Heh. Well, tBF is hardly the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had (and has, to a much, much, much lesser degree) a ton of influence. tBF is a central place lazy press members sometimes go when they want quotes from "a Bitcoin person." It doesn't appear to mount legal defenses or otherwise uniquely assist users (if you just want to talk to Marco Santori, you can shoot him a PM through the forum), but is more of an "elite"-shared microphone with a decent amplifier. They do host and maybe funded some unique online bitcoin tools (they host information from a node crawler I can't remember the name of). If they wanted to impress me, I should've been made aware of efforts to help Casascius fight the threat letter, filings to challenge government laws banning (in full or in part) bitcoin transactions and exchanges, and education projects along with tangible results of those projects. I've neither seen nor heard about these, so I can only assume they didn't happen, true or not.

I can understand why relatively large businesses would want something to share together, both for funding and speaking, but there appears to be no benefit to regular users and small business operators who join. Maybe there's intent, but I haven't noticed results in its year and a half of existence. After losing some of their big corporate names (Shrem & Karpeles), it seems plausible that tBF will organically lose steam without any community efforts to knock it down, for better or worse.... maybe it just turns into the Roger Ver Foundation.

"Vietnam: Bitcoin transactions now allowed according to the Vietnamese government"

"No transaction in Bitcoin is allowed in Vietnam"

You appear to be selling for <1/3 what you will be paying UA to do the transfer.

"There is a cost of US $0.015 per mile and the processing fee per transaction is $30."

Obviously, but with all the knowledge people have gained in cryptocurrencies, we can now apply that to legitimate fiat businesses, except maybe Erik Voorhees, who I guess will just live on a plantation growing bananas which he trades for precious metals and stores in his underground SWAT-proof bunker.

I've decided this poll is garbage. There's too much crossover. Bank executives generally are lobbyists and occasionally thieves. They often help with or design marketing campaigns (or at least buzzwords). Issue exists in almost all the responses and I don't like the wording at all. Lockin'.

Yes, this is the end. Because MtGox is dead, which has been confidently predicted by both bears and bulls for years, we're all going back to cash without even a glance back, lest we be turned to a pillar of salt.

clarification: "religious official" refers to an official of a religion (self-declared or determined by some type of organized hierarchy), not any official who is religious....

Inserted into Thief category.

Reasonable. Changed.

"Unauthorized crackers" sounds too much like White people in Detroit.

Nords lose virginity faster than anyone else in the world. In Iceland, the AVERAGE age for first time having sex is 15-16 (~16 elsewhere in Nordic countries). In the West, it's generally ~18 years, and ~22 years in the East.

Maybe they're low on body heat, have poor school attendance enforcement, they're trying to correct a labor shortage, or rotting fish just really kicks their hormones into overdrive, but they seem to hump everything, everyone, everywhere. Can't guarantee the authenticity of this statement, but I believe Sweden actually made "hump day" a weekly holiday where everyone's excused from work and school to hump each other.

Just to prevent time-wasting: I can't spend more than $1000 on this (either as BTC or items off Amazon shipped to US). That'd stretch my budget to its painful maximum. If spending that little is a pipe dream, please let me know.

I've been wanting to get back into testing batteries for a while. ... I've had a minor obsession with it for years. The end-goal is to create a consumers' guide site posting collected data, though I'm sure companies and hobbyists would really appreciate an easy-to-navigate page covering different sizes and designs with experimental data rather than the not-fact-checked advertisements manufacturers push. I was using a cheap DC wattmeter and a lab's ancient analog voltmeter to double-check data (it always failed to match, and voltmeter was calibrated properly while wattmeter cannot be calibrated, so...), with the battery connected to a case fan. It's an inadequate solution, obviously. I can't find a satisfying solution already-made. They're either too imprecise, don't log data automatically, don't log enough data, and/or have too small of an operating range.

I'm looking to measure the following:
*Watt-hour consumption over time
*Amp-hour consumption over time
*Voltage output (under load)
*Amperage output
*Wattage output
*Time running

Device must meet the following operating specs:
*Precise within .02V, .005A (wiggle room with higher output)

*Input range: .25V, .01A - 45V, 5A

*Able to adjust current supplied to "output" device within input range (must be able to step down voltage and decrease amperage supplied - no need to step up)

*"Time running" able to be started, stopped, and paused

*Polls, at most, once per three seconds -- however often it polls, it needs to poll at exactly that time with virtually no latency or discrepancies.

*"Set it and forget it" data/power USB connection for PC (data could be stored internally and later extracted via USB, or output directly to PC storage device). It can output the polled numbers into a shell-less file so long as all recorded numbers are separated and where each measurement is separated into different rows (I just need to be able to copy-paste into an Excel sheet without much fussing)... so like:
[Wh] 000.100 000.195 000.290

[Ah] 0000.0500 0000.0980 0000.1452

["VOUL"] 0000.0050 0000.0049 0000.0049

[A] 0001.0000 0000.9987 0000.9968

[W] 0000.5000 0000.4986 0000.4976

[time in seconds] 000003 000006 000009
^would be fine

Stretch goals:
*Device able to internally "consume" the energy, outputting it safely as heat and perhaps measuring it more accurately... heat cannot interfere with measurements!
*LCD display outputting current watt throughput
*Measure temperature of battery at terminals, ambient temperature, and relevant components inside the measuring device
*Ability to be calibrated easily by my stupid, aloof monkey brain without access to maintained lab equipment like adjustable DC power supplies (I could at least check recorded DC voltage of PC power supply lines against what the motherboard claims.... no idea how accurate they are)

I was waiting for a coffee pot's water reservoir to fill and wondered if marketers (specifically, deceptive marketing tactics and non-obvious psychological manipulation) were "under-hated" compared to lawyers (which I really should have sub-categorized in the poll, but with limited option choices on forum, it'd turn into "which type of lawyer do you most hate?"). Outside those top two, there is no logical order... I tried to categorize some a bit and put them closer together, but for no reason other than to maybe make it easier to choose.

