|
541
|
Economy / Services / Re: Gigamining / Teramining
|
on: November 19, 2012, 09:43:37 PM
|
I noticed this when going through the unread-posts list: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=126673.0Does this look like something that could be useful? On my end, all I can provide is the txid with which I sent money to GLBSE, though I'm not sure how you can verify that it's me (you can trace back the origin of the coins through source addresses until you hit a 50-BTC generation transaction, some of which was first spent from bitcoind running on my VPS). Shortly after funding my GLBSE account, I bought as many Gigamining shares with it as I could; the remainder sat idle until it was refunded a while back after GLBSE went under. What I don't have is the CSV file that some people managed to download before GLBSE went under. |
|
|
|
|
542
|
Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Got scammed while buying BTC with paypal, what should I do now?
|
on: November 19, 2012, 09:09:19 PM
|
Harrison: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces...
"Gorilla warfare?" What's that? Cage-fighting an ape?  I'd think an operator would know the correct spelling of "al-Qaeda" and "guerilla," among other things. Sounds like a stolen-valor douchebag, in addition to a scammer. |
|
|
|
|
544
|
Bitcoin / Armory / Re: Making a portable offline Armory installation with the Gentoo Linux LiveDVD
|
on: November 14, 2012, 10:40:03 PM
|
All this security, but you don't check github's SSL certs?
Using wget to download tarballs from GitHub produces a couple of errors: (1) the certificate isn't trusted and (2) the certificate is issued by an unknown CA. Since you can download the files within a browser without issue, I suspect it's just some brokenness with wget. If you wanted to do so, you could use Firefox, Konqueror, or whatever to download the files. |
|
|
|
|
545
|
Economy / Collectibles / Re: How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?
|
on: November 14, 2012, 06:09:18 AM
|
point me to a link that generates those with a unique private key... (wallet)
If you're referring to my project, you need to clone it from the GitHub repo, make sure you have the software (including vanitygen) listed under Prerequisites in the README, and run the script. Each run generates new privkeys for each note. It's intended for offline use; it's not offered as a web service. If you're referring to something else, never mind. |
|
|
|
|
546
|
Economy / Collectibles / Re: How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?
|
on: November 14, 2012, 01:26:42 AM
|
I think the notes should go from 1-256, each .01 raising the hue level a bit, that way it will give a cool effect,  I was aiming for standard denominations that mirror existing paper currency. (At present value, I should probably do 0.1 and 0.2 BTC notes as well.) |
|
|
|
|
547
|
Economy / Collectibles / Re: How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?
|
on: November 13, 2012, 11:23:18 PM
|
I've put together an offline note generator: https://github.com/salfter/btcnotes/Notes are rendered four to a page. Five denominations (0.5,1, 2, 5, and 10 BTC) are currently supported, each of which prints in its own color. Addresses and private keys are generated on-the-fly, rendered as both text and QR codes. Page layout is done in PostScript with artwork that started out as SVG, so you get the highest print quality possible. For convenience, final output is to PDF. I considered using HTML and CSS to position SVG images directly, but print quality proved a bit hit-or-miss...Firefox was usually OK, but Chrome frequently rendered SVG elements at 72 dpi or so before printing. Even with Firefox, I sometimes had some unexplained print failures. For sample output, try this: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/57535575/job2948.pdf |
|
|
|
|
548
|
Economy / Economics / Re: What if gold is produced in lab?
|
on: November 13, 2012, 05:18:58 PM
|
I thought that nuclear transmutation resulted in gold that was at least significantly radioactive? Maybe they have found a better way to do it, I haven't read any recent articles on the subject.
From Wikipedia: Gold was synthesized from mercury by neutron bombardment in 1941, but the isotopes of gold produced were all radioactive. In 1924, a Japanese physicist, Hantaro Nagaoka, accomplished the same feat.
Gold can currently be manufactured in a nuclear reactor by irradiation either of platinum or mercury.
Only the mercury isotope 196Hg, which occurs with a frequency of 0.15% in natural mercury, can be converted to gold by neutron capture, and following electron capture-decay into 197Au with slow neutrons. Other mercury isotopes are converted when irradiated with slow neutrons into one another or formed mercury isotopes, which beta decay into thallium.
Using fast neutrons, the mercury isotope 198Hg, which composes 9.97% of natural mercury, can be converted by splitting off a neutron and becoming 197Hg, which then disintegrates to stable gold. This reaction, however, possesses a smaller activation cross-section and is feasible only with un-moderated reactors.
It is also possible to eject several neutrons with very high energy into the other mercury isotopes in order to form 197Hg. However such high-energy neutrons can be produced only by particle accelerators.
