Looks like the price at cex.io crashed.

And the maintenance fees are ridiculous now.

Maintenance of 100 GH = $26 / month.

Revenue of 100 GH at current exchange rate (443) and current difficulty = just $83 / month.

In a few more months those GH won't be profitable at all.

https://cex.io/maintenance

And it keeps going up faster and faster.

I need a windows VPS that accepts bitcoin. Preferably one that's located in a country that doesn't respect law enforcement.

So, let's say I scammed some bitcoins and want to wash them, isn't it virtually impossible to trace?

All I need to do is deposit the coins onto some web wallet, and withdraw them, and I get different coins, since most web wallets don't keep the coins tied to your account on the actual cash in address. (I've tried this. After I withdrew my coins, the original coins I sent are still unspent, so I got totally different coins).

Even if someone wanted to trace it, they don't know *where* I sent the coins to, since sites don't exactly publish a list of bitcoin addresses they control. And when I cash them out, nobody would know that I even sent coins to an exchange, because again, anyone could own that address. And from what I've seen, most sites don't pool coins into a centralized known address, they keep them distributed over many address and just spend the outputs when they need to, so unless you make a withdrawl from mt gox and get coins from a particular address, you wouldn't know mt gox controls that address.

Wouldn't that cause issues?

Like let's say, the difficulty just reset, so we have 2016 blocks to go till the next change. At the current hash power, it'll take ~ 10 minutes / block like it's supposed to.

And for whatever reason, 95% of the hash power is taken off the network (which is NOT totally unrealistic. If there's a rise in electricity costs or a decline in bitcoin prices to the point where power cost > value of bitcoins mined, a lot of ASICs will be taken offline, since even if you wanted the bitcoin, it'd be cheaper to not run the ASIC and buy the bitcoin instead). The difficulty is still the same, and will remain the same for 2016 blocks. If 95% of the GH disappears, then each block will now take 200 minutes to find on average, for the next 280 days.

Like let's say someone has 75% of the overall mining power.

Could they reject other miners' valid blocks? The 75%'s blockchain will always be longer then anyone else's, so would it cause all other miners' blocks to be orphaned?

And they could essentially set rules on the transactions, and set a minimum Tx fee to get a Tx included in the blockchain.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/01/world/bitcoin/karpeles-dead/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

april fools

Even CEX's OWN WEBSITE tells you that you'll lose money by buying their product

https://cex.io/calc

Punch in the #s representing the current market stats

100 GH
16% maintenance fee
0% pool fee

Current difficulty: 5006
Difficulty increase: 50

Conversion rate: 460
Conversion rate increase/decrease: 0

So for 100 GH at their current prices, you'd pay 1.1 BTC
Their calculators show that you'll get a .62 BTC return before maintenance fees > return, at which point your GH are worthless.

Even the default values that are in the page when you go to it show a net loss if you buy their GH, so it's not like people are getting deceived by false marketing.

Like, if miners that control > 50% of the hash power come together and decide they want to increase the reward per block mined to 100 BTC, couldn't they do that?

Since it's all peer to peer they could just change the software to accept that.

Sure they can. They can't get rid of the protocol, but they can make it useless.

Let's say for you have a totalitarian country.

They can make a law saying that they'll execute anyone who uses bitcoin. Nobody would dare touch it anymore. That's an extreme, but it's still possible in some countries (more realistically they'd seize your assets).

For a country like the US. The government probably can't make it illegal to possess or use bitcoin, but they can do the following to effectively kill it:
- Give it unfavorable tax treatment
- Force merchants who accept it to adhere to complex and expensive accounting rules, so that it's not economical to accept it as payment for any legitimate business
- Call it a counterfeit currency and prosecute people who try to use it. (2 words: Liberty Dollar). I don't care if you want to believe it or not, but if you print up your own money (even if it doesn't resemble US dollars at all, eg. Bitcoin bills), go to a store, and try to pay with it you CAN get in trouble.
- Make a few high profile examples. Find a company doing bitcoin mining who's books aren't correct to the letter, seize their assets. Find a bitcoin user who didn't report capital gains on their coins and throw them in jail for tax evasion.
- Use the fact that bitcoin is commonly used for criminal purposes to have law enforcement harass bitcoin users. Government can seize coins that are traced to have been used in illegal activity (or if the government SUSPECTS they were used in illegal activity). This can easily be done to merchants by mandating they report transactions and wallet addresses. The govt could even go a step further and mandate that merchants give access (private key) to those wallets to a govt agency.

Sure, things like drugs are illegal and are a thriving economy, but that's different. You can't grind up a bitcoin, snort it, and get high, so if the government hassles people who use it, and no legitimate business will accept it because it's too much of a pain in the ass, nobody is going to bother using it unless they want to use it to buy drugs online or something.

Here's the issue with bitcoin.

No chargebacks, and you need to store/protect your private keys.

That's a BAD thing.

When I buy things online, I buy with a credit card. I don't have to do any research into whether a merchant is reputable or not. If it doesn't show up or is not as advertised, I make a phone call and get my money back. I don't have to worry about protecting my information, because if it's stolen, I make a phone call, get my money back, and get a new card issued.

For fiat, it by itself has no protection, but banks, a trusted 3rd party, and the FDIC protect it. If your bank account is hacked, you get your money back. If there's fraud of some kind involved, you get your money back. If your bank goes bankrupt, the FDIC covers up to 250K of it, which is sufficient protection for most people.

In order for bitcoin to appeal to the masses, there needs to be a trusted 3rd party who can offer a payment solution that includes dispute resolution and chargebacks, 100% protection for your account being hacked, basically removing any kind of responsibility or liability from the end user. And I'm not talking about a "trusted" 3rd party like coinbase, or bitstamp. The service would have to be offered by an organization like bank of america.

To the average person, there's no appeal of bitcoin. It puts the onus on YOU to protect your money and making sure the merchant is reliable. I've lost one of my credit cards while on vacation, didn't even worry about it till I got back. If that were bitcoin then I'd be panicking about losing a ton of money if I didn't resolve it immediately.

First off, how do I disable the transaction fee for low priority transactions? It forces a transaction fee even though I set it to 0.

And what's the easiest way to spend an output twice? (Yes, I'm fully aware of the fact only one of the transactions will make it into the blockchain and be valid.)