Lost a whole lotta money for ignoring this subforum. Was pointed toward here the other day. I've been thinking about GPU mining altcoins for the free heat (recently switched to electric heating, anyway), but didn't want to deal with all the hassle of keeping up with the 100+ different Bitcoin mutations and converting them into BTC. The 3% fee is really pretty generous considering how much time I'd be out otherwise just to have one card running, so even if OP's doing some extra skimmin', the payout's still pretty good, transparency be damned.  

ETA: Now I just need to build some mini-boxes to put around the house where the electric heaters are now and I'm all freakin' set! Once it warms up, just move 'em to the horse barn!

Pssh. Ronald Jenkees has been accepting btc for ages. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=298257.0

No clue on that (maybe when your first share is accepted?). Sorry.

You appear to be trying to use a Blockchain.info wallet identifier as the username when you're supposed to use a bitcoin address like 1Ba11ooNy2b8EyPwW5F56mJnhauDK7va5Z

BTW, you generally shouldn't publish your Blockchain.info wallet identifier. You still need to verify your email address with them.

This sounds like pretty reasonable balance between passive and active aggression. Cheap spotlight aimed at his smoking spot. Hear a cough, turn light on. No more cough, turn light off.

If he asks, tell him it's sound-activated to keep away burglars. He'll probably be too stoned to figure out why that's BS.

Nobody's going to stab you. 

(bring a gun)

After days of talking (technically, since 2011), it looks like Wall Street Raider is now "sort of" for sale for BTC. The full version (with digital manual) is regularly priced at $29.95, while the "lite" version (without manual) is available for $19.95. Coins are worth the equiv of $1000, here!
Full - BTC.02995
Lite - BTC.01995

Wall Street Raider is one of my favorites. It's not a very pretty game, but the level of depth and complexity is unmatched by anything in the genre, and it's extremely difficult to believe it was all coded by one guy. In Wall Street Raider, you play an outlandishly wealthy individual, competing either against AI or other humans. Your goal is to (wait for it...!) accumulate the most money. WSR has a near-endless way of earning (and losing) money, containing such details as a dynamic interest rate affected by market forces (including you, should you be large enough) and the Federal Reserve (or appropriate central bank based on the currency you select.... BTC support not yet added), short and long Treasury bonds, interest rate swaps, corporate bonds, commodities trading, futures trading, unique industry types (aside from each industry having a unique set of random events, some are mechanically different in operation), and 11 different forms of taxation (and many write-off events).

Summed up another way: there is no other game ever created where there is a dedicated button to manually "prepay your income tax."



There's really no way for me to describe all the different ways to play (outside of writing large walls of text). Luckily, there's a shareware version which'll give you a pretty solid idea of all the different ways to experiment: http://www.roninsoft.com/download.htm

WSR currently only runs natively on Windows, but should function fine on (at least) Parallels, Crossover, or WINE (run the shareware version, first, though).


This offer is not currently available through Roninsoft's site. Instead, you have to PM me your name (or other identifier) and email address. This is then forwarded directly to the developer who'll personally send you a copy of the program with proper registration data in it within two days (probably within a few hours). You can PM me for a unique bitcoin address, or send me the proper amount of coins to 1FZzNjTtFNLuFFFKX2U2fWdT7jLR6bseTc and sign a message with the address you sent from with your name and email address.

Updates (excluding hotfixes for bugs) are sold for $9.95, but always include major new gameplay elements. Updates are currently only available for BTC if you have previously purchased a full game with BTC, and at a 10% discount over the USD price. Escrow through an automated service is acceptable (I'll pay the fee for the first three purchases).

Well, this is bitcointalk.org, not altcointalk.org. Many altcoins have their own forums and usually don't piggyback on this one for long.

"Second Life was enabling anonymous texts and planning to introduce voice calls, while game noticeboards could, it states, be used to share information on the web addresses of terrorism forums."

Forums may be loaded to capacity with paranoid delusions, but at least we're not that bad.

They edited the article. 

Updated image. Complete Nov. data and partial Dec. I now use "d" instead of "QT," so won't have "unified" data going forward.

