My thoughts exactly, except I wasn't sure if they were on the board. Are you sure?

Yeah, that's not clear at all unless you try it see how it works. Glad we figured it out. By the way, I think certain boards do not allow editing of OP (sales threads, I guess- not sure).

Alright. I thought you could report it to your local police. They should be able to interface with the Interpol or directly with the police in England. This is clearly an ongoing fraud, offering non-existing products priced in $, accepting only irreversible payments through the Bitcoin network. They should get nailed hard.

Have you tried reporting this scam to the local police? They must have a cyber/economic crime unit, and may be able to get warrants for ISP information. Chances are slim, but it's not impossible.

That I agree with.

It may be interesting, but it wouldn't be very productive.  There is nothing you can do about whatever information you would be getting (unless you are a board member).

Edit your original post, there is the subject field which can be edited. Try it here.

If you are curious how many peers your client is connected to, mouse over the middle icon in the lower right corner (connection bars) - you will be able to see the count:



If number of connections is stuck at eight for more than several hours, you may have a system then does not allow incoming connections. Try going to Settings>Options>Network and choose "map port using UPnP". Restart the client, see how it goes. A general consensus is that running an honest node like this helps the network.

Great initiative. It would be nice to have a short video demonstration of typical usecases. A friend from a western country sends bitcoins to an address; only an hour later, the recipient in Kenya spends some of it from her mobile phone, the merchant may be using a phone, too. To set the expectations right and avoid disappointements, it should be mentioned that this is still a young technology, but growing every day.

The U.S. government went really harsh after online gambling businesses 5-10 years ago; I am somewhat concerned that Bitcoin in general may end up taking heavy beating ("we don't do body counts" is the stated U.S. government approach to pursuing their agenda).

This is where Bitcoin Foundation and vanilla businesses come in - educating the public, the law enforcement, and the representatives about all the facets of this wonderful technology.

Thanks for clarifying.

Just searched this thread for "tso" and for "order" and failed to find the victim. Would you please point to the specific post?

No victim, no crime?  It appears that so far nobody fell for this scam, and without victims stepping forward, authorities will not act. Fair enough. In the meantime, we should try and guess who is behind this, per Phinn's suggestion. Writing style, misspellings, mindset...

Tried again with bitcoin-0.7.1-313-g4fb7372-win32.zip - successfully downloaded blocks and verified, from scratch. It took about 11 hours. Setup the same as in my earlier posts here:
Windows XP SP3
Pentium M, 1.6 GHz
760 MB RAM
bitcoin-qt.exe -connect=192.168.0.xxx -logtimestamps -benchmark

Peak memory usage ~180MB.

There may have been a WiFi problem towards the end of download (or client got stuck doing nothing). Finally I restarted it with port forwarding and made ~20 connections within hours. Received and sent coins.

All in all, even this weakling can download (via LAN) and verify complete blockchain overnight.

Minor issues:

- download progress bar still disappearing towards the end of download
- it says "processed X of 210000 blocks" - even though we are well past 210000
- CPU usage for the first ~third of blocks is 40%-100%, then it slows down to 0%-40% for the most part - not sure what the bottleneck is
- verification slows down progressively; would it make sense to base progress bar on megabytes, not on the block count?

By the same token, back in GPU days anyone could have invested a couple of millions of dollars and bought enough GPUs to have 51% of the network - for a while, anyway. Was there a problem? Now anyone could invest in and build FPGAs or ASICs to do the same - for a while, anyway. This topic has been regurgitated over and over again, plenty to read and think about. I'm not worried about it.

Great news, kudos to engineers behind this project. This will look wonderful on your resumes!

How is it annoying? If it was a discussion about something that is still relevant, I see no problem - on the contrary, it is better than fragmenting and duplicating the same discussion over multiple threads.
Another good reason to necro a thread is to check how past predictions and analyses worked out.

These are good questions, and are answered - along with many more - in the Wiki. The FAQ section is a good place to start. Another good resource is the Stack Exchange. Finally, technical reference paper ("the" Bitcoin paper) is available for download from bitcoin.org.

Have fun, and keep in mind that Bitcoin is still in its infancy, going through growing pains and exciting times...

Optional traceability may be one of Bitcoin's strengths. It is a fact that in most countries today governments and private corporations can and do trace every penny that people spend. People, on the other hand, have no access to similar information about spending habbits of governments and corporations. Bitcoin ledger is public, and - if desired - can be used to audit spending and balances of entities using it.

I wish it to be less preaching-to-the-choir, and more of an opportunity for bitcoin-curious businesses to see demonstrations and attend lectures and hands-on workshops. Besides that, bitcoiners should get together for brainstorming sessions and hackathons.