The title probably already gave it away but I think we're all thinking this.  You know how quite a large number of BTC transactions involve illegal stuff?  Don't you wish you could damage those guys' business or basically take their money?  Well, most drug-buying, burnout, ass clowns aren't exactly way into following the BTC community.  Drug dealers probably can't read so well to begin with so needless to say, most aren't here following every little post

So, if someone were to say let's everyone refuse to sell any BTC on any exchange for 1 week starting on XXXX, the price would skyrocket and then everyone dump it after the 1 week and all the money that was collected illegally at the artificially inflated buying price would go straight into our pockets during a big sell off

What do you think?  Could we get enough people to follow along while keeping enough people in the dark?  Or would early sellers, etc ruin it by not exactly following the policy?  Would we even have enough people?

It'd suck and only be slightly funny if half the pools out there went offline after ASICs launched because everyone collectively sent 10x the shares all of a sudden The way I understand it, a pool sends a proof of work operation the same as the block but with a much lower difficulty.  The client solves it and submits the "answer" and the server re-runs that 1 calculation to make sure the answer is correct then accepts it.  If it happened to also have been a low enough hash value for the block itself, it submits it and the pool gets 50BTC.  Yay!

Except what's the CPU and RAM usage going to look like at 10x the shares?  I assume if my i5 can do like 12MH/s then doing 1 verification hash calculation wouldn't take real long but some pools get many thousands of shares in a minute and I'm more worried about the overhead and network traffic.  Are the pools in any trouble if they're running on crappy servers or is the client so lightweight, nobody needs to be concerned?

Or is there some manual or automatic adjustment to share difficulty that will make shares themselves harder to solve and keep the communication and verification from getting too intense?

[Good luck with that!]

Hey ASIC pre-order people, you're screwed Here's why:

#'s have been corrected with more accurate info.  Unfortunately not much has changed

I've been going around trying to get more exact numbers from the major ASIC manufacturers and so far they don't even seem to know how many preorders they have   So we're going on ballpark estimates and rumors.  Many weeks ago, BFL had stated they have 7000 pre-orders total.  I heard from several other users that it's now stated to be 14,000, but taking into consideration other things, it's now much lower.  Let's say 5000.

Let's be conservative yet realistic and say that that's 4800 Jalapenos, 150 singles, and 50 mini-rigs.  That's 16,800 GH/s + 9,000 GH/s + 75,000GH/s =  100.8TH/s.

BTCFPGA's line of products:  They're the only other ones expected to ship before 2012 concludes so they've got to be a pretty good target.  Rumor has it, they're around 400 so let's go with that and split em between their 2 product levels.  That = another 16.2 TH/s.

The Avalon allegedly has a lot more than I thought despite shipping in fairly late 2013, like 3-4 months after their competition at which point ASIC mining will be extremely hard to profit form.  Well, they have some special 300 pricing but haven't hit it yet so let's say 150. That's another 9 TH/s.

So that's 126 TH/s total added in just preorders.

The number of people willing to risk lots and lots of money on a preorder for an experimental device from somewhat sketchy companies is definitely less than the number of people who will buy mining hardware soon after it's released to the public and proven to work for at least a short period of time.  I'd say it's 5:1 but let's go conservative and say for every 1 preordering daredevil, there are 2 people that will buy the hardware once it actually comes out and works.  Also they'd obviously be more inclined to buy higher end hardware than the Jalapenos for example once there's practically 0 risk (post-release) but once again, let's go conservative with a best case scenario and not adjust for that.  So with my numbers, that's another 252 TH/s for a total of 378 TH/s.

And the current total computational of the network is around 22.5TH/s.

So, since difficulty and price all scale evenly with each other, I can do this in any order.  A BFL jalapeno runs at 3.5GH/s and at the last price I recall from MTGox ($12.80 USD per BTC) and the current difficulty, that will pay for its $149 price tag in 11.19 days.  Not bad!  HURRAY, let's all pre-order!  Hell no, keep reading, lol.

By the time ASICs are released, 25BTC instead of 50 will be the mining reward per block and I think we all know the price won't magically jump to 2x overnight so let's go ahead and double that.  That's a 22.38 day payoff.  Now let's add all those new miners and readjust for the resulting difficulty increase of approx 16.8x, and you'll pay off your Jalapeno in 376 days which means you're making $0.40 USD per day.  That's all assuming that from release time to about 1-2 months afterwards, nobody ever buys another ASIC miner for that entire 376 days.  Let's factor back in future sales rates and....you're not going to pay it off, lol.  So let's say my numbers or estimates are somehow drastically off and give it a + or - 70% accuracy variance.  That results in...you still being screwed, lol.

