I wanted to easily see if my (hilariously small amount of) Bitcoins gained or lost value, but I just couldn't find a tool that did the job to my satisfaction.

Therefore I present the Bitcoin Utility Belt for Google Chrome (holy cow, it's a browser extension!):

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-utility-belt/bejgfgaachlgfbdboheckmhpfodgfien



Utilities in the belt so far, from top to bottom:

• Currency Converter (also shows current BTC in USD value from MtGox)
  
• Profit/Loss display of Bitcoins you bought
• Graph showing the last 24 hours of BTC/USD value

I hope you'll find it as useful as I do. This is the first (public) release, so there will be bugs, I just know it. I'll watch the thread for any sightings of those pesky critters.

Hi, I'd be interested in a $50 Visa card. If I understand it correctly that would be $50 + $7 (14% fee) + $5,95 (activation) = $62.95, right?

How long would it take to get the code (via PM, I'm outside U.S.)? Would be great if I would have the code ready to use before Friday, June 1st. I've not used a U.S. Prepaid Visa before, is there a name associated with the card and is it going to be mine and if not is that going to be a problem at online stores (mainly Desura and Kickstarter) where I want to buy using my own name?

I got the number error when I wanted to create a new chain with 6 blocks per hour and 50 coins per block. On the old site it worked to just enter 50.0 and 6.0 instead. On the new site that doesn't seem to work.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have users pay "electricity fees" for their rigs. It makes things more realistic and it also solves the problem of everyone just buying a ton of rigs right from the beginning because you could make a loss if you aren't careful. If your balance reaches zero, all your rigs would automatically be turned off.

I often get an error that tells me to enter only numbers when that is exactly what I am doing. This was with the old site and is still happening with the new site. This happens when buying/selling stuff on the exchange and when creating a new chain. Other than that I found one new problem, choosing which chain to mine and upgrading a rig doesn't seem to work in Google Chrome. Works fine in Firefox.

The game itself.. The idea is very interesting, it could be a lot of fun. The biggest problem the game has right now is in my opinion that rigs and upgrades are way too cheap. There is really no reason for anyone not to just buy a few dozen rigs and instantly upgrade every rig to maximum.

I don't see this as a negative thing at all. Quite the opposite, it's a very positive development. A lot of the most popular open source projects have or had at some point the backing of one or more companies. Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, Linux, Wine, VirtualBox, Blender, Open Office, etc. Open source is great but the bad thing about it is that somehow people completely lost respect for the job of "software developer". It seems like they don't feel software developers are entitled to receive money for working which is absurd. Gavin now having a commercial interest in Bitcoin means he is much less likely to stop developing Bitcoin at some point due to a loss of interest and it also means he can spend more time on it. And it's in TruCoin's best interest to help Bitcoin succeed. There is of course a risk but the way Bitcoin works makes this risk rather minimal. If some or all of the developers of the Bitcoin client at some point decide to do something that the majority (51%) of the community doesn't like, people will just use a fork or a different client and the current developers would loose control over Bitcoin which solves the problem.

Thanks But that wouldn't help. I would still have to deal with customs because of the children's books. I don't want to dodge taxes on the bitcoins or anything, I just don't want to deal with the customs office because their bureaucratic process is way too sadistic for my taste.

Is there any chance the coins will be available through a distributor in europe at some point? I'd buy a couple as presents (and one for myself because they're awesome) but not if I have to deal with customs. The last time I had to was when I bought some merchandising from the U.S. You wouldn't believe the amount of documents I had to send in before I finally received the parcel. And then the postman who delivered the parcel and collected the customs fees didn't have any idea if he needed to do anything special, like letting me sign some extra paperwork, so after a minute or two he just gave me the parcel reluctantly.

I did, thanks a lot

Sent a pm, bitcoins and used the form on nothingsteamed.com

Looks like the first two videos of talks from the Bitcoin Conference are now online at: http://onlyonetv.com/category/shows/the-bitcoin-show/

1) Jeff Garzik a Linux Kernel and Bitcoin developer speaks about the state of Bitcoin

http://onlyonetv.com/2011/08/the-bitcoin-show-special-bitcoin-conference-coverage-jeff-garzik/

2) Stefan Thomas of weusecoins.com and BitcoinJS talks about BitcoinJS development

http://onlyonetv.com/2011/08/the-bitcoin-show-special-bitcoin-conference-coverage-stefan-thomas/

If your keyboard has a Windows key you can press the Windows key and the R key together to execute a command. Just write cmd and hit enter, this opens the Windows console. Then navigate to your namecoin folder and to execute a command write:

namecoind.exe TheCommandYouWantToExecute

and hit enter. The help command gives you a list of all the commands (namecoind.exe help).

If your keyboard doesn't have a Windows key but you are using Vista or Windows 7 you can just click on Window's Start button in the task bar and enter cmd into the search field, then hit enter. On Windows XP you can use the Alt + F2 key if I remember correctly.

It takes quite a few hours for the initial download of the block chain and whenever you start the Bitcoin client, it can take a couple of minutes before new blocks are downloaded. The client doesn't show you how many blocks there are left to download but you can check the current number of blocks yourself at http://bitcoinwatch.com for example.

I wasn't able to watch the live stream but I watched the three recorded episodes of the Bitcoin show. There seems to be some pretty exciting stuff coming. I wonder if Bitcoindeals will make sense for international customers. It was said that the site will be open for international customers when it launches publicly, but if the items are sent only from the U.S. it's not really interesting to me personally since shipping from the U.S. usually costs $20 and that's just not worth it for most things. The other thing I found interesting was the idea of an online wallet that doesn't have direct access to your bitcoins. After reading about what happened with mybitcoins I don't think I'd ever trust any ewallet service with more than pocket change.

Here's one related to money, from a Discworld novel so send Terry Pratchett a bitcent for it

A one dollar bill is the promise that you will receive 1 dollar worth of gold as long as you don't actually ask for it.

It's funny because it's true, money is an empty promise but still people believe in it.

71 on an ATI HD 5570 which is why I only tried mining for about an hour and then decided it's not worth my time. It is very useful to stress test the GPU though, to look for cooling problems for example

Hi there!

My name's Chris, I found out about Bitcoin a couple of months ago but just started using it very recently (now of course I wish I had been using it way sooner ). I'm still a bit undecided on Bitcoins but it's certainly very exciting to see how Bitcoin develops.