PROOF OF WORK RESULT: false (boooo)

Got that a few times now. So it looks like I am, in fact, completing 600,000 (x2?) invalid hashes every second.

Any idea what the problem is?

minerd --userpass 1:1 --url http://127.0.0.1:8697

Miner is the one here: https://github.com/Lolcust/Tenebrix-miner

My box is just a simple macbook with 2 CPUs and no modifications (except the fact that it's running Xubuntu).

I said 6 3-year-old macbooks. Referring to my 3-year-old macbook seeming to have 1/6 of the power.


Two.

I've been mining at 600 khash/s (2 threads) for a few hours now, which seems to be about 15% of the power of the entire network. I find it very hard to believe that there are only six 3-year-old Macbooks mining the entire chain right now, and I haven't gotten the one block per 30 minutes that I should be. Any idea what's wrong?

Why do all these coins have to be called by a name whose sole function is to show a feature that they have that the original does not? Are we really going to be using Solidcoin, Litecoin, Speediercoin, Freecoin, or whatever other name people come up with in 20 years, and what are people supposed to think of the name? The only thing I know of with a reactionary name that has ever had any success is openoffice.org. All the other "hip alternatives" - Firefox, Linux, Android, etc. have names that stand on their own to someone who has never heard of the original, and that's what I like about Tenebrix (and GeistGeld).

A proper economic analysis of this needs to take into account both the initial cost, buying the video cards, and the running cost (electricity). Back in June, miners thought that the price was going to keep on going up, so it was seen as worth it for a very large number of new miners to come in, and they did, paying the initial cost. The price went far down, and it is now no longer worth it for new miners to enter (unless they're not paying for their electricity), but even in July it was worth it for existing miners to keep mining.

In August, however, the price kept on falling, and fell below the threshold so that the least efficient of even the existing miners were forced to shut down, which is why it's only then that the number of miners started to go down. It's not a 2 month lag, it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis - like a thermostat only increasing or decreasing the power to the heating when the temperature falls substantially below the target. The price threshold for miners to stay mining is about 1/3 of the threshold for there to be new miners, so there is a 3x range within which the price can change without changing the number of miners, but if the price falls outside the range it drags the number of miners up and down with it (technically, it's the expectation of future high prices that brings new miners in, and that's what happened in June, but it's a good simplification in the long term).

Bitcoin: The internet's own local currency.

It wasn't an anecdote. It was an argument (when your income comes from grants you have no incentive to do a good job) with one anecdote to help express the point.

Waiting for 1 confirmation is safe enough for the real world. If you're caught double spending, there's no way to pass it off as an accident, mistake or anything but premediated fraud, and it's so hard to pull off it's less risky to just shoplift. And aside from that you got MtGox codes and the Instawallet green address.


Modern (as in a few weeks old and newer) Bitcoin offline merchant solutions adjust prices automatically. There are people working on this - see bit-pay.com

As for cash, I hate coins. If people were decent enough to include sales tax in the price of the product and make all the prices end in multiples of .25 (even .49 and .99 are acceptable) it would be different, but most stores don't do that. That's reason enough to use Bitcoin for me.

Yet another 17 year old to add to the army; any sources for this?

I don't buy coins, although I do get paid in them for some work. About a third of what I have right now I got back during the $0.80 days in March (and another 8.50 BTC which I got during the $0.80 days and spent on a shirt at $3.50), and the rest at various places up and down the big bubble (although I did escape part of the downfall by exchanging back and forth). So it's a mixed bag for me.

The ability to include a short message with a transaction. The sheer amount of unnecessary back-and-forth that people have had to do because of the lack of this simple feature is mind-boggling.

The problem is that that's a circular argument. If you believe that being able to fence off any land you grab before anyone else is a freedom, then yes, trespass is a violation of that freedom. But what if you believe that the key freedom is the freedom to use whatever natural (ie. not other people's labor) resources you want? Then the fence becomes a violation of freedom. As long as there are multiple people who want to use the same resource it's necessary for all but one of the people to be blocked. Is it the first one to get to that particular resource that gets lucky? Is it the first one to build a fence around the area of nature that produces the resource? Does it depend on who has not taken their fair share of nature's production yet? Unless you can justify your theory as to what the "just coercion" is, then you have to accept that your theory is no better than anyone else's.

Not all people agree on what "economic liberties" are. For some people, their idea of economic liberty is what you call trespass. For some people, the right to monopolize the product of your intellectual labor is just as legitimate as the right to physical property, and they might even have a point - in terms of economic impact, sneaking into movie theaters (trespass) and copyright infringement for personal use can get scarily similar to each other. For other people, this same logic is why only consumptive use of someone else's property should constitute a property rights violation, and from there it's only two steps to Proudhonianism (lower left corner on this scale).

And that's where the theory of marginal value comes in. Which is more valuable - gold or water? Well, it depends on how much water you have.

The main correlation with trustworthiness seems to be community involvement. Back during the crisis, MtGox was very heavily involved with the community setting things right, and now they're the ones bailing out other exchanges. BitMunchies was always engaged with the community, etc. MyBitcoin, on the other hand, was invisible on the forums, and even when people started complaining about it they made no effort whatsoever to do damage control.

Those are the kinds of businesses I would trust with my money - by participating in the community it's a sign that they care about Bitcoin itself and aren't just in it for personal financial gain, and they're putting their reputation on the line as collateral.