Hi

people are going crazy about a readjustment of the BTC/USD rate. I guess all arguments are on the table. At least those that I read were repeated 20 times each. Maybe it's time for a poll.
Please let me know if I forgot any important options.

[One very special implication]

Deleting a post/thread doesn't work and I don't intend to censor myself but the following is based on misconceptions about merged mining.
Maybe it would have been a nice idea to have merge mining the way I understood it but it isn't, so ... you can just close this tab

I have read into merged mining a bit today and might not have understood all aspects of it, but as far as I understood, it goes as follows:
The miner has to present the hash of predefined parameters (transactions, timestamp, etc) and some additional data that together results in something that hashes to "a nice number".
Merged mining now does exactly that but for the second block chain it swaps "predefined parameters" and "some additional data" for the second (and third, ...) block chain.
This way, n block chains can be secured at the hashing costs of one block chain.

Positive implications:
* Cool new block chains will get secured much faster than before
* Miners might even secure block chains that don't have a reward for mining just for the good of it. (Namecoin without coin generation would serve a good purpose, so people could support it without taking the generated coins.)
* Once all the major pools do merged mining for 20+ block chains, soon the last noob will understand that the hashing power behind any such block chain does not imply a USD/coin-rate lik many do here all the time. cosbycoin and poocoin will have 15TH.

Doubtful implications:
* "Zero fee" Acoin pools can merge mine B-Zcoin and make a profit from B-Z rewards

Negative implications:
* countless block chains might get support and confuse those who might want to use such digital currencies. Trust in each single such currency falls.

One very special implication:
* What if I receive a fork at my miner now? Until now I decide which one I mine for. It might turn out I mined for the wrong one when a follow up block gets found for the other one first. With merged mining I can just mine for both and if I find a block, announce it for both chains, just in case. This can go on for 20 forks and so on. Prepare to see very long living forks! If I'm right with my conclusions, we will need some mechanism to counter this chain pollution.

[How I think we could do it:]

Hi

after having introduced at least 15 merchants to bitcoin so far with close to no success I'd like to start something more coordinated and ask what you think about it.

How I do it:
When I see the need for bitcoin for some business, I send one bitcoin to an instawallet, send the merchant a link to that wallet, explain how easy it was to set up that wallet and send a coin to it and how easy it would be for him to just accept bitcoin (up to here it is how I try to promote bitcoin donations), that he could do it more professionally with individual receiving addresses or get bitcoin completely out of the equation by using bit-pay. Usually I don't through it at them all at once and many claimed it was interesting but none took the BTC so far. Finally I tell them that I will take my BTC back if they don't send it elsewhere within a month, so theoretically this practice didn't cost me bitcoins so far. I'm mostly worried about having all those coins at instawallet, which I don't consider to be a save haven.

How I think we could do it:
# Set up a website
# If you see a target (merchant/charity/etc.) that could use bitcoins, you fill in a form at that website with target name, contact email address and the url where others can verify it is their email address
# The website now lists that target with a bitcoin address that everybody can donate to
# As soon as donations reach x$/BTC/€... the target gets a mail explaining what happened and how he could get those bitcoins and eventually profit from using bitcoins himself
# At predefined thresholds the website sends further mails telling the target that there were 12 people that would love to see him accept bitcoins and even gave him a total of 1.3BTC to try it out ....
# The website shows the balance and the amount already withdrawn together with statistics on how many mails have been sent and eventually the target's response if he stated a public response
# Volunteers can step in and write personal messages coordinated and in the name of that project
# The website could offer the possibility to enter a return address and a date until the target may reclaim the donor's coins.

Any thoughts? If I set up such a service, would people compensate me for a start? Maybe on the long run? I know I could do it but I'm a bit worried about yet another project that doesn't pay for my living. Anybody else willing to do it? Maybe together?

Hi,

every Bitcoin conference is reason to go to the shops near by and ask if they would take bitcoins. This happened before and is quite natural for our community.
Now there are protests at Wallstreet. They ask for all kind of donations and now also accept bitcoins that go I don't know where.

