I'm trying to diversify some of my gold holdings into bitcoin. I have some rare $20 st. gaudens double eagles (certified by PCGS) that I'm interested in selling for bitcoins. Anyone interested? I have done a lot of selling on ebay: http://myworld.ebay.com/cobleesAnd also recently traded on bitcoin-otc: http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=cobleeI'm also currently selling some 6970s. Once those sales are completed, I will have more references. If interested, please reply and tell me what you are interested in. Thanks. |
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The 10,000 BTC pizza never cost anyone $140,000. The guy who bought it spent an appropriate amount at the time. He didn't lose money by spending it.
I always view lost profit as ....losses. Maybe I should not. But I do. The guy who bought Pizza did in fact lose a great "potential" which could definitely be called a "loss". I can see that reasoning very well. I just call it "potential loss". It's silly to hoard bitcoins. Just spend it if you have something to spend it on and replace the spent bitcoins by converting USD. The fact that bitcoin value can go up is besides the point. Just put however many bitcoins you want to save/hoard aside and get more that you will spend to actually help the bitcoin economy. And to those people who think that the person who bought the 10,000 BTC pizza was stupid, what if because he was able to make a real world transaction with his mined bitcoins, he figured that bitcoins was worth the investment. So he decided to triple his mining hashrate and made 20,000 BTC more than before. Now tell me if that purchase was worthwhile. |
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Please add support for ArsBitcoin. Thanks!
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That exchange rate is holding nicely despite the mining flood, I'm a tad perplexed.
Same here. People are mining namecoins like crazy... a block every 2 minutes. I'm sure most of these coins are dumped on the exchange to trade for bitcoins. How is the exchange rate rising? Where did all this new demand for namecoins come from? |
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So these "difficulty 1 hashes" are the same as shares submitted to a pool. On average you find a block with the number shares equal to the difficulty. So right now, you should find a block for every 23509 "difficulty 1 hashes" on average.
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These are still available. I reduced the price to $280 shipped for each. Thanks for looking!
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I believe mike was referring to the namecoin blockchain as having to deal with the 33 extra bytes...
There is no way on earth we are going to convince half of the bitcoin nodes to upgrade to help out the namecoin network... if I am wrong on this please correct me but I don't see how I could be.
You don't need to make bitcoin users download a new client. The 33 extra bytes is just the extra nonce stored in the coinbase. Current bitcoin clients will accept new blocks with whatever in the coinbase... they don't care that much. So there's no need to update bitcoin client. But the new namecoin client will check the coinbase in the bitcoin block to validate its blocks. At least that's what I understand. |
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I think BT mentioned that it costs roughly $8-$9 per day for the server costs alone. That adds up to $240-$270 a month. So with a %.5 fee, it almost covers that.
Yes, about 0.63% would cover the 13.5BTC or $270/month, all else being equal. Hmm... I think I'm going to increase my donation... Hey BT - just go for a 1% fee. It's a good buffer if BTC languishes around the current price level and you can always lower it as the pool grows. I thought it was a good idea when BT defaulted the donation to 1%. Because 1% seems like a fair donation. But it seems like a lot of people (especially pool hoppers) immediately changed that back to 0%. And pool hoppers were causing the spikes in traffic, which is causing RPC connection problems for everyone. It wasn't very fair for us loyal users to donate 1% or more and for the pool hoppers to get a free ride. So I'm ok with having a fee for everyone. |
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At the recent Mt. Gox exchange low of approximately $13/BTC, that comes out to roughly $200/month.
I don't know what the server costs are, but from the above analysis, 0.5-1% fee implementation seems a very reasonable rate to cover bandwidth and processing expenses, as well as at least some of BT's time spent on the pool.
I think BT mentioned that it costs roughly $8-$9 per day for the server costs alone. That adds up to $240-$270 a month. So with a %.5 fee, it almost covers that. I think 1% fee seems fair to cover the server costs and BT's time. Plus if there's a need increase number of servers, that will cost money too. BT has really done a tremendous job with ArsBitcoin. I'm all for having a fee and help keep a good thing going. |
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To above posters, AOCLBF with Phoenix will solve your backup pool problems.
But I'm using linux. |
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I understand that everyone can implement a website (or client) with your rules. But another website can decide on their own rules on how to "transfer" an address. Since your rules won't be as simple as FirstBits, it will be hard for people to just accept it. As a user, I will just use payb.tc instead of paying someone for an address that only makes sense by your rules. Know what I mean?
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TeraPool is correct. Merged mining does not pollute the Bitcoin block chain with Namecoin data. The only addition to the chain is a single hash in the coinbase transaction - ie, an additional 33 bytes per block. It isn't significant. This is the whole point of having split chains that share work.