Good luck with that!

[@ Mods:]

@ Mods: This threads needs to goto $Economics

Yeah, right after you change your av pic, asshole.  Btw, everyone put him on ignore until he does.

[Butterfly Labs]

Sorry, I don't have one   But this space is reserved for the list  I'll start with the ones I do know about though.

Butterfly Labs
BitForce Jalapeno  4.5 GH/s  -  $149 (30.2MH/s/$)
BitForce Single 'SC'  60 GH/s  -  $1,299 (46.19 MH/s/$)
BitForce Mini Rig 'SC'  1,500 GH/s  -  $29,899 (50.17MH/s/$)
Anticipated release sometimes before Christmas
Comes with their own driver and custom mining software.

btcfpga (what an unfortunate choice of name, lol)
27GH/s bASIC NextGen Bitcoin Miner $599.99 (45 MH/s/$)
54GH/s bASIC NextGen Bitcoin Miner $1,069.99 (50.47MH/s/$)
Anticipated release in November or December

Avalon
60GH/s Avalon ASIC Miner $1,299 (46.19 MH/s/$)
Anticipated release in Q1 of 2013
Do note that according to them, the price will go up to $1999 after 300 total orders

Deepbit (I assume?)
4GH/s DeepBit Reclaimer One $320 (12.5MH/s/$)
8GH/s DeepBit Reclaimer 4A $520 (15.28MH/s/$)
80GH/s DeepBit Reclaimer RM $2800 (28.57 MH/s/$)
Do keep in mind that speed specs are not based on working prototype tests yet, but are guaranteed to be not worse than that.
You can only make a pre-order of it by buying a special "DB.RCLMR" security in the Exchange section of https://icbit.se trading platform
Anticipated release in Q2 of 2013


Everyone reply with any other companies, models, price, specs, anticipated speed, any any other relevant information about the products and I'll add them.  Company information or reputation or reviews are worth a lot more than impressive specs too by the way.

Since a lot of things are the same length and character set as a bitcoin address and there's 100% random with 0 static characters, they're very hard to identify with a Google search for example.  So if I was looking at a website and it was cool and I thought maybe they take BTC donations but can't find it, I can't do a "some keyword site:http://thatonesiteorwhatever.com/" google search string because I can't supply the keyword because I'd have to know part of the bitcoin address.

So my solution is simple.  Allow the totally optional letters "BTC" before any address.  So like:
hey, send me some tips and donations and stuff at BTC1E9KYg64m1fceAXTsLY2VfXK5u2eL7a3St

Just make the next version of the client strip off "btc" or "BTC" from any address on the fly without complaining.  It's a text control interpretation and string manipulation change!  1 line of code!  Plus, that future-proofs the addresses against competing protocols.  Then you could have a same-character-count addressing system in some other currency and know that it's not a bitcoin one because of the prefix.  Then you don't sit there trying it 5 times before you realize it's not from the bitcoin system.  It's genius!  What do you all think?

When ASICs ship, if basically everyone fires them up at the same time and the total GH/s goes approx 1.5-2.0x higher, whatever difficulty it's at would result in a block around every 3 mins or something.  Is there a protection in the protocol that adjusts the difficulty early if something like that happens or do we just get to the difficulty adjustment and lose days and days off the life of bitcoin and artificially inflate the supply, both very bad things.

Are you ready to have your minds blown?  I just realized something.  You know how BTC has been going up and up and up?  You know how there's $1.2+ mil in pre-orders at BFL and the initial ones were BTC-only?  Put 2 and 2 together.  As soon as they start to be released, BFL is going to sell off all that BTC and miners are going to sell their BTC again. I think it's gonna fall pretty hard.

If you somehow think this is not true, ummmm, according to MTGoxLive, $1.2 mil USD is exactly 1 shit ton of money

I've been watching the charts and the increase in total computation speed seems a bit excessive even at current exchange prices.  Take a look. They're nuts!  It seems to have shot up significantly right around the time that Butterfly Labs would be mass testing some of their 7000+ pre-ordered ASIC chips.  Hmmmmm

They say vague things in their posts on purpose but given their anticipated ship dates, trust me, at this point they're definitely done manufacturing them and are working on testing and packaging them.  You don't finish a 1st release device and cross your fingers and hope it runs once it gets to the customer.  You run it for 24+ hours to make sure defective ones don't go out So I do wonder if they're running many, many GH/s worth of them at once to do a bit of a burn-in or mass reliability test.  And why crunch dummy data when you can make money mining?

