Hello, I'm interested in buying up broken/unusable S9 boards, mostly for the heatsinks.

I'm wondering if there are significant quantities of these floating around out there.

If your board is fixable you will get a better deal having it fixed -- I'm not trying to compete with the repair shops and not offering enough for that.  On the other hand it seems that if a single SMT land pad on the PCB is damaged even Bitmaintech's authorized warranty repair center will refuse to fix it and declare a total loss.

So it seems like there is a good chance that there are quite a few unfixable boards floating around out there, and as time goes on that pool will grow.

Still determining pricing, but probably in the ballpark of $210/miner or $70/board.  Less if the board has been lit on fire, more if I can get a large quantity in a single transaction.

Feel free to post below if you have any perspective on the market for these unfixable boards.

If you have a serious offer involving a significant number of boards, my email address is in my profile.  Please don't PM me, I don't read those.

Sha na na na.. sha na na na... hey hey hey, goooodbye...

http://www.cnet.com/news/bitcoin-mining-company-butterfly-labs-shut-down-by-ftc/

I've got a cryptography project shaping up that could benefit from renting lots of idle FPGA miners.  Specifically Spartan-6 LX150 chips (*).  If you have a lot of these, and can put them online, please contact me through the email link in my profile (do not send forum PMs).  Let me know how many chips worth you have.

Just to be clear, we're not interested in actually taking physical delivery of the miners or chips.  You'd give me a login on some junky linux box that has JTAG or similar access to the boards, I'd pay you weekly in BTC.  You pay the electric bill, but obviously we're offering more than enough to offset that.  You're free to bail out at any time.

There are still a few things that need to happen for the project to go forward, one of which is finding enough compute power.  So if you don't have a fairly large installation that's ok, let me know anyways, but I'll probably put you on the wait-list for after we get the first few big contributors going.

Thanks,

(*) It *might* make sense to add support for other FPGAs, but only if you have a truly gigantic quantity of them (like 1,000+).  If you think this might be you, let me know what you've got.

Yall,

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/19/bitcoin-savings-trust-ponzi-scheme-judge-order

So, it turns out that Bitcoin founded both the CIA and NSA.

Yes, it's true.

Link:

  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304422704579570132275301414

Go here and click first link to bypass paywall:

  https://www.google.com/search?q=Bitcoin+Exchanges+Probed+Over+Shuttered+Drug+Market

… and suddenly the chorus of people saying "AML is okay" vanishes.

[Moderation promise: I will not moderate except to delete posts that try to derail the thread by advertising an altcoin]

Moderation promise: I will not moderate except to delete posts that try to derail the thread by advertising an altcoin

Update, 15-Apr: it has begun... sooner than I thought.

I think the POW innovations have it all wrong. You can't prevent ASICs; there is no ASIC-proof POW. But that isn't the point.

The point should be to ensure that some near-ideal mining device:

  (a) already exists in mass production, with another use,
  (b) isn't susceptible to botnet-mining, and
  (c) has a cost-of-ownership dominated by silicon rather than electricity.

I fear very much what happens once the difficulty plateaus and the only people who can still mine are those with $0.02/kwh electricity and most users are facing electricity costs five times higher than revenues. Nobody "mines for fun" to any meaningful degree in that situation. The hydroelectric warehouses buy up all the idled ASICs from high-electric-cost owners at bargain prices and we wind up with five or six giganto-mines. Then the next time the BTC/USD exchange rate takes a sudden plunge -- for any reason -- those five operators can't cover their electric costs and the rational choice for them and their shareholders is to mount a 51% attack.  The scariest part is that since a 51% attack isn't illegal shareholders can actually sue mine managers for not doing this (at least in the US where managers of for-profit non-B corporations have a duty to act in the corporation's financial interest).

We're relying on altruism more than we think, folks.

If the POW is engineered so that the ideal mining device already exists people won't have to take a gamble with sketchy outfits like BFL. If it has other uses they won't be tempted to sell when operation becomes unprofitable, or they'll sell on ebay to people applying it to a non-mining use.

Unfortunately the people cooking up idiotic monstrosities like scrypt-jane and X11 have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Hey look I'll gang together ten ASIC-friendly algorithms and that just has to be ten times better, guys!

(edit: stuff above here is the main point of this post/thread; what follows is just an initial stab, probably wrong, at solving it)

One possibility is a scrypt-like algorithm but with:

• An utterly massive N-value, like 16GB or more, beyond the amount of memory in most botnet-slaves and impossible to hide the performance impact in the rest.
• Anti-TMTO modifications so you can't trade X times less memory for ~X times more computation.
• The simplest possible blockMix() operation between memory-data-out and memory-address-in -- much less than salsa20/8.  Probably siphash is ideal, big thanks to tromp's paper on cuckoo cycle for this idea!

