I don't believe the design specs for bitcoin will allow this, it just isn't possible to scale it without a complete redesign of how the internals work. Kind of the reason this problem has shown up now while other theoretical problems will come in the near future. 

Well, here goes a long spiel.

Probably the last that anyone had heard from me before a few days ago was dated September, 2011 according to my profile stats. So it has been a long time of me just lurking around from time to time.

I can't remember exactly when, but some story broke on the Internet about my bitcoin collection and shortly afterwards things got crazy.

The first thing that happened was my inbox here at the forum exploded with people asking for a loan of anywhere from 10k to 100k bitcoins to start the next big market place. I had a few people message me here that they had been burned by a hacker or some website that had their wallet information and asked for anywhere from 100 to 1k bitcoins as a way to help them recover their loss. I always wanted to help people, but there is no well to tell if these were sincere request or just someone out to make a quick bitcoin scam. Some of those I did help people I did help just to be nice, but word must have gotten around quick.

I had to step back from the forums for a while as it was a good place for people to chase me down. All the questions of what I would do with it or how did I get it, was I the one that hacked XYZ website and that's why I have so many, etc. Somewhere in this topic I think, is a another long explanation of how I came into possession of it all. Long story short, I was in bitcoin early when the network was small and basically used a lot of Amazon processing power to load up a ton of bitcoin miners all at once in their clusters (Amazon) using a custom compiled version of the CentOS bitcoind source files. Amazon had a big price difference between running a lot of windows sessions and running a lot of Linux sessions. Turns out, the Linux sessions were running kind of an old version of CentOS as well as I couldn't even get the compiled binaries to run.

Well, a lot of money was spent to generate that chunk of bitcoins, but not so I could posses it all, there were plans to use it as a backing for re-loadable credit cards like service that had bitcoin powering it in the background. Needless to say, that project fell out due to (at least in hindsight) very inept investors. The project floundered and then finally as a way to get out, they (investors) wanted to see what they could sell everything for. It had cost a lot of real money to produce that pile of bitcoins, so I ended up buying it for dirt cheap (at least in terms that bitcoins really had no value to them). Maybe after the 7 year NDS I signed expires, the world will know who it was, but for now I can't name anyone or business.

Once the market value was shooting up to space, the pile of bitcoins was worth a small fortune in theory at least.

A lot of bitcoins were spread around the community to help people at first, but it kind of got out of hand.
Ultimately, a large portion ended up being donated to wikileaks.org, so I'm certainly not the person sitting up top a large pile of bitcoins anymore. The rest went to paying off small debts and the very last of it was just recently donated to wikileaks.org again. I never had any intention of trying to crash the bitcoin market with a large sell-off as many theorized I would do. So sleep safe that there is one less person like me in the bitcoin kingdom. 

So, no matter what legend has built up, nothing amazing or exciting has happened to the bitcoins I once had. No buying a Country or purchasing Islands of the sort. Just trying to help out where I could instead. The only thing I have left is old screenshots and empty wallet files now.

A large portion of my past time has actually been invested in the creation of an alternate digital currency for the last few years because I always thought there was a better way to do it. So that's where I spend all my time now, at timekoin.org

I was great to catch up with everyone though, hopefully the story wasn't too boring. Maybe not as exciting as some had hoped.

I still lurk around the forums   

Someone did send me a message asking to come out and say hi. 

When I get more time later, I'll put up a good long post about what has been going on all this time. As most can imagine, I try to avoid the the spotlight, although my name seems to come up in bitcoin articles from time to time. Overall, just like to keep my privacy. As I said though, when I get more time later I'll type up a nice long "what the heck has been going on" post. 

As admin, they would have access to all, including that.

Another good point of advice, don't brag about how much you have. When I saw a news story about bitcoin and the value was so high, they mentioned in the story that the person who had the most bitcoins in the world (270K I think) and I wanted badly to e-mail them and say that they were very wrong and that I had 100K over that, but I didn't because I don't want the media banging down my door or turning a watchful eye to thieves or crackers.

I disagree with everything you said but offer nothing in return to dispute it in the spirit of your posting history. 

I will say though you've certainly come to the wrong place to play pretend lawyer.

I brought this up a long time ago, basically I called it a reverse-time attack. You generated a block chain with 2 PCs at the lowest difficult and wait until it over-takes the real block chain and then bring that block chain into the network. To get around the issue, the clients since had a hard-coded block lock put into place with every release. That way if someone did try this, the clients would see that the block chain history didn't match the new "fake" generated chain and refuse using it.

The only reason that attack would work is, 1) you get a perfect 1 block / 10 minute generation cycle. This would eventually catch up with the real block generation because it can vary from 10 minutes to an hour sometimes 2) There was nothing in the software to say otherwise until the block chain locks were added

The effect would be, you would wipe out all transactions and end up owning all the bitcoins generated with that fake block chain. But like I said, something to counter that was put into place long, long ago. 