If circumstantial evidence isn't enough, try simple business logic.  The price is set at $149 for a 3500MH/s chip. At current prices, they would make $149 after about 10.8 days of mining!  So why doesn't Butterfly Labs just run them for 10.8 days instead of selling them?  Then they'd have $149 and the chips lol.  I mean seriously, read those last 2 sentences again, people.  You think they're not mining with them?  I can't be the only one that realizes this.  From a business perspective, if you had an investment that would pay off 200% in a month and you sell it off instead, you're a crazy person.

So I think a huge portion of them are fully assembled and running right now.  The question is, under these circumstances, when would they stop mining?  Simple. Keep mining until one of 4 things happens:
1. someone notices the potential ability to do a >50% of total computational power attack as that would cause everyone to jump ship and crash the price like the Hindenberg.  By the way, they *potentially* have over 30,000GH/s worth of mining hardware in inventory at the moment and everyone else in the world cumulatively has 21,000.
2. "At current prices, they would make $149 after about 10.8 days of mining" <-- until this is no longer remotely true for any reason
3. someone posts #1 on a bitcoin forum
4. everyone gets super, mega, raging pissed off that the devices are taking too long to ship

So they're either waiting to get closer to the split (see #2 above) or for all their mining to drive the price down slightly in a roundabout way (also #2) or any of the other reasons.  All that pre-order money could easily fund the manufacture and hold of a TON of inventory for a month or two so I seriously think that gigantic spike in the charts is primarily them mining.  They have slightly over $1 million USD worth of preorders right now by the way.  That'd buy the chips, hubs, PCs, internet, electricity, and building for a gigantic mining operation

Of course, they'd never ever admit this.  Bitcoin mining is an arms race.  First it was CPUs then GPUs then FPGAs now ASICs and each were like 10x faster than the last, forcing everyone to buy them.  It's just like guns vs grenades vs nukes.  Since mining is competitive and you only get your share of a certain amount of coins, well back to the analogy in that deals tend to go sour when you find out that the arms dealers are also using the weapons TO SHOOT AT YOU BEFORE YOU BOUGHT THEM!!! ROFL.

So this is all kinda scary, bad news but the good news is, if I'm right that means when the Jalapenos and other ASIC models ship out, the total speed will drop for like a week then go back to a similar level to what it is now

I'm wondering if this happened to anyone else.  I'm very suspicious now because Linode hosted sites were hacked fairly recently and are strongly related to bitcoins.

From GMT -6 US central time 1:16 AM until 2:06 (right now) I've gotten 6 e-mails on a main account of mine from apache@*******.members.linode.com with the stars being a specific member number.

The entire end of that URL won't resolve to a real site though.  The IP address that the message originated from was not in any known IP database but it does resolve to that ending URL according to one IP tool I used.  It was located in Europe but that's all it can determine.  The contents of the first message were:

test.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

test

and the subject line is "test" and the from name is "added by portage for apache"

And all others had the same content except for the body text area "test" was removed.  With the most recent hack of a non-linode server, I'm wondering if somehow someone's attempting to do this big leak I heard so much about by those assholes who hacked that other site.  I don't recall if it was hosted on Linode but I don't think it was.  This may have nothing to do with bitcoins and is just some idiot with my e-mail address failing to configure a server correctly or someone setting up a spam server horribly wrong (on Linode though?) but, the timing is sure odd given recent events.

So this definitely leads me to ask, has anyone else gotten these e-mails?

EDIT: oh, if I type the IP address directly into a browser, I get a postfix admin login window requesting that I log in, stating "Mail admins login here to adminster your domain." but get this, there's a navigation link on the bottom of the login window saying "Return to NYCTelecomm Mail Admin Page" and it loops back to the IP address but not in a properly formed URL.  That appears to be a linux development website if I simply google the name and the Linode folks are way into Linux development and donating to Linux related stuff.  So....anyway, wtf is going on and did anyone else get these?

I don't claim to have the bitcoin protocol memorized but isn't the difficulty reassessment and adjustment on a static time duration?  According to the charts on http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ we're overdue by quite a few days.  How is this possible?