( 197Au is the only stable (non-radioactive) isotope of gold.) As noted elsewhere, it's cheaper by far to mine gold than to create it in a reactor or a particle accelerator. |
|
|
|
|
549
|
Economy / Collectibles / Re: How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?
|
on: November 12, 2012, 10:31:55 PM
|
Another possibly useful bit of code that creates QR codes in SVG format: This depends on netpbm and qrencode. Basically, what we do is create a QR code PNG, convert it to a PBM text file, and mangle that with an awk script (an admittedly naive script, but it should work for addresses and private keys) into an SVG file. First, the awk script, which we will call pbmtosvg.awk: #!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {getline; getline; w=$1; h=$2; y=0; print "<svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" version=\"1.1\" width=\""w*3"\" height=\""h*3"\">"}
{for (x=0; x<w; x++) if (substr($0, x+1, 1)=="1") printf("<rect width=\"3\" height=\"3\" x=\"%i\" y=\"%i\" />",x*3,y*3); else printf("<rect width=\"3\" height=\"3\" x=\"%i\" y=\"%i\" style=\"fill:#FFFFFF\" />",x*3,y*3); y++}
END {print "</svg>"}
It reads the dimensions out of a PBM text file, then writes a grid of black and white rectangles into an SVG file. To use it, try something like this: for i in 1JzFx4iQqnpyBaQbjfZ9Tg2u4KzkSpTDzi 5HzQEdP55SGjBawGCw25A14FcjegFyPtbn3xhzb1rhpxX5dZcc4; do qrencode -s 1 -l M -o - $i | pngtopnm | pnmnoraw | ./pbmtosvg.awk >$i.svg; done
Some examples:  1JzFx4iQqnpyBaQbjfZ9Tg2u4KzkSpTDzi  5HzQEdP55SGjBawGCw25A14FcjegFyPtbn3xhzb1rhpxX5dZcc4 You can then merge these with one of the SVG note designs already given however you want. I'm thinking a little HTML file with some CSS positioning info should work to overlay QR codes (and, optionally, text) over a note. By keeping all images in SVG format, your notes should print at whatever resolution your printer can deliver. |
|
|
|
|
550
|
Economy / Collectibles / Re: How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?
|
on: November 12, 2012, 08:55:55 PM
|
Maybe this is a bit much like hammering a square peg into a round hole, but after messing around with Inkscape for a bit, I couldn't find an easy way to change the overall color of an SVG file (such as what several of the banknote designs posted here use) with it. Since SVG is just a bunch of text, it's not much work to use standard command-line tools to do most of the work. First, grab a file you want to edit. For this example, I'll use graphnote.svg from https://casascius.com/graphnote.zip. First, we need to extract the colors used: grep "#" graphnote.svg | sed "s/.*#/#/;s/\".*//" | sort | uniq | grep -v "^#$" | grep -v "#SVGID" >graphnote-original-colors.txt
You may want to remove black (#000000), white, (#FFFFFF), and any grays (#666666, etc.) from the list. Doing this with graphnote.svg produces 13 distinct colors. Next, make a swatch file: c=0; for i in `cat graphnote-original-colors.txt`; do dec_color="`echo $i | sed "s/#//;s/\(..\)/\$\(\(0x\1\)\) /g;s/^/echo /" | bash`"; pbmtext $i >/var/tmp/tmp$$hdr.pbm; (echo P3 64 64 255; for j in `seq 1 4096`; do echo $dec_color; done) >/var/tmp/tmp$$.ppm; pnmcat -tb /var/tmp/tmp$$hdr.pbm /var/tmp/tmp$$.ppm >/var/tmp/tmp$$_`printf "%03d\n" $c`.ppm; c=`echo $c + 1 | bc`; done; pnmcat -tb /var/tmp/tmp$$_*.ppm | pnmtopng -comp 9 >graphnote-original-colors.png; rm /var/tmp/tmp$$*
Next, load the swatch file into the image editor of your choice and adjust the colors. I use the GIMP. First, you'll want to select Image -> Mode -> RGB to enable the color editing we want to do. Next, select Tools -> Color Tools -> Hue-Saturation... to tweak the colors. Make sure Master is selected as the color to adjust, then use the hue, lightness, and saturation controls to shift the color swatches to something you think will look good. To make a green bill out of graphnote.svg, try setting hue to 70 and saturation to -15. Save the result back to a new PNG file (e.g., graphnote-70,0,-15.png). Now we need to read the colors out of the edited swatch file: pngtopnm graphnote-70,0,-15.png | pnmnoraw | awk 'BEGIN {lc=0} lc%837 == 265 {printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$1,$2,$3)} {lc++}' >graphnote-70,0,-15.txt
Finally, we can use the original file and the two color table files (the text files generated) to create a new SVG in the desired color: sed "`awk 'BEGIN {ln=0} {line[ln++]=$0} END {for (i=0; i<ln/2; i++) print "s/"line[i]"/"line[i+ln/2]"/g";}' graphnote-original-colors.txt graphnote-70,0,-15.txt`" graphnote.svg >graphnote-70,0,-15.svg
You will then end up with something like this (if you don't see a green Bitcoin note below, your browser is out-of-date and needs to be upgraded):  Repeat all but the first two steps to produce notes in however many colors you want. |
|
|
|
|
551
|
Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: The Environmental Cost of Bitcoin - Youtube Video
|
on: November 11, 2012, 07:27:04 PM
|
Heilbroner’s characterization of environmental problems is as misinformed as his half century of wishful thinking about socialism. But this should not be surprising. Environmental issues frequently overwhelm intelligent thought and factual analysis. Scratch an environmentalist, find a communist underneath. That's why they're called watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. |
|
|
|
|
552
|
Other / Beginners & Help / Re: bitcoins hacked
|
on: November 11, 2012, 06:48:36 AM
|
i thought all bitcoins must always be on the network, and accounts are all on the network on the Internet. my idea was have a wallet on a flashdrive was actually just a password on the flashdrive to access the account that is inevitably on the network. i guess i am wrong?
