I think the biggest problem for the value of bitcoin right now is paypal fees. To buy / exchange them if you are getting dinged to gain them, unless you are keeping the bc's and reusing them, everyone is getting dinged with fees.
The way around it is to choose the "gift" option, then if the other party has a paypal account there is no fee. |
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So first, someone will have to take the source code AND compile a version that will remain hidden AND produce bogus blocks AND be able to be remotely controlled AND be able to restart itself after a system reboot/shutdown AND coordinate this properly to have *all* bots online at the same time AND be able to funnel those fake blocks to a central fake client AND be compile another client that will accept those fake blocks AND it will have to be setup to only work as private/local nodes AND you'll need another compile for a client that will connect to the public network AND the fake network to start loading up the fake blocks AND, AND, AND...
Huh? Are these things supposed to be difficult? You make it sound like it would take years of development to do this. I've developed software for 10+ years, and in my estimation it'd take a skilled programmer perhaps a month or two to do this from scratch. Possibly much less. Anyone that has created botnets has already created the remote control libraries, so that's just a matter of linking them in. Someone else mentioned a botnet hearder not wanting individual nodes to be discovered because of the CPU usage. Well, most people don't EVER bring up a CPU usage meter, so the risks of that are minimal. If you REALLY cared about that sort of thing, just stick in some code to shut down the usage whenever you detect keyboard/mouse activity. These are not difficult problems to solve at all. Are these things suppose to be easy? People don't operate botnets because they are hard, but because it makes them money for the amount effort they are going to put into it. I read in the news from time to time about botnet operators getting busted. They weren't doing it for the *rush* of the challenge, but to make a living. 2 months of dev work is like not getting paid for 2 months. The investment would have to be worth it to someone with that much free time. Plus there is a movement out there to root out botnets. So all your work could go up in a electron should someone shut you down or wipe our/take control of your botnet. Risk vs Reward, right now there really isn't a reward for a Botnet operator. |
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Interesting replies.
I don't have such a client -- just to clear that up.
What I'm getting at is this: If BTC were highly valued, and a very clever-but-selfish developer had an exceedingly fast client (say, someone gets CUDU running on all cylinders, or hand-crafts SSSE3 for i7), would they be better off retaining the program for their exclusive use (during inflation), or offering it for 'sale' by effectively charging a fee for every find.
I suspected it would be more profitable to distribute it with a small fee, but the reception sounds a bit... less favorable.
The difficulty would just goes up and make it harder for you to generate bitcoins. But it would go up less if you were the one with the fast client and everyone else had "normal" clients. If you distributed such a fast client to everyone, then yes, the benefit would cancel out. Some of us are already like that, I'm running optimized clients that were posted by some members that have a 50% speed increase for a while now on a lot of PCs.  |
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No one mentioned anything about the Linux client, but I've tested it on mine, runs 500 blocks / second during download, everything else works great, no issues to report so far.
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Updated with all *swap* request so far. This should certainly put the odds of a winner more into everyone's favor come next week.
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I would still make it 50 BTC though, just split it up between the 2nd, 3rd, 4th place runner ups, etc. So the first place PC gets 25, the 2nd place PC gets 12, 3rd place PC gets 7, 4th place PC gets 3, etc. etc.
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Leave everything exactly as it is, except have the difficulty adjusted every 1,000 blocks instead of every 2,016 blocks just to make it twice as responsive to server farms joining the network and then when light CPUs are running the network.
And a splash screen! For windows client anyway, the Linux client always seems to pop up right away.
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Interesting replies.
I don't have such a client -- just to clear that up.
What I'm getting at is this: If BTC were highly valued, and a very clever-but-selfish developer had an exceedingly fast client (say, someone gets CUDU running on all cylinders, or hand-crafts SSSE3 for i7), would they be better off retaining the program for their exclusive use (during inflation), or offering it for 'sale' by effectively charging a fee for every find.
I suspected it would be more profitable to distribute it with a small fee, but the reception sounds a bit... less favorable.