Check out the MTGox Live chart for 2-27-12:



I had a whole room full of economists working on the reason for this all day, but since it's a Monday, this is all they came up with as a solution:  because Monday Cat hates Mondays

Check this out!  Daily newsletter deal on a newegg Sapphire Radeon 6850:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102908&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL011012&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL011012-_-EMC-011012-Index-_-DesktopGraphicsVideoCards-_-14102908-L07A

That means you can use Sapphire Trixx to OC is REALLY easily.
Use the code: EMCNJJN45
and it's $15 off!  That brings it down to $135 with free shipping.  Now I don't feel so bad about the lack of 5830's because this is very comparable cost-wise and electricity usage-wise.  Those start out at about 213 MH/s (and the 5830's start at 286 and OC easily to 310-320 in most cases).  I know I'm getting at least one :-) I don't think this is better than a practically identical but cheaper 5770 though, which they have one from MSI for $115 so do consider that.

How am I the only one I see wondering about this?  Someone (and I do mean one because I doubt 1000 people suddenly independently decided it was buying time) bought something like $400,000-700,000 US worth of bitcoins to get it to this price.  I certainly am not hopping on this one until someone knows who.  You can't move that kind of volume without one single person here not knowing if someone is investing or scamming or creating a new business or what.

The most likely situation is that they're purposely causing a slow, seemingly sustained rise to fool people.  Everyone buys after it goes up and up and up for days.  So let's say the math says that one person raised the price by $2.50 and everyone else following along with buying, hoping to make money on the way up, raised it the other $1.50.  One giant sell-off of the entire volume a few days after it levels off a bit to put in some cushion purchase bids and tada, they made money.  Theoretically that one person would make something like the difference in price caused by everyone else on the way back down.  Of course, that assumes that more people buy in than take the opportunity to sell a large stack of their built up BTC.

But seriously, what else would someone have planned for around 100,000 BTC that were just bought?

[What's not causing the drop is:]

I've seen a lot of minor reasons why it dropped but the real reason is obvious.  The distance in time from when GPU mining really took off to about a week ago is approximately the time it takes to pay off the average efficient set of cards.  If I mined from April to now, my cards would be paid off too.  So people with lower budget simple rigs are hitting that level and thinking about selling for USD or permanently withdrawing their USD from the exchange so their long term investment ends nicely instead of continuing to risk it.

The majority of miners joined to make money/get "free" cards so if you've made around the cost of your rig and saw the price drop and stay there for a few days then sneak down a little more then stay there and show no sign of raising but you're sitting on like 30-50BTC, you're going to take the opportunity to dump them all on the market just in case it drops to like $2 and ruins your entire mining experience.

Unlike other people, I'm going to actually post evidence.  2 months ago there were about 8 radeon 5830's on ebay with the cheapest at $140.  Now there's 38, almost all used, almost all referencing bitcoins, and the cheapest around $127.  People are definitely selling off their rigs now that the price dropped and they've already "cashed out."

What's not causing the drop is:

- investors because no investor sees it drop like $2-3 and decides to sell.  That doesn't make any sense and if they're as stubborn as me, they won't sell it at a loss even if it takes 6 months of sitting on BTC to prevent it.

- any blog post, news article, or forum post caused it because our opinions on BTC is pretty set in stone and can't be shaken by something so insignificant.

- a massive theft and sell-off because we should have heard about it by now.  It would have been at least like 500,000 BTC to get to this price and that's almost 10% of all coins that exist.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who noticed this but right now, MTGox (as seen by MTGox Live) is getting pounded with an suspicious sequence of trade orders.  They're at about 5-10 per second nonstop and all are buy orders and are all of the size: 0.02, 0.09, 0.10, or 0.37 BTC.  They're all those same 4 values but are completely randomly sequenced though.

This has only driven the price up a couple cents US but it's been at least 1000 straight trades for easily 10 minutes and that's just how long I've been watching it for.  It's so many trades, I'm on an i5 quad core with 8 GB of RAM and a GTS450 and the javascript to draw them is causing this separate window to lag as I type.

Is someone's tradebot having a meltdown? Otherwise this is obviously a specific attack trying to crash the exchange with a high volume of low orders?  The same 4 values in a random pattern is textbook AI avoidance.  They probably have a guard that catches hundreds of the same order or same order sequence being placed in a row as a sort of DOS attack so they just made

As of right now, the MTGox Live graph line is actually frozen so their servers aren't doing so well.  This could be anything from an attack against MTGox Live viewers only to attempting to crash MTGox's trade servers or even something I haven't thought of yet.

Here's a screenshot of it as it's happening.  So imagine this but relentlessly for about 20 minutes now.

