Unless Avalon somehow has a contract with a supplier denominated in BTC, then yes, 75BTC most certainly does equal over USD$7,000... Or more likely, RMB¥43,000.


Almost anyone on this forum "believes" in Bitcoin as far, far more than a get-rich-quick scheme.  That doesn't mean we don't expect some return for sinking $7k into it.   

If it's chump-change, please send me $700 worth of coins to either of my addresses

Uh, yeah, metaphor?  Learn it.

Sure, $700 in LTC starts to get into what we might consider "real" money.  But trying to imply that some elite group of scammers controls the currency because of such a small transaction just doesn't hold water - Unless, of course, you consider me one of "them".   
 
In which case... Mwa-hahaha!  Grovel before me, peon, and perhaps I'll toss you a TRC or two for fetching my slippers!   

dont forget he has a contract with 420 to buy 700$ worth ltc

Seriously?  $700 amounts to chump-change.  I personally traded out of that much this week just because I happened to have that much and decided the trend had moved away from LTC as a viable "Bitpenny" proposition (I still think we need one, but LTC has failed for a variety of reasons).  I have no interest or investment in the BS politics of the whole "scene".
 
People don't scam for $700.  Now if you know of someone going for $700M... Or even $700k worth - Let us know - Until then, just noise in the background.

My apologies - I meant that a bit tongue-in-cheek (I promise I'd say something less... delicate... than "nosey bastard" if I really wanted to get nasty ), though my concerns I did mean sincerely.
 
Seriously awesome customer service right there - Within a day of my having a bit of a rant, you corrected the problem.  Kudos, and thanks for taking the time to address this.  

You've fixed my objection, tomorrow I'll place an order with you - If you'll still have me as a customer, of course!

Does anyone else find it extremely sketchy that this nosey bastard wants your date of frickin' birth just to check out?
 
I use Bitcoins largely for their increased level of anonymity (to the extent you can have something physically shipped to you "anonymously"  ).  Not so I can give anyone that hacks you a simple one-click identity theft of all your customers.
 
You just lost a $600 order, friend.  Let me know if you wise up, because you have a good storefront - But damn me if I'll give you more than my shipping and email addresses.

Hmm, do most people run their clients with an explicit "-rescan"?  Or do you mean that he suppressed its default behavior?  I just run it in whatever defaults it has.

As for restarting, I don't leave my main PC on 24/7, so it starts (and stops) at least once a day, usually.

I did recently update the client to the latest version (within that two weeks - A few days ago, Sunday or Monday I think), but it seems strange it would have taken a few days to "heal" my local blockchain if something had gone wrong.  Usually those sort of things work as an all-or-nothing proposition, it either works or fails.

Weird, anyway.  Incredibly glad it resolved itself (hey, I use BTC(etc) mostly for fun, but can't sneeze at almost USD$200), but still somewhat creeped out by the sudden coincidental fix.   

Okay, it just went through.  Call me completely frickin' paranoid, but I find it rather disturbing that after two weeks, the transaction magically completed half an hour after I posted to a public forum about a problem...

Also, has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Blue the other ding after fourteen glasses of keyboard, innit?

Weird problem with spending LTC...

About two weeks ago, I attempted to spend 3k LTC.
 
The transaction still hasn't made it to the blockchain, but my client shows me as down 3k regardless.  I've quadruple-verified that I sent it to the correct address, it just doesn't want to go.
 
Any way to cancel (and retry) the transaction, or to try to resend it, or something other than just write off far more than a casual tip's worth of LTC that seems to have vanished into the aether?

Thanks!

Someone else may have a stock storefront they can point you to, but I can tell you how I'd implement it...

You have the game running on server X.  You have litecoind (preferably stripped down to only accept the two RPC commands mentioned below) running on server Y (And although X could equal Y, that just begs to get hacked).

When someone goes to make a payment, you invoke the getnewaddress RPC call (remote this however you like - I'd probably go for a simple webservice wrapper rather than expose "real" RPC to the network), and tell the customer to send however many LTC to that address. 

Once a minute or so, you invoke listtransactions (you could hook this in a cleaner way and thus avoid polling, but seriously, not a lot of overhead here on the wallet-side) with only a tiny change to the litecoind source, but I'll presume from the nature of the question that you want to minimize custom coding here) and compare it against your list of outstanding payments.  If you have a match, credit the customer for their purchase.  Note that you can do almost all of that on Y and send a message (via Email for all it matters) to X on receipt, rather than having X and Y chattering constantly for no reason.
 
And as a matter of good practice, you really shouldn't keep more LTC on Y than you could stand to lose; Manually send its balance to a "real" account, preferably on a normally-offline machine, on a reasonably frequent basis (daily?).




I would say instead that it dropped because of the GPU miner, which stripped it of at least part of its raison d'etre as a GPU-hostile alternative to BitCoin.  That said, you still don't have quite the disparity between CPU and GPU mining as you do with BitCoin, so I for one continue to have a lot of hope for LTC (or at least, only slightly less than I do for BitCoin, which too sadly seems to have jumped the shark already).


/ Sorry if this posts more than once, it gave an error on my first try...

So none, then?

Or did you mean the PR barrage of forum-spam, completely lacking in any technical details or substance whatsoever behind it?



Yeah, about that whole "launch" thing?  Not getting a beta out before the 10th merely didn't look very good...  But not getting a client out (not even a beta) by the official launch date?

DOA, dude.

I don't think you can really fairly call him an attention-whore when microcash.org fired the first volley (at least, of this round - I get the idea that they have something of a history here).  I'd feel pretty pissed too, if someone decided to semi-publicly taunt me in a place I couldn't respond.

