I was actually referring to encryption of the account login page.

But I have some more concerns with the stats.  Errors like this one make me wonder whether shares are being calculated correctly.



Also, poclbm-mod shows my hashrate as at least 300 Mh/s every time I look, yet my account page varies wildly and is regularly as low as 200 Mh/s.  What is the explanation for this?

I've been counting on this to happen, but the real A/C bills won't start arriving for a couple of months so it has to be something else.

The time horizon should be close to the economical lifetime of the hardware.  Anything else is just arbitrary.  What time horizon are you using?

I've been using this pool for a day and just received my first payout.  So I thought I'd post my experience.

1) So far the payout seems to be in line with my expectations.

2) Uptime isn't perfect, but it's good enough.  No complaints considering all the DDOSsing going around.

3) I don't really get the controversy over the efficiency issue.  This is an entirely reasonable thing for a pool to encourage.

4) I am concerned about the pool hopping issue.  But the proposed solution seems reasonable and effective.

5) The website isn't great.  It's impossible to navigate.  Why are the stats on the front page?  It took me almost a day to figure out what the statistics meant.  Estimated payouts are wildly inaccurate.  Since I joined at the end of a block, for the first few hours I was convinced I had hit some kind of Bitcoin jackpot.  Alas, that was not the case.

6) Not encrypting passwords is dumb and will likely end up being a dealbreaker for my continued use.

This must be based on a very high cost of electricity.

Gold is inconvenient in *certain quantities*.  You could buy a house or a car very easily with a few pounds of gold.  You can't buy a sandwich with gold because the smallest coin (1/20 oz) is worth $100.  On the high end, consider that ten billion dollars in cash ($100 bills) was sent to Iraq on a few pallets, weighing perhaps a ton.  In gold coins this would have been about 200 tons.  Both could be divided into approximately the same units.  Gold would have weighed 200 times more but that probably wouldn't have made any difference.

Same thing for silver.  You could easily buy a sandwich or a week's worth of groceries with silver.  Buying a house would be a hassle but not impossible.  Waging war halfway around the world with silver currency, though, would mean sending a small cargo ship's worth and you'd be totally screwed if it sank.

Bernie Madoff was a scam and instead of suing him they made him Chairman of the NASDAQ.

Every time a Bitcoin is mined, a banker loses his Christmas bonus.

I think there's really no need for 14-digit precision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures

Yes, I understand both randomness and induction.  But please tell us how you induce anything you consider "true" from data that you consider "completely random".  Randomness precludes predictability.

Out of curiosity, what did your crash have to do with Linux?

What a curious statement.  You can't induce anything from complete randomness, let alone universal truths.  How do you deal in cryptographic currency and not know this?  Do you really think the universe is "completely random" or is that just a misstatement or what?

Well, there are really two separate issues.

In my experience banks and credit card processors tend to have conniption fits when presented with non-standard hardware or software.  Telling them you want to install a competing processing service on hardware that they have any control over is just an excuse to raise your fees or cause you problems.  I don't know the usual arrangement, but if it's common for the POS terminals to be subsidized or locked-down then you can say "adios" to the dream of running Bitcoin on them.

As for smartcard readers, I was referring to currently-installed hardware.  If it's really just an easy and cheap (<$400) upgrade, then great.  But if a substantial portion of older POS hardware in use isn't capable of easy upgrade, then at a certain point dedicated hardware becomes the better choice.

Property rights aren't a problem for natural law theories.  They arise naturally as a compromise between (the animal-nature-compatible) alternatives of either violent competition for scarce resources or simply eliminating competitors pre-emptively.  Property is one of the most beneficial applications of the non-aggression principle.


I'll take that as a "no" then.


Do you mean conception, or haven't you noticed that pregnant women tend to eat more than usual?

In my opinion the biggest hurdle is that the transaction processing business is a total racket.  There are theoretically several different tiers of processors but they are all owned by the same company so they dictate everything from hardware and software to banks to fees.  And then there's the fact that I've never actually seen a POS terminal in the US with a smartcard reader.  They can't be that common.  Instead of messing with existing POS terminals you would be better off making a small ethernet-ready box that runs the necessary software and interacts with your Bitcoin cards or smartphones directly.  I'm not joking when I say it would end up being cheaper to go this route.

Stimulus creates crappy jobs and since most Americans are dependent morons they will eventually take a crappy job rather than starve so yes I suppose in one sense it "works".

If the universe is completely random, can you point to any examples of (random) net entropy decrease?

Using a non-smart-card means you would have to trust the merchant not to just take all the Bitcoins on the card.  This works for gift cards that are good at a single merchant but it doesn't really work for generic currency.

You might have issues if you opened an exchange with branches in multiple states, and offered transfers between them.

Otherwise, unless you really do the research and know the meaning of literally every word, I'd take US code with a grain of salt.

First of all, this is an obvious way to go and entirely doable so I'm not sure I understand why anyone would say it isn't Bitcoin related.  A smartcard is just a small tamper-resistant computer.

And I'm thinking a store with several POS terminals could theoretically have their own dedicated miner on-site just to process their own transactions.  Wouldn't this speed up the transaction time or am I missing something important?