Then the ideal mining device looks like a very cheap (~$50) backplane full of commodity DRAM DIMMs. The DRAM industry has the largest economies of scale of anything in semiconductor computing, bar none.  Way beyond CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs; no ASIC startup will ever come close to their economies of scale.  The key is making sure that putting extra intelligence on the DRAM chips (yes, you can do this) doesn't win you any advantage.  That ensures that the mining industry has nothing to gain by diverging from the DRAM industry, and a lot to lose from economies of scale.

Anti-TMTO can be implemented in a very basic way by using serially-chained addressing for not just the read-phase but the write-phase too.  There are probably better ways to do it.  If the algorithm's dependencies are sufficiently serially threaded through the memory then very little of the silicon is active (switching) at any point in time, so you'll draw very little electricity.  I'd have to run the numbers here but the goal is to ensure that the total cost of electricity over the expected dielectric lifetime (at 24x7x365 operation) is significantly less than the cost of the memory chips.  I think that's doable.

You'd still need to buy a cheapo backplane to mine, but those things are easy for any PCB shop to design, slap on an old FPGA (or even CPU) to use as a memory controller, you're good to go.  Product development costs would be in the $5,000-$10,000 range instead of the $5mm-$10mm range.  Heck you could solder them up yourself.  Great maker project.

moved

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=565492.0

I think that is tinfoil-hat talk.  I believe most people want a free and fair system, and so bitcoin will stay free and fair.

Unfortunately I don't think so.  Sadly most people today would rather have security than freedom.  That sucks, but it's how it is.

a bit of taint was peeled off every fee-paying transaction included in the block.  So each newly generated coin can be traced back to a lot of addresses…. It's not very useful to define taint in this way, so blockchain.info for instance does not include it.  If you perform taint analysis on a newly generated coin, you'll find zero taint.

Probably because blockchain.info's taint analyzer has very different goals than governments and the legacy financial system do.  Be assured that if a taint system is imposed, it will deal with transaction fees.

Bitstamp is already demanding receipts for mining hardware.  This can be done.  Semiconductor fabrication is already heavily licensed.  I have to be pretty creative with the EAR paperwork when taping out to overseas foundries.

It's really a shame that the Zerocoin people are taking the attitude of "claim priority (first to publish), somebody else can do the heavy lifting of actually making it work".  Satoshi did it right, he did both, and he changed the course of history.  People like Satoshi are the ones who created the Internet, and I see fewer and fewer of them in academia with each passing year.

[Bitcoin Chief]

Apparently Matonis is both "Bitcoin Chief" and also "Bitcoin's executive director" now.  Not "The bitcoin foundation's executive director" but "Bitcoin's executive director".

http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/bitcoin-chief-advises-to-invest-in-digital-currency-only-if-users-can-afford-to-lose-114030200294_1.html

In the past Matonis has generally seemed to be an upstanding guy, which is more than I can say for his peers on The bitcoin foundation's board.  Let's see if he does the right thing and asks the journalist to correct this clear factual error (in the title of the article, no less!).

http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/robust-bitcoin-survives-first-real-test-mt-goxalypse-30053292.html

Summary: ghost of Keynes cries out "die, die, why won't you die?!?!"


Also, it was refreshing to see something like this:

Promoters of the crypto-currency are often doers and creators. They are people like Marc Andreessen or senior web industry business executives: engineers and entrepreneurs who are currently creating a lot more wealth than other industrial sectors. This indicates that when they believe passionately in something, they build things to support it.

Instead of the sneering "clever people who lack the interpersonal skills to make it in business" line that led to the immediate demise of my Guardian subscription.

[anybody who withdrew fiat from gox is exposed to a major clawback risk.]

It's starting to look like the gox situation was a bitcoin version of the Madoff affair.  Company loses (or simply doesn't earn) money, inflates ledger balances to compensate, everything falls apart.

The Madoff case involved a very, very, very large clawback of payouts made to investors before things came apart.  This was based on the premise that as a fractional reserving scheme those payouts were actually "stolen goods" comprising other customers' deposits.  A lot of people were very upset about this.  In some cases they clawed back withdrawals made several years before the collapse.

Since gox "got the AML/KYC religion" this means that -- at the very minimum -- anybody who withdrew fiat from gox is exposed to a major clawback risk.

In theory people who withdrew BTC are at risk too, but I suspect the authorities will focus on the fiat withdrawals.

Edit: the Zeek Rewards situation is probably a more accurate template for how this will play out.

Pretty simple question.

Is Karpeles' scam more like Bernie Madoff or Jon Corzine?

