Sure would enjoy a hint... pM me maybe? my lips will be sealed!

Assuming for windows?

Malwarwbytes
And kaspersky Av
(In combo)

Mac or Linux or a Windies server?
clamAV

Not that I've ever heard of...  And at one point I sold some coins for Paypal. Of course, within 6 months all of the transactions had been charged back. Lesson learned. But even when explaining my case to Paypal customer support there was no form of reprimand for selling crypto coins...

Yes, but so long as you're not reusing passwords, all thats at risk is the coins on the VPS, not all your coins everywhere. And again, so long as you're using bit/reputable VPS providers as opposed to those $15/year providers, I'd have no problem trusting them with some coins...

Of course better option would just be to create a local VM and stake locally, but if that's not an option for OP for whatever reason, then an amazon, Azure or similar VPS would seem fine (in my mind)

You don't need to share any passwords, make a password unique to the wallet you're staking with and that's all they could possibly get access to. As for VPS admins upping and stealing your coins, yes, that's a possibility... likely remote, so long as you use a reputable vendor.

Off topic but does anybody know - if I set up my own server, can I play a full game with an unregistered client? Or am I still limited to 10 or 15 minute sessions?

Is that controlled by the client or by the server?

Wouldn't normally think to ask this on a Bitcoin forum, but I'm thinking people responding to this post might know. Thanks.

With equal sized networks, security should be equivalent if you base it on compute time rather than number of confirmations.

Ie a Bitcoin transaction with 6 confirms (1hour work) should be just as secure as a a transaction with 60 confirmations from an aktcoin with 1 minute blocks.

People will say what's the point, but I think the shorter block time would be helpful just so That seller could get more immediate confirmation that the transaction had valid inputs and likely wasn't a double spend attempt. To be equally sure as a Bitcoin transaction with 6 confirmations, they'ed need to wait an hour, not just 6 confirmations.

Staking doesn't use any cpu, that's one of its primary "advantages"

To OP: there are vps companies that take Bitcoin, yes. Whether you'll make enough from staking to pay for the hosting us a different story - Youd need a huge amount of coins to do that.

You mean like name coin?

One issue I see is block times. I'm of the belief that one of bitcoins major hindrances is the 10 minute block time; nearly every alt attempts to address that, but building an alt atop of Bitcoin means that it's also limited to 10 minute blocks and SHA256 as its proof of work algorithm. Doesn't allow for much differentiation

I thought peer coin was onto something as well, and at one point, actually with the release of prime coin (also a sunny king invention), I sought to diversify my crypto holdings and sold off a bunch of prime coins and bought lite coin and peercoin to hold along with Bitcoin. I still think that peer coin is arguably superior to bitcoin, but network effects, etc give Bitcoin a huge advantage.

I'm of the belief that neither Bitcoin, nor any other crypto, nor any other currency or payment method, is "perfect", but even if the most "perfect"coin ever was created, it wouldn't challenge Bitcoin, as there is too much vested interest in it at this point to allow any other coin to Replace it. Only caveat to that is if a nation created an alt coin and decreed it to be their official currency, that would force millions to use that coin and could cause the new coins usage, market cap etc to all exceed Bitcoin. But absent that, the vested interest is in bitcoin, even though it's trivial to make any application that supports Bitcoin to also support any number of altcoins at the same time.

I'm not a lawyer or scientist, but I think that while there at agreements in place to give patents some form of international protection, many other countries (among them China and India) don't pay them much heed. Others, like disease ravaged countries in Africa also say they'll pay no attention to patents in their battles against the diseases that ail them

In short, patents might be responsible for huge pharmaceutical prices in the US, but that knowledge can and will be exploited by other counties around the world. So research or knowledge gained from this won't be lost to a black hole of knowledge.

What is this "big" thing they're preparing for? Or is it just fantasy?

Anyone can claim any amount of coins have been lost; absent coins being burned to a verifiable burn address, there's no way to prove any loss.

Yes, if someone comes along saying they lost 5 BTC, I will fee horrible for them, but even if the sum of coins reported lost by people to things like crashed hard drives, etc was 2 million, in my mind, I wouldn't think that the remaining coins should be any more valuable, because there is no way to prove those coins lost, rather than people trying to manipulate perceived prices.

People come up with all sorts of theories about when to say that coins have been lost; if they haven't moved for X amount of time, presumed lost, etc... That doesn't make sense.

First off, early miners could have simply backed up their wallets and haven't felt the need to combine all of their coins at a new address, and a lot of people claim to have created paper wallets and done things like burying them somewhere. Those coins won't move either. Really, just because a coin hasn't moved from its address for a while, that's no reason to assume its lost. Or, at the least, it would be very unwise for people to try to adjust value of the remaining coins, as those coins "lost" could move at any time. There's no proof the private keys for older coins have been lost, in many cases, no ones even claiming the key has beeen lost, it's just that someone is speculating that the key is lost due to the lack of movement.

Some point in late 2011 or 2012. A friend heard about it and got really excited, and brought it to my attention... At first, it made no sense to me at all - i was like "digital money? You mean someone could just find their wallet file, duplicate it and have twice as many coins? Yeah, sounds like a great idea"...

Over time, I learned more about it and started gaining a legitimate interest. We (my friend plus one other) combined our funds and build a GPU rig and mined for a bit, then we went on to become some of the first orderers from BFL... Still took a year to get product, but our miner was received in July 2013... Then, watching the difficulty rise, I convinced them to sell (we had a few jalapeños we bought for $149 i believe... maybe $199...), and sold them each for between $800 and $2000 on eBay.

Haven't mined since.  But yeah, I've been watching this for a while...

3 AM... My standard bed time. I only wish that my bodies internal alarm clock would set itself for 7 hours later rather than forcing my eyes to open at 7:30 exactly.

Yeah, before fixating on huge prices in the future, the first question should be along the lines of "when will Bitcoin stop falling?"

Whose paying for us posting this?

Unfortunately, this place seems to attract those without scruples.

Cloud mining sounds great in theory, but lots of operations have turned out to be scams. Even this one, AMHash, run by one of the "gods" of the Bitcoin universe.

Just as they say if you don't control your private key, you don't have any bitcoins, same can be said for mining hardware - if it's not under your roof, or at a cage in a data center that you have the keys to, you don't actually have any mining power, just the hope that whoever you gave your coins to will give some of them back as time goes by

Sounds like an exciting new idea for my next game night!

/s

None of us heard of bitcoins before 5 or 6 years ago, I imagine most could do without it. Of course some have pinned their entire hope for the future on it, but for most of us, life would go on without it