I agree with this. It would seem that most of the moping, groaning and whining are a result of "oh, I can't actually hedge my bet against being cheated(pirateat40'ed)? Now I feel even dumber than I did when I actually got cheated. I R ANGRY FOR BEING MADE TO LOOK LIKE A FOOL, TWICE!!@$&%"

Possible that Deepbit is redirecting some of its hashrate and the pool op is lining his pockets with unreported blocks? kinda explains why they've had bad luck recently

When SHA256 is cracked open like a redheaded kid stealing magical breakfast meats and getting a 1970s asswhooping for it.

Pretty much what Graet said. Don't go and buy new GPU's unless you intend to use them(gaming) beyond the point when GPU is profitable, or you're able to sell them when GPU becomes unprofitable(costs the average person more in electricity to run the card than it pays out.)

Some factors to consider:  How much do you pay for electricity? Will you be able to sell the GPU for enough to make it worth it while mining with them is still viable?

There is alot of skepticism surrounding the production and utilization of ASIC devices. It's all been a gamble since the $30 bubble of June '11 and subsequent decline; the new gamble is investing in ASIC hardware. Alot of people have put their bets in ASIC development, but even more people have said it's BS.

If I were you, I'd try and pick up GPU's 2nd hand for cheap, and try to re-sell them to gamers in late December for pretty much what you paid for them. That way your only real investment is purchasing the electricity used to power the card(s) for a few months and stack some coins to hold onto. I'm becoming less skeptical of ASIC devices myself as there are now 3 different vendors offering pre-orders, not just butterfly labs. Of course it could just be "hey, that guy's doing a long con, I should do one too"...

Hi. I like porn. Alot of people like porn. Alot of people have wives that stay at home and can't wait for your credit card statement to come in via snail mail so they can open it and catch you red-handed with "shady" charges on your card.

As far as a "for profit" business model based around BTC goes...?

Offer a service that will pay subscription based fees on the behalf of the Bitcoin sender. Subscriptions to Porn sites, subscriptions to MMORPGs like WoW, etc... things people don't want to show up on their credit card statements for whatever reason. This seems like it'd be viable simply because part of the beauty of BTC is the anonymity that comes along with it. A bitcoin related service that supports this anonymity would be quite popular I imagine.

In essence, it would just serve as a payment proxy. Let's say "Client X" wants to purchase a 3 month membership to Brazzers, a porn site, for $59.97, which is the actual price. Client X then sends you the equivalent in Bitcoins, roughly 6 coins at current value(plus a small fee, say 1%), and then you charge the $59.97 to your debit/credit card and hand over the login info. You get paid for providing the service of true anonymity, and your client is happy that no paper trail will ever rear its ugly head. I suppose the same could be accomplished by purchasing a pre-paid Visa card.. hmm.....

Anyway, I'm not interested in starting up a business like this, but I think there's a market for it, especially in countries that don't have pre-paid plastic.

Hi. I am poop ghost. I don't like banks. Donate to me if you like how your toilet takes away your excrement waste.

Hi Madara. Welcome to the forums. To answer your questions,:

1)  When a Bitcoin client is loading blocks, it is loading a complete history of every transaction that has taken place over the Bitcoin network. When a "block" is successfully mined by a user, that block contains all of the transaction information that has taken place over the entire network since the last block was found. The 0.5 BTC you have made so far was carried on these blocks, and the entire network confirms that these 0.5 BTC indeed belong to you. Think of it as a way of proving that the transaction(s) took place. As for the amount of space taken up on your PC, you should have at least 3GB of hard drive space (not to be confused with RAM) free and dedicated to storing the block index. As of this writing, the block index is only 2.7GB large, but will get bigger as time goes on and more blocks are discovered by the network. When you open your wallet up again in the future, you will only need to load the blocks that have been discovered since the last time the wallet was up-to-date.

2)  This question is hard for me to answer; I've never tried buying BTC directly with a debit card. Credit cards are a no-go because you could just charge-back the charge and reverse the transaction, so nobody will accept credit card payment for BTC. However, you can buy Second Life Linden with credit, and then sell those same Linden for BTC. As of this writing, Second Life Linden is the 3rd largest volume exchange for BTC.

3)  Unfortunately mining with Processor power is no longer viable, so your dual-core won't do much good here. The nVidia 4500 GPU is not capable of OpenCL, and OpenCL is needed for mining with a GPU(even so, nVidia cards are no good for mining. You want ATI/AMD video card/GPU). As for the laptop, it's typically not a good idea to mine for BTC with laptops due to heat issues, even if they do have an ATI/AMD GPU in them. You don't want to overheat your laptop and have it permanently crash on you. A typical dual-core CPU will mine at roughly 2 megahash/s, which would yield all of... 0.000001 BTC every 24 hours? Rough estimation, but yeah, not worth it. You want to mine with a GPU/video card, or specialized mining equipment such as an FPGA or ASIC.