[anonymous prepaid cards]

At first I was glad to see the first few bitcoin ATMs coming on line.

Then I found out that they require a palm print, facial photo, and government ID scan.  My jaw dropped.

1. The legacy financial system's ATMs are under none of these onerous requirements.  Any Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or Citibank ATM will happily spit out $500 at a time to holders of anonymous prepaid cards issued from any country on the planet (except possibly Iran and North Korea).  No photos, no ID, nothing.  This is an unbelievably blatant double standard.

2. The user has no idea who this information is being given to or what will be done with it.  Most importantly, there is no guarantee that use of a bitcoin ATM will not be grounds for an IRS audit.  Mark my words, two or three years from now any US person who's ever gone through AML/KYC with any bitcoin-related business, including use of one of these ATMs, will get audited.  The IRS has complete impunity to audit whoever they like, whenever they like, for any reason (including political orientation) or no reason at all.  If they can use audits to repress a wing of the Republican party, I'm sure they can use them to repress cryptocurrencies.  They've already used it to harrass open source projects.

I really think this is the legacy system's strategy for strangling bitcoin.  They've apparently been able to convince regulators to impose AML/KYC requirements on bitcoin-related business above and beyond those imposed on all other money-related businesses.  With that little barrier out of they way they can now simply keep bumping up the regulatory requirements to whatever level is required to make bitcoin more inconvenient/risky than what they're offering.

The people operating these ATMs need to stand up to FINCEN and point this out.  The potential users of these ATMs need to shun those based on an AML/KYC double standard.  Don't accept a level of regulation that exceeds what's imposed on the legacy financial system.  That's the only line in the sand.

Edit: boldified "anonymous prepaid cards" since people seem to be missing that part.

["Bitcoin Price Plunges as Mt. Gox Exchange Closes Indefinitely"]

I suppose "until an undefined time" is technically what indefinitely means, although I doubt most of their readers will think that at first glance.  Lame journalism (but what do you expect from bloomberg anyways?)... on the other hand the shenanigans coming out of gox are lamer so I guess it all cancels out.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-02-07/bitcoin-price-plunges-as-mt-dot-gox-exchange-closes-indefinitely

PS I think this (press) subforum should be given an exemption from the subject length limit so we don't have to delete words from the articles' titles to make them fit.  The full article title is "Bitcoin Price Plunges as Mt. Gox Exchange Closes Indefinitely".  Upon typing the last word of the subject line I was overwhelmed by the urge to use capslock.  Deal with it.

http://www.coindesk.com/chinese-bitcoin-exchange-okcoin-accused-faking-trading-data

What, faked economic data coming out of china?  unpossible!

I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I figured with everybody else yammering about China, well… if everyone thinks one thing, then I say, bet the other way.

"Misuse could prompt law enforcement agencies to close Bitcoin exchange platforms and keep consumers from accessing their investment."

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/european-union-warns-on-bitcoin/?_r=0

How dare we get in the way of them Cyprusing more people?

All your bitcoins are belong to Draghi.

is this "Chinese students" subforum actually run by Bilderberg-Illuminati?

[blocked by 0 people, 100% feedback score]

Hey, I wanted to warn people that localbitcoins.com:

1. Will let BTC buyers / USD sellers hold your coins for 48 hours, with the rate locked in, and then decide whether or not to cancel (they even have an "on vacation" setting for their account!)

2. Does not let new users leave feedback, so buyers can selectively accept

Overall it's quite a nice scam.  I accepted an offer to buy $300 worth of USD in the form of amazon.com gift codes at $358/BTC (at the time gox was around $310 so this wasn't unreasonable).  The exchange rate dropped -- or at least failed to continue its recent meteoric 10%/day rise --  the seller cancelled all his orders and set his account to "on vacation".  I left the most negative feedback possible, but his account still shows "blocked by 0 people, 100% feedback score".

Scam scam scam, just wanted to let others know.  Avoid; you will be giving somebody else a free call/put option on the USDBTC.  I can see how scammers can make a ton of money on this during major price moves.  There is no options market for USDBTC, but if there were, then a call option equivalent to an escrowed no-fee-to-cancel transaction on localbitcoins would easily be worth 5-10% of the transaction amount.  Unfortunately a lot of people may not even realize they're being scammed this way -- they don't actually lose their coins, they only lose the upside of holding them (while retaining the downside).

Until localbitcoins does something to prevent this (like a cancellation fee payable to whichever side escrowed first) they're essentially complicit in the scam.

I also think bitcoinity ought to stop listing them.  Right now bitcoinity consistently shows localbitcoins "bid" way way way above even mtgox, mainly due to these scammers.