That's really odd... I couldn't tell you why feedburner choked on that one or even if it still does, here's the proper URL:

http://codinginmysleep.com/everybodys-got-a-system-arbitrage-betting/

As for it not showing up under the series URL, well, that was my bad - I just forgot to tell WordPress it belonged to a series

I've fixed what's under my control at least, I'm looking into the feedburner thing. Thanks for the info and the subscribe!

The fact is it did work, just not the way you wanted it to. You complained, they explained themselves, you complained again they told you no and now you're whining about it publicly hoping to shame them into paying you off so you'll shut up.

The adult way of handling this would be to involve authorities or a neutral third party of some sort, not the public. If you legitimately feel that they have wronged you in a legal monetary transaction and you're not getting anywhere with the company yourself, there are other channels. Going to the public makes you seem immature at best, scammy at worst. It's not you saying "I was legitimately wronged" any more, it's you saying "You don't agree with my assessment so now I'm going to publicly shame you" and that isn't acceptable behavior.

Of course it's unlikely that any of the proper channels will get you what you want since they'll be looking at BitInstant's ToS and other binding documents to determine what should have happened, and since you agreed to those rules you'll have to play by them. If you broke the rules, or even bent them, no external body will enter any rulings in your favor and you know that, so instead you come here and shout as loudly as you can in hopes that BitInstant will just pay you to shut up.

Charlie, do your investigation and decide what the proper course of action is - pay them if they legitimately deserve to be paid - but I swear to you, if you pay this person one cent just to make them shut up I will personally fly to New York and slap you across the face. We don't negotiate with terrorists

I'm playing "crusader of justice" because there's something inherently shady about your behavior and accusations and BitInstant, being both an involved party and a respected business lacks my unaligned third-party ability to look at your story and shout "BULLSHIT!"

You only feel wronged because you lost money. Whether you actually were wronged or not comes down to the minutae of BitInstant's ToS, the actual behavior as it occurred and other details that I'm obviously not in-the-loop enough to speak to. What I can speak to is that your FEELING of being wronged is nonsense. You lost money on a trade because of a baking delay. Welcome to the club, grow a pair or go home. I want as many people as possible participating in Bitcoin as possible, you included, but not if you're going to actively run around spreading FUD every time something doesn't perfectly execute precisely the way you think it should and you have to take some kind of loss. In short, your particular brand of nonsense hurts the community, hurts the project and drives people away for no valid reason and your presence is therefore a loss to the community.

Kindly resolve your dispute with BitInstant in private or involving whatever authorities you deem necessary to involve, but don't come shouting about it in the public eye and not expect someone to refer to your behavior as shady, suspicious or to just stand up and shout "BULLSHIT" at the top of our lungs. We don't have too many established and respected Bitcoin businesses and I'll not stand idly by and watch others erode what little infrastructure we have left with FUD.

Now seriously, get the hell off of my lawn.

And what if the price difference were reversed? Would you be quietly grinning at your little win or would you be on the forums complaining that they gave you too much?

Whether BitInstant did anything wrong or not, you're still breaking the #1 rule of Bitcoin: You have expectations. Exchange rates are super-volatile and not everything on the USD side happens as cleanly and instantaneously as the BTC side. If they fulfilled your order and you lost $250 due to exchange rate fluctuations while USD-side banking crap delayed the transaction that's just part of the risk you're taking when purchasing a volatile asset.

Again, I'm not automatically dismissing BitInstant's liability, I don't know the details of your particular case well enough to actually place or even discuss blame, but BitInstant exists to speed up and simplify these transactions, not to guarantee you against losses due to market volatility. If they actually wronged you in some way, feel free to go after them, but if you're just crying because you bought in at price X and in the time it took to complete the buy BTC is now worth < X - JOIN THE CLUB. How do you think those of us who had to go through days-or-weeks-long ACH transfers or Dwolla nonsense to get in or out of the market feel? You've got it good and you're still complaining.

Damn whippersnapper, GET OFF MY LAWN!

Back before I started blogging mostly about Bitcoin, I had a short series on all the "systems" crazy people come to my hometown of Las Vegas with and why none of them really work. I covered Martingale betting, why it doesn't work in the long-term despite often working in the very short term and how it's similar to some of the larger-scale economic games that the banker assholes always seem to be playing.

