I have written up a high-level overview of a distributed mining pool proposal. Please follow the link below, read, and give your comments.
http://privwiki.dreamhosters.com/wiki/Distributed_mining_pool_proposal

Specifically, it would be important to try to poke holes in the framework, to make sure that it can be made cheater- and spammer-resistant. (Just like bitcoin itself! )

Your comments appreciated.

OK, quick poll to see what people think.

I can trivially set gribble to respond in PM for all commands in #bitcoin-otc.

So asking whether I should do that.

I deliberately don't have a third option like "yes, but not for command X and Y", because doing that would not be trivial. (well, would require some coding).

The way I figure it, if someone wants to make some particular response from gribble public, like the latest mtgox quote, he can take the effort and paste it on channel.

Your votes (and your comments in the thread) appreciated.

a bitcoin miner's lament

all day long i generate,
my room's so hot, there's no debate -
if it continues at this rate
i will be baked like a sweet potat-

o, how hard it is to make a block!
everyone wants one, there's limited stock.
difficulty rising, gotta fast get a lock
on that precious fifty-bitcoin block!

GPU is crunching but average time
has grown so fast my hash rate's hardly worth a dime
room is toasty, like a tropical clime
but i persist - a fresh block is sublime

i'm gonna have to take a dip, a dip in the pool
a mining pool, the greatest tool
a small miner's friend, for only a fool
would keep solo mining as if it's cool

when difficulty's up so high, sky high,
what's a fellow gonna do but wait to die
of old age while you hash, hoping for a tie
with a hash target so low you want to cry

so i mine in a pool, getting bitpennies a day
hundreds of miners joining that fray
building that block like a brick out of clay
it's the only game a small miner can play

but pennies ain't enough, i want more
i drop by mtgox to see what it's got in store.
i see that price and sweat out of every pore
it's shot up to the moon, way up from before

and i patiently sit, and wait for a dip
refreshing mtgox, with every sip
of my cup of tea, but at this clip
i'm only missing out, and i lose my grip

i plunk down some fiat, a few grand
no time for limit orders, i grab all the outstand-
ing asks, and behold here i stand
thousands of bitcoins in my hand!

now i live in trepidation
waiting for bitcoin appreciation
it has thus far been a total sensation
part of me wants to dump, but i'm patient

now i start to develop some cunning
i decide to start a business and get it humming,
helping get that bitcoin economy running!
i now realize it's never been about the mining

a newbie comes by on IRC
"i clicked generate coins, and nothing - see?"
i share my wisdom through my PC
which now is deep as is the sea.

=======

i envision a great hit song from these lyrics

If you like - feel free to throw some coin at 1CrmbXC3HBZszFhDDLJMCsTkaWG2EJo6gD

Selling diaspora invites, at 2btc each.
If interested, talk to me on freenode IRC, nick nanotube, channel #bitcoin-otc

As a complementary service to noagenda's anti-deflationary scheme (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4780.0) I hereby introduce the Bitcoin Fractional Reserve Bank, to pull the meager bitcoin economy out of the deflationary spiral of doom! By lowering our reserve requirements over time, we can arbitrarily extend the inflationary period of bitcoin, and thus counteract the hard-coded reductions in bitcoin creation rate!

The current reserve ratio is set at a respectable 90 percent, and will be halved every time the bitcoin block bounty is halved (every 210000 blocks). All deposits are backed by the Fractional Deposit Insurance Corporation), up to a maximum amount of 0 bitcoins. All deposits carry an attractive 0% interest rate, which is in the top 5% of all bitcoin depositary institutions!

Further, we are well prepared to deal with any bank run-style event. In addition to the solid backing by the FracDIC, we are prepared to close our doors and suspend operations, until the depositors clamoring for their funds walk away in defeat and frustration.

So, deposit your bitcoins into the BFRB, and I promise to lend out 10% (current rate - will vary in tandem with bitcoin block bounty) of the money you deposit, thus inflating the money supply beyond the built in bitcoin limit! Do it for yourself, do it for the bitcoin economy, do it for me!