That said, with still no client up, I half suspect they would like nothing better than for a day-1 DDOS to succeed; If no one else can connect to the network, the insiders get to split the 100k early-adoption bonus just between themselves... Not that it really matters, since so far, it seems like they just make up rules as they go anyway and justify it with a nebulous "answering the community".

I mean, I can't even count how many times I've wished the government would tax me more so they could distribute it evenly to Warren Buffet and Bill Gates...

Just a peeve here - We had coders "tricking" GPUs into running semi-arbitrary code considerably faster than CPUs by writing it as custom shader routines, years before OpenCL hit the scene (Google for "GLSL" or "Cg").  So yes, the possibility does exist of mining on a completely non-CL-supporting platform.

That said, shaders (at least back then) had a fairly limited set of available operations they could do (mostly linear algebraic transforms on single or half precision floats, not bitwise ops on integers), and an incredibly small stack space (on the order of 256 bytes) - Good luck implementing SHA256 under those conditions.   

So, microcash.org still has nothing there beyond the splash page - Thus no ability to configure and test the client before the 10th.  Gee, that 100k in early-adopter "bonus" coins will sure look nice in the dev's account!

Interestingly, though, looking at the page source, it does have something that just screams "professional":

Potshots at someone in a place they can't respond.  Classy.

Okay, let me make sure I have this right - As a potential participant in the MicroCash system, I have to pay for my computer capital, memory usage, cpu usage, network usage, and disk space usage - And MicroCash promises to tax me for this, so it can give it to others using the same (or potentially lower, as I'll address in a minute) level of resources but who happen to have a higher MSB set in their account balances?

I sincerely hope I have that very, very wrong, and you've left out something about these taxes funding a built-in exchange, or secure online wallet backups, or hell, even paying 3rd-party dev(s) and auditor(s) to improve and validate the system.



Okay, perhaps you've just touched on our failure to communicate here - How exactly does one use MicroCash without becoming a node?



The possible account-space for a modern cryptosystem comfortably exceeds the number of atoms in the universe by a factor of more than a google.  Given that they don't count as a scarce resource, that inactive accounts have no effect on either network or storage, and that disposable one-time-use accounts provide one of the bigger selling points of a cryptocurrency - What does this first point matter?

As for "cleanup spam", this tax seems like a bitdust attack built right into the system itself - How does MicroCash plan to get around the resulting problem of massive block fragmentation, and how does causing such fragmentation prevent the ensuing cleanup?  Or does the protocol have a significant enough change from existing BitCoin clones that "dust" no longer presents a problem (and if so, why do we need to pay to avoid it)?



Again, what infrastructure?  We (the users of the currency) provide all the necessary infrastructure, all the end-point computing resources, the entire raison-d'etre for any currency.  I don't see how charging us for our own contributions makes the network in any way "better".



But on day-1, only the large existing SolidCoin holders will have a balance on which to draw interest; this tax effectively gives them a reason not to spend their MicroCash, as they can continue to receive income without doing anything (including contributing "computer capital, memory usage, cpu usage, network usage and disk space usage" to the network).  They can just log in once and go offline forever, and rake it in over time.  How does that encourage new users of the system, to know that they get to pay a tax to others who can effectively retire on their now-idle "investment" capital?

Simple lack of interest in alternate cryptocurrencies.  The average geek (if not the average Joe) has at least heard of Bitcoin at this point; Pretty much no one outside the Bitcoin-enthusiast community has heard of LTC or any of the other alternatives.



On a typical modern quad-core CPU, you can expect somewhere around 15-20MH/s mining BTC.  This will produce roughly 0.4BTC/month, or $2.00 at the current exchange rate (plus a tenth of a percent or so for merged NMC mining).

On the same CPU, you can expect to get 20-30KH/s mining LTC.  This will yield roughly 675LTC/month, or $2.50.

So you will still do better to mine LTC than BTC on a CPU.  That said... Neither actually has a net positive yield unless you get free electricity

...And if you somehow have free electricity, you should rush to buy as many 5830s (currently the cheapest in hardware overhead for the hash rate, ignoring power efficiency) as you can lay your hands on, which will give a payback of 3 months assuming the exchange rate holds near $5/BTC.

You, uh, still haven't answered my question about the nature of those fees and where they go on the short term.  You made a vague allusion to "operational costs", of which none exist that the entire network doesn't already share equally, no central taxing authority required.



Right, it doesn't - Because a "pyramid scheme" refers to a very specific, well-defined type of scam, rather than to your entry in the weekly bad-ASCII-art competition.

Bad enough we need to explain this over and over and over to the general public, without members of our own community deliberately misusing such terms to (attempt to) score political points.

Agreed, not the prettiest GUI out there, but seriously?  The best (or really, "only", unless you count that badly broken Java abomination) NameCoin interface available for over six months now.

Don't like it?  Do better.   

Can you elaborate on the meaning of "operational costs", given that in a P2P currency, every participant shares the costs (basically just bandwidth, and my own at that) equally already?  And, where exactly will this half cent per day go - not in the abstract sense, but in the "0.005MC transferred from account ABC to account XYZ" sense - To what does that XYZ refer?

(And guys, c'mon, let him actually answer instead of mocking him - The petty, nonstop bickering really sucks most of the fun out of all this)

At the current difficulties, and given the viability for GPU mining of LTC, you would do better to do that the other way 'round - Mine LTC, and for every 800 or so LTC, buy one BTC.  You'll have a few LTC left over, and still get a 15-20% better BTC yield overall.