I posted this on Craigslist as well, but perhaps one of my fellow Bitcoiners would be interested in negotiating a trade: my car for your BTC! Local offers only, but I'll be happy to meet you at a parking lot and treat you to lunch while waiting for the BTC transaction to confirm. Yes, I'll take cash as well, but BTC would be preferred. The car is a 2004 Chrysler Sebring Touring with leather interior, power driver seat, power windows/locks, and a V6 2.7L engine. I'm looking to upgrade to a minivan -- yup, my family is too big for a sedan these days. PM if you're interested.

If you've done business with me, rented one of my mining rigs, traded currencies, etc., please post below! For reference, I run the cryptocurrency blog/newsletter at HolyNerdvana. If you have problems with any of my mining rigs, please drop me a note there and we can work things out. My goal is to keep all my readers and renters happy.

So I have a question: how do you build a "solo mining pool" where you can get stats and such? Right now I have the Litecoin client running on one system, and I have a bunch of other systems connected to it and mining. However, I can't get any stats this way (at least, not that I know of). Is there some software out there that's prebuilt and free, or is this something that the pool operators have put together on their own? One aspect I'd like to have control over is the difficulty of work unit assignments, as I have CPU miners doing 20kHash/s while other GPU miners are cranking out 600kHash/s. In the end, I'd like to be able to get a list of all the connected machines, allowing me to verify which ones are active and what their actual kHash rate is.

And before you ask, no, I'm not looking to make a new LTC mining pool; this is purely for use in my own network. Second, I do have a fair amount of hashing power available (over 5000kHash/s), so on average I should be able to find an LTC block every few days. The reason I don't like the mining pools is that what they pay does now appear to match my hashing power, plus the frequent DDoS attacks and pools that aren't accepting registration make me want to go solo for a while. This Litecoin Calculator for instance gives me an estimated 21.5 LTC per day for 5000kHash/s, but my actual LTC at a couple different pools has worked out to more like 12LTC.

I may be adding some additional hashing power as well, so it just seems like if you have enough hashing power to make solo mining worthwhile (which for me I take as being the ability to mine a block in less than two days on average), solo mining at present can still be the best route. Plus, it helps make the network more secure -- not that I see anyone doing a 51% attack any time soon, but making the network more diverse is still a good thing in my book.

Anyway, if someone has some good recommended reading for setting up a more complex solo mining pool, please let me know!

Having sold most of the 800 or so BTC I've mined since starting, I'm currently kicking myself for not being more bullish. Of the alternate cryptocurrencies, Litecoin seems to have a lot of potential right now, and it's actually outperforming BTC for mining by over two to one (and no ASICs to screw things up, at least not for a while). So I wrote a blog on the subject:

http://holynerdvana.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-breaks-100-litecoin-rising-as.html

Remember when it was possible to buy a shiny new Radeon 5970 and have it pay for itself in a month or two? Litecoin is currently in the same spot. Three 7970 GPUs, a moderate motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD, etc. and you're looking at well under $2000 for something that can mine (conservatively and at present difficulty) 300LTC per month. Break even point in terms of power use would be LTC valued at $0.24, which we've easily eclipsed. Plus, even CPUs can make a profit on LTC right now!

Lulz: http://doterraskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-doterra-and-mlms-are-better-than.html

Looks like someone is bitter about the block halving and is getting out of Bitcoin. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!

So I noticed a couple days ago that Bitcoinica suddenly went down. I thought perhaps someone else would start a thread, but after a few days with no posts I decided to look into it more. Well, as you probably guessed from the subject, Bitcoinica is not down, but it appears Comcast's DNS servers are no longer resolving the host name. Digging a little deeper, I found the following:

First, here are the current DNS addresses for Comcast users (I think it's for all users):
http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.php
75.75.75.75
75.75.76.76

I thought those IPs looked rather odd, but apparently they're legit -- and easy to remember. But do they do anything different? Well, here's a quote from the above page:

These IP addresses are distributed across many servers via Anycast for redundancy and reliability. As part of our ongoing efforts to protect our customers and provide great security features, DNSSEC validation is now automatically included as part of Comcast Constant Guard™ from Xfinity. Learn more about DNSSEC at our DNSSEC Information Center or by watching this short video.

