Thanks to Jeremy from Spend Bitcoins you can now use bitcoin to donate to the fund to help pay her medical and rehabilitation costs. Dana lived in the same neighborhood as me and is the victim of an arson attack that left burns to 60% of her body.  She faces a long and difficult road to recovery.

Please see:

http://www.spendbitcoins.com/dana-vulin/

Although scrypt coins like TBX/FBX/LTC are quite memory hard compared to bitcoin there was some criticism on the TBX launch that it wasn't memory hard enough. Would it be possible to make a CPU coin that increases its level of "memory hard"?

This could offer protection against botnets because it would require mining rigs to be heavy in low level CPU cache and light on operating system and userland.

Ideally the future cost to produce has more to do with the cost of L1 and L2 cache than with electricity.

This would be an alternate form of "difficulty". The hashrate could actually be going down but the interest and amount of people (and hardware) hashing the coin could go up. The more people hashing the more memory hard it gets to mine.

I was taking a tour of a very large server room feeling a bit insignificant in comparison so felt I needed an idea that could turn into an epic project. I would like to merge Crypto-currency hashing with competitive and exponentially growing AI.

I know that we have computers that play chess and can beat the worlds most advanced human chess players for example deep blue vs kasparov but I would like the explore taking this to the next level in a peer 2 peer project.

The network would be secured with hashing in a similar way to how existing coins operate but the rewards mechanism would be tied to massively multiplayer games of chess. The chess board would start off small but would grow as more players entered. To start a game you would need to spend a coin (either a bitcoin or a coin from this alt chain) this would help discourage players taking up to many sides. You would also need to find a way to discourage alliances.

It could be that once one side engages another side they are locked into battle with each other until one side is defeated or it could be constant all against all war. This is just getting some ideas.

Overall the idea of the network is to encourage competition to increase the AI rather than just the hashing power.

Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, ideas etc?

I've been watching the price since Wednesday and its barely moved. Could we be about to go through a uber-boring period where there a more coins being mined so inflation is increasing but the actual price remains solid?

I guess we may find out by the time this weekend is up.

Hello,

I live in Australia and have very little chance of ever being able to buy a house. I earn about 20k AUD a year if I am lucky and houses start at about 350k AUD here. Flats and town houses aren't that much cheaper either. Sure it may be a bubble and I should just wait etc but I don't think prices will come down to meet my income even if it is a bubble.

I would however, like to get started with some kind of property and i'm fascinated about how there are cheap houses in the US such as in Detroit sometimes going for as cheap as a dollar.

I am wondering if someone who lives in the US would be willing to buy or help broker houses so that people outside the US such as me could buy them for BTC.

This is just a half baked idea for now. I know those suburbs are dangerous but perhaps this kind of thing could encourage investment and help restore some of these neighbourhoods. As well as help show that
BTC can be exchanged for things other than USD.

best regards,

Chris

Has anyone noticed the price has started rallying today?

The sell order book is as bare as a skimpy waitress. Quite incredible.


https://btc-e.com/tbx_exchanger

Hello,

Would anyone be interested in designing a logo for Project In-Utero? I would like to offer 1000 2000 TBX.

Project In-Utero is going to be an open source community based around development of the concept of creating an artificial uterus and placenta using reprogrammed autologus stem cells and tissue engineering.
This artificial womb environment will be controlled using open source wetware (e.g. the interfacing of electronics, computers and biology)  
This environment is not intended as an artificial uterus for a zygote to develop into a foetus but rather for a fully grown and aged adult to reverse aged related damage and completely rejuvenate their body.

I would like the logo to be about 200 x 200 px like the wikipedia logo but you can change that if you think a different size will suit your design better. I would prefer in png or svg format.

I would like the logo to show an adult curled up in a foetal position inside this uterus with a placenta connected to their naval. The whole system would ideally be connected to a computer system of some type.