And just to re-iterate. That "addition to the chain" is only in the namecoin blockchain. Bitcoiners will be none the wiser unless they switch to a pool that is helping them mine namecoins as well. In which case the bitcoin blockchain is still completely unaffected. That's wrong. 33 bytes are added to the bitcoin blockchain. As Mike Hearn said, it's not significant. So I agree, it's not really polluting the bitcoin blockchain. But I'm still uneasy about what the consequences to namecoin would be if you tie the generation of namecoin and bitcoin together. |
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Can't you just create another Phoenix miner on a different pool with a low aggression value and it will take over if your main pool worker goes idle?
That's really not the same. It's also more hassle. I use poclbm b/c it's just as fast as phoenix has better display and has backup pool. |
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hannesnaude, although your idea is interesting, I can't see it becoming popular. FirstBits has a nice property of never changing and that anyone can implement a website that provides the exact same service. The fact that a shortened address can change according to your rules makes it such that your are the sole controller of what's "right", of which shortened address points to which public address. In a sense, your service will be no different than a shortener that lets you pick a short vanity address. Why would anyone pay someone else for their shortened address via your service when they can just get their own vanity address here? http://payb.tc/ |
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Anybody can still run bitcoind and be none the wiser about namecoin. This will not affect bitcoin's blockchain at all as far as I know.
If miners are working on the same work, wouldn't bitcoin's block also contain namecoin's transactions some how? Otherwise, how could the same share be used for both networks? Someone who understands this better, please correct me. That is for the market to decide. The current price of NMC to BTC is roughly that of it's generation difficulty now because both currencies are virtually worthless in terms of spending power.
Once namecoins can be (well) used for domain name creation, and bitcoin for buying goods, the market will create it's own prices for both blockchains. I see no reason why difficulty should play a hand in value, it doesn't for bitcoins at least.
I think the value and difficulty of a crypto currency is tied closely together. Although I can't prove it, I think it's not just higher value causes higher difficult, but higher difficulty causes higher value also because the blockchain is more secure. Because of that, I don't think both currency can succeed at the same time if their generation/mining/difficulty is tied together. |
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Maybe an image helps.  Yeah, jumping on bitcoin's back to climb the mountain seems like a win/win solution. But in the end, the destination is different. Bitcoin does a lot more work to climb Mt BTC. Namecoin will eventually realize that he's going up the wrong mountain.  |
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I think this is a very bad idea. (Assuming I understand this correctly)
First, you are polluting the bitcoin blockchain with useless namecoin data and vice versa. So you are increasing the size of the blockchain that everyone has to store for this purpose. This has a non-trivial cost on the whole network.
Second, you are tying the generation of namecoins to the generation of bitcoins. This leads to the value of namecoin being tied to the value of bitcoins. In the end, you are just effectively doubling the number of bitcoins from 21 million to 42 million.
The only benefit is a short term benefit of being able to mine more at the current hashrate. As soon as this is fully implemented, the value of bitcoin/namecoin will just decrease until the total value mined is the same. Because this is a zero sum game. You can't just generate value out of nowhere.
There is a perceived benefit that this will make the namecoin blockchain stronger. That's true, but effectively, because namecoins will be so tied together with bitcoins, it will no longer have its own identity and worth because it will be overruled by the value of bitcoins. Namecoin defines the value of a NMC by domain names. Right now, it costs 50 NMC to get a domain name. If you tie the value of NMC to BTC and BTC has a real value, then it would make the value of domain names either too expensive or too cheap. Let say in the future, 1 BTC is worth $1000 and 1 BTC is pegged at 10 NMC due to this merged mining. This makes 1 NMC worth $100. Is that the right price for a .bit domain name? We don't know. But the value of NMC cannot be changed by market forces because it's pegged to BTC. Assuming bitcoin is still the dominating crypto currency, the usefulness of namecoin's original purpose is gone.
If we go through with this merged mining, we are tying 2 crypto currencies with 2 different goals (finance vs. DNS naming) into 1 fate. This will effectively devalue both currency and likely destroy the usefulness of the auxiliary currency and prevent it from succeeding by itself. And it will add a non-trivial cost to the main currency by dirtying its blockchain.
This may seem like a win-win situation on the surface, but in reality, I believe it's a lose-lose situation for bitcoin and namecoin.
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Although btc value has come down, I will still honor the 22 btc each price if you want to pay in btc. Here are some pics:   |
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I will tell you why it makes sense to store it as a double. Currently, each PPS share is worth 0.000031989190 BTC. If you round that to a satoshi, then you only get 0.00003198 BTC. You lose .9190 satoshis for every share. If you look at ArsBitcoin's lifetime shares, you will see the number one person having 3,647,233 shares. If he lost .9190 satoshis for every share, he would have earned 0.03351797 BTC less. It's not much, but it's still something.
I personally think BurningToad should round down (not up!) and keep the change as fees. But I applaud him for trying to be as fair as possible.
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