It almost sounds like you do have bad sectors on your hard drive and a recertification of the whole disk would be prudent. The best way would be with your hard drive manufacturer's HDD diagnostics (they boot off a CD), and do a full surface test. After that passes, fsck your file system and check for bad blocks in the OS.

After backing up your wallet again(you should have many copies, so that if corruption happened a month ago but it went unnoticed, you can roll back to that), run the tests above. Then delete the entire bitcoin data directory including the log files directory and start Bitcoin up fresh so it creates a new wallet and blockchain from scratch. If you get it working up to where it has the latest block and can receive and send back out test amounts, then replace the wallet.dat with your backup, preferably a copy that was made before any issues started. If it still dies horribly, likely you have some bad hardware like bad RAM or a bad HDD controller corrupting things.

Buy a mouse without a short in the cable?

Looking at the circuit board and not investing a whole bunch of time, it looks like this is the likely chipset:

$487
Xilinx
XC6VCX75T-1FFG784C
FPGA Virtex®-6 CXT Family 74496 Cells 40nm (CMOS) Technology 1V 784-Pin FCBGA

Package    784FCBGA
Family Name    Virtex®-6 CXT
Device Logic Units    74496
Number of Registers    93120
Typical Operating Supply Voltage    1 V
Maximum Number of User I/Os    360
RAM Bits    5750784

The spec sheet for current draw also might make one think it would draw around ~22w...

What's really worth asking is if they've set up business licenses and reseller license in all 48 states that have sales tax, and registered for a sales tax number, and if it will be properly paid to the recipient's state government, as state sales tax laws require that the buyer's state government gets paid tax. Or if it goes in their pocket...

Bitcoin?

Some of the router captive portal packages are third-party companies, the router sends the wifi user to a page on their server where they can purchase credits or a password, and the owner of the router gets a cut of the profits. Hotels outsource to companies like this, where 24 hours cost $10 or something ridiculous like that. It would seem easiest to convince these companies to take Bitcoin too, as they already have the rest done.

You see in my first column, all the calculations are in individual hashes, so all is accurate. The second column with Ghash is not used in calculations, I just added that for ease of reading and so you can see what it would translate to.  You see 838,860,800 hash/s is the actual rate for BF singles used in the calculation, I translated the 800 mibihashes/s (2^20). There are many places around Bitcoin where the "computer" MiB, GiB are used - bitcoincharts' network hashrate, for example; lots of stuff is written by coders for coders, so 2^10 is used instead of 10^3, even when it doesn't make much sense. I don't know how miner software is reporting mhash without looking at the code though. Someone selling hardware will probably use the hard drive trick where their 1TB = .909 computer TB.

Is someone going to buy $500,000 worth of these to make BTC valued $1,000,000 in a year anyway...(or somewhere between 1% to +10000% of that depending on how the market goes)

Waiting for first-person reports!

The settings above are for conservative background mining; if you want to crank it up, try phoenix with:

-k phatk2 VECTORS AGGRESSION=13 FASTLOOP=False WORKSIZE=256 PLATFORM=0 DEVICE=0

You must underclock the memory to 300MHz for the best performance, using a utility like MSI afterburner or Sapphire Trixx. If you use stock GPU RAM speeds, these settings will be better for you (but still not as good as the above with an underclock):

-k phatk2 VECTORS4 AGGRESSION=13 FASTLOOP=False WORKSIZE=64 PLATFORM=0 DEVICE=0

Sick=incorrect?

Assuming nothing else changes; the addition of this many bitforce singles would increase mining difficulty, you would need even more.
It also depends on if your 800MH/s is 800,000,000 or 800*1024*1024.

Here's the number of singles I get after calculating how much higher the difficulty becomes, note this is 800MH; if spec'd at 800MiH/s you need more.

This is now the "eavesdropping on zby and Holliday" thread.

It works better than buying high and selling low!

Bitcoin doesn't have a predictable market, it is too thin and volatile, voodoo charts don't work on it. One person can drop the market 10% in a minute because they need money to buy a car, and in 10 minutes more, the people that got zhoutonged betting that wouldn't happen push it down another 10%.

First, make sure you have a driver installed correctly, one which includes OpenCL. I would recommend the ATI Catalyst 11.6 full driver package as the most problem-free. Use the control panel->programs and features, and uninstall ATI drivers currently on the system (pick "remove ALL ATI software" when prompted). Restart. Install 11.6. Restart.

Then I would recommend the Phoenix miner. Extract it to it's own directory, and save the following to a new miner.bat file in that directory:

phoenix.exe -v -u http://workername:password@us.ozco.in:8332/ -k phatk2 VECTORS AGGRESSION=6 FASTLOOP=True WORKSIZE=256 PLATFORM=0 DEVICE=0

Put in your user/pass and the pool URL that you are using. Note that on most pools, you don't use your main user name, you create a second username called a "worker".

These options give you a miner that will work well in the background while you use your computer. Run the miner.bat file.

If it still can't open the OpenCL device, run just this command, it will print a list of your device numbers, so you can make sure your video card is device 0:

phoenix.exe -v -u http://nothing:8332/ -k phatk2

That should get you mining, you can start tweaking things from there.

Don't know why it would be that high, I sent a coin to EU from USA for $1, but it was just taped to an index card in an envelope. Casascius should be able to do something in the middle. Go to usps.com, and see what the actual shipping is to your country from the US (use ZIP code 84604 if you need one to put in). You'll have to use US ounces and guess the weight of the total package (like 9oz for a 20x20x10cm box + coins)

I used to support a network of about 10000 old 286 machines, most with 2mb ram or such. (They were POS systems so they didn't need upgrading). We'd peel the sticker off the fan, give it a drop or two of oil, no more noise. Good for another 20 years.

Simple explanation:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/tv-shows/the-good-wife/bitcoin-for-dummies/

/*begin advanced wallet-stealer metacode*/
FileScan [(filename:*.bat); (filename:*.cmd); (starts: #!/bin/bash)]
 if BinScan (FileScan.Results): (string "--datadir" DirName)
  send (filesIn DirName where filesize < 10mb) to (backdoor)
 if BinScan (DirName/*): !"KeyA"
 install Bitcoin (encryption key keylogger version)
If (bitcoin.wallet.default.balance) < paltrysum
 leaveAlone

Open him up a -50BTC account at your bank of Bitcoin for all that capital expenditure.

Now you can show him the joys of 10:1 leverage trading too!

It would not be wise to bet against customers anyway. In gambling, you know the odds in your favor. For example: roulette - 1:35 odds + your profit (two losing numbers 0 and 00). Or sports book (spreads constantly changing to keep winners vs losers even + your fee). However, we see that in "swarm theory" of trading, the collective intelligence of everyone summed tends to make better decisions than random; when summed together they will have a higher percentage of winning than a baseline and slowly extract money from the house.

Heavy reading: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/ferreird/nenana.pdf

It seems if you are doing a group buy, you MUST only do it if you laser the purchaser and/or unique BTC amounts in the perimeter of all holos. Otherwise I would be able to buy JoeBob's 5BTC coins, get the private keys out of the currency, and re-label them with my identical but un-identifiable group-buy holograms.

You can stick the tamper-evident hologram wherever you want, but the way it works on Casascius' coins is that top of the hologram is inkjet printed the "firstbits" of the address (so you can look up the balance), and underneath the hologram (inside the coin) is a little card with the mini-private key for that address. To digitally redeem the money in the address, you must remove the tamper-evident hologram to get to the private key.