Good to know, glad I asked. 

On my workstation, I was experimenting with all the different GPU miners. Some that you CPU mine and GPU mine and the total hash is much less. So far though, the DiabloMiner seems to be best one because I can CPU mine and GPU mine at the same time with a actual net gain with the two at the same time.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question, keep up the great work.

While I like the idea of the first post, it seems like the only difference between this type of pool-mining setup and the existing ones is that the BTC generated at the user and then the pool decides how it's divided up, is that correct?

It's one solution that sounds like something I saw proposed before last year, but I'll post the holes I've found in it in that topic rather than here.

I was wondering when this topic would come up. Actually working on a solution for that care of bitcoin itself. Basically I'm going to use BitCoin to invest back into, well BitCoin.

Working on a bitcoin data center as I type 

I read all 27 pages of this topic  

Sorry if this is an obvious question,  no one asked as far as I could tell. Once you have the DiabloMiner connected to your bitcoin server, does the server have to be actively mining at the same time with the CPU or can it just sit connected the p2p network with everyone else in the world? I ask since I'm running the bitcoin server and DiabloMiner on the same machine at the same time. Works fine, without BTC being generated anytime soon in the near future, can't tell if it's working as it should.  

I think in theory you can, if you spend some BTC on one, the others should update automatically. I'll have to test that to see what happens.  

Tough call really. When mining clouds were rare back in my time last year, the cost was not worth it because the value was 1 BTC -> $0.001 almost.  But now, even though they cost much more to produce than the value, the long term investment makes it worth the cost now.

I wouldn't look at a mega-rig as a short term lotto, but more like a long-term investment. If it cost $1k to only mine $500 worth of BTC, it doesn't make sense in the short term, but if a year from now that same BTC that you spent $1k to create was now worth $2k in value, then you have a good long term investment.

So if you want to play the day-trading like the stock market, buy/sell BTC with the market wave. If you are looking for a more long-term investment, a mega-rig might be the answer if you are willing to take that long term risk. The rig could die early or it could hum all year and produce a nice vacation fund for the family.

It's all about risk.

Actually I had something better than a lawyer, I had a legal CPA Attorney do it for me. Truthfully, anyone can sue you for anything, but I'm not worried.

LOL, how many seconds did it take you google that? Yeah, my sig is in no way connected to that wallet file.  

Sure, go right ahead.

The initial investors never got the concept really. When I first started, when 1 BTC was basically $0.0001, the idea was to generate/buy as many as possible, then use it for payments. So if someone wanted a credit card that could buy $100 worth of stuff, they would insert X number of bitcoins to get that value loaded on the card. To keep the bank current, the credit card would be backed by Bitcoins at the bank basically. They initially though that 1 BTC would never get above maybe $0.20 per BTC, at least that's what I go from them. So they invested about $12k to either generated or buy bitcoins for the first part of 2010.

My part was to simply compile some versions of bitcoin that could run on the Amazon cloud service. They rented a ton of CPU time and basically generated BTC non-stop for a while. At the same time, I was buying from members here (they probably remember me buying a ton from them) and then funnel everything into one massive wallet file. After funds ran out, so did the Amazon CPU time and me bugging members to buy what they had generated from the start.

Then things sat in limbo for a while, long while. The project went bust and the people I was working with really still had no idea how BTC worked really. Soon, the project turned into zombie status and the initial investors (remember these aren't technical people in the least) though it was worthless or maybe just a fade that was dieing a quick death. Who am I to argue? That's when I offered a buy out back in Feb of this year and they took it finally.

I think after a few more stories make it in the news about the BTC value, they will kick themselves for sure.

Either way, I'm keeping my BTC in several secure places and the wallet files I'll make sure never touch my PC for security reasons. I look at it as a retirement fund, when I finally get tired of working the 9 to 5 grind, I can tell my boss to shove it with a smile 

Good news for me anyway  , they sold me the project for $5k to recover some of their cost. I now technically own the wallet files and other software I was working on with them at the time. For legal reasons I can't blurt out who the investors were or the banks, companies, etc. they were representing basically (unless I won't to land in court forever), but I think I made a wise investment. It's still going to take a while to get my wife on board as she still doesn't understand the whole BTC concept, but everyone here knows and I know what it means. She was really skeptical about my purchase this week.

I'll probably take some of the backup advise here too, why have a few backup copies when you can have many on different media types spread around everywhere (all encrypted of course this time).

Thanks for the advise everyone!

Hehe 

It's just going to sit at the bank for now until the investors decide what to do with it. The irony is, they think the project is a bust, so I've requested to take over ownership of it but never mentioned anything about it's current value because they have never bothered to check since last year. Can you believe all the "smart business" people that told them that BTC was just a waste of time for them? Shows how smart they were.