Wire transfer to bitstamp on 11/20 with a support ticket opened 11/27.  Not deposited, no response from support.  This is the first time I have dealt with bitstamp.  Triple checked every detail & number for accuracy and my bank assured me on 11/27 that it has been sent.

What is the next step?

In USD ...

Over the past few weeks & months, the Mt. Gox price has been ~10% higher than the rest of the market (bitstamp, btc-e, etc...).  Today, bitstamp is as high or just higher than Mt. Gox, and still 10% higher than the rest of the market.

What gives?

How would a community be able to use bitcoins if access to the internet and thus the bitcoin P2P network was either completely unavailable or only sporadically available from a small number of nodes?

Places such as Burning Man, remote villages and countries under civil strife come to mind.

There might have to be a level of trust for 0 confirmation transactions.

For example, would it be possible to create a separate, isolated bitcoin network with no mining and the disconnected network can get a trusted node to dump the latest block chain onto a USB stick every other day, and copy any information back onto the stick as needed (such as transactions).

What are the other ways to work?   Has there been any testing, design or thought put into this type of situation?

Has there been a public, in-depth, 3rd party review of the standard bitcoin client?  I have experience with software engineering... an industry average is at least 1 bug per 1000 lines of code.  The bugs might be trivial or critical, easy to spot or hard to discern or activate.  I am NOT saying that the people who write bad code, but that programs are written by humans, and even the best of us make mistakes.

http://mayerdan.com/ruby/2012/11/11/bugs-per-line-of-code-ratio/

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/21137/average-number-of-exploitable-bugs-per-thousand-lines-of-code

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/the-danger-of-complexity-more-code-more-bugs/

Kudos on the protocol fuzzing work that appears to be going on.

Used coinapult.com last week - seems like an interesting idea for simple payments and bring on new people... same person created satoshi dice, thought it was worth a test.

Sent 0.001 BTC with 0.0001 transaction fee from my home e-mail address to work e-mail address.  After 2 hours and 18 confirmations of my transfer to coinapult's address, no e-mail showed up at either location, even checked the spam folders.  Contacted support and they said they would not be able to get to it tonight but fix it tomorrow - no problem, it is a beta site.   3 days later, still nothing - e-mailed support again, no response after 30 hours.

Its a shame as it seemed like a valuable service - send bitcoins to an e-mail address... veterans can just send it to their wallet, and newbies would be guided on how to setup an online wallet.

I lost 0.0011 BTC, please let this 11 cent lesson help you not lose your bitcoins.

I am going to write my own bitcoin client - I have started reviewing the standard client code.

My sequence of goals are:
1. Create a client that can create keys & addresses and store them.
2. Using a standard client, send a small amount of BTC to the created public address.
3. New client creates "offline" transactions to send the BTC back to a standard address.
4. Manually review the transaction, copy transaction over to a standard BTC client and transmit it to the network.
5. Think about connecting to the bitcoin network.

Here is a list of capabilities / methods I want to implement to manage keys & addresses, am I missing any?

Entropy -> Private Key
Private Key -> Public Key
Public Key -> Public Address
Private Key -> Secret Storage (custom wallet)
Secret Storage (custom wallet) -> Private Key
Public Address -> Storage
Storage -> Public Address
Public Address -> Public Key


What are the methods needed to create transactions?  Is the blockchain needed?

It looks like one of the bitcoin console functions would handle the transaction - which one(s) can be used if the transmission does not come from the client's wallet?
sendfrom
sendmany
sendrawtransaction
sendtoaddress

[What is the maximum number of private addresses?]

I have done a bit of homework and have a CS/math degree.  My field is not crypto, but I know about fields, groups, graph theory and SHA-256.  Any answers, review or corrections of my questions would be appreciated.

What is the maximum number of private addresses?

2^96  --  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.0

and "almsot 2^256"   --   https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key


What is the maximum number of public addresses?

Only max found is 2^192 from  --   https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key

25 byte public address  minus 1 byte for 00 hardcoded first byte  --  2 ^ ( 24*8 )


Has it been proven that there will be no hash-collisions where 2 private addresses share the same public address?


No info found.


What is the process to create a private and public address ?

The address creation process looks like a random private first, then generate public address from the private...

It looks like there are Process to create a public address from a private address:

3 SHA-256 hashes and 1 RIPEMD-160 hash, plus some other simple manipulation.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses


Assuming a public key is generated from a private key, how does it computationally compare to block creation?

Creating a block needs 2x SHA-256.
Creating a public key needs 3x SHA-256 + 1 RIPEMD-160.
RIPEMD-160 is 2xMD4 hash, each of which is less than or equal to a SHA-256  hash

Thus a public key is ~ 5 hashes and a block is ~2 hashes.

Currently, my perception of Bitcoin ownership is it is filled with people who fit into one or more categories.

1. Alternate Currency. Want an alternative currency (don't like banks or don't trust current fiat currency).
2. Speculate. Believe that bitcoin is going to go up in value in the future relative to fiat currency and want to make a profit in the fiat currency.
3. Regular Economy. People who want to buy and/or sell regular items goods and/or services in bitcoins because it is more efficient, convenient, etc...

These are the outcomes of bitcoin with only these people's motivations:

1. Alternate Currency.  Without any speculators or Regular Economy folk, it is going to wind up a "monopoly money".
2. Speculate.  Without people to transact "real" economic activity (exchange bitcoins for something other than another currency) it will be a cycle of bubble & crashes.
3. Regular Economy.  I suspect most people "in the world" fall into this category.

Using the price of bitcoins compared to fiat currency, it is clear there is a demand for bitcoins.  However, the question is what are you going to do with bitcoins once you have them?  The current answer is either hold them for a while and sell them at a profit or hold them for a long while and hope for an even bigger profit.

