Thanks to Snowden & Bruce Schneier, we now know the answer. secp256r1 has an NSA backdoor - see http://www.linuxadvocates.com/2013/09/is-openssls-cryptography-broken.html

So - while a backdoor is not really a "honeypot" this is the best answer:-

I got mine last week.  Order # 69xx.  It's *sweeet*.  7.5gh/s

Hi Guys,

Thanks for those answers - I did sortof guess most of that, but the thing I still don't understand, is how those answers apply to the actual data I'm seeing.

What do you guys reckon is the answer?

When we see "ask" - that's obviously going to have been matched up with some previous "bid" - so do you think they're reporting *only* the actual transaction that *caused* the trade, and not the original transaction that *facilitated* it?

And, while I'm still struggling to grasp this stuff - I'm also trying to understand the "direction" of whatever the actual meanings are.

Or in other words - in my brain, I see a "trade" as being something that TWO people engage in (a seller, and a buyer), which probably accounts for my inability to understand why trades have only one designation applied to them (e.g. why are all these trades recorded from the point of view of only one side of the transaction?  Is there a second matching transaction for everything (and if so - how do I find it?, or if not, why not?  and how do they pick *which* one (buyer/seller) to use?)

So... I do the following:

# perl -e 'print time'
1367244848

# curl 'http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/trades/fetch?Currency=USD&since=1367244848000000'

{"result":"success","data": [
{"date":1367244849,
 "price":"143.25661",
 "amount":"2.28045686",
 "price_int":"14325661",
 "amount_int":"228045686",
 "tid":"1367244849353590",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"market"},
{"date":1367244849,
 "price":"143.25661",
 "amount":"1.6445",
 "price_int":"14325661",
 "amount_int":"164450000",
 "tid":"1367244849654839",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244857,
 "price":"142.63001",
 "amount":"0.03795578",
 "price_int":"14263001",
 "amount_int":"3795578",
 "tid":"1367244857007284",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244857,
 "price":"142.63",
 "amount":"2.17982948",
 "price_int":"14263000",
 "amount_int":"217982948",
 "tid":"1367244857061458",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244857,
 "price":"143.25599",
 "amount":"0.8028",
 "price_int":"14325599",
 "amount_int":"80280000",
 "tid":"1367244857426715",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"market"},
{"date":1367244859,
 "price":"142.63",
 "amount":"0.63613875",
 "price_int":"14263000",
 "amount_int":"63613875",
 "tid":"1367244859424413",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"market"},
{"date":1367244859,
 "price":"142.62",
 "amount":"1.42786125",
 "price_int":"14262000",
 "amount_int":"142786125",
 "tid":"1367244859497547",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"market"},
{"date":1367244860,
 "price":"142.62",
 "amount":"2.2706509",
 "price_int":"14262000",
 "amount_int":"227065090",
 "tid":"1367244860239912",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"market"},
{"date":1367244860,
 "price":"143.25599",
 "amount":"0.6",
 "price_int":"14325599",
 "amount_int":"60000000",
 "tid":"1367244860839385",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244861,
 "price":"143.25599",
 "amount":"0.41954114",
 "price_int":"14325599",
 "amount_int":"41954114",
 "tid":"1367244861158710",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244861,
 "price":"143.256",
 "amount":"1",
 "price_int":"14325600",
 "amount_int":"100000000",
 "tid":"1367244861198775",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"bid",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244865,
 "price":"143.25662",
 "amount":"1.79058811",
 "price_int":"14325662",
 "amount_int":"179058811",
 "tid":"1367244865385919",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244865,
 "price":"143.25661",
 "amount":"8.20941189",
 "price_int":"14325661",
 "amount_int":"820941189",
 "tid":"1367244865433889",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"},
{"date":1367244866,
 "price":"143.25661",
 "amount":"0.2782",
 "price_int":"14325661",
 "amount_int":"27820000",
 "tid":"1367244866968567",
 "price_currency":"USD",
 "item":"BTC",
 "trade_type":"ask",
 "primary":"Y",
 "properties":"limit"}]
}

Can someone tell me the *meaning* of those 4 combinations bid+limit, bid+market, ask+limit, ask+market?

Also - are these things the actual trades that have taken place, or are some of them "orders".  If they're not orders - does anyone know where to get a list of orders from?

Also - does anyone know how Mt.Gox handles "partial" stuff?  e.g. if I want 1 BTC, and the best price has someone is selling 2, does that other guy just sell me half of what he's got for sale?  What about the opposite - what if I want 2, and a pair of different people are each selling 1 - I assume I get both of theirs?  How does the above data reflect these things - as a pair of orders perhaps?

Thanks!!!

There are many different ways to mine bitcoins (CPU/GPU/FPGA/ASIC), but nobody seems to have written a Rainbow-table solution yet.

I've worked in Crypto for decades, and I thought I'd take a crack at building such a beast, but I need to know how big I can sensibly make my tables.  This is all currently theoretical, but please can you take my poll and let me know how interested you would be.

New 3tb hard drives are about $136usd today.  You can hang upto 100 drives off each USB host controller in your PC (if you've got enough powered hubs and cables etc).  Usage after initial setup/pre-computation is very low bandwidth.

Here is a rough cost table, showing terabytes you could make available, the $USD cost of that much in hard drives, and the monthly power costs to run them (assuming 15c/kwh - ignoring all controller/hub/PC costs)

TB   Drive $   power $/mo
 3     $135     $2
 6     $270     $3
12    $540     $7
24    $1,080   $13
48    $2,160   $26
100   $4,500   $55
200   $9,000   $110
500   $22,500   $274
1000   $45,000   $548
2000   $90,000   $1,095
5000   $225,000   $2,738

Assuming that any investment you make will produce bitcoin rewards that are the same as, or better than, current ASIC predictions (eg: performance better than ~ 1.5Mhash/Sec per ~ $150), how much storage (if any) would you be prepared to invest in such a pool???

Note: you will need a permanently-on PC and permanent internet connection to do storage-based-mining - the actual mining "Brain" would be needing to infrequently query your storage for index lookup results.  (and, if you're running a "Brain" on your PC, it will need to query other pool worker storage systems for index lookups itself).

Storage-based mining using Rainbow-Tables would be a new and different way to mine, and involves enormous quantities of storage (disk drives) holding pre-computed lookups. 

In laymans terms - a rainbow table is a bit like an index in an encyclopedia.  Current bitcoin mining works using MegaHashes-second, which is kindof like how fast it can search through an entire set of encyclopedia volumes, looking for a specific thing.  Rainbow tables work a different way - instead of searching fast for something, they compute a pre-loaded index of candidate starting points - or basically - they are used to "jump" directly to the approximate location of the answer you're looking for, instead of having to search mindlessly for it.

Once the tables are pre-computed (an offline setup process that takes several days), drive use and access is very low bandwidth (the "Brain" controller software seeks only one specific sector of data out of all it's available space, infrequently.

Thanks for voting!