http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/intrsngUSD#kgmtgoxUSDzrg90ztgCzm1g10zm2g25

I would suggest that link.

Who would use paypal in regards to bitcoins, anyway?  Ever heard of a charge-back?

If the difficulty dropped by 90% I'd be profitable at $0.20 a coin.   

AFAIK in any one retarget the difficulty can only change by what, -75% or +300%?  i.e. the biggest change can either be a retarget to 1/4 * current diff, or 4 * current diff

 1GH/s today will not find btc at the same rate as it will after the next retarget, nor does it find btc at the same rate as it did before the last retarget.  But you should definitely leave the competition for creating btc - you'll make it easier for me to find btc.

A domain + dns + privacy service for a full year through nearlyfree is... $12.50.

Why -wouldn't- you get one?   

Bitcoins will always suffer from the fact you need a few confirmations to be sure your transfer is going to stay in the chain, so they are not as 'instant' as other forms of electronic payment.

Unfortunately unless you trust some central authority(as you do when you use a bank, or a credit card, or... MtGox), this delay is needed.

Also, ATMs - how many people actually use these regularly?  I'm just using my debit card to grab physical cash... okay... if I'm doing a legal transaction with that cash, it's much easier to actually -use the debit card- for that transaction. 

I use cash to like, pay the kid next door to mow my lawn.  Which if you get into the little details probably isn't actually legal. 

All that is needed to transfer any amount of coins from one wallet to another is some sort of access to the internet.  If Alice has a working smartphone, she has a working source of an internet connection, and does not need an accomplice. 

Unless for some reason she's on Mars and the light-speed delay is longer than the block-generation delay.   

It shows a large amount as 'other' since at the moment a lot of people are switching to smaller pools because the largest pools are getting ddos'd(my primary and first two failovers are down, personally), and the not-so-large-but-still-big-pools are getting overloaded because people are switching to them suddenly, also crashing those, so the smallest pools that are not well known publicly are taking over(there are numerous pools in the <100 GH/s range that are not included in graphs and would fit in the 'other' portion).

tl;dr the hashrate of the 'top 10' pools has tanked thanks to a kind of chain-effect from the largest couple getting attacked

+1

Bitcoins are still worth a hell of a lot more than before they got media attention.

Gotta love their storefront on streeview.  "Chambers Lofts" in Kansas City.  An apartment building.  Nice. 

Miners can do both - buy coins when they're lower than their operating costs, yet also keep mining so that the difficulty stays prohibitive to others getting into mining.

- the M2050 is the same GPU as the GTX470, not sure about the differences in the memory layout of a Tesla though

The scrypt code itself has two separate loops that use 4k memory each, from what I can tell, so >8k is good to have.  Beyond that, it also uses salsa20/8 and SHA256, and I don't know how much memory those use up, if they ever even drop out of the registers.

FWIW my Athlon XP sees a bit more than 1/2 the performance per GHz per core( vs Phenom II) when hashing scrypt coins, but don't know how much is due to cache size, special instruction architecture(using amdfam10 for hashing on the phenom), or something else.  Of course that's per core, so the Phenom II can do a whole hell of a lot more than just 2x overall.    In other words:  Athlon hashes at 1.15k per sec at 2.4 GHz, Phenom hashes at 3.2k per sec at 3.8GHz per core.  Also, the phenom did almost exactly 3k per sec when it was stock clocked at 3.4.

Quick question on poolserverj - is there by chance a config setting that will let me change the difficulty for 'accepted work'?  Haven't had a chance to take a closer look at the source yet, figured somebody else might know.

The reason I'm asking is I'm considering porting it to make a pool for litecoins, but of course would ask permission if I had to modify any of the source (I did manage to take a brief look at license.txt while perusing a bit of the poolserverj code ).

I'd prefer this over pushpool because I like Java.  

As far as I can tell anything other than share difficulty would have an easy workaround to get litecoind and poolserverj to work together (in terms of, if I run into an issue, I can make another program of my own to translate between the two, or modify litecoind).

Quick note in linux - you'd do the same thing for configuring as above, but replace the .bat with a .sh that looks like


Then run  it from command line typing ./filename.sh

You also have to make sure the .sh has 'execute' permissions, which in Ubuntu is as simple as right-clicking on the file, and setting the correct properties. (there's a checkbox that lets you make it executable, I think, not on Ubuntu atm to check)

( or you can learn the chmod command )

You have to make a .bat file that looks something like this:


Where, in my case I'm using minerd-ssse3-core2 because it's a specific compile of minerd that's optimized for this laptop's processor using windows.  I use a totally different compile on my linux machines, each one compiled for those particular machines.

--scantime # chooses how many seconds to spend on one piece of work, can tweak it depending on if you see stales.  If you see a ton of 'boo!' coming from the minerd output, try lowering the scan time a bit.

--retry-pause  is how many seconds to wait to retry if you can't get work from the pool - if you set this low you're going to spam the pool, too high you'll miss out on possible work if there is a failed attempt to get work.  Minerd defaults to 30, I think, if this isn't set.

--threads says how many threads to use, on a dedicated miner set this to how many cores your CPU has, on non-dedicated make it your total cores minus 1 so the program doesn't take over your whole system (or use all cores but set the priority low in windows task manager)

ip/port replace with the pool's ip port  (in this case
http://184.107.145.244 which I assume is defaulting to port 9332 - different servers can change the port number if they wish, though)

I think for this pool  you'd just do --user LTCADDRESS_1:1 through 9 (LTCADDRESS_9:9) instead of --userpass

After you've made a file that looks like that, save it with a .bat extension, and run it from the directory you have minerd in.

(edited this a bit because some things I said made -no- sense xD )

Question:

Is there enough support in the TBX community to implement such a change to successfully take over 51% of the chain right away at block x?

I don't mine TBX so this doesn't really concern me, but I'm curious.

Just curious, is this built off of the tenebrix mod of pushpoold?

Compiled and running the 40101 daemon on linux.  

phelix - setting -s below 3 was very useful before the 4032 block since we were seeing a new block about every 3-4 seconds, so the default 5 second scan time would cause an unnecessary number of stales/orphans, but with the difficulty increase they're not being generated nearly as fast(I think the diffculty went up 400% or so at 4032?)

Yeah the 8 million I mentioned is quite an outlier.  Only mentioned it because it fell in the 20-30 range I suggested.

A quick and dirty copy/paste into openoffice calc shows since the last difficulty change, Ars has averaged about 1.55 million shares per block found with the Q1 and Q3 at 0.46m and 2.25m - I was using Ars as an example of a fair pool, the actual statistics seem to show they're beating the 1/difficulty rate by quite a bit(which explains the current positive buffer).

The accuracy gets a little screwy past the precision I'm using here because there was one data point that has a share count of 0 - not sure whether to include it or not, but the effect is like a -0.6% difference (1/170) if you include it(my numbers above don't).

[edit] oh just a thought, my math professors would kill me for saying 'average' when I meant 'mean', especially since I listed Q3 and Q1 - which are usually listed along with median for box plots.  The median is 1.12mil, which shows the expected skew since numbers can't go below 0 but can occasionally get very high.