It was a fun series to write - I might just bring it back between Bitcoin posts

In all seriousness, though, I work in the gaming industry and we do refer to it as a "idiot tax" or a "math tax" quite often - though there is a preferred description when speaking to those outside the industry: It's entertainment, plain and simple. You'd pay money to go to the movies, you'd pay money to play a video game, there's an element of excitement involved and depending on the amounts bet and your particular financial situation it can be a lot of fun to gamble. Despite knowing how poor my odds are, I occasionally play craps or feed a few dollars into a slot machine just because it's fun. I fully expect to lose my money, but that's ok because I'm paying for my entertainment and I'm aware of that choice - anything I win is a bonus.

Sadly there are some for whom that style of play isn't enough - as with any activity there is a dark compulsive side to betting and it's easy to go too far so if you've got a compulsive streak I would agree with the OP, don't play SatoshiDice or participate in any sort of gambling if you're the type who will lose your house over it. Everyone else I'm pretty sure is aware they're being set up to lose and can make their own decisions about their own entertainment.

Funniest thing I've read all day, and man did I need a laugh today

Yes. Yes I do. Missing deadlines is not a new invention unique to BFL or Bitcoin.


Because no company is actually required to give you any of this information, you're just spoiled by the radical transparency of most Bitcoin ventures. BFL isn't doing anything that Samsung, Intel et al wouldn't do.




Consumer rights mean I can't sell you something with claims and then have the product fall short of those claims. If the final product falls short of claims then I'm required to refund your money if so requested. That's not just law, that's good business and it's what BFL did when their FPGA line fell short of expectations.

They have "told us what it is" within acceptable legal limits. We have specs, we've been told what the products should do and what kind of power consumption we should expect. If the final product falls short of these claims, then I'm sure we'll see a refund option just like we did with the FPGAs. Manufacturers aren't required to prove to you what their product contains, what manufacturing process they used or any of this other nonsense - they're only required to deliver something that does what they claim it will. Specs were available at the time of preorder and the only change since then has been in a positive direction. As for Intel showing prototypes, well frankly they can afford to. When you're pioneering the processes that make the newest fastest smallest chips, the secret is in the process not the final product. The most AMD could do with an 11nm Intel chip without holding it in their hands and putting it under a microscope is say "yeah that looks about the right size for 11nm."

And ANOTHER one who doesn't read before posting:

Hey look, another one who doesn't read before posting.

WTF world do you live in? Tons of companies sell preorders. Apple sold preorders on the iPhone 5, nearly every video game that is released comes with the option to preorder... Perhaps Intel specifically doesn't sell preorders but it's not like it's an unestablished crazy upside down concept. Not only do lots of companies sell their products via preorder, but they do so without releasing even as much information as BFL has and with hundreds or thousands of times BFL's preorder numbers.

iPhone 5 buyers, for example, might have liked to know that their maps were going to be shit on iOS 6 but was this info available before they held the product in their hand? No, because Apple kept their mouth shut about that, and nearly every, "feature." Same with the "grip of death" "feature" in previous hardware.

Again if you don't like the way BFL behaves, vote with your wallet and buy from a competitor but for the love of god stop acting like what they're doing is abnormal - the way they're working is the way most businesses work, you're just used to a level of transparency you don't often find outside of Bitcoin. If you want to see Bitcoin adopted outside of its current niche market, you're going to have to get used to the way normal businesses operate.

BFL has publicly stated that the first run of units to ship are still having their fabrication outsourced. They hoped to have their pick/place, reflow oven, etc in place and running early enough to manufacture them in-house but it didn't work out that way. Likely we don't have pictures of the finished product yet because they don't actually have a finished product in their hands to show us - it's still out at some fab house. Now I'm sure they have a prototype of some kind, but prototypes also tend to be larger and uglier than finished products, usually don't work as well as finished products and almost invariably reveal more copy-able information than a finished product.

Because no company is actually required to give you any of this information, you're just spoiled by the radical transparency of most Bitcoin ventures. BFL isn't doing anything that Samsung, Intel et al wouldn't do.


