every time.
2.) Receiver has to scan every OP_RETURN tx on the blockchain in search for his funds.
3.) The receiver and only the receiver can spend funds at these addresses the sender generates.

It is a standalone currency

ZeroCoin was the bitcoin addon, ZeroCash is an actual fork that ensures all spending on the chain is untraceable.  So, this is what you are talking about.

I stopped buying hardware with bitfury october

Wait until start dumping their 55 and 28 nm in a few months and then start buying it up en masse when it's cheap and actually makes sense

Sending it out now.  Sorry, I'm rocking a wicked sinus infection right now on top of work for grad school.

Between stealth addressing and coinjoin, we're already ahead of them.

Zerocoin is now called zerocash and will be launching as an alpha in April or May. This was announced about a week ago.  Proofs are now less than 300 bytes in size thanks to SNARK.

Remaining newsletters will go out tonight, along with a weekly update.

We have been featured in Conformal's (developer of Coinvoice and btcd) blog:

https://blog.conformal.com/redecentralization-robust-developer-network/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vmehu/redecentralization_building_a_robust/

PM me your bitmessage address to be added.  Please remember that you need to leave your BM on to receive messages through the network!

Not a lot is known about this, as M. Green has been keeping very quiet.  The most I know is from these slides.

The transcript from the presentation is here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=q3rgh5ZY

Fun facts:
- ZRC uses Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs) for proofs, which are only 288 bytes in size for 128-bits of security
- Tradeoff is the time it takes to generate proofs for splits/merges (measured in minutes)
- Verification of proofs in milliseconds
- Release date: May 2014

Another way to fix this is to just run a centralized node for the first few hundred blocks that calibrates the difficulty of the network based on the orphan rate it encounters and pushes it to clients via an ECDSA signed packet; I haven't seen this implemented yet, but it really should be.

As GHOST is okay with orphans (it includes their work in the tree generated), this should not really be an issue with ethereum