Auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=221432131398

Was used in a media center computer for a year. Using a raspberry pi now, so I don't need this anymore.

Auction: http://www.ebay.com/itm/221431448891

Use solidly for about 5 months of litecoin mining during the winter.

Auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=221431468174

I have decided to pull any bitcoins and altcoins off of every exchange I was using until those (or other) exchanges start regularly and publicly demonstrating solvency, preferably cryptographically.

BTC-E announced recently that they would be publishing financial statements, verified by an external audit, on a regular basis. I look forward to seeing progress on that.

I don't follow this logic. Are you saying I should trust a random idiot more than someone who has established trust with me?


If you mention you support jury nullification, you'll be disqualified.

Random idiots are often swayed by the appearance of authority. Random idiots, in groups, often justify the use of violence against non-violent individuals.


I never claimed I had such a solution. I only wondered if "picking somebody randomly to make important decisions" was truly a good principle or not.

Because there's nothing which says "you must use bitcoin or forfeit your life," that makes it significantly more democratic than any "current implementations of democracy."

The same is not true for the aforementioned "current implementations of democracy."  Suppose I live in the US and I do not support any war. The fact is that I am required "by law" to fund it. What that means is if I refuse to fund it (by not paying taxes), I can face many years in a cage, and if I resist, I can be shot. Yes, I'm permitted to verbally disagree, yet I have no freedom to disagree financially.

If I disagree with "bitcoin," the alternatives do not threaten my person or property.

How does "picking somebody randomly to make important decisions" remain a good idea?

Exactly which American laws has Mt Gox violated, and how?

Exactly what information does the blockchain provide to the IRS that would implicate a person in tax fraud?

No victim = no crime. Who's the victim with regards to "insider trading"? Is Inside Trading Really a Crime?

The SEC destroys markets, it doesn't make them safer:

Madoff and the Failure of the SEC
The SEC Makes Wall Street More Fraudulent
The SEC Short Sells Us Down the River

I use blockchain.info

The way it works is simple. You go to a merchant that accepts bitcoin. You negotiate a price. The merchant presents you with a bitcoin address to send a payment to. The easiest way to do this is to show you a QR code that you can then scan using your phone. You send the required bitcoins and leave the store with your goodies.


What happens if you lose your wallet or purse? Advice: only keep as much cash on you as you intend to spend. Don't keep your life savings in your wallet or purse, and definitely don't keep your entire bitcoin stash accessible from your phone. Suppose that you do lose your phone though. You would still be able to access your blockchain.info wallet from the website directly and retrieve any balance you had saved. Anyone that finds your phone isn't going to get the coins right away unless they know what they are doing. Access to the app is going to require a 4 digit pin, and after a number of incorrect attempts (5, I think), then you need to enter the full password.

The recommendation here is to have a phone-only wallet that has a small balance.

Can you explain how this is being calculated?

Suppose [insert ASIC producer here] has manufactured 10,000 units. Among their choices are to either sell those units, or, use them directly to mine bitcoins.

Which path would be the most profitable? There's not enough variables here to answer this question, so we would need to fill in some blanks.

Suppose they have a full 2016 blocks before the next difficulty adjustment. That's 50,400 bitcoins (25*2016), $5,797,000 USD at $115 USD/coin.

Suppose that each of the 10000 units is capable of running at 5GH/s. That would give them an effective hash rate of 50 TH/s.

Current estimated network hash rate is around 88 TH/s, giving a total network hash rate of 138 TH/s.

According to allchains:

MH/s: 50,000,000 (5000 * 10000)
Watts: 300,000 (30 * 10000)
$/KwH: 0.10
Cost/Day: $720
Difficulty: 11171715.45
Coin/Day: 2250.837
$/Coin: 114.01
Total profit: $255897.916 (per day)
Per unit: $25.6

A block is ideally generated every 10 minutes. That's 144 blocks per day, or 3600 bitcoins.

The next difficulty adjustment would occur in approximately 8 days. Per unit profit for that difficulty period would be about 8*25.6 = $204.8.

Assuming the network hash rate stays around 138 TH/s, the next difficulty adjustment would be about 19 million.

They would be pulling in about 1311 coins per day @ $148816 total profit, or $14.8 per unit. Assuming a full two weeks before the next adjustment (unlikely), that would result in $192.4 profit per unit.

Total per unit profit for the two periods is close to $400, assuming a lot of factors including the bitcoin price remaining steady and no other ASIC sellers doing the same thing.

Managing and configuring 10000 units is not a free exercise. At 5 minutes per unit, that's 34 full days of work, or 104 eight-hour days. Suppose that you could hire 104 people and pay them 20 an hour and get it done in a day, costing you about $16640, or about $1.66 per unit.

If the 5GH/s units were being sold @ $500 each, that means $500 now versus potentially $400 in a few weeks time.

Of course, BFL isn't selling for $500, they are selling for $274. Why might that be? I suspect it's because units aren't being shipped as they are ordered. Instead, anyone who orders now may not get a unit for several months. How much would you pay for a 5GH/s unit if you could get it in a couple days? $500? $1000?

clusterssh and screen

I've gotten an answer on this directly from bter.

Turns out it isn't a direct restriction.

The problem is that a number of users have reported that the transaction is very slow, as a result of the mining pool not including a tx fee and having a lot of activity. But it does apparently work, it just might take longer than you might prefer or expect.

Rather than dealing with users complaining about their deposits not showing up, they just tell you not to do it.

I'm looking for an answer to this question myself.

Thanks for sharing this information dreamwatcher.

You said that you were not going to go into the errors in all of those, I was wondering what errors you were referring to. Is it incorrect to say that you cannot use the same private key (64 character hexadecimal format) for any altcoin? I understand that the WIF and WIF compressed formats will be different for each, which is what is listed as "Privkey" by vanitygen.

Sort of. You can have the same private key, which would have a different public address for each altcoin.

I did actually compare the liteaddress source with the bitaddress source.

I did actually scan through the differences between the litecoin-qt source and feathercoin source.

Unfortunately, while I have a general idea of how the addresses could be generated, I have no way of testing it.

All of the altcoin private keys can be generated using sha256. The problem is generating the correct public address from that private address.

As far as I am ware, that isn't setup for FTC or CHN/CNC. If it is, could you explain or provide a link?