No.

This thread is insufficiently theoretical. It is a classic example of preying on the uneducated and undereducated. If I remember correctly the 2nd law of thermodynamics is taught in decent schools around 8-9 grade. So anyone who would fall for it has a mental capacity of approximately 15 years old high-school student.

Since 1824 the theoretical limit of efficiency of any theoretically ideal heat engine is well known:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodynamics)

So assuming the hot side at the temperature of boiling water (371K) and the cold side at the room temperature (300K) one gets the theoretical unattainable efficiency of about 20%.

The only progress that can really occur is in education.

One cause of discrepancy is that getaddr displays only hosts with stable IP addresses. This excludes nearly everyone on consumer-level DSL lines which enforce IP change at least every 24 hours.

Being rude is only a minor issue. I think for non-technology-experts it is important to develop a feel for how the hucksters behave versus how somebody with some knowledge behaves, even if they don't immediately know the right answer.

I remember helping my friend's kids (high-school age) set up their AT&T DSL. They asked me a question, I smiled and took a breath to answer and they immediately told me "Stop, don't tell us! Let us make 3 guesses!". The attitude to learning and problem solving seems to be probably more important than the detailed knowledge.

I cannot erase what I know from my brain, but I'm trying to learn purely by interpersonal attitude clues how people can make a judgment about the value of the advice. The hucksters seem to have this apparent confidence in their manner, that's probably why they are called "con men" in the American parlance. The true experts tends to be more nonchalant or irreverent when talking about their area of expertise.

It is always easier to make better guesses about that in person, not through the written medium. The intonation of "Why you would do that?" can say a lot of things that are somewhat difficult to explain in writing.

I'm more of a small/middle-business person, so I can better understand the issues faced by small shops renting space in the data center cages.

How does the above DoD example compare with a personal web site for a porn-star/ex-model? How come a woman with incomplete high-school education can be astute enough to understand the issues of who can have access to database of her customers? Granted, she was about 40 y.o. at that time, but certainly wasn't a rocket-science intellect.

Another bullshit claim. As of this moment getaddr.bitnodes.io shows 59 full nodes listening on a non-default port, different than 8333. Obviously, the time to sync will be much longer when one's node can access only less than 1% of the global full nodes.

But my point stands: in a completely unregulated market like Bitcoin everyone has to be really vigiliant and keep their bullshit detectors tuned really sensitive. Otherwise you are going to be just another mark exploited by the cons that concentrate on this forum.

Libertarian capitalism is cruel that way. The essence of the functioning speculation markets is that there has to be a constant supply of people willing to take the "stupid" side of the trades.

Yeah right, tech expert. Just another cycle in the Bitcoin evolution.

Year ago we had rubbish hauling contractors from London pretending to be ASIC designers and offering miners for preorder.

So this year we'll have Florida tourist trinket stall (?) owners pretending to be cryptocurrency expert usability consultants.

I'm not a car mechanic, but I've heard that the 4-stroke engine in my car only fires once every 4 strokes. How about providing a button that would let the engine fire once in every stroke? It already has 4 valves in every cylinder, right? Just a proposal, right? I'm not a total crackpot, right?

This is the real problem with computing-related services in the USA. To be able e.g. cut hair and/or shave one has to have cosmetology license. It doesn't guarantee nice haircut or clean shave, but one at least can be confident of not getting lice or AIDS.

Nothing like this exists in the field of computing services. Any fool who wouldn't pass the lowest-level information technology exam certification (A1?) can come up and spout completely spurious and deranged advice, both about IT and general career development.

It is the essence of a free market. Caveat emptor!

Stay away from this dude! Never make a mistake of being his "customer". This is classic example of a total dumbass who has no basic understanding of networking and computing. "Open up Bitcoin to all ports"? How so?

This guy is completely incompetent on several levels:

1) Typing "mcafe" to google gives "mcafee removal tool" as a second choice. One doesn't even to have to type the whole 6 letters of the company name to learn how to remove the expired antivirus.

