WU is roughly a measure of used hashrate, same as shares submitted successfully. So... do everything you'd normally do to increase hashrate and shares while ensuring you have no (or very close to no) HW errors and are not having latency issues with the pool you're mining on.

A pool with high server-side share difficult is going to give you a higher variance in your WU and it's normal for it to fluctuate a bit. It's said WU will generally equal 90-95% of hashrate in good conditions.

I meant to say only the first time someone posts in a thread will their WTA be calculated (for decay purposes). If a HAU posts once in a thread, it's the only time his contribution will be counted for WTA (decaying), so he can't later make a new post in a thread he's already posted in to increase it's WTA (decaying) score. I was thinking this would help prevent abuse by people thinking they could game the system in keeping it in the "what's hot?" list by just deleting their old original post in a thread and then posting something new to bump it up. I wasn't trying to suggest that everyone's WTA (decaying) resets to the highest value as soon as someone comes in and posts "hi mom" to a 500-day-old thread -- sorry about poor wording there.

The WTA decaying is definitely resource-hungry. But let's just recalculate the WTA (resource-hungry) whenever someone posts and store that value as a numeric value that's compared to the timestamp when you're displaying the list of threads. That's a static request with a simple numeric calculation, not at all resource-hungry.
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This may end up being most pragmatic. I was hoping for something which could more accurately forecast when HUAs (or many "LUAs") were being most active in a thread so that old active threads would eventually fall off the "what's hot?" list. I think it'd be very time-efficient for people without a time to have a more dynamic version of the "top 10 threads" list @ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats which is effectively useless in finding new, trending discussions (and I think it'd be fairly useless with non-decaying WTA alone, too, since "old" stuff never fades away).

IIRC, they did sell a good bit of gardening equipment, from grow-lights to shovels. Maybe someone sold some Lava soap or something there.

(or the shovels were moved to their weapons site... I think they were sold in gardening, though, which was an actual category, at least a couple years ago or whenever it was I last visited.)

That's roughly what happened with me. I didn't take Bitcoin seriously or bother reading much on it until I learned about Silk Road (I think it was actually Chuck Schumer, just recently at the NY conference, who made the video of himself browsing in disgust). It was a pretty significant proof-of-concept. That's when I said "wow, people are actually doing something NEW with this." Before that, it was just some goofy online currency weirdos used. I'd guess it's similar with all the people being introduced to Bitcoin and hearing that it has marginally lower fees... if you either trust someone with your money or spend weeks downloading a blockchain after more weeks researching it.

If that was proof-of-concept, I'd call this proof-of-failure... or at least an alert that there's still a good ways to go -- not with BTC (there've been some pretty awesome developments lately... don't think anyone can complain about a lack of innovation in the privacy dep't), but communications. They're a good bit dependant on each other. If your communications aren't secure, it doesn't really matter how obfuscatable Bitcoin transactions are. I used PGP in the early days of BTC, but it's too much of a hassle unless you're only talking to a small handful of people each week. Frankly, stuff like selling someone coins he claims to resell on a "black market" wouldn't even cross my mind to encrypt, though I don't run a $multi-million MSB. The Windows GPA software is terrible and crashes pretty frequently. Very user-unfriendly.... built-in email tools are pretty decent if you're willing to spend a few minutes reading up on it and downloading the software. GPG's not totally secure by itself, though, even if the user-friendliness problem were solved... but now that I think about it, I can't really recall a story where government put in much effort trying to break cryptography (well, trying to break INTO encrypted documents, anyway). I'm not sure I've ever seen the words "government brute-forced" together. I guess they generally still use crusty old tactics, which is still quite effective.

I'll double this sentiment. Having to hard-restart rigs every couple hours is not cost-effective at all, especially when you're asleep. I've been having a lot more trouble Scrypt-mining than with SHA-256 mining, and I'm guessing it's because I skimped on the PSUs a good bit more (700W per 2 270s & rest of components). Each card's gobbling down ~275W + I'd guess ~75W for the rest of the components for an ~90% load. PSUs run hotter than they should, which is fairly dangerous.

... Cost me a Hell of a lot less upfront over other options, though. They were on a great sale.

