Not necessarily. I believe they would consider bitcoins to be credits in an unregistered barter exchange, which counts as taxable income as soon as you receive them.
That said, I'm not going to report them that way unless requested by an auditor. It would just be a mess trying to account for them.
The Good/Bad news is that your accounting software can check the block-chain after the fact: If you have kept track of all of the addresses you have used. Based on the OP, TurboTax won't have that feature in 2011/2012. |
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I like the GPL. The problem with using a software license for hardware is the concept of "source code" becomes ambiguous. If it is made out of molded plastic, am I required to supply a copy of the mold upon request? For images, are the original vector files used for rendering needed? Do all of the rendering parameters need to be spelled out? I think for the FPGA, releasing the verilog files is enough, even if the "compiler" is very proprietary. For the board, releasing the eagle files is probably enough as well, despite being another proprietary program. "Public Domain" may cause legal problems in some countries. That is what the WTFPL was written for. Edit: The GPL licenses have some anti-patent provisions. This may be a problem if some patented functionality is included in the cost of one of the components. |
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However, aren't hard disks sealed to partial vacuum?.
I suppose there may exist some hard disks designed to operate in a partial vacuum, but those would not include cheap consumer disks. The top plate is too thin to hold a substantial vacuum. I have seen some disks with vent holes you are not supposed to cover. Specifically the Western Digital WD1600AAJB. Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3,050m) (using WD1600AB specifications) |
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Okay, went and tested it: the '>' command overwrites the file; data or not. You would use the append command ('>>')to avoid overwriting the file. I was thinking maybe it was a meta suggestion: exit the thread without writing to it  |
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Following the link you provide, I note that China has banned the use of virtual currency for the purchase of real goods, as you report, but that it also restricts the use of virtual currency to virtual goods provided by the issuer of the currency, and thus Bitcoin is effectively banned in China. You suggest that the definition of a virtual currency includes that it is backed by one issuer that can provide goods and services and that it is pegged to a specific exchange rate. Do you have a reference for that definition as a general rule, or are referring to China only and extrapolating from the link?
Thanks!
I was only extrapolating from the link. Chinese residents should read the original Chinese circular from the Ministries of Culture and Commerce in case something got distorted in the translation/summarization: The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services. Edit: It may make sense to see a "virtual currency" as something like vouchers. Obviously bitcoin is distinct from that. |
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Why doesn't Bitcoin qualify as currency from another country, where it would only be taxable when you "repatriate" the currency into USD?
Because there is no other country that backs bitcoin; so it is not actually a "foreign currency." I am not a lawyer though YMMV. |
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Try that with a test file. It will exit immediately without writing anything.
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I suppose to quickly answer questions like yours, the first post of the thread should be kept up to date. The back-plane is supposed to be optional. There will be a USB port on the modules that is inaccessible while plugged into the back-plane. This is to allow stand-alone operation. AFIAK, the point of the back plane is to make managing several boards easier. I envision powering down the chips being useful in off-grid applications where power may be at a premium, depending on weather conditions. It may also be useful if you want "standby" hashing power to protect the network, but you would probably use (cheaper, more power hungry) general-purpose machines for that. I was going to say my post was the first mention of a temperature sensor, but it actually wasn't. I don't think any temperature-sensing scheme is finalized yet. I just noticed the MCU has that feature when reading the datasheet (+- 20C). I then would like to state that for the current design we are going to use 2 FPGA's per DIMM PCB at maximum, not more !
In addition the motherboard will hold up to 5 DIMM boards - Post 92I'd say that a DIMM may draw up to 35 watts from the backplane. This should be sufficient for all 2-FPGA and some 4-FPGA cards. If a card needs more, it should use dedicated Molex/PCIe connectors. This allows for 2-card backplanes with just an ATX20 connector, 4-card with ATX24, or up to 7 cards with ATX20 + P4, up to 9 cards with ATX24 + P4, or up to 13 cards with ATX24 + EPS12V. - Post 184Let me try to collect the different suggestions and comments made on bus design till now: Protocols suggested to be on bus: - Post 198I wanted to get an idea what the space would look like on this board. This shows two LX150s in the FG484 package and the MSP430 in the QFN64 package. This FPGA is available in a smaller package, CSG484, but I think this one fits nicely, and a larger pitch means easier job routing the signals to the pins. For comparison, this package is 23 mm square, the smaller one is 19 mm square. - Post 235I had a qoute from pcbcart for a 4 layer board of our size with gold finish and 240 connection pinns for the DIMM ind 1.2 mm thikness resulting in 18 euro per board for a quatity of 10 boards. - Post 280As for license preferences: I would be happy with many of the OSI approved licenses, but GPLv3+ or maybe GPLv2+ would be my preferences. - Post 351(I don't think the preceding has been formally decided yet.) I uploaded a new version of the board to both dropbox and github: - Post 374 Update: Post 416I don't think anybody has volunteered to program the MCU yet. In theory, I could do it if I get my computer situation straightened out in the near future. |
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...This is affected by turbulent boundary shear between the hard drive surface and the air around it. This is also believed to be truly random.
