[€294]

Hello fellow Bitcoin hackers,

looking at ticket prices of upcoming conferences this year I got a little bit frustrated:

Bitcoin in the Beltway Washington: €294
Inside Bitcoins Hong Kong: €294
WIRED Money London: €1248
Bitcoin Finance 2014 Dublin: €599
Inside Bitcoins Conference & Expo Melbourne: €276
CoinSummit London: €677
Annual North American Bitcoin Conference Chicago: €202
Coin Congress San Francisco: €331
Cryptocon Sydney: €913
Cryptocon Singapore: €883
Inside Bitcoins Tel Aviv: €368
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies St. Petersburg: €37 (or donation)
Cryptolina Bitcoin Conference Raleigh: €202
Camp Bitcoin Black Rock City: ? (probably donation)
World Bitcoin Forum Bonn: €300
Bitcoinference Summer 2014 Amsterdam: ?
Bitcoin Central & Eastern European Conference Ljubljana: €300
Inside Bitcoins London: €495
Bitcoin Conference Kiev: €75
Bitcoin World at Money2020 Las Vegas: €2171 (yeah, baby!)
Dubai Bitcoin Conference: ?

With the notable exception of the St. Petersberg conference and the Burning Man camp the events are obviously not targeted at free software developers or mainstream users. So I propose to organise an event that is accessible to a broader audience, similar to the open source conference FOSDEM (https://fosdem.org/):

• Free entrance / donation
• Location at non-profit or academic venue
• Possibility to volunteer
• Free booths for free/libre open source projects
• Lightning talks
• Hackathon/dev rooms
• Workshops for beginners
• Possibility to trade/withdraw/spend cryptocurrency
• Family-friendly
• Colourful start-up fair
• Friendly security staff (if any)

Let's make cryptocurrency conferences less about suits, but more about community and fun (hello shibes)! Ideas, comments, pointers to similar proposals welcome.

Cheers, Meinhard.

Edit: Added Coin Congress

hallo liebe cloud-mining interessierte,

bei meiner recherche zu deutschen cloud-mining-anbietern bin ich auf http://btc-cloud.de/ gestossen. routinemaessig habe ich kurz nach dem namen im impressum gesucht: "norman poetzsch, pirna". und boom, es gab gleich dutzende treffer, die ihn mit diversen betrugsfaellen in verbindung bringen, z.b. http://paid4magazin.de/index.php/facebookpromotion-de-alles-gold-was-glaenzt/

..der typ hat echt nerven, es jetzt unter gleichem namen mit bitcoin-mining-vertraegen zu probieren.

also, aufgepasst beim vertragsabschluss!

hat jemand erfahrungen mit dem anbieter?

-----------------------------

english:

dear cloud mining enthusiasts,

while researching german cloud mining services i came across http://btc-cloud.de/. routinely i checked the name in the impress with a quick search: "norman poetzsch, pirna". and boom, i got dozens of hits linking him to various fraudulent activities straight away, for example http://paid4magazin.de/index.php/facebookpromotion-de-alles-gold-was-glaenzt/ (a german special interest blog about paid-to-surf offers)

..this guy really has guts to now try his luck with bitcoin mining contracts under the same name.

so, watch out when ordering contracts!

any experiences with this service?

Hi Scrypt miners,

I was lucky enough to get one of the first Scrypt ASICs produced by Chinese GridSeed during my stay in South Korea last month. Cheers to Dis Btopia of xbitcoinx.com! I just hooked up one unit containing 5 chips to my Ubuntu box via USB port and here is what I did to get it running. Mind you, these instructions are for mining Scrypt, not SHA256 or dual mode, which the ASIC can also do. Most of the information I pieced together from this post in Chinese: http://cybtc.com/article-468-1.html

Download GridSeed's modified cpuminer and unpack zip file:

Code:

wget https://github.com/gridseed/cpuminer/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd cpuminer-master

..or download via git:

Code:

git clone git@github.com:gridseed/cpuminer.git
cd cpuminer

Install automake:

Code:

sudo apt-get install automake

You might need to install other compiling tools. I didn't need to, because I compiled other things before.

Compile:

Code:

./autogen.sh
./configure CFLAGS="-O3"
make

Connect and power up ASIC.

Find correct USB device:

Code:

ls /dev/*USB*

..or watch syslog while plugging in ASIC:

Code:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

Start mining (replace "ttyUSB0" with device found above and add your pool data):

Code:

sudo ./minerd --freq=600 --gc3355=/dev/ttyUSB0 --url=<your pool> --userpass=user:pass

You should now see lots of output with yellow "LTC" lines. If you see red lines, that's bad. Anyway, post here if you run into troubles.

I am not quite sure what the green and red LEDs are about. As far as I can tell there is no English documentation about that anywhere. I assume green (which is on as soon as power and USB are connected) indicates a certain ready state and red (which flashes sometimes) means hardware errors.

I am getting a lot of "Invalid nonce" errors in the cpuminer output along with red LED flashing. Probably because by mistake I got a 12V/0.5A power supply instead of 12V/5A and chips run low on power. So I can't tell you much about hash rates etc. right now. I'll get another power supply next week, so stay tuned.

annyeong seoul,

excuse my english post, but i don't speak korean (yet). i work on a few cryptocoin projects and i am staying in korea for a couple of weeks. so i am trying to get in touch with "bitcoiners" while i am here. i already visited korbit, zecca cafe and "that bakery in incheon". all meetings were delightful and i hope to meet some more people before i leave on 2 february.

several people told me about a bitcoin meeting on 17 january, but i can't seem to find any (english) information about it. does anyone know details or can point me to a website?

cheers, meinhard.