But that's a one time thing that people will not really recognize from outside our community. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to go through their list of food deliveries and ask them one by one if they accept bitcoins offering to buy some pizza and add them to our wiki if they do.

I would honestly not go and take the burden of calling 40 shops, explain bitcoin to 10 of them while the others just shout at me only to be allowed to go through the hassle of getting one of them started to accept my bitcoins, pay him 10BTC and kindly add him to the wiki.

... but ...

We could make a business out of that. An escrow that accepts donations for such a project. Promoters can post proof that a new shop accepts bitcoins and reclaim the checkpot for that. At the escrow you can define how your payment ought to be treated: immediate payment or distributed over the next x months.

Good idea?

Hi,

I want to ask course of action as the other thread doesn't get the necessary attention.
http://50.19.139.134/test.php
leaked thousands of mails with worker passwords but many are legit passwords of the mail accounts too for sure.

Is there any place to go to get all these mail accounts locked down?

Hi guys,

with the firefox plugin bitCoinEverywhere installed you can shop in all the online shops that are adopted by the plugin and when you are presented the shop's payment options you will be given one extra option - guess what - bitCoin. The plugin charges you 5% extra and gives you the weighted average price of the last hour for your purchase and will do a paypal, moneybookers, bank transfer, whatever payment as soon as you've sent the bitcoins demanded to the bitcoin address shown on your behalf. The plugin will find the which data to send with the payment (bill number, name, etc). With green-addresses, this can be processed with no delay compared to a direct paypal payment.

Sad thing is this plugin does not exist. I see several issues but also great potential to such a service.

Problems:

• Shop owners might not want plugins to mess with their payment processing.
• Every payment update in the shop could lead to a broken plugin so QA might be extremely costly.
• Payment providers like paypal, moneybookers and even banks might close the accounts after the 3rd payment.
• The plugin provider would need to have quite some cash in moneybookers, paypal and bank account so the clients can use all these methods at all time. After all sending the received bitcoins to Gox, cash out the dollars and send them to paypal again takes several days if not weeks.

Oportunities:

• I suspect bitcoin owners to be willing to pay 5% fees for payments if they can use bitcoins at amazon today
• there are shop solutions used in hundreds of shops so covering one would mean covering all that use the unchanged payment module
• Some shops might not notice the plugin as payments flow without any chargebacks. Fraud management is probably not alerted.
• Shop owners might cooperate as they never have to deal with bitcoins and as long as they don't do this weird bitcoin thing, nobody can blame them for accepting extra customers all paying with the same bank account.

I'm bringing this up here as I don't see any way of running this alone or with people I know and have no time to do the business plan and search for investors now. Do you think this would be a cool thing? A doable thing? Maybe a substantial subset like payment processing for shop owners without client side plugin but a lib installed on their frontend server?

Any comments welcome

Hi

I'm traveling in Iran at the moment and there is a good reason for using bitcoin here:
Due to embargo there is no international credit card you could use in Iran. Business men told me that their transaction costs are 8% when dealing with the USA as they have to send the money via Dubai.

Unfortunately using bitcoin is not possible for several reasons:
"High speed internet" is available to every Iranian in cities. Unfortunately high speed internet is limited to 128kb/s wich is a problem when downloading the block chain.
The bigger problem arises from the embargo though: many sites block Iranian requests including the sourceforge downloads for the client, google code for the source etc.
I could not find a link to download the bitcoin client here. Could you please add trustworthy mirrors for Iran, Cuba, etc. or just straight stop using pages that block the spreading of FOSS to such countries??

Regards,

giszmo

i see many posts of people complaining about chaos and posts on wrong threads etc. With this poll I hope to find out if we could improve the situation by changing our use of the report button.

what if i could print out the first n digits of my private keys and those digits get removed from my wallet? wouldn't that be kind of a tan? so if i want to send from address 5 i would need that remainder that i decided to move to dead wood.
* the modification to the client would be minimalistic
* the block chain would be unaffected
* user could decide on the tan length. that would be his level of security vs. effort to use it trade off.
* user would need to type in as many tans as sending addresses there are involved
* the user could decide to put stronger tans on receiving addresses than on pocket money addresses.

downside compared to tans as we know them:
* a trojan on the pc would be able to take over the transactions being done and change both amount and target once it has the tan. some eTAN procedures claim to inhibit that by hashing target and amount.
* a trojan on the pc would not only be able to take over the transactions being done but any further transaction from the same addresses.

thoughts?