...
I thought that part of HDDs were evacuated to reduce friction... No, the heads ride on a cushion of air. It it dust that is removed from the cavity. Dust can cause enough turbulence to cause the heads to crash into the disk surface. These days, hard-drives auto-park the heads when the power is removed. Hard drives I have taken apart also have dust traps with filters near the edge of the platters. A little off-topic though. |
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I think at the moment the legal status of Bitcoin is unclear. You run into this minefield of legal terms that have very specific meanings (that may exclude bitcoin). But on the other hand, countries around the world have agreed to crack down on money laundering and terrorist financing. Bitcoin may not be a "Foreign Currency" because it is not backed by any world government. Bitcoin may not be a "Virtual currency" ( Banned in China for the purchase or real goods) because is is not backed by any one issuer that can provide virtual goods and services, and is not pegged to a specific exchange rate. Bitcoin may not be a "commodity" (what most exchanges treat it as) because it has no inherent value. Bitcoin may not be a "security" (Subject to much more regulation than a commodity) because it acts more like a commodity. That said, bitcoin users may have trouble with reporting requirements if their activities are considered a Money Services business. Just the act of relaying transactions on the network may subject you to reporting requirements you can't meet because the blockchain deals only with annonymized information. Adding sender information to the blockchain would be in violation of privacy laws because the information is public (and it would bloat the blockchain). That said, I am not convinced the Enabling legislation and regulations are actually that far-reaching. I am in the process of drafting a letter to FINTRAC asking for clarification. |
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It's worse than that: we want to be able to bring down the FPGAs deliberately if they are drawing too much power. How much data would need to be moved across the bus every time we do this? So far the assumption is that bandwidth is negligable. Edit: 1.6MB can take minutes at standard serial speeds.
Another reason for using the MCU is that it saves space on the FPGA for hashing. The MCU can translate between USB and SPI for example.
Edit2: MCUs can also be reprogrammed without software costing $3000 to produce the bitstream. This makes things like minor protocol changes or calibrating the built-in temperature sensor easy.
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Person A decides to sell off his old hard drive. Before he sells it, he makes some "random" data by making a disk image the size of the drive full of kiddie porn and then encrypts it with 20 minutes of 'cat /dev/urandom'.
You lost me here. Isn't /dev/urandom a one-way function? I recently bought a 500GB hard-drive used. Spent 25 hours overwriting it with /dev/urandom (CPU bound). I then spent 5 hours overwriting with /dev/zero (I/O Bound). Without the "Key" you can't prove whether something is data or meaningless noise. |
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Spelling-corrected version of my response: I like some of the inforgraphics too, but fail to understand why Bitcoin would be the “taxless currency.” An accountant I know pointed me to IT-95R http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tp/it95r/it95r-e.txtwhen I asked about the tax implications of holding a currency experiencing hyper-deflation (not guaranteed to continue). Note that bitcoin is not actually a “foreign currency” because it is not actually backed by any government. They are backed by proof-of-work and the anonymized public transaction history. |
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As long as it doesn't destroy the FPGA and doesn't draw excessive power on 2.5V, this should be fine. If we would completely power it down, it would delete its configuration as well. But yeah, the reset 0.1W look good. Does it even make sense to shut down the PSU in this case? I'd guess that an idle dual-FPGA DIMM (just the MSP running) could be brought down to ~2W (mostly switcher quiescent current) that way, which sounds OK to me, if we can save an additional 2.5V rail that way. Remember: if all the modules on the motherboard are shut-down (but drawing ~2W each), it is possible for the motherboard logic to turn off the ATX power supply. That is that only logic that needs to run off of 5V. Sorry for the confusion. |
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lol @ people not understanding how things work making arguments that don't make any sense.
Protip:
1) read the alternative chains wiki page
2) understand what a merkle branch is
3) understand (2) allows securing an arbitrarily large namecoin/blahcoin block by adding ~30 bytes to a bitcoin block.