2) Many (if not most) ISP offer a ISP-side firewall as a protection to the beginning customers who may have trouble understanding and configuring their equipment. This is especially important to the ISPs that use DSL equipment (like AT&T) because of the possible complication in accidentally setting "bridge mode" in the equipment (and also due to older releases of Windows supporting native DSL protocol which is ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) not the IP).

3) Every ISP that I've seen has a self-service way of removing this ISP-side firewall. I haven't seen AT&T pages recently, but couple of years ago this was just a couple of clicks on their customer service pages. Other ISPs require changing the login from e.g. "user@isp.com" to something like "user@isp.com/nofw" or "unsafe-user@isp.com".

4) Bitcoin Core for sure doesn't require any incoming connections to properly synchronize.

Again, stay away! The completely technically incompetent vendors is one of the major risks for Bitcoin users. If you need a refresher go lookup the history of shtylman and his Bitfloor that is detailed on this forum (especially his hare-brained implementation of "air gap").

If using the Internet required something like the driver license this guy would have failed his exams at the level of not being able to tell which way is left and which way is right. Not being able to tell the difference between incoming and outgoing connections is about the same level of incompetence.

This is just a beautiful example of stupid vendor serving the stupidest customers.


Edit: I'm preserving turtlehurricane's signature, because something is telling me this is going to be another disaster.

Every organization I've seen has disaster recovery procedures. Just follow them. The comments I made earlier about "terminating sysadmins" pertain to terminating those who don't follow them for one reason or the other. It really isn't a computer-science-specific problem, more like general organizational management problem.

With one man shops (like bitcointalk.org) the situation is simplified. Loss of access requires disassembly of the server to reset its password protections. If there was encryption in use, those data are (most likely) irretrievably lost and the server requires reinstallation with the fresh software. The reset/reimage is not something that can be done quickly, surreptitiously or socially-engineered into the normal workflow of the customer service of the data center. I've never heard of anyone successfully performing such an attack, but I've heard of performing similar attack where the goal wasn't to steal the data but to steal the hardware.

I personally wouldn't bother thinking much about it. In all cases that I've seen/experienced the password loss was temporary, i.e. the person recalled/found the proper password after giving it some time. The true loss happened only if there wasn't anything important on the server anyways.

The real, practical danger with one-man shops is not the password loss, but grave mistakes, that corrupt the data on the server without getting noticed.

Ha, ha!  I like it!

But seriously, the normal course of action is to terminate sysadmins who are incapable of producing the proper credentials to the equipment they manage. "Termination" doesn't mean "killing", just "firing from employment 'for cause'".

There was an really interesting case of a network sysadmin for San Francisco municipial government that went insane (schizophrenia/paranoia) and refused to disclose passwords to the Cisco equipment which he was supervising. Sorry, I don't have a link handy.

What Hashfast did isn't called "exit scam". The proper name is "tunneling".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_(fraud)

You have some sort of problem with your hardware or configuration. While I don't run Win X, my friends are running the MSDN copy and it is running the cryptocoin daemons without any problems for much longer than what you see.

Anything can be implemented in ASIC. The proper solution is to come up with an algorithm that an ASIC will have to implement a large fraction of a general-purpose CPU. This way the cost of developing a competitive ASIC will have to rise to match the cost of developing a competitive CPU.

If you are thinking of developing an altcoin I think the good suggestion is to include some of the extended-floating-point (10-byte) operations in some steps of the "hash" function. But the "hash" shouldn't be considered a "cryptographic hash" but a "chaotic map" that is sensitive to the details of the arithmetic implementation. Examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinkerbell_map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

I've seen many ASIC/FPGA hardware libraries, but all of them implement only IEEE 754 floating point in 4- and 8- byte precision. There isn't anyone who does 10-byte precision. On the other hand the detailed, bit-accurate implementations of it are freely available since the famous Pentium FDIV bug.

