Yep, my name is Peter Parker you believe that too?

I am not saying that the guy is not Jeremy West, and I am in no way trying to infer that he is not (Sorry Jeremy if you read this), but hell, he could have said he is Batman.

Somewhat that, now go off a do a whois query for that domain, check their SSL cetificate, hell even check their website and tell me who those guys are and where they are located.

All good questions, and it is ones that I have been pondering myself.

To start I would like to comment that you don't need to look for niche markets as of yet, all bitcoin seems to have is niche markets.  In fact the niche’s are getting so full that I wrote them off a while ago as a potential area of development that I would be interested in. 

For the volume of trade we seem to have enough Exchanges, Lotteries, Instant Payout, Term Investment (“Ponzi”) & Porn sites.  (Sorry if I missed your favorite bitcoin activity)

What I see a great lack of is the more mundane stuff, good and services that I use every day.  Just opening my eyes and looking at my desk I see a few things, my mouse, my iPod and a bottle of coke, you probably see similar things.

These markets are not niche markets, they are day to day markets that we use constantly and they are wide open.  Next time I need a new mouse I will go online to some store like newegg and in the next few days I will have one, same goes for a new MP3 (or whatever your format of choice is) except it will be instant.  We need to make it so that it would be just as easy to do these things with bitcoins as it is with your credit card.

Bitcoins will have truly turned a corner when I go to the vending machine and perform some sort of key exchange (by some method unknown to me at the moment) and boom, I have a bottle of coke.

I think those are the type of opportunities we should be looking at, bugger the “new fandangle” type approach for now, let’s just stick with things that we know work because we use them every day.

As for an example, I think the first guy that has the balls to write a simple script on a simple website that allows me to buy an iTunes Gift Card with my bitcoins would have my business.  That person would have to have the balls (and $ and BTC) to put themselves and their company out there in a transparent manner though, get Cyber Insurance, put their address on their website and stand behind their service and not act like the proverbial Snake Oil Merchant, in short, do it in a professional manor (and pay my a 1% of net royalty fee ).

Once again, just my opinion though.

Less of the Shady "Give me your bitcoins and I will give you back more" and penny gambling sites and mentality.

More professional "men in business suites" with proper accounting and accountability.

I am rather new to bitcoins, but I have been in business and finance since I left school back in the 80's and while I love the idea of bitcoins and very much want them to succeed I am rather shocked by the abondance of get rich quick schemes, gambling, badly secured amaturish exchanges and what appear to be Ponzi schemes.

If bitcoins want to be taken serious a place as a reliable, non gimmick currency we need serious and non gimmicky uses, people and businesses.

Just my opinion.

I didn't think you had to deposit coins in an address before you deposit coins in an address.  I admit I could be wrong.

I have another for you, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Not really related to your question but...

If you "bitcoind getnewaddress [whatever]" and use that address for the transaction and NEVER use it again you have just done an anonymous transaction that cannot be tracked (unless someone gets your wallet.dat, and then it is the least of your problems).

No third party's that have any information about you (the anonimizer) nothing.  Just you and your bitcoins.

Woot, thanks for the 0.65535256 LTC

I will lecture the next person that I meet in the streets on the folly's of bitcoins for ya. :p

You could upload the blockchain, but it would still have to do allot of the real CPU intensive stuff (scanning the blockchain for the keys in your wallet) but it would be a time saver.

The 612MB for ram that comes in a micro while small is more than enough to process transactions so I would not worry too much about that.

Login to whatever user is running bitcoind (not root I hope) and type;-

bitcoind getinfo

You should get a response that says something like;-

{
    "version" : 60300,
    "protocolversion" : 60001,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 64009467.64009467,
    "blocks" : 189791,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 1866391.30500321,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1341275641,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : ""
}

The line you are after is the one that says ["blocks" : 189791,]  if it is not 189791 or more you have a way to go sorry.  The blockchain download is painful on a micro, that is why I recommended the spot instance.

No worries, sorry I could not go back further (I have not been in the "bitcoin" game that long).  I also had similar concerns that bitcoind would thrash the EBS drive but when I actually looked at it the blockchain is only ever downloaded once, and when you download it is scanned for the keys in your wallet so one it is written to storage.

There will be read IO's for previous blocks when you do things that don't involve your key's but that should be very minimal, nothing like running a real read/write db.

But that is just my understanding from briefly browsing the code, I have only been playing with bitcoind for a few months but my testing at amazon seems to back it up.  I am mainly into servers and such.

Just downloaded and installed litecoind and set it to get the blockchain.

LNKKfX6DufX91FY12qNGSfGEo3Mbu9E2XF if you are still feeling generous ;P .