If he used it for personal use, then sure he could keep it to him/her self. But I think this being open source software, he couldn't legally do that. There are a lot of gray areas about that would be beyond the scope of this topic I'm guessing. |
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We've still got 1060 something blocks to go before it readjusts difficulty.
Also, while I don't believe his claim on how MUCH BTC he got, I still believe he had the 1000 cores crunching on it. Also, there's MAYBE 1000 cores generating BTC =/ The user base isn't THAT big yet.
So, did he generate ungodly amounts of BTC? No. Did he put enough CPU into the system to disrupt the difficulty process, which has yet to adjust back downward? Yes.
That's a third option I hadn't considered, thanks for pointing that out. |
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There is a speedup for me, but it is not faster than the ubuntu 64-bit version. I am surprised; with SSE2 I expected it to fly :S
Yeah, my Linux 64bit systems still have the leg up on my windows servers, even with this optimization that is made that speeds them up by 50%, seems Linux still rules the roost for coin generation speed. Most of my coin generation comes from my Linux servers more than my windows servers, it's about a 1 to 4 ratio, for every 4 blocks made by my Linux servers, 1 will be made by one of the windows servers. that's not an indicator of performance mind, block generation is pure luck, it's the hashes per second that mean something. Yes, sorry, I left that part out, the Linux servers (same hardware) always generate higher khash/s than the windows machines, at least mine do. Your mileage may vary. |
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Since I chose the same numbers for first and second lotterys, can I re-choose 5 different numbers? >_>
Yeah, your right, I didn't notice that. Well for simplicity reasons, let me know which one to swap in. I'll do the same for anyone else that chose the same number both times. You can't exactly split the winnings with yourself if the number drawn was the same that you chose in both lottos.  So in the spirit of Bit Coin, fair enough for everyone that participates.  |
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There is a speedup for me, but it is not faster than the ubuntu 64-bit version. I am surprised; with SSE2 I expected it to fly :S
Yeah, my Linux 64bit systems still have the leg up on my windows servers, even with this optimization that is made that speeds them up by 50%, seems Linux still rules the roost for coin generation speed. Most of my coin generation comes from my Linux servers more than my windows servers, it's about a 1 to 4 ratio, for every 4 blocks made by my Linux servers, 1 will be made by one of the windows servers. |
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I was thinking it would be neat to give away like .1% of available coins to any new IP address. As it is any donation that puts it over 500 just gets eaten quickly (maybe by people who do IP magic).
Yeah, it's easy to get a thousand IPs even if they are just on loan if you really wanted to sap the donation page dry. |
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Might be easier just to take that address owner and send 0.01 to you; check to see if the address matches up.
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Lottos are fun, especially if it doesn't cost much to play. I'm going to duplicate my states pick three lotto. It's easy and straight forward, plus I'll use the results from the actual state lotto for fairness. I'm not going to take a percentage of any winnings, so winner takes all (including all mine if you win). Rules:- Cost to Enter: 1 BTC
- What do you pick? Any number between 000 and 999; 000 counts as a number, so does 009, 099, etc
- You can enter as many times as you like for 1 BTC each, so you can pick multiple numbers
- The maximum (but not minimum) jackpot will always be 500 BTC, the reason for this; it prevents someone from just buying all the numbers for a guaranteed win. So you make it not feasible to try and game the system.
- Any extra BTC left over after a winner is put into the next jackpot. So if 600 BTC sits in the "bank" (server in this case) and someone wins pick 3, they get 500 BTC and the remaining 100 BTC starts the next pick 3 winner jackpot
- If no one wins, the jackpot will be used to start another new pick 3 and another date (probably just a few days into the future) will be used to pick the next winning number.
- There can be multiple winners, so then the winnings are split up (this also further helps to prevent someone from buying every possible number for a guaranteed win)
- Your 1 BTC and pick number are sent directly to a static IP address: 64.186.155.104 -- This is a server generating BTC every day 24/7/365. Anything it generates on it's own (50 BTC) will also be added to the jackpot for the winner.
- Please include either your BTC address or IP Address (if you have a static) along with the number you picked, otherwise I won't know where to send the winner the BTC
- Winning numbers (evening drawing) will be taken from my states official website here so you can check for yourself: http://www.tnlottery.com/
If you can pick up the local broadcast stations here, you can see the drawing live on TV as well.
