Test

test

When ghash.io just started, Alex one of the authors of the pool in Ukraine, created an account for us called "bioinfo". We have used this account only occasionally for prototype hardware and small batches of miners but over months a significant amount of BTC has been accumulated on the account.  The management of ghash.io accounts has been taken over by cex.io . Beginning of 2014 we have create an additional account "bioinfobank" with the same email address.

In June we detected that we can no longer login to the old "bioinfo" account that was still in use. On June 8th we got this reply from Daniel (cex.io support). "We have found that you have multiple accounts registered to the same email address, please use individual emails for most reliable account management. Your account has been frozen, please be patient while we investigate why your account was frozen." Few days later cex.io request personal KYC data from me even though it was not a private account and it was never created for a private person. I sent all documents but refused to send a picture of me holding a photo ID. In general I would never agree to provide my personal data to a dubious institution because of many potential ways to illegally exploit it and I would never mine on a pool that requires KYC but this was an old account. cex.io continued to refuse to provide access to the account so I went in person to the London Coinsummit conference that was sponsored by cex.io and talked with Jeffrey Smith (Chief Information Officer j.smith@cex.io) who promised to look at this issue. I emailed him after the conference again but I have never received a reply.

Did anybody else had his funds seized on cex.io ? Please send me private messages.

PicoStocks has decided to expand its shares portfolio and purchase shares from CoinTerra Inc. Users interested in evaluation and revenue sharing are invited to place bids on the PicoStocks platform until 2013-10-07 24:00 CET (today midnight, Central European Time).

About CoinTerra (http://cointerra.com/)

CoinTerra is at the stage of tape out of a 28nm chip for BTC mining (Global Foundries, 28nm HPP node, FCBGA Package, 1.4GHz clock frequency yielding a minimum of 500 GH/s per chip, operated at 0.765V). The first products based on this chip will be shipped in December. Current value of the company is estimated at 20M USD (pre-money valuation). The company has 16 425 293 outstanding shares. The company offers shares at 1.2176 USD per share, which was translated to 0.01 BTC.

IPO* page: https://picostocks.com/stocks/view/31

I was interested whether early Bitcoins are also traded on exchanges and contribute to price shaping. Apparently not. I extracted the time [block height] of unspent transaction outputs. Below is the plot of the time bitcoins were last used. Time is expressed in 1000 block units (approximately 1 week). For each 1000 blocks the total number of bitcoins last used in these 1000 blocks is show. For two big outliers the block numbers and the BTC values are printed to the right.

The plot below shows the cumulative number of unspent bitcoins starting from the beginning of bitcoin mining.

It looks like a large number of bitcoins is waiting in very old accounts untouched for many years. Approximately 30% of bitcoins have not been touched for more than 2 years. So a total of 15% of all bitcoins to by mined are still in the hands of developers and early adopters. This is not much, given the value they created for the global financial system :-)

After failed IPO* of the 72TH-mine (due to default of the manufacturer) and first delivery of ASIC products by Avalon we decided to float an asset based on alternative ASIC development project conducted in close collaboration with BitFury.org. The new mine (100TH-mine) will have much better profitability than the previous project.

Summary:

Strong aspects:
-   low investment costs: only $5 / 1GH/s (4 times cheaper than competing products)
-   low maintenance costs due to low power dissipation of the chip: approximately 0.2-0.3 Watt / 1GH/s (4-20 time better than competition)
-   4 year manufacturer warranty
Weak aspects:
-   chip not tested yet, tape out in 1 month (full mask, engineering run), final simulation results will be posted in 2 weeks
-   deployment of 100TH-mine in July 2013

Details:

The proposed project is a 100 terahash/s Bitcoin mine. The hashing hardware will consist of mining boards developed in collaboration with BitFury. Today’s network hashing power is 4 times lower than 100TH/s but this situation will change dramatically in the next 4 months before the deployment of the hardware. The hardware will be located in the datacenter operated by MegaBigPower.com. The monthly maintenance and management costs will be kept at the 5k USD level. Hardware will be produced and assembled in June 2013. Mining will start at the data center on 2012-07-01. Estimations based on a predicted realistic continuous monthly network hashrate increase of 100TH/s (starting from 0TH/s on 2013-01-01) and BTC exchange rate of 17 USD point to a return of investment of 500k USD in 3 months after mining starts, i.e. in September 2013. Total income over the next 4 years after subtraction of the initial investment costs of 500k USD amounts to 2.7M USD. The suggested valuation of the venture is 500k USD (5 USD per 1GH/s, 1 USD per share), which is currently much below the retail purchase price of the hardware from competing suppliers. The venture will be legally operated as a PicoStocks project. No separate legal entity will be created.

The main risk of the project is the delay of the installation of the mining equipment. PicoStocks, legally responsible for the project, will reimburse investors if an income of 1M USD (10 USD per 1GH/s, 2 USD per share) will not be achieved by the mine until end of 2016 due to delayed installation.

