Like I linked, 22 have reported in the forums buying the SCMiniRigs. I know 3 people personally who've ordered 1 who don't post on the forums here. You have to assume there are many who aren't reporting. If you then consider it takes equivalent only 25 Singles to compare to a miniRig, the estimates of those ordered is in the near 100-400, and only 286 jalepenos make a miniRig, and the number those are probable thousands ordered. The terrahash/s is going to skyrocket at the exact pace they are able to rollout product. Those in the early order lists may only get a few weeks of goldrush before the rush fades back to mild to low mining income again especially after the BTC halving in Dec. Difficulty projections by Jan/Feb are already estimated near 70mil from the 2.6mil it is today.

There are a good many major concerns related to if they are able to achieve delivery. First is the fact that if they ship even 12 SC mini rigs (or any combination of jalepenos and singles to match that), the total network computational speed doubles. Doubling will mean doubling difficulty within shorter time-frames, especially if rollout is slow. If you speculate that the company may have already sold 100 or more equivalent minirigs, then you must expect the spike will be 8 times the present difficulty. That could be an underestimate as well if you consider that butterfly labs may be hedging their bets and running their own wharehouse of rigs first before delivering to customers. We've already seen computational speed double in the past 2 months, and I'm not saying it is but it could be them. The next major issue is mining percentages cut in half this December. Throw in the fact that they may have delivery challenges. You could order today and not see your SCs for months out. By then, you might not even be lucky enough to have the thing pay for itself after a 6-12 months. There are a number of variables and Butterfly holds all the cards. To me, it looks like another set of ponzi graphs ahead.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89521.120
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89538.0

If you follow these threads, or track the poll, you'll find network estimates are WAY above my network computational estimates above.

qikaifu: That is already an option as part of the www.automtgox.com service.

To set this up, you would specify a percentage to send received bitcoins to another bitcoin address before conversion.

I thought I'd hear something back by now but I haven't.

In any case, the only thing I can suggest is remove the Api Key and Secret from the header and see if your application still works. If it does, it means that your key/secret isn't actually being used and the un&pw is getting precedence.

I looked at your code, it looks good to me. So the only next thing I can think that is requiring un/pw is you haven't gone to your mtgox api page and set the necessary rights for that key. Check all to on. If you don't know what I mean, you can check out the videos on www.automtgox.com. There's a part in the 2nd video that shows how to set api keys.

Anyway, once the rights are assigned, you shouldn't need to pass the un/pw.

Thank you for your input.


We have no problem if MtGox were to provide the services we do. It would be more efficient actually. We built our service out of personal need because they do not.


The 5-10 minute wait is certainly a concern we have no control over. It may even be longer in some cases. This is entirely based on how many block checks MtGox requires.  This issue may actually justify only targeting business that take phone sales.


We already worked out the name of the business with Mark from MtGox. Our goal in including MtGox in the name wasn't to borrow on the success of the brand as much as try to state clearly that our relationship to your money is through the MtGox service. Our business only AUTOmates the functions of managing your wallets on MTGOX.  On reflection, it probably wasn't as keen as we hoped.


Along the same automation concept, we also have discussed setting up another business that allowed day-trading based on rules like buy at ___ and sell at ___ within some rotation of 7 day basis points.

Again, we won't be investing the time if interest is not evident.



 

http://www.automtgox.com

AutoMtGox is considering adding Merchant Services which would allow ANY retail owner a way to accept bitcoins from customers immediately at checkout, as long as they have a smartphone or pc monitor that they can turn to show to a customer.


How it would work is as follows (for retail in-store)...

• Customer indicates interest to pay with bitcoins
• Retailer connects browser on smartphone or PC to a bookmarked page on the automtgox website
• Retailer enters price in US Dollars and cost in bitcoins is returned with a wallet address, btc.to code and QR Code to have bitcoins sent to.
• Customer is shown the various address input methods and amount to send bitcoins.
• Customer sends bitcoins to address.
• Retailer is emailed a notification when bitcoins have been received with a link to confirm.
• Retailer clicks on link and browser shows payment information as well as the progress of conversion to US Dollars and sent to your bank.
• Sale is complete.

Process takes maybe 5-10 mins.

(for over the phone or email sale)...

• Customer indicates interest to pay with bitcoins
• Retailer connects browser on smartphone or PC to a bookmarked page on the automtgox website
• Retailer enters price in US Dollars and cost in bitcoins is returned
• Retailer retrieves or requests customer's email and clicks link to send email to customer.
• Customer receives email with amount requested and wallet address, btc.to code and QR Code to have bitcoins sent to.
• Customer sends bitcoins to address.
• Retailer is emailed a notification when bitcoins have been received with a link to confirm.
• Retailer clicks on link and browser shows payment information as well as the progress of conversion to US Dollars and sent to your bank.
• Retailer ships item at leisure.

It's a pretty rudimentary system but it works. AutoMtGox already converts bitcoins to US Dollars reliably based on the rules you set up so the only things we'd need to build are the following:

• Merchant Set-up Screen with margin over exchange rate to calculate bitcoins prices, btc.to address, and email notification settings
• Email alert notifications and customer email
• Merchant & Customer URL & pages
• Account poll-rate increase when merchant sales are triggered.

It's a lot of work but we want to take a stab at user interest here before we invest the effort. Please respond if this would be of interest to you...

