I've got some potential international customers and I'm thinking of doing a bit of business via Moneybookers, but I'm getting conflicting information. Half of the googlesphere thinks moneybookers transactions are reversible, the other half thinks they're not and then a small fraction are saying that folks have had accounts suspended for exchanging BTC, yet there are a couple exchanges that do business in MBUSD... Maybe I just haven't spent enough time on IRC or something. Does anyone have a real answer for me?

So I figured I'd ask since you all seem to be a security-minded bunch and there are probably a bunch of programmers hanging about.

For my day job I've recently dusted off my C# hat to write some ASP.NET stuff for our intranet site and today for the first time, they didn't want an Active Directory based single-sign-on for a particular page. Now I've never used anything else via ASP.NET - it's basically the only reason I dust off the C# hat at all - super easy to do SSO in ASP.NET, giant pain in PHP.

Anyway, I found the whole process surprisingly easy. I've got a SQL database configured and secured, bumped up the hashing algorithm to SHA512, enforcing password complexity was as simple as setting a couple flags in Web.config... This is way too easy, right?

So aside from the troll-ish replies involving such classics as "Microshit" "Microshaft" "Micro$oft" etc. how good or bad IS the security built into ASP.NET's Membership Providers? Just glancing at the database it *seems* like they've done everything I would've done by hand but it also *seems* like it'd get used a lot more if it were all that secure.

Is it just a cost-of-entry thing? Anti-Microsoft sentiment? Or is it actually broken in some way I've yet to identify?

So I'll fully admit, I'm NOT programmer enough for this project - I have a decent high-level understanding of a lot of what would be involved but I am nowhere near competent enough to actually write the code. Instead I'm just going to suggest an idea and see if someone who DOES have the skills will run with it. Perhaps if others like it enough we could even start a Bounty or something.

In light of the recent Mt. Gox issues I think it's time we built a distributed exchange. NameCoin has already proven that you can use a BTC-style blockchain to store non-coin data like DNS so why not provide a modified client that holds a buy/sell order database and matches buyers with sellers? The client could support a small variety of payment processors to begin (dwolla, etc) and expand with time. If the client interfaces directly with, for example, Dwolla's API then it should be able to transfer funds directly from my account to my seller's account, bypassing the middleman entirely.

I'm sure there is some obvious technical limitation that I'm missing or this would have been done already, right?

Hi everyone, I've been working on the technical aspects of an idea I've been chatting about a little since the whole "market correction" yesterday. The bitcoin economy has grown far too speculator-centric to see much success as a real currency. In order for BTC to truly remain/become useful for purchasing goods and services some level of stability is necessary; a slow steady rise is fantastic, a continuous roller-coaster of huge peaks and valleys is not. Furthermore, as a miner it concerns me greatly to see prices dip low enough to damage my business when these bubbles eventually burst.

So I have a proposal: It begins with the miners since we/they are the initial source of all bitcoins (some 7200 per day, a fairly substantial number) but it hopefully sees adoption by many others too. If you're not a speculator, if you're a miner or someone who does business in bitcoins you want a stable exchange rate that increase proportionally to important factors like adoption levels or hash difficulty (which is actually sort of a factor of adoption levels) not on the whims of a bunch of get-rich-quick investors! If you want bitcoin to take off and stay useful in the long term, to survive the media madness and become a viable dominant e-currency, then we MUST do something about the volatility. The advice to "buy when it dips then resell high" doesn't help the market as a whole, it only helps the speculators who buy into the methodology and eventually, such a low will not have a corresponding recovery. You can only crash a market so many times before it stays crashed.

So I suggest that we adopt a new ideal value for what those of us treating this like a business are willing to accept for 1 BTC. We set up an exchange rate that is pegged to difficulty and assume that to be the value of 1 BTC. If a mountain of miners and traders all decide that 1 BTC = X dollars then speculators will have a hard time increasing or decreasing the value by as much. They have to buy their way through the mountains of BTC available at $X before they can effectively raise the price above or below it. This means that significantly larger amounts of money can move about in the market without affecting the exchange rate. If you look at the market depth data on Mt. Gox right now you'll see two large spikes of sell orders at $25 and $30. These spikes represent such a "wall" and we've seen before the stabilizing effect that such walls can have on value.

I've created a simple web site (changed: http://www.bitcoinreference.com) with a forum attached that displays what I believe to be a fair market value for BTC which is automatically calculated from the current difficulty setting and converted into several world currencies. The data updates automatically so it should change immediately when the difficulty does. Right now I'm using P=D/25000 to set the price, which seems to roughly follow historical data if we ignore the recent bubble and its associated correction. This pegs the price at $22.69 USD currently. I am of course open to suggestions on more accurate or reasonable formulae should you have any input.

If we all buy/sell/trade at this assumed value with at least a meaningful portion of our BTC we can create a new "wall" set where WE decide. We can stabilize the value of the bitcoin, which makes it more attractive to existing and new businesses and gives it the image to match its potential as the new world currency.

Edit 2011-06-13: Changed URL, my proposal wasn't really a "union" per se so bitcoinreference.com is much more appropriate. Site content has not changed, nor has the URL structure, so the API can now be found at http://bitcoinreference.com/api

Edit 2011-06-14: Changed displayed market valuation and API. Site now shows market valuation based on a four-hour moving average and shows standard deviation for the same period. Ranges based on one or two standard deviations from average can be used for a number of purposes as discussed in my post below and on the "how to use this data" page on the site ites.f

Note: The purpose of the site has changed from what is specified in the post above. I am no longer interested in starting a cartel or union of any kind. bitcoinreference.com exists only for informational purposes and I now hope to help stabilize the market through education and dissemination of information.

