Yeah, it looks like the Mt Gox API was down for a bit. I'm thinking about switching to a different exchange, or maybe even making it an average of a few. Any suggestions of which one(s) I should use?

It would also be possible to let the user specify the exchange to use when generating the image.

Thoughts?

We're still mining, but it's definitely getting close to the "not-worth-it" point. One issue is that each payment needs to be over 0.00005430 BTC for the client to send it, and with the shares spread out over so many people, the payment per account is tiny until it has been mining for months. I made a payment today almost 3 months since the last one and there will still some accounts that were under that limit. I had to manually remove those and will need to carry over the unpaid earnings for the next payment... an extra pain in the neck for me.

So, my plan at the moment is to just continue letting the FPGAs do their thing, and checking on the earnings occasionally. When it's enough for the majority of shareholders to receive a payment, I'll make one. I'll keep an eye on the difficulty/price ratio and not mine when the cost of power outweighs the earnings. At that point, we should discuss selling the boards off. Thoughts on that plan?

Today's payment txid: 986d9a5048e9b29ed4af96c3868f981955e645b9529c3ff93e511751480a91b0

Payment time:

txid: 2487f5d874a344c4c77f3578634c6e659b52f18213f369e6b8d37a9b015dbab1

Sorry, I don't seem to be getting notifications from the forum these days, so I didn't see your reply. What kind of stuff would you be interested in helping with? Design? Backend? DB? The site is Python/Flask/MongoDB. The biggest thing to figure out right now is how to restructure the DB for pooled work. I have a basic idea down for using user accounts for requestors (each account maintaining a balance to pay PPS rewards, spread over all outstanding requests from a given user). Miners don't need accounts, but I'd like to copy the Eligius model to let a miner view some stats for a given payout address. I'd also like to get a nice API up.

Structuring the DB will be a task we would need to do together, but either of the other two things could be tasks you could mostly take on yourself. Interested?

Thanks!

And, another payment:

txid: 05096425978646edb4adf6ff176eea2aa9dfd7defa18891fa77c93cc8e941af2

Sexy.

A side note, I am still working on this project, albeit slowly. If there is anyone that would like to collaborate on it, please let me know!

Another payment!

159574c5c5919a15cea9c1e1aa860e2aca3f9706e05c7a2fa0c0e12e42c053f6

So true! Whether or not Nelson is correct, I absolutely loved his presentation.

Fair enough. I'll keep your bid in mind. I didn't think anyone would really want to replace the screen, but cool idea. Might consider doing it myself.

Anyone else?

Bump

To be clear, this is not split-key generation. If you use the -E or -e option, you are just encrypting the address, but you still have full access to it, so this isn't secure for the other person.

As vv01f suggested, instead of -E, change that to -P (followed by their public key). You will provide to your friend the "PrivKey" that oclvanitygen will print out when finished. He or she can then use bitaddress.org to combine the two (their private key + this partial private key) to produce the final private key and address.

Ah, you're talking about proxying the work and turning it into PPS. This is an interesting idea, but would be extremely risky for me. I would have to pay for each share submitted, but could potentially never get paid myself. I could remove the risk by logging shares, then paying out proportionally instead of PPS. Either way, I think I'll save these ideas to possibly be implemented further down the line.

Thanks for testing!

I worry that proxying work from other pools could potentially get me in trouble. If the work is proxied, I will be receiving the full solution and, in theory, could swap the payout address for my own. The reason I worry about this is that the other pool operator could essentially frame me by doing this themselves if they see the solution came from my end. I would have no way to prove to the miner that I didn't do this. If there was some way to protect from this, I'd gladly do it but I don't see a solution at this point.

Anyway, the real goal is to get PPS working so that this is the first truly pooled vanity address site. Another thing on my wishlist is some client side javascript for the user to generate ECDSA keypairs and combine private key solutions.

I'm hoping to get all that worked out in the next few weeks. If anyone would like to contribute to the javascript part, I'd love to work out a partnership!

Seeing as I've had no offers, I'll reduce my asking price to 1.2 BTC. I'm not in a hurry to sell, just looking to get a fair price for this. Thanks!

Thanks for everyone's thoughts on this. I really appreciate your help! It looks to me like PPS is the way to go, and I'm starting to figure out how to implement it. It will take some time.

If anyone's curious, the alpha version of the site is up. This is without PPS, so it's not too exciting for now. I'd appreciate any feedback, though. Thanks!

http://vanityamp.com

There are a few tabs mixed in there. That should cause problems on some systems: lines 324, 331, 333, 334, 338. The 'bytes' issues are definitely due to using python3: http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html#text-vs-data-instead-of-unicode-vs-8-bit

Should be easy enough to fix that up, though. Throw the code up on github and I'm sure someone will do it.

Why would you go through all that trouble for security, but allow these people to have full access to your wallet? Buy your own engraver and bury the "wallet" in your backyard!

http://www.amazon.com/Dremel-290-01-Stroke-Engraver-Template/dp/B0000302YN

Bumpity