That's only really likely to happen if the value of Bitcoins also plummets, in which case it's still a pretty cheap loan.

Yes. That's the problem. Suppose that the pool sends out a difficulty change, and then - at the same time - the miner submits a share, so that the two messages cross on the wire. What difficulty applies to that share? The pool and the miner have completely different views on this. In fact, pretty much the only safe time to change difficulty is when you're sending out a new item of work, because otherwise there's no way for the miner and the pool to prove to each other that a given share was meant to have a particular difficulty associated with it.

(The whole "every miner gets the same message" thing is unfortunate too. From what I can tell it makes it impossible to create a Stratum proxy that distributes work to several different upstream servers.)

I'm actually testing one out now that has a higher maximum cap. Thoroughly voids your warranty of course, as LazyOtto pointed out.

They should be, yes. Not everyone's going to realise that, and since he's banned everyone who's likely to point this out from commenting in his threads they're going to carry on not realising that. Then there's the small issue that investors aren't in fact rational (no-one is) and creating an environment where all the comments are positive is a really good way of convincing people to rationalise away their doubts.

Also, since it's a red flag and not proof positive of scamming, anyone who did point it out could expect the usual cavalcade of comments about how they have no evidence, they're trolling, they should shut up... Remember what happened with Pirate?

I kind of predicted this when Theymos originally offered to allow thread starters to set local rules which the moderators would enforce, but they've basically turned into a scammer's dream. Usagi in particular is making good use of them to ban anyone who points out the myriad ways in which he's screwing over investors and lying about the values of his underlying assets from his threads. In particular, he's banned everyone who's pointed out how badly his planned trade-in scheme would screw over investors from his latest thread trying to convince people to take him up on it, so that he can screw them over without the inconvenience of comments pointing out the holes in his claims.

Unless we want the forum moderation team to help scammers swindle suckers out of Bitcoins, it might be a good idea to rethink what kind of rules people can set in their threads.

Also, I notice Usagi claims to have spoken to theymos personally about setting these kinds of local rules and got his agreement on it:

Actually it solves nearly all of the fraud problems from Goat's perspective, I think, so long as the list of addresses and amounts is made public by Nefario. If Goat checks the signature on and keeps all the signed messages transferring ownership, he can easily prove that someone with the appropriate private key did redeem the shares and there's no way for him to fake this himself. It doesn't really matter to him whether Nefario or the claimant is trying to scam him, especially since Nefario could do the exact same thing with normal shares listed on GLBSE.

(Really this needs full-blown distributed timestamping and a public record of transfers in order to prevent certain kinds of fraud between stockholders when transferring shares, but that's a lot more complicated to achieve.)

I think we can add "hiding the evidence" and "trying to extort investors into harassing the forum moderators to get his critics banned" to that:



Surely that goes beyond mere scammer-tag territory?

They kinda suck in the "plug and play" department too from what I can tell; apparently you either have to keep trying to flash different speeds of firmware on them until you get one that works acceptably well, or run a really slow program that does it for you and then have to do it again once the weather warms up. As grotty as the interface is on Ztex's kit, at least it has automatic speed control. (Originally they didn't even have that option, leaving some early adopters in warmer areas cursing and desperately trying to get more cooling to they actually ran reliably.)

Almost certainly. I've decompiled the Python code in snoopy.tar.bz2 from that web server and that appears to be exactly what it's doing.

There's a download on http://82.130.102.160/ called snoopy.tar.bz2. Appears to be a Python program bundled into a binary. Hmmmm.

Revolutionary? You built a Bitcoin mining FPGA board using an off-the-shelf FPGA, and screwed up your power estimates so it didn't even work the first time round. That's hardly revolutionary. I don't think you were even the first on the market; certainly other development teams (including the one I was bashing on bitstreams for a bit) were ahead of you, seeing as they had actually tested their bitstreams on actual hardware and confirmed they could get the performance they were claiming - rather than making bullshit claims and failing to correct them well after they realised they were impossibe.

That's not how I remember it. From what I recall, the offer was made within days and I don't remember seeing any retraction, or anyone else mentioning any retraction, or... In fact, as recently as May this year Nefario was giving the impression that they were still worth shares in GLBSE, it's just that GLBSE shares weren't actually worth a huge amount each:

The original version of GLBSE used a command line client and private key authentication. Nefario changed it to the web interface that exists now because having to mess around with the command line actually made it unusable to most people.

Not necessarily. Unless the website software is specifically coded to use Tor for its own requests it'll send them over the open internet - and since the site will appear to work fine even if the admin screws this up, there's a good chance that some Tor hidden services are actually misconfigured in this way. (Setting up a Tor hidden service that forwards to the webserver and making sure the webserver itself sends out its requests over Tor are totally independent of each other.)

Now, it's possible to set up your server so that the software running your hidden services can't access the internet except over Tor, but it's fairly non-trivial. The easiest method involves obscure iptables matching rules.

He gained not having to pay back the people who bought "GLBSE" shares on his exchange as a result of his screw-up. He also gained transaction fees on the GLBSE asset. (Also, the trust of the community by virtue of "doing the right thing", which would make it rather appropriate if he lost that trust again after it turned out he couldn't actually fulfil his generous offer.)

Arguably you're asking the wrong question though. Perhaps what you should be asking is what others lost as a result of his actions - how much direct financial loss did Goat and the other holders of "GLBSE" suffer as a result of sinking Bitcoins into something that turned out to be worth far less than he claimed.

Step 4. Don't include hardware depreciation costs in your accounts.
Step 5. "Profit".

Everyone here should know by know about the dodgy accounting that tends to surround everything Bitcoin, surely?

NYAN.* are effectively a kind of tranched security. Remember how that worked out for all those holders of CDOs in the non-Bitcoin world?

Well, I'm not really going to encourage anyone to use mine on new boards going forward - bitstreams without dynamic clocking are probably unnecessarily risky now we have one that actually supports it. Aside from that, some people have been seeing a speed increase I think, particularly on more difficult older boards? Your mileage may vary.

I've pointed this out to Inaba too. He also claimed that the fact bASIC had said they were using cell-based ASICs meant that they were using structured ASICs and wouldn't be able to compete with BFL's chips on power efficiency. I'm fairly sure that's wrong?

At the time he made that promise, he either knew or should have known that he couldn't keep it based on his existing contractual obligations. He made it anyway. He and others profited from that false statement, whilst people like Goat who had no reason to believe that Nefario wouldn't fulfil the promise he had made - because unlike Nefario they didn't have any way of knowing about the contract stating he couldn't - have lost money.

Oh dear. I think we have a slight problem here.

A number of people have argued that, by incentivising people to just sit on their money, deflation rewards people who abstain from consuming resources. That may be true; unfortunately it doesn't reward anyone for conserving the resources the eager savers haven't used. In fact, it's probably best for anyone holding them to do something with them quickly, before deflation eats into their value too much. So a few years down the line, when people start trying to exchange their paper profits from deflation for actual things, the resources simply won't be there to do it at any reasonable price. Suddenly we've got price inflation in a system designed to be deflationary, except that the size of the total money supply hasn't changed... I'm pretty sure that can't be good.

There are of course additional costs associated with building and operating a factory - if it didn't make sense with existing electricity prices, chances are it doesn't make sense at prices near zero. In practice, what actually happens in cases of oversupply is that some of the suppliers go bankrupt and lose their investors' money, reducing the overall profit from the industry.