I realized my flaw in this after wondering why the numbers were so freakin' consistent month-over-month. The "real" minimum is significantly lower than 9.5kB/s TCP. QT still downloads transactions to add to queue and relay, however. Since this transaction queue exchange appears to take significantly more bandwidth than block exchange, the download bandwidth limit is almost always reached. QT possibly prioritizes bandwidth, giving top priority to block exchanges instead of transaction exchanges (clever behavior if true).

I'll see if I can find the "truer" minimum. Will let it run in 24h spans at different limits and find the lowest possible without generating a block backlog. Stats in OP are fairly useless with that in mind.

Are you using OSX?

Umm... It sounds exactly like Chase QuckPay (along with many similar programs at other financial institutions), which is basically PayPal without the middleman (the middleman being PayPal). It's a clear step in the right direction for financial institutions. It removes some friction, theoretically costs less (but since fees are charged based on how much banks feel they can squeeze, kind of irrelevant),  and is much quicker than the horribly outdated US money transfer systems used to move money around banks today.

What'd be nice is if JPM didn't try to copy Paypal (where it looks like it's going to act as the middleman when someone doesn't have a JPM/Chase account), but instead tried to copy the Shared Branching model credit unions adopted, where you can transfer money free and instantly to any other credit union (participating in the Shared Branching program), instead of just between your credit union's branches.

Wow! Amazing news. Looks like Paypal's finally offering that missing link, a dual-currency (BTC-fiat) debit card!

"However, he believes people don't correctly understand what bitcoins actually are today, and he's yet ready to let people link their bitcoin wallets with their PayPal accounts."

Oops.   

There can be no closure until you satisfy our curiosity. What was the mistake?

What is the probability (per check) of finding a valid, activated credit card number and selecting the correct CVV, cardholder's name, and expiration date, assuming the expiration date is not beyond five years into the future?

Maybe just for a US Capital One MasterCard credit card, to keep things simple. Uses MOD 10 algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_10 The first six digits of these cards are 517805. Digits 7-15 are unknown - the account ID #. Digit 16 is the MOD 10 checksum number.

This means there is a total pool of 99,999,999 accounts. Assume 10,000,000 are activated.

Expiration date is simple. Most (all?) aren't valid for more than 5 years. That gives a 1/60 chance of getting only the expiration date correct per check.

Cardholder's name is more of a clusterfuck. Let's assume only looking at "black" and "white" names (we're looking for a US account, remember) gives you 85% of all total active accounts. Let's assume common names make up 60% of all total active accounts, and that there are 50,000 common name combinations.

CVV is easy, and we'll assume we don't know how Capital One comes up with these numbers, so it's a simple 1/999 chance.

So. We need to successfully correct all of them in one go, and we have one ~1/10 chance (account #), one 1/60 chance (exp. date), one ~1/83333 chance (cardholder name), one 1/999 chance (CVV).

I think the per-check probability of all this comes to .000000000020020100300621424707921073926538% (low confidence, someone smart should check this because I originally posted this post as a question but ended up giving enough data where I thought I could solve it).

Keep in mind, per-check chance of finding funded bitcoin address is ~0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000034211388289180104270598866779539%.

To make the numbers a little easier to grasp, here is %chance of finding bitcoin address if "DSV-like software can check 5000 addresses (10M of which are funded or will be funded within 6 months) per second, and 100 botnets of 50,000 computers each":
Per century,
0.00000000000000000000053944517054379188413880293137978%
If 100 botnets of 50,000 computers could check only 1,000 addresses per second (5x slower than above stats for bitcoin), the chance of correctly guessing info on an activated credit card is:
Per century,
10.01005015031071235396%

ETA: I left out PIN number. Point still stands.

You don't need three resistors, only one. (*IF* you need it at all)



68-75 ohm seems to be the agreed-upon "hasn't screwed something up, yet" range.

Huh. I thought it was a reference to Venetian doges. Click links at own risk...

Long-term Bitcoiners were selling large quantities >$1000. Don't think they don't see the opportunity to double their bitcoins right now. I'm waiting for <$400, though I was happily pressing the "buy" button at $550 and again at $650.

Outside of "destroyed" and "early adopters," yeah, I'd say you were.