In light of the recent downtrend in the value of BTC I've got a proposal to help turn things around. These bubbles and their associated bursting are not our fault, my fellow miners. We want nothing more than to mine some bitcoins and sell them for a reasonable profit over our cost of equipment and operations. Most of the miners I've talked to are not the "get rich quick" speculator types. Sure we'd like to make some money but we're also in this thing for the long haul (at least I am). To this end I propose a sort of solution. I propose a union for the purpose of price-fixing in an attempt to stabilize the market value of bitcoin.

Every day something on the order of 7,200 BTC are generated by mining operations. If we were to assume that the vast majority of miners are acting in a for-profit manner and selling their generated coins this would account for 10 to 15 percent of the total volume of BTC traded on MtGox in a given day. While certainly not the majority this is a strong enough percentage that we should be able to wield some influence at least over the market.

I say we agree on a difficulty/price ratio that will allow us to make a reasonable income in return for our efforts and absolutely stick to it. In both directions. If speculators try to increase price too far beyond our agreed-upon limit, they will likely fail as at least 10% of the market will be selling at a lower rate. If the market attempts to dip below our rate, at least 10% of the market will be resisting the dip. This will hopefully produce the kind of stability we need in this sort of market. Price per BTC will suffer fewer fluctuations and will only rise or fall as a factor of difficulty which, of course, is a factor of the number of people mining which is a factor of adoption rate.

It might work, it might fail. We might have enough power to demand a fair price at market and we might not but I think we owe it to the community to at least try. Who's with me?

Edit: As it turns out my idea wasn't much like a union at all, more of an educational effort regarding the VALUE of bitcoins as compared to their PRICE. To that end, I've obtained http://bitcoinreference.com and set up a redirect for the old btcunion.com domain. You can all stop defining the term union for me or giving me your opinions on unionization, whether bitcoin miners constitute a "workforce" etc.

So I can of course monitor system temps with speedfan and gpu temps with afterburner, but I'd like to consolidate my temperature monitoring across all of my rigs somehow. Does anyone know of an existing utility that can do this, or perhaps even a windows command-line utility to return GPU temp that I could base a hacked-together utility on?

I'm thinking of starting a web site or two selling goods for BTC and since I'm starting from scratch rather than expanding on an existing site I thought I'd ask the community before I start: What is, currently, the most polished/developed shopping cart that supports BTC. I'm talking about ease of use, ease of setup. I don't want my customers to have to jump through any more hoops than necessary but I'd also like to jump through as few as possible myself.

So I've got a couple of dual 5830 rigs built and parts are on the way for a couple more. I've got them plugged into a kill-a-watt and the two of them combined plus a small fan are eating about 800W. I'm worried that a third box on the same circuit might pop a breaker. I can always move the new boxes to a different circuit but for cooling purposes I'd like to squeeze at least one more onto this circuit. Does anyone have any tips/tricks for reducing the power consumption of the rigs? They contain only the basics (cpu/ram/mobo/hd). I'm assuming the cards need all their supplemental power connectors and such and I've got the drive set to spin down.

Any magic tricks I'm missing?

I just put a 2nd 5830 in my mining rig and I'm noticing that GPU1 will go to 97% or so and GPU2 will drop to 5-10%, then after a time GPU2 will go high and GPU1 will drop low. What is going on here?

So I threw together a rig, mostly from parts I already had, and went with Windows XP since I'd seen in a few places that XP doesn't require dummy plugs to run headless or see cards that aren't plugged into monitors but OpenCL still appears to identify only the card I've got a monitor on. Have I been steered wrong? Does XP really require dummy plugs too or have I just missed a step somewhere?

I've been mining on a few PCs around the house, but so far every GPU I've mined on actually has a monitor plugged into it. I just got a third video card for my quad-PCIe motherboard but don't have a third monitor. Are dummy plugs required on Win7 with the latest CCC/OpenCL/Drivers? They seem easy enough to build, I just want to know if I should plan for a trip to Radio Shack before my new card arrives.

Thanks!

Hi all,

One of the biggest concerns facing bitcoin right now is becoming user-friendly. While spending bitcoins from your smartphone certainly seems cool, they're still not so universal as to replace existing concepts or technologies like physical money or credit cards.

I know that there are "bitbills" floating around out there which use QR codes to hold the public/private keys but I was wondering if anyone had any input on a few of my more recent ideas.

Does anyone think there is a legitimate use for actual bit*coins*? It would be just as easy to print a QR code for the public key on one side of a coin-like object which is hollow and made of something just strong enough to hold up inside of a pocket. It could be snapped in half to retrieve the private key if one wanted to convert it to digital bitcoins. It would have an advantage of small size and portability over bitbills. We could also store the public key in an RFID module to allow confirmation of balance that doesn't degrade if something as fragile as a paper QR code becomes damaged.

Another, possibly much easier option would be to use small low-capacity flash drives to hold something like an individual wallet.dat file. With the right software it should be relatively easy to create a "plug and pay" system where you hand your memory stick to a cashier, he or she plugs it into the cash register and makes the transfer. For the truly untrusting there could be user-facing terminals where the customer could make the transfer and the cashier would simply confirm it. I can even see single-use hardware being made to handle person-to-person transactions; something with a 3G modem, small display and a couple of USB ports. Network providers could take a per-transaction fee automatically rather than charge a monthly access fee since the amount of traffic generated would be fairly small.

My last idea actually begins with a question. I'm a bit sketchy on the specifics, how many bits are there to both the public and private key for a bitcoin address? I ask because a normal credit card style magstripe holds about 210 bits per inch on tracks 1 and 3, 75 bits per inch on track 2 and is about 3 inches long, so with the right encoding you could fit 1,485 bits of data on a standard credit card. If that's enough to hold a key, then it may be viable to create a system that "feels" no different than standard credit card transactions to an end user.

Any input or other ideas?