4)  Other than the free bitcoin "faucets" which you have apparently already found, there is no way to get "free" bitcoins without mining them yourself, and I've covered mining with the 3rd answer above. However, there are ways to get Bitcoin by doing "work" over the internet; www.bitcoinjobs.com , www.reddit.com/r/gonewild ... These sites offer to pay you in Bitcoin for jobs/services.



I hope these answers help!  Enjoy, and good luck!

I trust myself. Me. I. Had a buddy that was also mining coins, had 300ish right around the $30 spike in June '11, he had left them on Gox prior to the spike. He logged in to cash out, only to find out his account was compromised. I asked why he left them on Gox instead of a personal wallet, his best answer was "I can't trust myself".. ie, accidently formatting the drive where the wallet was stored and not remembering, storing the wallet in a Truecrypt volume and not remembering the password to said volume, etc.. I mean these are totally fail reasons and dude friend of mine, bad as he is with his own money, should ask himself one thing...

Who do you trust more? Somebody who is you, or somebody is not you? The former should be the answer every time.

All late model Mac laptops come with either Intel HD graphics, or nVidia GeForce "M" solutions, neither of which are good for mining. It will cost you more in electricity to keep them running than they will return at current value, not to mention ruin your overpriced hardware via overheating. The late-2011 iMac model comes with a special slim version of the Radeon 6970; if you want to mine for BTC with Mac hardware, this is your best bet. Apple as a whole isn't very bitcoin friendly..

OP is offering cyber-security services in another thread, yet can't figure out how the client works?
Fail troll is fail..

At current difficulty, it takes ~52,000 shares to make 1 BTC at BTCguild, which charges 5% for PPS.

To make 52,000 shares daily, you need ~2,650MH/s/24hours.  Hope this helps.

At current difficulty, 1400mh/s should be netting you around half a coin a day. If difficulty goes up 5% every 2 weeks, then it will take 84.333~ days until the block reward is halved, leaving you with approximately 40 bitcoins. Still enough coins to play around with, and you will thank yourself if the value skyrockets.

Second hard drive, couple different flash drives, and a netbook that I keep at my friend's house just in case mine burns down . Flash drives and netbook are stored as Truecrypt volumes. Don't keep your wallets hosted at a cloud/dropbox unless it's encrypted/hidden or some shady admin will just take it.

It *should* be upward-bound, and would be if not for all the skepticism encircling Butterfly Labs and their ASIC products.

If BFL does actually produce their SC line of products, it will mean very scary things for your average every day miner. Even though there are lots of FPGA modules available for purchase from various manufacturers, the "meat" of block creation is still GPU mining. The release of FPGAs didn't impact the viability of GPU mining all that much because the speeds are in the same neighborhood (Overclocked 7970 GPU ~650MH, BFL FPGA Single ~830MH). If BFL releases even 1/10th of the ASIC products that they have pre-orders for, the difficulty will just about double in a mere matter of weeks.

This is all compounded by the fact that the block reward will be cut in half sometime in early December. Enthusiasm for the currency as a whole will be drastically reduced on the miner-side if GPU mining is no longer viable unless you have free electricity, and even then, it won't be nearly as profitable. Who wants to run their cards at high temperatures for next to no reward?

The bottom line is... If ASICs make it out onto the market, you better have one, or you'll be making a fraction of what you're making now with GPUs. I'd rather have tens of thousands of users under 1GH/s mining/trading/spending coins, than a couple hundred users close to or over 1TH/s. Fewer users and less enthusiasm amongst the community means a drop in value.

We all know what happens when the majority of wealth in an economy is limited to the privileged few.

Details   2012-09-02 10:09:18   lessthan 1   26631073   63f59df5   13ckc67   PENDING   0.00100000   LOSE   0.00000001   17206

Details   2012-09-02 10:09:17   lessthan 8000   26631073   9db09520   13ckc67   PENDING   0.02000000   LOSE   0.00000001   17206

Details   2012-09-02 10:09:16   lessthan 16000   26631073   c5075aec   13ckc67   PENDING   0.04000000   LOSE   0.00000001   17206

Details   2012-09-02 10:09:16   lessthan 1000   26631073   6df328d9   13ckc67   PENDING   0.00150000   LOSE   0.00000001   17206



So um... 4 seperate, yet consecutive rolls, and the "ghost of satoshi" rolls the same number, 17206, 4 times?
sup wit dat?


edit:  Is this a case of placing "multiple bets in the same transaction"?  Didn't think the "ghost roll" would provide the same number.. I guess this is what the newbie board is for.