So it is both an open-source code and something very expensive to build an implementation faster than the generic AMD/Intel CPU.

It is probably not a whole re-download but just a re-build of the "chainstate" subdirectory. Keep a local backup of that directory that is periodically updated (I use 7-zip 'synchronize' option) and you should be fine.

On a parallel note: keep track of the people who say that "LevelDB" is a fuly ACID database engine and people who claim that Litecoin isn't meaningfully improving over the Bitcoin code. W.r.t. this bug this is a way to recognize liars and bullshit artists.

I see more ignorant posts being made by idiots in the field of actual computer security, not salesmanship.


This type of attack is easily preventable. I'm just going to quote myself again. Further discussion and explanations are available in the parallel threads in this subforum.

Easily preventable on two levels:

1) collocate your own equipment in a remote data center. The customer service staff will simply have no access to it besides being able to press buttons on the box.

2) use non-commodity hardware like Oracle SPARC or IBM POWER or HP Integrity/Itanium.  Then even if they manage to steal it they most likely will not be able to get the data off of it without specialized assistance.

Edit: Also, don't run Linux on those machines, but their native OS: Solaris, AIX, HP/UX respectively.

7-Zip works just fine for both backup/rsync and compression. Use the "synchronize" option. To have a successful restore you can only make backups while bitcoind/-qt is shut down.

I doubt that there exist a proper backup utility which would successfully backup both live database engines BerkeleyDB & LevelDB. The BerekelyDB has good crash recovery, so file system snapshot backup tend to work nearly always. But LevelDB is an more of an educational toy and it rarely properly recovers from snapshot backups.

BerkeleyDB has a proper live backup utility, but it has to be built exactly like the bitcoind (using the very complex mingw&gitian build process) to be willing to work with a live instance of bitcoind.

Depends on which "ratio" are you asking. You may be right about ratio of people with problems to people scamming. But if you measure ratio by posts not by people, then the scammers are majority, especially in the mining forums.

Some of them possibly even start without evil intentions. But with time they learn that scamming here is easier than shooting fish in the barrel, and it becomes too hard to resist.

I'm kinda disappointed that you've regained your senses and decided to test hardware. Just less than a week ago I had interesting experience of watching similar scam (but one the corporate contract level and not related to Bitcoin) unfold personally in front of my eyes. They key hook was to convince person sitting in front of the computer with 3" floppy drive that there is no working drive there and they need to download the test program instead running one off of the 3" floppy. I learned a lot watching and listening that unfold.

Look, this situation is really easy to read, it happened multiple times on this forum.

1) If you are really an inexperienced, frustrated computer user: just run the hardware tests for your machine, memory and disk faults are the most common root source of the problems you're seeing.

2) If your are just another gang of scammers trying to build mutual reputation of fixing the tough computer problems so they can then offer remote assistance using Teamviewer to the fresh marks: this isn't new either, it has been done multiple times already.

This is what makes bitcointalk.org such an anthropologically fascinating place: trying to figure out if this is a new scam or new convolution of old scams.

knightdk is just working on his required activity for the signature campaign.

What you are doing is just confirming for everyone that you have no idea what you are doing with your machine and you are the perfect mark for an enterprising scammer.

What I'm doing here is trying to discern if this is a natural, genuine stupidity at work or if there was some better hidden ulterior motive. We'll find out in due time.

Your hardware is broken. Get another, correctly working, machine and all your problems will disappear. Why you keep torturing yourself and us if you know how the computers work?

30+ seconds is nothing. With sufficiently complex wallet it could take minutes to return from RPC call. With backups running in the background I've observed over 15 minutes to service complex sendmany requests.

The problem is unfixable with the current architecture.

If you really trying to develop something reliable you will have to monitor the wallet access directly through BerkeleyDB API and/or utilities. Start bitcoind with -privdb=0, create an appropriate DB_CONFIG and then you can monitor the wallet lock activity of the live bitcoind instance.