You are arguing that the overall social utility of Bitcoin is "worth it" - worth both the raw energy cost of the computational work, and worth the regrettable fact that it provides a profit opportunity for botnet operators.
I'd rather like to support a system like bitcoin, that i can use myself for value-transaction, than searching for E.T. to make some scientist save cash. That's a waste of energy and still people do it voluntarily without any benefits. And i really dont care if some botnet-ops make a profit or not, as long as they don't bother ME (or anyone else). |
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nice one,
although bitcoin is all about "mining gold" in your article,
get's harder any day for the average get-rich-quick-user and mining is just a side-effect anyway, so maybe you should think about to include some other features.
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Should have mentioned in my first post, but everyone remember, during this last change, 0.3.6 came out and doubled the hashing rate... so that really just reflects the increase in efficiency of the new version.
True, still 2weeks+ to generate something on an average-users desktop (to finally notice: "it works!", or "damn, no luck and next diff.upgrade") is way to much for most people. Those i know are not that patient, are you? And still, what for, if theres nothing todo with those coins besides get-your-energy-costs-back by selling them on the market? What do you tell people to MAKE THEM USE bitcoins? Why should they download and install? They want to buy stuff, but there isnt any. They want to "make money", but they got no server-farm to spare. What other reasons are there to use a system like this? I for myself just do it to support the system, nothing else. I havent bought anything so far and i'm not planning to in the near future (except a lot more onlineshops and isps accept them) and i'm not making any profit of it, so far it just costs me, but i dont care, it's kinda fun and might even work (or be worth the effort) someday, so i wanna be part of it. But I'm not the average guy or girl that just wants to buy stuff online, if i were, i wouldnt use bitcoins at all, i'd just use PayPal, or moneybookers, or my CC. Oh wait, i'm average, i do exactly that, why don't i buy stuff with bitcoins? |
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Pre-paid bitcoin cards that people can buy from others, circulate on the local market, etc?
Not sure if i get that right, like to buy pizza and cigs with your coin-card? No. You don't buy stuff on your local market for PayPal (or other virtual currencies), do you? But you do online. There's not much choice if you want to buy with bitcoins. You have to check this site to see what's available and if your lucky, you get something, prolly not what you are looking for. So why use it? |
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IMO that's good news. It shifts the emphasis over to adding value to the currency, rather than minting.
If you ask me, it's way to early. We only got a few thousand users and almost nothing to "buy" for coins, why would someone want to "add value" to it? Way more than a few thousand I believe. I just shutdown a server farm last month of 300+ machines and the difficulty continues to climb, so there are a lot more people using it than what we see reflected at the forums here. If you run a supernode (not recommend unless you have gobs of CPU and bandwidth), you'll get a glimpse of how many machines are out there with the client running, my last count was 3,700 on one of mine. Sure, that's running machines, but not users.  My point is, as long as we dont see some more stuff sold for bitcoins, there's almost no other reason to "use" bitcoin but to generate coins (to sell and make money of it and buy the stuff they want) for new users. So far it's just a cute crypto-communities baby, that noone out there cares about, except for those crypto-freaks and wanna-be-anonyms. If we want to beat PayPal, we need a whole lot more users, but why should they use bitcoin instead of PayPal, if they need to use PayPal to buy bitcoins anyway and cant buy the stuff they want for bitcoins but for PayPal? |
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IMO that's good news. It shifts the emphasis over to adding value to the currency, rather than minting.
If you ask me, it's way to early. We only got a few thousand users and almost nothing to "buy" for coins, why would someone want to "add value" to it? |
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 Sadly this will make it even harder to get new people in, if they don't actually see any progress in the first few weeks/months of "usage". Guess most testers wont stay long enough to generate anything.
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Independent? says who? Seems to me more like an affiliate-linklist than a "testing site". I'd be interested in testing some EAs, so far i haven't found any (more or less free, to test them) that worked out, not even on demo-accounts and i'm less than willing to pay $100 and more for a money-oven. |
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.. but i would have to make some script that changes the address after each transaction and parse it to the website..
you will need a script that communicates with your bitcoin-node, that's true, but that feature you're asking for already exists. you either get a new address by clicking the "New Address" button manually, or by calling "getnewaddress" through JSON-API. set a label for each donator, show it on your website and you will be able to track received coins. |
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It should be optional to select a 'sender', currently i can only send anonymous transactions, thats's quite annoying when accepting donations where the donator is to receive something in return, or even just to know who paid for the product or service you 're providing.
you can set a new address for any donator, or even any single transaction if you like to. if only the donator knows that address, you know, where coins come from. |
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0.3.6 up and running on w2k/xp32/xp64/w7
nice speed-updates on all systems,
guess we can prepare for another major step up in difficulty, now that all nodes do 2-3times the hashes they did before.
is that a good or a bad thing?