Sure they do, but they only gain whatever information Intel is willing to let them have. A timeline/roadmap for the future of a well-established product isn't a lot of information, the nm process of a brand-new never before seen product is a hell of a lot of information. If you were running BFL wouldn't you want your competitors to be fully entrenched in potentially inferior processes before you released data about which process you're using?


Except that NASA is a taxpayer-funded entity explicitly designed in such a way that all of their records, discoveries and processes are to be public information (with exceptions made for national security etc of course, it's the government, whaddya expect?). BFL isn't, they're a private company and as such are under no obligation to give you a thing. Hell, what they've given you is already more than what most companies would give you for an unreleased product. Did Apple release PCB renders of the iPhone 5 prior to release? Hell no, they barely gave out STATS let alone pictures of a running device or half the things people are demanding of BFL.


They've already given you quite a lot. The similarity of their case design to Apple TV doesn't really speak to anything besides perhaps a lack of uniqueness in either Apple's design or a tendency for the industry to copycat successful products, can't say which but I've got a dozen products in my home that look more or less like an Apple TV (including an actual Apple TV).

Here's what it boils down to:

Traditionally when you create something, as a business, you have two ways to secure that invention. Either you patent it, in which case your product and processes become public knowledge in return for granting you a period of enforceable exclusive profit or you keep your data a trade secret and the period of exclusivity lasts for as long as you can keep that secret out of your competitors hands. Many companies choose column A, examples being... well, just about anything you can find a patent or trademark for. Other companies choose column B, one famous example being KFC's secret spice recipe - not trademarked or patented, just flat-out secret. If someone got their hands on it and leaked it to the world it'd be open season on their secret spices.

Column C, chosen almost exclusively by Bitcoin businesses and Bitcoin businesses alone, is radical transparency. Tell everyone everything in as much detail as they'll listen to. Enough data to compete with you, to the point of copycatting a process you'd never have been able to mimic otherwise. You've become used to this for some reason, despite the fact that absolutely anywhere else it's not the norm. Walk into any normal tech company and start making these same kind of demands - you'll be removed by security. I'll never understand how a community that grew up around what is essentially a crypto project decided that having secrets and the right to protect those secrets is a bad thing. I understand you like your software and hardware open-source, but out here in the day-to-day tech world FOSS is the exception, not the rule.

If you don't like any of that, you're welcome to vote with your wallet, just don't buy BFL products if you disagree with their methods. Go support bASIC or AvalonASIC or something, competition is good for the marketplace and I'm sure that while BFL, like any company, would love to have a monopoly, the existence of alternatives drives all competitors to create better stuff. There is in fact something you can do about this if you feel slighted, so perhaps stop whining and just do it.

Wow, everyone saying "the dollar and euro don't have a foundation to act as its voice" sure forgot the big switch to the euro fast. When the euro was still not quite a concrete thing yet there was a hell of a lot of chatter with groups forming on either side to promote or protest the idea of a united European currency and all kinds of special interest lobbying going on to convince individual countries' governments to adopt or refuse.

Other currencies have a foundation acting as their voice too, it's called the military. If you take issue with the currency of your country, there is a tendency for men with guns to "convince" you otherwise - to varying degree of course.

Except that there's no "exactly right amount of ram" for sCrypt.

sCrypt, like bCrypt is defined over a largeish table which is constantly accessed and modified, both in size and content, during the algorithm's run. The amount of space this table will take up is effectively a pseudorandom value dependent on the message so each hash will take a different amount of RAM than the last.

That's the entire reason sCrypt based altcoins were supposed to be GPU resistant and should still remain ASIC resistant: their memory requirement is both large and random and the algorithm itself is designed to access that memory as much as possible, thus making performance of a brute force attack against it heavily reliant on memory latency.

Again, I haven't looked at code to say how the GPU miner actually works, but the theory was that since all but a very very tiny amount of GPU memory is "pooled" in such a way that only one core can access it at a time, any GPU miner would have most of its threads deadlocked for use of that one shared resource most of the time. I'm tempted to say that the miner probably uses a very clever workaround to solve the locking problem, but I sincerely doubt that they've found a way to sincerely perform brute force against sCrypt without maintaining and heavily utilizing that large table in shared RAM.