Listen up, kids. Don't ever have sex or do anything with the goal of sex where you think it'd be a good idea to wear a condom. Once you have sex that doesn't feel like a handjob from a pissed off gorilla, you'll realize why so many people support abstinence and conservative relationships. Getting any type of STD is basically a sexual death sentence unless you move to Atlanta where everyone's already infected.

(I think that's good enough to include in The Talk. Second opinion?)

Too many.

Okay, I think this is the one. I think this is critical for BTCTalk 2.0 (or 3.0, I guess?)

Have Weighted Thread Activity ("WTA") display next to threads, maybe color coded. WTA is displayed in percentage and is the cumulative activity score of unique users posting in thread, divided by 10,000.

Stephany has activity of 50 and posts once
Bill has activity of 100 and posts twice
John has activity of 1000 and posts ten times
Betsy has activity of 300 and posts three times

They all post in a particular thread. The WTA for this thread is (50+100+1000+300)/10,000, or 14.5%

This percentage is to roughly guesstimate the "legitness" of the thread. This could have a major impact on astroturf ponzi threads where low-post bought accounts are pumping up the nonsense. Every time a "major poster" posts in a thread while leaving the default-on "add to WTA" option checked, he is adding to the thread's "legitness."



Beyond this, another positive impact can be made with "WTA (decaying)," a column where WTA is calculated normally, but with a 5% (nominal) per day decrease in a poster's WTA contribution since the day he originally posted. This is able to be abused, so once a user posts the first time, that original posting date should be stored by the forum server and unable to be changed, even if the user deletes his original post.

Stephany has activity of 50 and posts once, first on 1/24/14
Bill has activity of 100 and posts twice, first on 1/20/14
John has activity of 1000 and posts ten times, first on 1/11/14
Betsy has activity of 300 and posts three times, first on 1/10/14
It is 1/29/14

The WTA (decaying) for this thread is ([50*.75]+[100*.55]+[1000*.1]+[300*0]), or 1.55%.

WTA (decaying) can be used to find the threads recently most actively posted in by high-activity users, a relatively accurate (IMO) "what's hot?" I'd also suggest something similar to a "what's hot?" button in the main user toolbar, where the top 100 or so threads (by WTA (decaying)) are kept.


I'd imagine this would be very resource-intensive, so the dev should be careful about giving rough estimates over hard real-time statistics (for example, don't calculate WTA contributions by user more than once). This would effectively replace having to ban giveaway threads and help reduce the potential for scams (except, obviously, by high-activity members, whose threads would initially be given more credibility). Trust rating could act as a multiplier to someone's WTA contribution, but that seems like a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

That'd be a little trickier to get away with since there's no reason not to download from the official site. You have a modified version of a "address cracker," though, and you could probably get a good number of people. God willing, they're all poor people. Or.... wait, that's worse, isn't it?

Sorry to bring up Mike -- that was the last federal government load of crap which got a sudden pissed off reaction from me when I learned about it, so I immediately connected the two, emotionally.

With regards to natural law, Shrem's committed exactly zero crimes. I'm very irritated that he may be facing years in federal prison over this. I'm pissed off when the first responses I read (after already being pissed off from reading the news) is that Shrem should resign for peoples' personal gain, because they think Bitcoin's going to be "tainted" by someone disregarding immoral laws when he's been making statements like this for so long. The insincere Winklevoss statement is probably the worst, like spitting on his face. (ETA: Had the stomach to actually read their statement, and it's nothing like the sensational condemnation in the press.) The questions over whether or not they did any background checks is totally valid... it's not like anyone who's read one damn sentence spoken by the guy thought Shrem was a freakin' Boy Scout and part-time pastor.

As I was taught in my law classes, all LEOs in the US are bureaucrats, with the ability and duty to actively interpret laws and determine whether or not certain crimes are worth enforcing, which is why any sane police officer isn't going to drive around fining/arresting jay-walkers, pot-smokers, and people with broken-down cars.

It's just a game, I guess. I guess this is my Super Bowl and the whatever-the-fucks just lost, so they're going to prison. Tough luck, bros - good luck with keeping your asshole covered.