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after tinkering around a bit and reinstalling the vcredist, i even got the VS build to work now.
on the regular client i get around 1600khash/sec, your latest VS build currently runs at ~2750khash/sec,
+70% that's an outstanding performance!
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Ok, i found it.  wiki says, create a bitcoin.conf like this: rpcuser=anything; does not have to be a 'real' user
rpcpassword=anything but that won't work (at least for some people, maybe windows?) removing the ; did the job, using # as seperator/commentor works fine. |
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I'm on XP here, not sure if theres a netcat-clone available. commandline works fine and does what it's supposed to this works fine using <=0.3.2 require_once 'jsonRPCClient.php';
$bitcoin = new jsonRPCClient('http://localhost:8332/');
echo $bitcoin->getblockcount(); but this doesnt work using 0.3.3 require_once 'jsonRPCClient.php';
$bitcoin = new jsonRPCClient('http://username:password@localhost:8332/');
echo $bitcoin->getblockcount(); |
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That's strange, didn't someone just say that was supposed to work? (what library was he using?) Post if you figure out what wrong.
That was me; I'm using the library at http://jsonrpcphp.org/ (download at http://jsonrpcphp.org/download.php?file=tgz&package=light), and I can confirm that this works: <?php
require_once 'jsonRPCClient.php';
$bitcoin = new jsonRPCClient('http://username:password@localhost:8332/');
echo $bitcoin->getblockcount();
?>
not for me, that's what i tried first, cuz it's on the wiki. this is all i get from jsonRPCClient: Warning: fopen(http://...@localhost:8332/) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 401 Authorization Required in ...\jsonRPCClient.php on line 132 also couldn't get curl to authorize yet, all i get is ..curl_error():transfer closed with 15 bytes remaining to read.. which results in a "bad json-syntax" of course testing on php5.3.0 curl7.19.4. and open for ideas. |
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i got some problems here too trying to get this run on PHP. so far i had no luck, neither the wiki-sample (jsonRPCClient trying to fopen( http://username:password@localhost:8332/)), nor my curl-sample (using setopt CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC) seem to work. |
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The rules must become public, static and standard.
actually they are. the rules of "creating bitcoins" doesnt change, its fixed, static and public too, same goes for transactions and the way they'r saved, in blocks, that's what the whole generating-process is all about, also static, also public. what else do you need? i dont get your point. |
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If you've got some valuable arguments, show 'em, you didnt so far. ..He published the code. You installed that code, look, it's not microsoft's code...
yeah, "the authority", if you want to call him like that, wrote and published the code and guess what? you can READ it and compile it yourself, no need to trust anyone but yourself. that's what open source is all about. If it were microsofts code, you weren't able to read it, you'd have to trust (and pay) Bill, but you'r right, it's not. |
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I'll give this one a run, the last build would crash randomly after a few hours same here, MSVC build didnt work at all (missing DLL even after vcredist_x64 install), Intel build seems to work fine for 1-2hours and then crashes. I get around 1600 with the regular client, Intel build ~2150, latest Intel tweaked ~2220. Update: this one seems to crash even faster, 30minutes first run, almost 1hour second run the missing DLL is in my first release (libeay32.dll) thats not the one causing MSVC build not to work, that'd be MSVCR100.dll. anyway, the Intel build does work, although it crashes. keep coding, i'm looking forward to test a cuda-version on my gtx260.  |
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I'll give this one a run, the last build would crash randomly after a few hours same here, MSVC build didnt work at all (missing DLL even after vcredist_x64 install), Intel build seems to work fine for 1-2hours and then crashes. I get around 1600 with the regular client, Intel build ~2150, latest Intel tweaked ~2220. Update: this one seems to crash even faster, 30minutes first run, almost 1hour second run |
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