I'm not arguing that an ASIC couldn't be built, just that it's unlikely any ASIC will have significant performance gains over mass-produced and readily-available CPUs. CPUs are already very close to ideal for this application and any optimizations gained by building a custom one-use-only chip are unlikely to be economically meaningful, regardless of whether such an increase is technically meaningful. If you produce a miner that is twice as fast as a CPU but costs 4 times as much, I don't see people lining up to buy it.

I couldn't agree more. Shall we start a list of the angry shouting people and start tying them to ASIC competitors in preparation?

You're all lucky this guy actually spoke to you at all. If I were that seller there is no way in hell I would put in any effort to appease a bunch of conspiracy theorists by potentially violating the privacy of my buyer. I wouldn't even have asked BFL, I would have sent your emails straight to the trash. You're also lucky this was an eBay purchase instead of direct - try asking a manufacturer for that kind of information and they'll kindly ask to see your warrant as security removes you from the building.

This entire effort is ridiculous. It's nearly impossible to believe that this many people have this much free time on your collective hands and this little common sense. If we were talking about any non-Bitcoin business BFL would actually be considered fairly transparent, but you're all too spoiled by the downright radical transparency of others to recognize that it's not actually normal for a tech business to hand you a "how to copy our shit" kit before the product is released. I also have the feeling that if BFL were a bigger business run by standard douchebag executive assholes, there would already be several lawsuits.

But hey, pass out the tinfoil hats, the controversy is just free advertising for the company you purportedly hate - especially when stuff like this happens. I'm sure you're right, though... I mean, buying thousands of dollars worth of electronics manufacturing equipment from eBay on the off chance you'll identify the source of the pictures then getting some random seller to cooperate with you to confirm the purchase is just part of the "long con." Totally. I mean, that sounds not at all crazy and totally like something people do, right?

Before there was LiteCoin there was TeneBrix (or maybe shortly after, I dunno they all sort of came at once these altcoins). They both use an algorithm called sCrypt rather than Bitcoin's use of SHA256. SHA256 is a series of outrageously simple integer operations that require practically no memory to perform. sCrypt on the other hand is explicitly designed to use quite a lot of memory. CPUs are a general purpose processing device with a pretty fair amount of memory on the chip. GPUs have quite a lot of memory available to them, but are designed to share that memory evenly between each of their several hundred processor cores so the idea was that sCrypt would be GPU resistant because GPU cores have a harder time getting their hands on a decent pool of working memory - I haven't looked over any code to see how exactly anyone has beaten that limitation, but it was sort of a soft limitation.

The TL;DR version, what you REALLY need to understand about LiteCoin to get this answer is this: The thing holding you back from mining faster isn't the bit of the processor that's doing actual math, it's the amount of RAM your processor has and how fast it can access that RAM. RAM that's on the CPU itself = crazy fast, the RAM clicked into slots on your motherboard = comparatively quite slow.

So now imagine you're building an sCrypt ASIC... You design a special purpose circuit that does the math and put it on a chip with a fair amount of RAM. Congratulations, you've just re-designed the CPU you already had, but at greater cost, worse power efficiency and it's only ever going to be good for one thing thus limiting its potential resale value. Woo.

In short, you already have LiteCoin ASICs - they're manufactured by Intel and AMD.

Anyone who thinks an unencrypted private message on a forum is actually private or secure in any way almost deserves to have their messages read and used against them.

Never suggested it was a popularity contest. What the orange ignore button indicates to me is that a lot of people have said "wow this person is full of shit" and that this should probably be my default reaction. If enough people think you're so full of shit that they never want to hear from you again, your button turns orange and you lose a hell of a lot of clout.

Matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of thing someone like you would do that might result in a "wow this person is full of shit" reaction - demanding that the administrator of a forum give himself a scammer tag (which we all know won't happen) based on crazy allegations that no one has any ability to prove at this point.

The real point is, we haven't heard anything from Nefario or any outside agents who are likely to actually know what's going on with GLBSE. We literally have no proof that anything shady is happening right now though there is certainly enough going on to merit suspicion or worry. Scammer tags are for scammers and let's be honest, we don't even know there's a scam yet. Speak to your suspicions all you want, but only proven scammers deserve the tag and it's way too early to start throwing this around.