Click on DNSSEC and you get the following page: http://www.dnssec.comcast.net/
Another potentially pertinent quote:

DNSSEC Deployment Completed!
Tuesday, January 10, 2012

As noted here on our blog, we have signed all of our domain names and all customers are now using DNSSEC-validating resolvers. Comcast is the first large ISP in the North America to have fully implemented DNSSEC, as part of ongoing efforts to protect our customers with Constant Guard™ from Xfinity.

So my bet is that somehow their DNSSEC initiative has decided that bitcoinica.com is not a safe website or something. Any thoughts on this? Other than changing my DNS server, it seems I can at least just connect directly to the Bitcoinica IP address (50.56.4.62), but https is not available if I do that, and come to think of it https://www.bitcoinica.com gave me the crossed out https as well. Perhaps that is the problem: Bitcoinica's certificate isn't valid, at least with Comcast? Does that sound right? Anyone else have thoughts or other details on this?

Okay, I know a lot of you think we're probably never going back there, but consider this a contest that will take more luck/skill to win then something like "when will we drop to $4 again". Prize is 2.5BTC from me, and times are in UTC. Voting closes when we hit $3.50 or in one month, whichever comes first. If two people try to guess the same date, tie goes to the first poster, and yes, we're guessing at the *future* (so guessing Nov. 18 2011 gets you nothing). I will try to put in an updated comment when voting is closed. Let the guessing begin!

My guess: I'm sticking with my June 27, 2012

Rather than throwing out terms like "fair" without trying to be fair, let's turn to what is hopefully the most unbiased arbitrator: the BTC community! Old_engineer already paid out the prize, but in the hope of ending this debate, sound off with your vote. If the outcome is different than what has already happened, we'll leave it up to goat whether he wants to give up/share his winnings.

Edit: In case you need it, here's a definition of fair: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair

Synonyms: Fair, impartial, disinterested, unprejudiced refer to lack of bias in opinions, judgments, etc. Fair implies the treating of all sides alike, justly and equitably: a fair compromise. Impartial, like fair, implies showing no more favor to one side than another, but suggests particularly a judicial consideration of a case: an impartial judge. Disinterested implies a fairness arising particularly from lack of desire to obtain a selfish advantage: The motives of her guardian were entirely disinterested. Unprejudiced means not influenced or swayed by bias, or by prejudice caused by irrelevant considerations: an unprejudiced decision.

So I'm curious: how long will it take to get funds out of MtGox into Paxum this weekend? I mean, is it all automated so it will be business as usual, or will they basically be shut down until Monday like the rest of the US? Anyone use this withdraw option before on a weekend? MtGox says "less than 24 hours", but so far I've got nothing and it's been about that long.

Not sure where else to put this, but since I was trying to take advantage of an arbitrage situation I figure it works here as well as anywhere. Anyone ever use BitInstant and have the transfer take exceptionally long? Right now, they're showing my deposit to Tradehill has gone through, but over 70 minutes later Tradehill shows nothing. Usually it's less than a minute before the funds are available at TH; anyone have a similar experience ever? What causes this, and what do you do about it? This will very possibly be the last time I try using BitInstant if something doesn't happen.

So, we've had since about 5AM GMT on Nov. 20 with no super large sell or buy orders, leaving us in a lull of activity while we all wait (and hedge our bets) on the next big move. Up or down, that's the question. A single 10K BTC sell could drop us to $2.19 or so, while a 10K BTC buy would bump us up to $2.40, so not very large movements. 20K BTC would extend the range to $2.15 and $2.47, and 30K would give us $2.12 and $2.59. Of course, that's only if we had a single giant sell/buy order, as a bunch of smaller orders would quickly trigger bots to rearrange the walls. If we follow last month's pattern, we'll have a slow upward trend for the next couple of weeks, but who knows what will happen over the holidays -- any guesses?