Some occupations are thrown in only to fish for interesting perspectives. I was thinking about including Monsanto as its own category...

Question obviously intended to be answered subjectively.

I feel like I should definitely be a millionaire just for getting that reference.

It seems easy enough to solve by devs, but there's really no reason for us non-contributors to even discuss. It's a very intimidating and time-consuming task to donate to "Bitcoin QT contributors" right now. There's more than a small handful of contributers, with individual contributions difficult to determine because most people just don't see them listed (or have the slightest idea of how to fairly contribute). There isn't a simple address you can send to in QT/d.

If I want to support Armory, I click the "donate to Armory development" button right in the client. If I want to donate to CGWatcher, I simply set how many minutes per day I want CGWatcher to send hashpower wherever Justin has it pointed -- it's right in the client and very simple to set up. I want to donate to a pool, I just set my donation % -- it's all very easy. The problem is clearly in the difficulty trying to fairly distribute donations to "QT/d." If devs can't agree on how this should be implemented/distributed, that's not really our problem or fault, and donations aren't going to come in at anywhere near the number they should. It can't be said that it's an issue with users not wanting to contribute when it hasn't been effectively tried, and I think going to corporations and semi-corporations like the Bitcoin Foundation for salary is a dangerous, half-baked plan which threatens the entire protocol (generally -- not in every case, perhaps).

If it's an unsolvable problem with QT/d, then I'd suggest developers who want to continue working on QT/d splinter off and either work with another client which allows them to easily be contributed to or start their own client. As far as protocol development goes, I think BIPs are widely-publicized enough where contributors can simply ask for donations on the announcement page.

Man-in-the-middle is a partial solution, but there's no way to fully solve it AFAIK. The escrow provider is shipped the item from the seller, escrow provider verifies its contents and can probably test any hardware for a couple hours, and then the escrow provider ships it to the buyer. That's expensive, though, and doesn't definitively rule out electronics, in particular, getting banged up in the shipping process from the escrow provider to the buyer.

The most reasonable way to go about it is to just honor refunds like virtually every online seller on Earth. Have a brief testing window in the purchase agreement - maybe two or three days from the time it's delivered. If the buyer says it's DoA, he pays shipping back and is fully refunded what was held in escrow. The brief refund window makes the shipping costs on the buyer's side too expensive to lie about for profit, unlike 30-90 day refund windows with companies like Newegg or Tiger Direct.

This is about right. Unless the code's really short and you can look at it yourself within a few minutes (and know what it means), at least let a few people test it out for you before thinking about downloading and running it.

Think of the computer as you, and you're out in a big city in a shady part of town, and some guy in a Guy Fawkes mask and furry suit comes out and tries giving people some type of liquid in a glass which he says solves some particular problem. You probably wouldn't drink first, and probably not even within a day or so of Fawkes still standing outside filling Solo cups with mystery fluid from a pitcher, and maybe you'd refuse to drink the mystery fluid until its contents can be certified in a lab. That's sorta-kinda what it's like to download software from this forum. Wait as long to download as you'd wait to drink from Fawkes' pitcher, keeping in mind the furry Fawkes of yesterday may not be the same furry Fawkes as today, and you can't be absolutely sure nobody added anything to his pitcher (or the bottom of the Solo cups).

Yes.*

It may help if AV software can't fix, but no, for the reason escrow.ms went into as well as some others.

There are some uncommon instances where a virus can continue after reinstalling Windows - ignoring the fact that you don't delete the virus on the storage device without completely reformatting (it'd be preferable to save low-risk files [documents, videos, pictures, wallets, that god-damned enormous blockchain] you want on a USB drive, then move the entire hard drive over to a "quarantine" drive [spare HDD or external hard drive] in case you end up needing those files at some point later).

1) BIOS infection. Through various potential methods, virus uploads modified firmware to BIOS which locks you out of changing it and will "replant" itself on new operating systems. This is fairly uncommon these days, but definitely out in the wild.

2) Your IP address is being targeted. In cases where your PC and/or network is not well-secured against the Internet, it's possible for an attacker to simply replant the virus when you reformat or reinstall.

3) Router infection. Router is compromised or modified firmware installed. AFAIK, the only thing like this out in the wild is called a "DNSChanger trojan," where your router credentials are cracked and settings are changed to use an attacker's DNS server, which could infect PCs on the network, or just serve them annoying ad pages.


As long as it's just adware, though, probably not worth panicking over (I'd still reformat). If it doesn't appear to do anything advertisement-related and/or is uploading data, that's when you should be freaking the fuck out, immediately disconnecting the infected computer, reformatting, calling ISP to change IP address, quickly going to a friend's house to change all passwords and creating a new email account to link all old accounts to, alerting everyone to the possibility that you'll be impersonated or that private information was leaked, etc.

Heh - that's what I was just thinking when re-reading this relic of a thread. We've had legal tender laws for a while, now. They may've had legal tender laws way back then, too... unsure.