4) understand a single bitcoin tx is more than 80bytes
5) stop whining
But then you can't use namecoin without downloading the entire bitcoin blockchain. You can't verify a specific merkle leaf without examining the whole block. Are you trying to claim that nobody will want to run a namecoin miner without the bitcoin blockchain? Edit: what happens when bitcoin gets replaced by bictoin2, but we think namecoin is still good? |
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No, both chains will be independent of one another. You don't need to download the Bitcoin blockchain to "cryptographically confirm the integrity of the Namecoin block chain". You can be a regular Namecoin miner or node and still asses if a block/transaction is valid or not.
If that is true, then why? For namecoin users this means a major change, as the blockains won't be compatible between the version below block 24k and above 24k. Some kind of blockchain corruption is happening. Bitcoin is desinged not to take up too much memory. Why not let the people who want to run two bitcoin clients: one for each blockchain? I understand namecoin is in a lull right now, but that does not mean you should force bitcoin users to deal with it. Edit: I also don't like how it is assumed that all miners are using pools. Mining becomes more profitable (mining two currencies at the same hash rate for the same kWh. If you don't care about Namecoin you can just sell the mined NMC for BTC). So.. by halving how much work you do securing both block chains, you increase miner profits? If you get a successful transaction block, are both currencies included? If so, you are either leaving something insecure or bloating both blockchains. |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Was going point out there was no easy way to get the original text for hash verification 1. Then I saw the unmutilated text quoted for my reply... 1: The board translates those [url] tags into HTML anchors. |
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I wasn't advocating replacing or adding any parts (except maybe a pull-up resistor to turn the 2.5V supply on when plugged into a backplane). No module will be running with solely the barrel connector: to do useful work, you need I/O. The I/O options include USB (includes 5V) and the backplane (can include 5V). Is it common for laptops to have underpowered USB ports? The power consumption is important because it is a pointless exercise if we can't meet the USB spec. Bus power is needed for MCU control in off-grid applications where you may want to turn off some, but not all, FPGAs based on available power. Determining available power is out-of scope (up to the host). Being able to turn off individual FPGAs is a nice-to have option, but I am the only person really pushing for the idea, as far as I can tell. If the MCU can actually turn on its own power supply, I don't care what voltage the input is. I looked through the MSP430F551x/MSP430F552x datasheet and still don't know what the MCU can do on only bus power. One thing I did learn is that the Plastic Quad Flat pack requires a thermal pad as a heatsink ( Pages 116,117). Presumably the BGA package cools the same way, but will already have pads in place for signal routing. Edit: Nevermind. I wasn't thinking completely straight. The 2.5V supply should draw negligible power whether drawn from 12V or 5V. As well, both supplies are equally controllable. The ATX 5V Standby line can't be used for powering the MCU from the backplane, because with over 4 boards you likely exceed 2 Amps. |
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Edit: It has been decided I was going off on an unnecessary tangent here. I'm confused then what you're proposing. Looking at your other post, it either sounds like something we're already doing or something entirely different. Can you try to explain more, maybe with schematics? Your Block diagram shows the 2.5Volt supply using the same V_IN as the 1.5 Volt supplies. I am proposing running the 2.5Volt supply from 5V if the power draw is low enough. For USB, you would be limited to 500mA, even with self-powered hubs. I still have not read the USB spec, so am not sure how to ask permission to draw more power (than 100mA). I also have not read the MCU documentation to see if it can do that from the LDO you mention, turning itself on with the enable pin. |
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This MCU, MSP430F55xx, has the ability to be partially bus powered with a built in LDO. The main purpose of this is to set the level of the USB I/Os independently of the other I/Os. We can't power the entire chip with USB, or we will have to use level shifters to interface with the FPGAs. Furthermore, when the board is used in the motherboard, this USB connection will not be present, so it needs to be powered off the ATX supply.
I think you misunderstood my thinking: the 2.5V Linear Regulator Drop-In suggested earlier can run on 5V. With efficiency listed at 87%, it obviously operates in switch-mode. If the MCU power+FPGA I/O is less than 2.5 2.17 Watts, bus power is doable without any level shifters. Last I checked, ATX power supplies can push over 5 Amps on the 5V rail. The motherboad would need a 20 (or 24) pin connector and traces for 5V. Edit: Barrel connector option my be a problem here. When would that be used? Edit: To answer that question: when you are using it in stand-alone mode and need extra power. |
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