Nope, well spotted As luck would have it though (since there is no real way of estimating IO's) I have real work data for you.  Last month on a "EC2 small" running bitcoind, namecoind, mysqld, httpd and a few scripts I use to collect data from various json sources all the extra costs break down to;-

$0.110 per GB-month of provisioned storage                         8.000 GB-Mo       $0.88
$0.110 per 1 million I/O requests                                 1,119,146 IOs       $0.12
$0.000 per GB - data transfer in per month                         1.580 GB          $0.00
$0.000 per GB - first 1 GB of data transferred out per month                0.690 GB          $0.00
$0.010 per GB - regional data transfer - in/out/between EC2 AZs or using IPs or ELB   0.024 GB          $0.01

So add $1.01, that particular instance came to a total of $8.86 for last month without spinning down.

All up still cheaper than a micro, and FAR more performance.  Your mileage may vary though, with spot instances we are never talking about a fixed cost.

Hi, I have a little experience with EC2 so I will try to help you out (I run ~30 instances for various clients).

An EC2 instance will actually complete the block chain, but it takes about 6-7 days and takes up over 2GB's of your 8GB EBS storage.  Once it has done that it will actually perform quite well as an on-line wallet for you.  You could even use it for a few small websites, MySQL db's etc, just don't get too ambitious.

If you are on the "free tear" it will even be free for a year, it hard to beat!

On the other hand, if you don't mind spending a bit of money and getting a bit of value for money look into getting yourself a small "spot instance".  They use unspent capacity on the EC2 network so the costs can vary, but a typical small instance will average out to costing about $0.01 an hour or $7.44 a month (assuming a 744 hour 31 day month), that less than half the on demand micro instance costs ($0.025 an hour).

You do risk that the spot price will go up and your instance will spin down a bit (and then restart when the spot price goes down again), so I put a maximum spot price in for $0.05 or so and I have never had one shut down and I have never had one cost more than $9 in a month.

Yeah, that brings be back to the "Business plan = Invest money...... Profit!!!!" thing.

I like bitcoin's, you can understand them and nothing is hidden.  If necessary you can get out a pen, calculator and a whole lot of paper and work your way back through a transaction.  In some ways it is better than "real" currencies because of that.

When you start up your miner and start running hash's you can track those hash's back into the blocks that are generated (provided it is not orphaned).

All of this fills me with confidence that bitcoin's might actually succeed in becoming a major currency.  But the whole "Business plan = Invest money...... Profit!!!!" mentality has to go, IMO it is not how bitcoin's work, they are transparent.  If I put money into a bank they tell me how they generate the interest.

Thanks for the reply, I will have to research further into PPT (Pirate Pass Through), I admit I know next to nothing about it.

Perhaps you could help me out, I have read a few things but I am admittedly stretchy on how PPT generates the new funds above and beyond what you invest?  It kind of puzzles me at the moment and you seem to be more experienced.

Pardon me for being a bit of a sceptic but that explanation sounds a bit like Homer Simpson saying "Business plan = Invest money...... Profit!!!!".

I am new to bitcoin's, but not finance.  I would require a bit more of an explanation.  One of the things that I (and others I would imagine) am very weary about is scams.

A poorly written website, no explanation of the "how" you plan on generating the "interest" and a mysterious "MinersFee" don't full me with confidence.

I could be wrong though, so I am asking, how do you generate the "interest"?

Darn, I have not setup a litecoind yet, I will look into it though, but I just "namecoind getnewaddress mystery2048" and received NJi4sjk5mEb54CXJNt2iiuL2ix7wN8k3LY .

Currently I am playing around with namecoins on the bitparking exchange just to get the "hang" of it.

1CA3aFtQUFRMtWWoHsPBfXpaHBnQt4vcHw

I could always do with more to experiment with.

Hi All,

I am a bit of a newbie when it comes to bitcoin, but I am a bit of the origional computer geek, but we were called Whizz Kids back then  .  I built my fist computer back when I was nine, back then you mail ordered a PCB and a large plastic bag of components (resistors, IC etc, not hard drives and video cards) and then attacked it with a soldering iron. 

I still have it somewhere, here is a link to Wikipedia if you want the spec's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Scientific.  Suffice to say with it's 4bit processor and 1k ram it would require some tricky programming and more tapes (Cassette back then) than I can be bothered calculating to generate single block.

Fast forward 30 years to today, I am still a geek!  I am the "computer guru" for a small programming house in New Zealand (6 Developers, 2 Management, 1 Office Girl and me).  It 's quite a relaxed outfit and I am responsible for "everything technical that is not codeing", so I spend most of my days working with my servers and services (mostly linux/windows on tin and cloud platforms), going through logs and "playing" with new technology. 

I have been aware of bitcoins for quite some time and have run miners every now and then just for academic purposes, I even have a few coins in my wallet.

Anyway, I was reading this forum today and noticed this post about Amazon EC2 instances https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94024.0 and hunted around for the reply button because I have considerable experience in that area (involving running spot instances, its not only cheaper, but you can get a far better instance than a micro) and could not find it!

After that I read the board policy's and started the process of "upgrading" to a Junior account (this post).

So, yeah, Hi Guys and Gals  .