The project is a spin off of my major project http://www.rejuvepedia.org

and the website for project in-utero is http://www.in-utero.org

The logo will go below "coming soon" on that page above and soon I will launch the forums and wiki. The logo will be used throughout the website and forums once they are ready.

Further bounties will be announced for more artwork and even animations of the process as well as writing short stories based around a cyber/bio punk and science fiction exploration of how project in-utero will change the world.

Please hold back for now with technical questions about how this project would work. That is to be discussed once I have created the forums.

If there are multiple entries I may need to select a winning entry that will be awarded the bounty. Only the winning entry will be used on the website unless I decide to pay the bounty for more than one entry and want to use those entries. If you have any more questions about this logo design bounty please let me know.

If the logo is used on merchandise such as t-shirts that are sold for btc then I will negotiate a royalty with the artist of the logo.

thank you.

EDIT: the bounty is now 2000 TBX

There is a lot of fishy stuff about this launch. It came out 75 minutes later than expected and its possible that others were mining on the new block chain before it was posted to the forum. It also came with missing DLLs files
for the Windows install and it didn't run in server mode by default meaning that many solo miners may have lost a lot of blocks. Of course there was a lot of rush to mine this new block chain but many people not realising they required to server switch and still seeing zero balance took to the mining pools despite the very low difficulty. The mining pools really made the situation much worse as all the hashing power was now centralized mainly at BTCguild.

Anyone with a direct low latency connection to BTCGuild would have easily mined a lot blocks and causing other miners blocks to be rejected or marked as stales. Many miners big and small alike found that they efforts to mine this new blockchain were futile. I call for a royal commission and thorough investigation into the I0Coin fiasco. We need to look at the block chain data and see compare time stamps. We also need to investigate the many lost blocks and coins and enumerate exactly who most of the winning blocks went to.

The pools unfortunately have to much power and are defeating the purpose of p2p currency.

FPGAs are used in many products and sometimes those devices get EOL'd or thrown own because of similar problems and that make them no longer fit for their purpose possibly in medical or scientific equipment, military industrial use or even video transforming.

I found this interesting site where back in 2007 this guy was cracking SHA with a custom rig "built out of surplus Grass Valley HD video transform boards, scrapped by GV because of defects."

He writes that "The boards contain 15 Virtex-II Pro (XC2VP20) FPGAs in 3 identical sets of 5 (here called "channels"). Each channel also owns a Spartan-II (XC2S50) FPGA that was originally used as a control chip, and a DSP (ADSP21160M) which probably calculated transform parameters. There is also a shared XC2S50 chip, which is not used in this application, just like the DSPs. The clock distribution tree unfortunately contains 2 domains, which means the 39MHz channel clock had to be distributed from chip to chip, using internal Virtex-II DCMs to clean it up."
 
http://nsa.unaligned.org/index.php

I could imagine that there would be a lot of this stuff gathering dust in Hollywood.

So I know that the BTC profitability is getting miserably low now and its not worth buying new GPUs and electrictiy prices are going up so fast it might not even be cost effecitve to run your current gear. So if you wanted to build a zero budget rig that used FPGAs where would you start?

Hello,

Before I got into bitcoin I started a CES based Local Exchange System for my city called Perth Community Exchange. (http://www.perth-exchange.org) I have been playing with the idea of migrating away from the CES and towards a new block chain based on modifications to bitcoin. I want to introduce security so that the block chain can only be mined by people that are part of the local signed trust network. E.g. everyone trusts each other through signed public and private key encryption. If you aren't on this network you can't mine. One of the main reasons for this is to keep it local because electricity is very expensive in Perth the other is that I want to encourage mining only using renewable energy such solar, wind, organic waste -> methane -> electricity and even Geobacter (The Electricity Producing Bacteria)  based energy sources.

The initial mining machines would be very low power and thus low hash rate (but will become more powerful with more energy as they move out of proof of concept stage) and forbidden to be attached to the conventional power grid. I'm not yet sure how this will be enforced but a sudden jump in hash rate may alert other miners to verify their trust in their peer network. If they want to use the conventional power grid they can be pointed to regular bitcoin or namecoin.

