Decentralised systems tend to take much longer to reach a satisfactory level of quality than systems created and controlled by an agent.  The mechanic of the first is evolution whereas that of the second is intelligent design.

Human nature is human nature, there's no getting away from it.  For me, Bitcoin is not so much synonymous with scammers, cheats, and thieves as it is with freedom and bravery.

Will Bitcoin survive? only time will tell.

I'm glad to see things are going well.

I've been looking around at other pools as always but once again simplecoin.us seems to be the best for me.  The closest competitor in my opinion is mineco.in which annoyingly lacks a feature to donate a percentage of earnings to the pool.  rfcpool is a little further behind due to it's particularly stupid "Grace period for previous-block share submissions, resulting in LOW stale rates!".  Both have the transaction fee reward advantage over simplecoin.us though.

I'm hoping my 720 MH/s can net one of these promotional Bitcoins.

My apologies, it seems I haven't expressed myself well.  I don't mean to imply that Bitcoin has a problem with illegal activity, merely that if one could argue the case then one could almost certainly apply the same argument to fiat and corruption.

I certainly have no ethical hang-ups with using Bitcoins and indeed feel better about trading with them than with Sterling.

Bitcoin having a problem with illegal activity is easily matched and bested by centrally controlled wealth systems having a problem with severe immoral activity.  A merchant accepting fiat is as easily accused of supporting corruption as one accepting Bitcoin is accused of supporting crime.

That money laundering was the key criticism of Bitcoin is a huge success.  If a merchant is concerned about supporting or appearing to support crime by accepting Bitcoin then I would urge them to think hard about what they are supporting by accepting fiat.

I'm surprised people make such a big deal of this "the manipulator".  Powerful traders are the inevitable consequence of trading in a small free market.  For those that don't like this there are many large and highly regulated markets out there.

In the same way as competition encourages miners to use very efficient hardware, so to does this free market encourage traders to make smart choices.  I find myself placing blame for high market volatility on bad traders rather than powerful ones.  As more unprofitable traders are driven from the market, panic sells and unthinking rallies will become rarer and less extreme.  I take solace in knowing that we are evolving towards stability.

TL;DR: If anything, I'm more annoyed with "the manipulated" than "the manipulator".

Slight bug with the pool stats page.  When I select BTC proportional I see my own name on the top 30 hashrates.  My rank is given as 614 and my hashrate as 750.  My hashrate really is about 750 but that's all pointed at the PPLNS pool.

Also, what happened to the 'shares this round' stats?

Cool.

I've sent a small donation your way.  Good luck with the merged mining.

Fair enough.  If I could be useful for testing merged mining though let me know.

I've not done much testing yet but have had no serious problems with rc2 yet.

I only found one minor issue.  As has been mentioned before, the 'Cancel' buttons of many of the dialogue boxes which ask for a password are not handled properly.  When encrypting a wallet or changing the password the cancel button always gives an error.  Also, when supplying a password for a payment or for creating a new address the cancel button picks up the "please supply a password" information box which I assume is intended for the case of selecting 'OK' with an empty password field.

The information boxes and warnings given when encrypting a wallet or changing a password are particularly well done.  I'm sure we agree that this aspect of the user interface is perhaps the most important.  I thought it would be good to mention that wallets cannot easily be decrypted but this would make the confirmation dialogue for wallet encryption too long.  One thing I found odd was that the confirmation dialogue was placed between asking for a password and confirming the password.  The first time I came to the dialogue I was worried that the password I'd supplied contained a typo.

Among other things I've created some new addresses, transferred BTC in and out, restored an unencrypted backup.  I've not managed to break the software and everything seems to work as it should.

Do you accept donations for client development Gavin?

My main wallet has only 69 transactions (74 if you count generated blocks).  My oldest transaction has 80588 confirmations (5 BTC from the faucet).

Thanks RyNinDaCleM, our second block of the month!

I'm afraid I haven't found a block for the pool yet but so long as merged mining will be working here the moment we hit block 19200 I'll keep pointing all of my hashing power at this pool.  Now that you have the framework for multiple coins it might be a good idea to add the main merged mining testnet before we reach 19200; I'll happily point a card at it for testing.

I've just tested the proxy, connecting with port 80 works fine for me.  I've also visited beta.simplecoin.us and had a look round.  Things look good.  I haven't tested the proportional pool though.

No, basically your shares would count for both.  [caution=overly simplistic]You would collect together bitcoin and namecoin transactions together, compute some hashes, and send shares to both the bitcoin pool and the namecoin pool.[/caution]  It would be as if you suddenly had double the hashing power on condition that the extra hashing power is spent on Namecoin.

A solution of dividing shares between Bitcoin and Namecoin is no good.  Of course, it would be better to spend all of one's hashing power on the coin which is most profitable.  This has led to the problem of massive swings in hashing power for Namecoin and merged mining is the proposed solution.

The idea has been around for a while, it's being pushed by key namecoin developers, and there are testnets of merged mining running now.  The main issue is that it requires a fundamental change to Namecoin itself, a change which will be rolled out at block 19200 (Namecoin is now at block 19004 but the difficulty is nearly 100`000 so it will probably take 3 weeks or so before the change is officially made).

The Namecoin pools seem to be much more up to speed on this stuff and already prepared to switch to merged mining the moment it becomes available.  I think I will probably just move to one of those pools when the time comes and I very much doubt I'd be the only miner to do so.  These pools are very small and I predict serious server problems so I'll make sure I'm ready to fall back to solo mining just incase.  I know many people don't care very much about all these new coins but I feel Namecoin has something going for it.  Check out https://www.masterpool.eu/merged and https://www.masterpool.eu/statistics.

Mine hard and mine smart.

Excellent.  I think it would be good for the pool to have support for merged mining with namecoin when it becomes available.  Given that this would allow people to mine namecoins simultaneously (hence much greater profit for miners in the short term) the pools which implement this first and with little server downtime could stand to gain a huge number of users.

Incase you weren't aware, the block number for migrating namecoin to the merged mining system has been brought forward to block 19200 (which could even be reached within the next two weeks).

http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=217

I was wondering: Are there were any plans to implement merged mining with namecoin here when the time comes?

Agreed.

I just added the lifetime shares for the top 30 for a total of about 61 million shares.  With the 15 blocks on record that suggests that each block took, on average, over 4 million shares.  Something is definitely wrong here but it's not so important to fix right now.

I'm really just hoping for a period of relative stability.

Have you tried linking the first card to your monitor and the second to a dummy monitor with a single xorg.conf file?  Scroll up to find my example of pointing my cards to a dummy monitor and compare the file with the one generated by

A watched pot never boils (although I don't know whether or not this idiom was designed to handle pots where the time taken to boil follows an exponential distribution).

I just refreshed the page to see that this block has lasted 169 hours 9 mins (now officially over a week).

You know a block is tough when the "Blocks Found Over Last Week" graph is empty.

Indeed, one can usually count on the majority of miners acting irrationally.