- No last minute submissions. Our timezone here is (-6:00 CST). No more submissions will be accepted *after* noon (12:00PM -6:00 CST) on the day of the drawing. If you send a coin to the server after that time, I'll return it. If you send a coin with no return address or way to know *who* sent it, it just goes into the winning pot for the next drawing.
Questions are welcome, I'll be glad to answer them here. Winner will be whoever got the lucky pick 3 match with the evening state drawing. Good luck to you all !! I'll make another after post up a list of all the numbers that were *picked* by those that entered for further verification (just the numbers, not who for privacy reasons) All participates from the previous two lottos, you are being moved to this one, so you have a chance to win for free. If you want to purchase additional tickets or new to this one, you still submit a single 1BTC for extra entry to get ticket in. |
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Winning number was 608, find it here http://www.tnlottery.com/winningnumbers/default.aspx#cash3It appears we have no winner again. So, the next lotto, I'm going to take those tickets from this and previous lotto here and combine them into one big one. So if you got a ticket before this time or last, you'll have another chance to win for FREE this time. I figured this will get a winner quicker, otherwise, this could go on for months  |
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If you could download a Bitcoin client that computed hashes at twice your current rate, but sent 5 of every 50 bitcoins awarded to the software developer, would you run it?
The speed comes at a price, if you visit the developer area, there are several members who have released highly optimized/customized compiled binary for BitCoin client using the source that will get you that speed increase, but the application can crash randomly so you might not generate anything overnight if you aren't watching it 24/7 |
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Yea, we still haven't gotten easier since nenold withdrew his 1000 cores.
That's because he never had them to begin with. Mainly because there are some members on this forum that have triple his claimed resources and they know how much he should be really generating if he did have that setup going for that long. No, he had something. Otherwise the difficulty wouldn't have increased so significantly. I still don't believe it though, mainly from a logistics standpoint. I won't argue if he has 85K BTC but you can go back in time on all the blocks here http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php and with a good spreadsheet and knowledge of how fast they are created (creation times are all there), he would have to created every *single* block (meaning not a single person was getting one) for 11 days straight 24/7 Further evidence is since he claims to have turned it off, the difficulty still has not changed. So either the interest in Bit Coin has grown to a level that the difficulty will naturally remain that high or someone else has filled in his place for block generation with another large server farm setup. 85K BTC is like sitting on over $4,200 USD which unless he had free server time, would have cost him nearly $33,000 USD for the 11 day sprint (with no competition from anyone else mind you) if he was using the Amazon Cloud Computing like he claimed. And to top it off, say he did spend the $$$ to place a 1,000 core server farm at his fingertips, that's still small in comparison to the total amount of CPU out there generating Bit Coins, so he would be lucky to get 1 in every 10 blocks that way, further making it take over 110 days to generate that much BTC at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars of CPU time. The numbers don't add up for his feat in my opinion unless he had a 100,000 core server farm setup for free. I would place my bets on that he was just blowing smoke. |
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1. Acquire access of large botnet
2. Have bots join bitcoin.
3. Speculate against bitcoin somehow
4. Have all of you clients transfer huge amount of bitcoin to an account controlled by you using bogus blocks
Now either two of these will happen
*Massive loss of trust in bitcoin
5. Profit from speculation
*Little or no loss of trust
5. Profit from theft
Works?
It would take a botnet larger than the current CPU pool (which might be possible), but it takes 100% CPU to make it happen, even if it's running on idle CPU time. So first, someone will have to take the source code AND compile a version that will remain hidden AND produce bogus blocks AND be able to be remotely controlled AND be able to restart itself after a system reboot/shutdown AND coordinate this properly to have *all* bots online at the same time AND be able to funnel those fake blocks to a central fake client AND be compile another client that will accept those fake blocks AND it will have to be setup to only work as private/local nodes AND you'll need another compile for a client that will connect to the public network AND the fake network to start loading up the fake blocks AND, AND, AND... I think getting the botnet will be the easiest part of this attack before one could move forward with it. |
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