* offer not available in stores. shipping and handling charges may apply. limit one account per person.

Mndrix and I (and a couple other discussants) have developed an exportable GPG identity protocol.

http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/GPG_Identity_Protocol

Quick summary: "This page outlines the protocol for exporting your GPG identity to other sites which may or may not support GPG authentication directly. The basic idea is that you can post a GPG-signed message to some area of your user account on the site, connecting your site id with your key via the signature, and then others can verify your signature and be certain that you are the same person on multiple sites.

Please check it out - your feedback (please post in this thread) would be appreciated.

In the future, I will be putting in the code on #bitcoin-otc to automagically query people's identities and ratings in various communities based on their OTC GPG auth, mndrix may implement it for coinpal, and hopefully other sites in the bitcoin community can join in so that we can create a broader web of trust.

I think it would be pretty great exposure for bitcoin, if someone knowledgeable about the internal workings of bitcoin were to submit a proposal to OSCON 2011 (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011) for a talk about bitcoin. The place is full of all kinds of FOSS ethusiasts, and besides the costs of making your way to Portland, Oregon, USA, it would be completely free (I think).

So... anyone up for it? Gavin, Jgarzik, Theymos? Bueller?

There should be an easy way to tag a post, thread, or user, as spam, with a comment, to bring it to moderators' attention. As it is, there seems to be no way at all to do that other than finding a moderator to PM, which is inefficient.

At the very least... with zero extra development effort, we could maybe set up a thread where people can post to report spam posts/threads/users, that moderators should review regularly.

I nominate this thread.


And I start by pointing out this user: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3108
he seems to have just registered and posted some inane posts, just to get some links in his sig pointing to some hyip stuff out there.

Some background:
The #bitcoin channel on freenode is orphaned - we have no ops, and due to freenode's group registration being pretty much dead, are not about to get them any time soon.

For now, community discussion has been going on in #bitcoin-dev, but as our user base grows, it will be helpful to separate general discussion from development-related discussion.

To this end, we need to create a channel for non-dev IRC chatter.

If you are an IRC user, please vote on the alternatives, or suggest a new one.

Hey all,

just want to see if there would be any interest in hosted private instances of a number of popular web apps. I can offer instances of MediaWiki, WordPress, phpBB, Zenphoto, and Drupal.

No shell account - you'd just have an administrator-level account on an instance of the webapp of your choice, to do with as you like.

For example, see http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/ - an instance of MediaWiki that is being used for the bitcoin-otc marketplace.

If you'd be interested, please let me know (and what monthly price in BTC would you think fair/attractive). If there's interest from at least a handful of people, I can make it happen.

I have started an OTC marketplace in IRC channel #bitcoin-otc on freenode. People can enter their supply/demand orders into the order book, and complete transactions OTC.

Feel free to join the channel, and to check out the web site with instructions and order book: http://bitcoin-otc.com .

Click here to use freenode webchat to join the channel: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#bitcoin-otc

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, questions are welcome.

This is just a brief note that I hope will help others compile bitcoind on their debian-like linux system. The main sticking point is figuring out what dependencies are needed. So follow these simple steps below, and you can be up and running in no time.

Note that I have done this on Ubuntu 10.04, i386.

1. run

Code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libdb-dev libdb4.8++-dev libglib2.0-dev

to install all the required dependencies. (note that the 4.8 version may differ depending on the age of your distribution)
2. get the source code of bitcoin, either through an svn checkout, or by downloading one of the release tar.gz's
3. cd to the directory where the source code is located, and run

Code:

make -f makefile.unix bitcoind

4. watch the compilation progress scroll by.
5. the compiled binary 'bitcoind' will be created in your current directory - enjoy!

Note: currently the official binary uses libdb 4.7, so if you want to be consistent with that, use libdb4.7++-dev instead of the 4.8 version. if you need to go back to 4.7 after running with 4.8, you need to delete .bitcoin/database/* files, because these logfiles are not backward compatible between 4.8 and 4.7.

Any comments/thoughts/suggestions are welcome. :)