Think of the wallet as something like one of those programs that stores all of your passwords. It stores addresses (which have some amount of bitcoins associated with them) and their corresponding private keys (which let you spend whatever bitcoins you have). You can receive bitcoins at an address not in your wallet; you just need to add that address's private key when you want to spend whatever you receive. So long as you have a copy of all of your private keys, you could wipe out your wallet and not lose anything. |
|
|
|
|
553
|
Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin, ECB and a Free Money Movement.
|
on: November 10, 2012, 03:14:10 AM
|
The very things you're criticising so vigorously, the state, the laws, the monetary controls, the governments, the regulations and all that technocracy were exactly created "for the general good", to defeat specific problems and to improve the situation.
...and they're doing such a bang-up job of it. Does Dodd-Frank ring a bell? :-| It's been said that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. I think an analogous case can be made for Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies that they can be useful for working around an increasingly broken central-banking system. |
|
|
|
|
554
|
Other / Politics & Society / Re: Thanks USA!
|
on: November 07, 2012, 09:12:37 PM
|
As for Obama, I expected Gitmo to be closed by now
Talk to Congress. He issued orders to shut the place down on day 2 (Executive Order 13492), but the Republicans, who were blocking everything just because... That is 100% weapons-grade bullshit right there. In case you've forgotten, the Dims had taken both houses of Congress after the 2006 election. They even had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. 0bama could've gotten anything he wanted for the first two years of his regime, and there's sweet fuck-all the Republicans could've done about it. We're lucky he didn't do more damage than he did. Now that he doesn't have a reelection to worry about, you should be afraid. |
|
|
|
|
557
|
Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Share your experience about how you started earning BitCoins.
|
on: November 04, 2012, 09:56:54 PM
|
I started by CPU-mining on my VPS. Without really knowing what I was doing, I managed to solve a block and score BTC50. BTC50 using VPS?? That's cool!  How long did it take to generate one block? Probably several months, at least...think it happened in May 2011. It's most likely not feasible today, as you won't see much more than 10-15 MH/s from it, depending on what your VPS uses (mine have given me 4-8 Xeon or Opteron cores). The only point in its favor now is that if you already have a VPS for other purposes, mining on it won't cost you anything extra. |
|
|
|
|
558
|
Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Share your experience about how you started earning BitCoins.
|
on: November 03, 2012, 05:54:28 PM
|
I think it would be helpful to newbies like me if you guys share your personal experiences of how you get BitCoins. Is that by mining, or freelancing, or trading? Whatever it be, just share ur experience with us.  I started by CPU-mining on my VPS. Without really knowing what I was doing, I managed to solve a block and score BTC50. After sitting on it a while, I reinvested it in a Radeon HD 7750 (which makes about BTC1 every three weeks) and a couple of BFL Jalapeños which I'm obviously still waiting on. |
|
|
|
|
559
|
Other / Off-topic / Re: ACTUAL Butterfly Labs PCB pics!
|
on: November 03, 2012, 05:45:53 PM
|
|
The most recent Jalapeño pictures to surface at the BFL forum show what look like two USB ports on the back. Would it be correct to assume that one is for power and data and the other is for more power?
|
|
|
|
|
560
|
Bitcoin / Press / Re: 2012-10-30 Coinbase: Buy And Sell Bitcoin By Connecting Any U.S. Bank Account
|
on: November 02, 2012, 03:29:02 PM
|
|
Is it just me, or does their instant account verification sound like a very bad idea? Give them your online-banking username and password so they can log in on your behalf? What could possibly go wrong?
They do offer a deposit verification method which should be safe enough...it's the same method used by PayPal, Dwolla, etc. to verify your account.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