Hi,

as an increase in the invalid block count would be an indicator of a 51% take over scenario and as I have seen how eligius got 4/10 blocks invalidated recently I wonder if there is any effort taken to keep track of invalidated blocks?

In my opinion the block chain should generally be a block tree containing also the invalid blocks with the client being able to request the longest chain, only. With this data the block explorer should also keep track of those lost blocks to run forensic analysis on them later.

Opinions?

Hi,

I've been working on that question and have a result that is far off the result previously found in the wiki:
My assumption: network growth is 2%/day
My result: 70% to never mine a single block ever.

Old assumption: difficulty growth is 10%/iteration (which is far more optimistic than my assumption)
Old result: 96% to never mine a single block ever. (which is a magnitude more pessimistic than my result)

Who's interested in proof reading? Who has another, maybe simpler solution to provide?
The Wiki link is here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_pooled_mining#Alternative_Perspective

Hi

as to my understanding, bitCoins success is based on the peer to peer structure and any entity owning 50% of computational power could cheat on the rest or stop the show for all. While pools are no threat in the latter sense as miners are no zombies tied to them against their will, I come to understand that pools really pose a threat in the former sense.

(Yes I know this must have been discussed somewhere in depth but i could not find it. It's mostly annoying me that all people suggest to join a pool based on the kh or Gh they do.)

My understanding of "mining" was that the miner may add into a block he creates *one* transaction for the reward and as many other transactions as he likes taken from all 0conf transaction that he sees. (input data) he then brute force tries adding salt (never read that but that's my conclusion) and if hash(prior block + input + time + ... + salt) < x he sends it out to the world. fool proof. simple. great.

As in slush pool's sticky post it is made very clear that in a pool situation it is not the miner who decides what gets into the block but the pool delegates the work to the miners. I read it such that not only does the pool dictate the reward (would make sense) but also transactions, time, prior block and the salt to try out.

My questions:
Am I about right in my analysis?
Does the miner know when it found a block?
Does the miner promote its finding only to the pool?
Does the miner do plausibility checks for the timestamp at least?
What if it is not plausible?
Do pools keep an eye on each other by comparing block chain data ...?

Thanx for pointers and answers ...

Hi,

my mining rigs are to be set up in a rather insecure server room and I'd feel better not running a bitcoin client collecting millions of blocks stored in that insecure environment. Can I set the miner or the client to assign blocks to a specific bitcoin id?

As I'm not running the rig alone it would even be better if I could configure it such that 20BTC go to id1 and id2 and 10BTC to id3? I've seen there are pool(s) that do that.

Regards

Hi guys,

when today the rate fell from 25 to 12 the forum was not available to me (empty pages). Also I wondered why there was nothing on twitter for an hour or so. Has it been only me that the forum was unavailable to? Not getting any news via forum or twitter was a bit scary.
I just wonder why nobody else mentioned the forum's unavailability during that time. Was it functional in the US?

Hi guys

no, I'm not asking for your addresses
And no, I'm not planning to give away my BTC now as they are "still worth something" *PANIC!!* =D

I'm just asking what is the best way to get all those non-geeks into the picture? BitcoinWallet on Android is one such thing that could show off great deal when others see how easy I exchange small changes with other geeks in seconds but that's another story ...

I want to give BTC as a birthday present. I heard that sending a wallet.dat would not work cross platform. Is that true??

If I see the friend in person I could give a bootable USB stick with everything in place but that is most likely too geeky for many. Also getting internet connectivity in place that just works is a concern then.

Any thoughts anybody??

given the BTC rises 20% per day while the network "only" grows by 5% per day, AMD would profit more from running their hardware selling the mined BTC than from selling hardware, wouldn't they?