However, there is not a good way to get bitcoins out of the hands of the original purchasers/miners except to trade back to a fiat currency.

I have perused the bitcoin related offerings on several sites and IRC and find it "thin" at best.  There is nothing local to me (town of 200,000, 1 hour drive to a city of 1,000,000+).  There are only people willing to buy or sell bitcoins for cash.

These are some of the purchases we all make that could be converted to bitcoins:
Pay for housing (rent / mortgage)
Pay for transportation (bus fare, gas, car repairs)
Pay for food (grocery store, restaurant)
Pay for reglare goods (books, lights, beds)
Pay for standard services (plumbing, shipping, ISP)
Pay for gifts (toys, flowers, rings)
Pay taxes (good luck!)

So my ask is that everyone encourage local businesses to accept bitcoins.  There are payment systems that can instantly convert that to fiat currency.  And, if enough local merchants start taking bitcoins, then the need to cash out is reduced.

When I can find a local plumber that takes BTC, I will know it has "arrived".

Hi, hoping to understand why I cannot use a second GPU on a mining rig:

Used this as a basis for my mining rig: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_rig  (Two ATI 5850s, Approximately 600 Mhash/s)

900 W power supply
MSI 870-G45  motherboard
2 GB DDR3 RAM
CPU AMD SEMPRON 140
2x XFX 6850 - 1GB GPUs
400 GB HD

I installed ubuntu 11.04 and all of the software as documented in this post: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7514.msg110334#msg110334

poclbm works fine on the first GPU (-d0) and on the CPU (-d2) and can see both devices

Code:

~/bitcoin/logs$ poclbm.py
No device specified or device not found, use -d to specify one of the following

[0]     Barts
[1]     Barts
[2]     AMD Sempron(tm) 140 Processor

I did run aticonfig --initial -f --adapters=all

If I stop all poclbm and then run poclbm on the second GPU (-d1) it will connect to the pool but does not start any processing.  CTRL-C and kill does not stop the poclbm and kill -9 crashes the entire computer. Once poclbm -d is run any software "reboot"" will crash the computer as well.

In googling around, I found that the motherboard physically has 2 x16 slots, but one is x4?   I know linux pretty qell, but don't know PCI-e too well.

From msi.com for the mobo:

PCI-Ex16:  2
PCI-E Gen: Gen2 (1x16, 1x4)

Questions:  Should this configuration work?  If so, how can I troubleshoot it?

Code:

~/bitcoin/logs$ aticonfig --pplib-cmd "get activity"
Current Activity is Core Clock: 875MHZ
Memory Clock: 1000MHZ
VDDC: 1150
Activity: 99 percent
Performance Level: 2
Bus Speed: 5000
Bus Lanes: 16
Maximum Bus Lanes: 16

~/bitcoin/logs$ DISPLAY=:0.1
~/bitcoin/logs$ aticonfig --pplib-cmd "get activity"
Current Activity is Core Clock: 300MHZ
Memory Clock: 300MHZ
VDDC: 950
Activity: 0 percent
Performance Level: 0
Bus Speed: 2500
Bus Lanes: 4
Maximum Bus Lanes: 16

Hardware specs for my mining rig:
Power Supply  900W
Motherboard  MSI 870-G45 AM3 AMD 770 ATX
CPU  AMD Sempron 140  
Memory  2GB DDR3  
2 x Graphics card  Radeon 6850

Running ubuntu 11.04 x64, using poclbm miner version "20110709" (also tried phoenix).

There is only 1 monitor connector to the 1 monitor I have.  DISPLAY=:0

Ran all of the steps in this article: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7514.msg110334#msg110334

Ati config shows the 2 devices

Code:

aticonfig --lsa
No protocol specified
* 0. 01:00.0 AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series
  1. 02:00.0 AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series

* - Default adapter

Running poclbm.py without a device shows the 2 devices:

Code:

./poclbm.py -d0 http://me@yahoo.com_0:password0@pit.deepbit.net:8332

No device specified or device not found, use -d to specify one of the following

[0]     Barts
[1]     Barts
[2]     AMD Sempron(tm) 140 Processor

I can run a miner on d0 and d2 without any trouble, and I am getting normal hash rates for the GPU and CPU

Code:

ps -ef | grep pocl
me    1749  1748  1 02:27 pts/0    00:05:38 /usr/bin/python ./poclbm.py -d0 http://me@yahoo.com_0:password0@pit.deepbit.net:8332
me    2088  2087 98 03:41 pts/1    05:56:53 /usr/bin/python ./poclbm.py -d2 http://me@yahoo.com:password2@pit.deepbit.net:8332

Every time I run poclbm.py with -d1, the program never shows it as processing hashes.  CTRL-C and kill will not stop poclbm.  kill -9 on the poclbm process crashes the entire computer.

I tried setting DISPLAY=:0 and =:0.1 before running poclbm.py with no luck.

Do I need a connectore out the back of the other graphics card?  How else can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks




EDIT: I am running x-windows, do I need to shut it off to run 2 card mining?

Back when I was just learning about bitcoin, I was not secure with my wallet.dat and there is a small chance it may have been compromised.  How should I fix that?

My understanding is that a wallet.dat actually has many keypairs for recieving addresses in it and when you create a new recieving address, it uses one of the precreated addresses, so simply creating a new recieving address on your original wallet is not enough.

Would this process work?

1. Stop bitcoin client
2. Move original wallet.dat offline.
3. Start bitcoin wallet - creates a new wallet?
4. Generate a new recieving key for new wallet.
5. Stop bitcoin client
6. Move new wallet.dat offline.
7. Move original wallet.dat into place
8. Start bitcoin client
9. send bitcoins to new recieving address.