The venture has 750 000 shares. If more than 500 000 shares will be ordered the hashing power will be increased proportionally above the expected 100TH/s to 150TH/s if all shares are sold. Each share is valued at 1 USD (recommended price) and corresponds to 0.2 GH/s. Shares that will not be ordered will be erased and a smaller mine will be deployed. The management costs will be decreased proportionally. The minimum price is 0.04 BTC which is below the expected price of 1 USD per share so the minimum valuation of the project is 400k USD for 100TH/s at an USD/BTC exchange rate of ca. 20 (today). The suggested price per share is 0.05 BTC, which corresponds to 1 USD per share and a valuation of the asset at 500k USD for 100TH/s. We offer a minimum price of 0.04BTC only because we worry that the exchange rate can rise in the coming 2 weeks before the IPO will be closed (in 2 weeks from now).

Business plan: http://picostocks.com/businessplan/19

Asset: http://picostocks.com/stocks/view/19

We are pleased to announce the second IPO* on Picostocks.

The asset is a 72 terra hash/s bitcoin mine. The hashing hardware consists of 1000 bASIC boards provided by BTCFPGA, LLC. Today’s network hashing power is 3 times lower than 72TH/s but this situation will change dramatically in the next 2 months before the deployment of the hardware. The hardware will be located in the datacenter provided by the hardware manufacturer. The monthly maintenance and management costs will be kept at 10k USD level (converted to BTC). Hardware will be produced by the end of February 2013. Mining will start at the data center on 2012-03-15. Estimations based on a predicted realistic continuous monthly network hashrate increase of 100TH/s (starting from 0TH/s on 2013-01-01) point to a return of investment in October 2013, a IRR of 10.2% (calculated on a monthly basis) and an NPV of 1 200k USD (based on a 0% BTC discount rate). The suggested valuation of the venture is 1M USD, which is currently below the retail purchase price of the hardware the venture owns. The venture will be legally operated as a PicoStocks project. No separate legal entity will be created.

The venture has 1M shares. The minimum price is 0.06BTC per share so the minimum valuation of the project is 798k USD at an USD/BTC exchange rate of 13.3 (today). The suggested price per share is 0.075 which corresponds to a valuation of the asset at 997k USD.

IPO: http://picostocks.com/stocks/view/17

BP: http://picostocks.com/businessplan/17

I am pleased to announce the start of another bitcoin stock Exchange, PicoStocks, http://picostocks.com.

The exchange is based on a different model than GLBSE or MPEx. The main concept of the new model is that PicoStocks is the legal owner of all assets. Users trading the assets can benefit from profits or buy and sell the assets to other users. PicoStocks is a legal person established under the jurisdiction of Marshall Islands. When floating assets on the platform PicoStocks will enter into share purchase agreement with the issuer or owner. In other words PicoStocks will share responsibility for the authenticity and validity of the offered shares. Of course the users are responsible for the evaluation of the assets.

We hope that the different legal model will help in floating “real world” startups on the platform, not necessarily related to the bitcoin economy. Having such assets on a bitcoin based exchange platform should be beneficial for the bitcoin community and for the issuers who, due to their small size, can not enter other regulated exchanges.

We have started the platform with the IPO* (Initial PicoStocks Offering) of 20% of all shares of PicoStocks. The business plan is available on the platform. We plan to float in few weeks a high tech SME dealing with the application of bacteriophages in agriculture. We will also float an ASIC mining project. Floating is intentionally relative expensive (50BTC), because want to focus on more mature operations. Floating can be done online, but the purchase agreement that contains the number of listed shares and the reward in BTC must be signed between the owner (seller) and PicoStocks before the trading of the shares starts on the platform. Both parameters (number of shares and raised capital) will be determined during the IPO* process.

It seems like a common threat to many BTC based services that intruders obtain access to a wallet and send the available bitcoins to a new address they control.

One way to protect the wallet against it would be to assign to the address (all in fact) in the wallet a restriction that all transaction initiated from this address require a (let's say) 1 day confirmation delay, within which the transaction can be reverted by the originating address. The whole network would of course need to accept this additional requirement assigned to the address and reject transactions with the transferred bitcoins if they have been executed too early. The requirement assigned to the account by the account owner would be not reversible (alternatively it would be reversible after the delay period).

Instead of assigning the additional requirement one could just select a set of addresses for which this requirement always holds ... for example all addresses starting with 111... (it would be the obligation of the service administrator to use only these for BTC transacitons). These addresses would be regarded as "safer/slower" addresses.

This mechanism would enable a service provider to scan all transactions originating from his addresses for unauthorized ones and would give him an option to stop the service if unauthorized transactions are detected and reclaim the temporarily lost bitcoins.

Was something like this already discussed (maybe planned) ?

I am trying to start bitcoind on various debian machines. The blockchain loading stops at a consistent location with a db error:

tytus@home:~/.bitcoin$ ~/.bitcoin/bitcoind getinfo
{
    "version" : 60006,
    "protocolversion" : 60000,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 156638,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 1090715.68005127,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1336563519,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : "EXCEPTION: 11DbException       \nDb::put: Cannot allocate memory       \nbitcoin in ProcessMessage()       \n"
}

tytus@home:~/.bitcoin$ head db.log
unable to allocate memory for mutex; resize mutex region

It looks like a db4.8 problem. I have tried the latest binaries and a self compiled version. My ulimits are:

tytus@home:~/.bitcoin$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority             (-e) 0
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 16382
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority              (-r) 0
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) unlimited
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) 2097152
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

I have searched for answers on the web and found only this transcript:
http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2011/08/11

but without a solution.

Maybe by manually adding a DB_CONFIG file in ~/.bitcoin I can solve this but there must be an official solution. Can anybody help?