I would like to see this system as one that could be setup in other parts of the world such as enable a currency system for undeveloped nations. Imagine mining on OLPC over a mesh network using improvised wind power for instance:

http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/press.html

They could do this without worry of rich people in developed nations coming in with 4x pcie cards and FPGAs monopolizing their new local currency.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could make mining only available to people on the local trust network?

thanks,

Chris

Hi bitcoin users,

As well as being interested in alternate and community currencies I am also interested in life extension and human rejuvenation. I am moderately active (and have been for about 5 years) in the life extension scene such as in the forums at Imminst. I admin a CES (Like a networks of LETS that run over a web interface) exchange for my city called Perth Community Exchange which has a small community and active mailing list around it but I won't talk about that much now.

About two years ago I started a wiki called Rejuvepedia. Over time time I have slowly built it up and developed it. It is still a long way from comprehensive. It's based on a radical idea that using open source collaboration methods and superseding the institutions of modern medicine (that tend to only be there to make money out of old and sick people) we will be able to work out how the rejuvenate the entire human body on the level of each organ and system. 

I started the project because I felt that SENS (strategies for engineering negligible senescence) was not open source enough and it was difficult for people to contribute unless of course you had lots of money to give them.

I knew about bitcoin for a while but for some reason I didn't think it was as free as a LETS setup and I didn't get interested in it again until this week.

I have occasionally given freelance work to students to help develop Rejuvepedia such as a girl with a degree in anatomy that was working towards a PhD in Wombat anatomy I paid her for about 4 hours to work on the anatomy section. This was also so she could get some money before her holiday in New Zealand. She had not used a wiki at the time but I needed (and still do) someone with expertiese in human anatomy.

The money I paid I her I got from my self-employment as a call-out computer technician. This is also where I get my money from that I use to pay for the web hosting fees on nearlyfree speech.

I wanted to eventually make Rejuvepedia a non-for profit so my donations to it would be tax deductible but I found out this would be quite difficult and apparently would have to take the extra step of actually making it a charity.

So I am wondering if bitcoin will actually suit Rejuvepedia much better. Unfortunately I didn't do any mining last year so I didn't get in as things were just beginning to roll. I can still buy bitcoins, offer to sell things for bitcoins, offer services or ask people that are interested in life extension to donate bitcoins to Rejuvepedia.

I also hoped that people would actually help out with the wiki without considerations of money much like they do with Wikipedia. For instance I hope that people will post blog entries (as the wiki has an integrated blog) and help add relevant news articles about advances in biomedicine and rejuvenation.

One of the next major things I would like to do is add some fairly powerful news aggregation to the wiki. This is something I would like to able to offer bitcoins (once I have more of course) for people to develop.

So the address of the wiki is http://www.rejuvepedia.org

I am eager to hear your suggestions and harsh but ultimately constructive criticism.

best regards,

Chris

 

I'm one of those people in their late twenties that still live with my parents. If I ordered a few motherboards with multiple PCIe 2.0 slots and bought several of the latest ATI cards and became a miner and didn't come clean to my parents about what I was doing they might be none the wiser. Well I know that my parents would notice the higher bill but there are probably miners that live at home where their parents wouldn't notice, perhaps they work a lot and earn good money.

So is the exchange rate of the bitcoin really that attached to the price of electricity?  Considering that many people may not be paying for their electricity. It would be like taking from Peter and selling to Paul. I'm not trying to accuse miners of leeching on their parents. Hell if I get flamed for doing that myself I would probably say that I saw it coming. What I am doing here is questioning some of the assumptions we have for it could be that much of the content of the internet is created in a similar fashion. (for example blogs, forums, wikis, irc chats) e.g. if all electricity was metered to the individual (impossible without a smart grid I know) would there be much less free content on the internet.