I wasn't keeping a log or anything but last month, didn't MTGox live say $10,000 would get you a $1.00+ movement given all the buy and sell orders in place?  According to it now, it's at $11 even and it takes about $325,000 to bump it down to $10 and $250,000 to $12.
I'm thinking that means the price is pretty darn stable as far as the big dollar per day spikes or giant $5 crashes like a couple weeks ago.  Then again I have no experience in the stock market which I'm sure takes millions to swing certain stocks either way and they still do so I might be way off.  What do you people with investment experience think?

[EDIT:]

EDIT: you might want to read one of my later replies first...

Whenever anyone wants to know if a gambling site is rigging the game, they run a sort of brute force test.  That's when they play a ton of hands to see if it's either letting them win for the first couple hands or making them lose more than the odds of the game suggest.  The Wizard of Ods is famous for doing that and found some semi-high profile gambling sites were rigging it so people won with their free initial buy in credits more than they should and then lowering the odds after that to below normal game levels.  He usually plays 1000 hands but I'm not that patient so I tested BTCFlip with 50 bets  

The results were *drum roll*...

26 losses and 24 wins.  They pay a 1% bet commission on referrals and obviously keep a bit of a advantage to themselves but these numbers indicate that it's not like a 20% advantage or something.  That suggests a 2% advantage but don't think that number is set in stone because 50 is not a big enough test to dial it in precisely.  The results were:

loss
win
loss
loss
loss
loss
win
win
win
loss
win
win
loss
win
loss
loss
win
loss
win
loss
loss
loss
win
loss
win
win
loss
loss
win
loss
loss
win
win
loss
win
win
win
win
loss
loss
win
loss
loss
win
win
loss
loss
loss
win
win


so it seems that there are no conditions under which it gives an advantage or disadvantage.  They certainly weren't letting me win right at the start lol.  Just for fun, I ran a few bets that were much, much larger than their 0.01 minimum and lost 3 and won 2 which doesn't say much other there's not a 100% "they win" clause in their randomization code for high BTC amounts can't really comment on whether or not they up the odds at all in that case though.

By the way, I actually played 51 rounds and it dropped one of my bets.  It timed out and they said they never got it but I checked and the correct amount was sent to the correct address.  I was running all of these in firefox but I opened IE because of the view source feature to see if there were any hints or exposed code on the page and that's the one that got dropped so maybe it's not IE9 friendly or something.  It is all javascript based so who knows.

So my overall result is with no account or other apparent way of tracking a deposited bet, if anything happens to the page or their server mid-game, you're screwed, making it pretty unsafe.  Also, they don't list any information on the odds or have any guarantee that they don't change so that's pretty sketchy.  Why would anyone (other than me ) play a game that doesn't list the odds of winning?  Other than that, from an odds point of view, it's at least somewhat close to 50-50 and appears to have no larger of an advantage than any casino game so if you want to go for it, go for it

EDIT: oh yeah, I should probably mention that I won 24 times and there are 24 payouts from them in my bitcoin client log so they also do pay you if you win  That seems to be an important part of any gambling site review lol.

There's so little to this that hopefully there's another explaination but I'm seeing one.  I had 0.30239966 bitcoins and I tried to send 0.3 to someone.  It warned me that because it was over a size limit, it was going to charge 0.005 so I accepted and now I have 0.00 as a wallet balance but the transaction went through.  That means it only paid .00239966 as a fee.  That's not 0.005 so that's not supposed to happen right?

I know the reason that no exchange wants to touch Paypal is because of "chargebacks."  Well that's the credit card term but same deal.  Here's the problem, and this is a real example:

Use Paypal to buy an in-game virtual item in SRO by Joymax of Yahoo Games Korea.  Claim the item was never delivered.  Paypal sides with you and Joymax has no way of proving they delivered the virtual item, the transaction is reversed and Joymax gets screwed.

Virtual items are generated for free but with electronic currency, you'd be super screwed if people did this.

I want to become a low volume exchanger for people where I can take Paypal payments and send them BTC so people so here's my question for you Paypal experts:

If someone uses a buy it now or add to cart button that's Paypal backed, there's an item description and shipping info tied to it so people can file a claim saying they never got the item it represents.  Requests for money sent from me are often treated as invoices so that could be a problem too.  So would it make me immune to this Paypal chargeback scam if I just simply have the person send me a generic member to member Paypal payment.  If, as far as Paypal is concerned, there was no item or purchase involved in the transaction and it was just one member sending another money, then there's no grounds for a chargeback to be filed.  Is that correct?