ETA: Calm, now. Gets under my skin... I've had >$2m equiv scammed or stolen from me in the past few years, and I know others who've lost a lot more. I don't absolve myself of blame there, but I'm quite poor and burdened because of it. A good chunk of the relatively low income I make goes right to my "involuntary lenders." I've talked to police and I've filed federal complaints, but I don't see a penny in restitution. The LEOs don't even talk back to me. Charlie goes out and buys freakin' weed brownies and helps a pothead launder money, and all the sudden, $millions in net annual productivity goes to prison because someone may've been scamming the government out of a few hundred $k.

This was completely my fault. Somehow, I managed to proof-read the transcript and never bothered sending qwk the completed one with notes. Sorry about that. Should be updated soon.

Check the "PR done" section.

Prosecutor can kindly go burn in Hell. Speechless. This is the most blatant anti-Bitcoin rights violation I've seen yet, way worse than the thug letters sent to Caldwell.

Shrem shouldn't step down from anything over this. The Foundation should be supporting him, not throwing him under the bus because they think they can influence the BTC price a couple points higher. Have some fucking integrity.

"They reason that cards have a high residual value because they are being sold at a premium on eBay, so if mining becomes untenable they can always sell them on as graphics cards. But that premium only exists because of the alt currency mining industry."
Yes, but you're overestimating it... by a lot.

"A market flooded with cards that months ago were selling for thousands of pounds will see prices drop to barely hundreds of pounds. This will happen just as the card manufacturers have ramped up to meet the demands which saw graphics cards on back order."
No.

"Of course, mining is niche and gaming is mainstream: many more people buy graphics cards for gaming than mining, but it only needs a small percentage swing from miners buying cards to selling them to radically shift their value."
No.

"Just as the Hoover promotion saw people buying vacuum cleaners just for the free ticket to New York, flooding the second-hand market and sucking up sales from new ones, we can expect a similar period of hiatus for new graphics cards."
True to an extent, but no.

"In the longer term those graphics card manufacturers who survive the blood-bath will emerge stronger."
 

"Some will, no doubt, cash in on the alt-coins craze with dedicated hardware for script miners, but ultimately the benefit comes from the huge number of people who've learned ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) development as a result of the gold-rush. They are now used to an incredibly short time to market.

While a graphics card developer might expect it to take a few months to design a next generation GPU, and then several months from tape-out to packaged chips, the Bitcoin market has got all these stages down to weeks."
*Scrypt, and hahahahahahaha

"Bitcoin, and all the other alt-coins, is training a skillset for building password-cracking hardware that is both powerful and portable.The implications for the security industry are significant."
Reasonable.


"Expect password-encoding ASICs to become a norm."
No.

"If you are looking at buying graphics cards for mining you need to remember they will not have a resale value."
No.

"If you are a graphics card manufacturer, start working out how you would survive months of almost no sales."
No.


10% accurate article.

What? The exchange they're locked into using (Bitstamp) by the ATM manufacturer (Robocoin) is being dangerously slow to process orders, resulting in excess working capital requirements on the ATM operators' part and possibly severe exchange rate losses. (unless they shift all that on the customers... didn't read the Reddit post entirely)

Sorry. Added. ETA: fixed its position in queue.

It's funny... the only reason few people use certificates of deposits anymore is because demand deposit accounts quietly morphed into certificates of deposits without anyone noticing.

Altcoin subforum has useful information. Altcoin subforum is heavily populated by giveaway threads, reducing usefulness of subforum to those without desire for $.00005 worth of NewAltCoin. (among garbage coin announcements, but it's probably impossible to make an effective, binary ruleset on what is and isn't acceptable)

Giveaway sub-subforum solution is acceptable, I think. There may also be a correlation between account sales (which is allowed because it's very difficult to effectively enforce a ban against) and giveaway threads, but who really cares about that? There may also be more "ideological" reasons for this move (preventing pump&dumps)... don't really care about those.

Don't trust anyone offline, either. Trust cash and coin in your wallet (even though there's a significant chance the cash is counterfeit). Hold the gun whenever humanly possible.

You're connecting to port 3333?