Oh and of course, as before.. your bitcoins and US Dollars are safe on MtGox. What makes us different is we never hold your wallet or your money.

I notified mark and I've updated the wiki's api for discussion.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with using the username and password strategy, but it does compromise the security of the user's private account and defeats the ENTIRE purpose of the api key/secret rights.

I mean, if its a personal application, it doesn't hurt anything, but if it's an application like www.automtgox.com, a service; there's a piece of mind I want to provide my customers. I shouldn't have  their passwords on other services.


I know why this happened too. It is because the old password implementation is still functional and coders are having a lot of trouble getting the key/secret model working and there are a hundred articles still out there describing how to use the old api with username and password.

But to prove I'm not crazy, this is the information on MtGox about key/secret. The wiki used to reflect the same information, and now it doesn't... Note that it does not mention user name or password.

https://mtgox.com/support/tradeAPI

The implementation I gave works and doesn't require username or password.

The whole point of an api key/secret implementation is to give user control of their account so they can revoke rights to an application. If they give up their username and password to applications, they can't guarantee that the application owner won't hijack the account. User should NEVER give out user name and passwords.  That's the whole point.

Anyway, I'll let them know over at MtGox that someone has compromised the wiki. Or maybe something changed recently that I don't know about.

hex, I am confused by your implementation. I see you include in your request username and password. Does your model allow for either username/password or key/secret to be passed?

Did anyone see Episode 44 of The Bitcoin Show with the lawyer?

He makes an interesting and excellent point about having certification authority body for bitcoin businesses. It seems to me, with that, some level of reassurance could be established to promote businesses that meet certain criteria, especially with regard to financial exchange.

http://onlyonetv.com/2011/09/the-bitcoin-show-episode-044/

Statistics show 8 active users. Active is defined as having actually exchanged Bitcoins to USD through our system. We've had a lot of new users recently join or begin testing but we shall see if they convert to active when exchange rates improve. I don't know how many have been from the forums.

If we receive more merchant interest, we'll provide additional features like email notification upon discovery of received bitcoins in account, and when conversion of cash occurred.

Clearly this isn't a full merchant cart solution, but it makes for an excellent staging area to test the concept of accepting bitcoins. A retail store owner can accept bitcoins and immediately reduce exposure to the volatility of the bitcoin market with full conversion to cash only taking a few minutes.

Right now, I use it for my mining for the same reason, to reduce exposure to this volatile market. I still keep bitcoins for other purposes and speculation, but I needed a continuous way to reduce risk.

I'm in agreement. I expect difficulty averages would level around here since mining profitability has been seriously thwarted for anyone investing in new equipment, while 7-day moving averages have lowered, and summer electric rates are still in effect (at least for part of the U.S. anyway). ROIs have converted from months to years with the edge too close, especially with exchange rates so volatile and testing new lows. ROIs can flip from positive to negative within a few hours and that should scare a number of higher cost miners out.

The video is back. I'm reporting it violation of terms of service and all its incarnations. You should too.

Still going strong... I'm happy to report users of our service are on a slow rise.

If this helps, ...

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Automtgox

I've been thinking more about your concern...


May I ask what you perceive your risk to trying the service to be?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but whether the business address is known or unknown, if the service solves a personal need of yours, wouldn't it make sense to at least try it out with a few bitcoins ?

I mean, either the service will 1) do as advertised, or 2) it'll rob you blind.


Do you honestly think that a service that doesn't hold or keep your assets, that you can immediately revoke rights to, that you could easily shutdown with a few posts on the forums, that is constantly liquidating your assets so your balances are always kept minimal, ... could actually be motivated to rob you?


Even if AutoMtGox went down, all of a sudden, all your assets would still be available to only you on MtGox, not AutoMtGox.


I made sure that these risk concerns were built into a total solution, as they were my concerns as well. We recognize bitcoin users are jaded after the recent series of hacks and shutdowns, but we also recognize you're a highly intelligent crowd with a high aptitude to understand what you risk using a solution like this for. We expect you will recognize they are minimal, and that they can be further reduced through fine-tuning of your settings or limiting your transfer of bitcoins to our service.


I personally hope you guys will try the service. I've been using it for the past 2 months as a way to reduce my mining operation exposure to btc cost risk before I convinced the author to make the service available to the public.

There is no expectation we're going to get rich here. We just hope to make enough to pay for the service and provide a means to make bitcoins more accessible since it seems to be a big barrier to entry for some. We think the best way is by making bitcoins to US Dollars an easier transition and we know that better solutions will evolve beyond our complicated solution.

But we're offering it to you because, as far as we know, it's the only best solution right now.


So ... please help me help the community.
What do we need to do to convince everyone who'd be interested to try?

I will pass your concern to the owner. I didn't know he did that. However, I'm betting the simple answer has more to do with the fact that his home address is his business address.

Still, your feedback is valuable. I'm sure other's share your concern.

The quotation from the FAQ you noted above was an error on the page. The faq wasn't displaying the number before the percent. I just checked and its been fixed.

As I understand it, AutoMtGox connects to YOUR MtGox account via an API (kind of how MtGox mobile does), so the fees that MtGox or Dwolla charge are independent and still taken in their traditional ways, as they are your accounts.

Check the FAQ again for AutoMtGox's fee. I don't like posting facts like that on forums in case the information changes.

I'm going to try to come...