I had tons of BLU on my android wallet. Where is my money?

Hi

I've tried to use this script and it works fine for starting the daemon on system boot, but doesn't help to restart it if process fails, although it should, as it has "respawn" stanza. I've tried numerous ways to do that and sorted a few minor issues on the way, but this is still not working for me. Any ideas how to make it restart automatically with upstart?

regards
Alex

Hi Mike

Hmm, right now we're presenting only currencies that have a direct exchanges available. But in fact MtGox provides CHF/BTC exchange, and localbitcoins also have some volume in it, so I think we can implement CHF directly, and also global average in CHF, which would be much more reliable to refer to.
I'll release it this week.

Hmm, probably we should redesign global average area and implement full range of possible world currencies for it, while keeping actual local averages only for currencies directly traded for BTC.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Don't think we are that influential yet the proposition is compelling. Hmm, not sure though, it's a rather controversial issue. I'll need to think a little more about this and possible side effects, I see reasons for both ฿ and m฿.
Are there any noticeable public discussions or polls on this matter I could review?

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Hmm, interesting idea. Probably we could do that, yet I'm not sure if it's viable for us to pay 0.0001 (current tx fee) for each timestamp. Assuming we will do it once a day - in a year we will spend ฿0.365 on it, which becomes a noticeable amount. I think we'll wait until version 0.9 for it, when transaction prices will be able adjust to hugely increased exchange rates.

I've added a note at github on it, will get back to it later on.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

I've added integration, but cannot release it right now - it's returning volume data for wrong time period (60 min instead of 24h as per documentation).
Queried their support on this, we'll see if they will fix it.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Hi Kupsi

Hmm, I see what you mean. Probably it would make sense to show global price in page title for each currency, not only low volume ones like NOK.
Implemented, will release this week.

Regards
Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Full reindex took a little more than 48h (I think about 96h), but now it's done and bitcoind works fine on my BeagleBone Black right now.
I will try to copy over this blockchain to RPi and see if it will work there. I had same problem with it before I bought BBB, but since RPi has twice slower CPU, indexing in there would take ages. Yet, maybe with readymade index it will work now.

IO is still a concern, I'm not sure how lond SD card would live with bitcoind running constantly on it. But I will find out, eventually.

Unfortunately it doesn't work at all on my Debian. I'm not sure what's wrong or if I made a mistake somewhere, but here is what I did:
1) I've installed a fresh Debian wheezy and installed all these debs (apart from bitcoin-qt as I need no GUI).
2) I've copied over whole blockchain from a windows machine with updtodate BitcoinQt 0.8.5
3) I started bitcoind with my custom config:
Bitcoind starts, but it:
a) always asking for database reindex and doesn't pick the index I've copied;
b) if I start it with -reindex flag - it hangs in processes with max CPU, but it doesn't respond over JSON-RPC, and even after a long time waiting shows no signs of life, so I have to just kill it.

However, I found something interesting elsewhere. Debian Unstable repo has bitcoind package available for armhf/armel architectures, and it's last 0.8.5 version. So I installed it and it works nearly fine. Unfortunately it still doesn't like my index copy, but when I run it with -reindex - it start fine, responds over JSON-RPC and indexing goes on, I see it by the quickly increasing blocks count. Full reindex will take I think 24-48h, but I hope it will work fine afterwards.

At the moment here is no way to switch currency shown in the main block on top of everything, but you can see global average in other currencies shown down below, just under the total market volume figure for selected currency. Hmm, probably I can add an option to choose different default global average using a cookie setting. I'll think on this.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

I was just trying to install these .debs on Ubuntu 12.04 at Beaglebone Black, but it doesn't work. Basically ubuntu repos for ARM have libboost version only 1.48 available, while these debs require 1.49. It probably can be compiled from sources, but that's not as simple as just installing some ready packages and also will probably take much time on a weak ARM CPU.

Trying Debian Wheezy on the same hardware.

Hi facade


I'm looking for a solution exactly like that and exactly in UK for my hardware project. Yet I know that in UK any bitcoin-related business is likely to get rejected by the local banks, or shut down after short time operating (like IBWT was shut down just recently).

So what bank you're using and are they aware of your services and business model? How reliable is your bank relationship?


Regards,
Alex

Recently I’ve heard a radio discussion about how “gene of altruism” survives natural selection. That discussion made me think about how modern network peer-2-peer applications should be designed to “survive” in their own natural selection.

At first when you think about altruism vs. natural selection - seems like altruism has no chances, as the altruistic individual is likely to leave no descendants, thus his genes will not propagate.

So how do the altruism gene survives?

A positive factor for altruism gene survival is sacrificing to someone with the same or similar gene, so that while some altruistic individuals die, their genes survive effectively because of coordinated efforts of multiple individuals.

Think of human body as a conglomerate of cells - every cell is extremely altruistic, as all functionally different cells are sharing same genetic code and working towards same goal, and only few germ cells are making it towards the reproduction.
Honey bees are going even further - numerous individuals share same genetic code and work selflessly towards survival of the whole hive.

DNA code defining actions of an individual on this level of abstraction is similar to a software program code defining actions of an electronic device.
Multiple individuals with similar DNA acting together towards same goal then are similar to peer2peer software installed on multiple devices across the network. Software defines actions of individual devices and interfaces and interactions between devices, and “sacrifice” of one device for sake of another is just a specific routine in the interactions protocol.

So if a program (DNA or software) allows recognition of compatible nodes and defines interaction protocol - network of nodes creates distributed system of a higher level, and this system as a whole is bringing much more profit to every node comparing to unlinked nodes working by themselves.

However, in cases where individuals are not sharing same genetic code (source code) and are not completely compatible - various problems arise.

There was an example In that discussion - certain unicellular creatures under harsh conditions can combine themselves into sporocarp, a fungi-like multicellular quasi-organism, consisting of stipe and cap. And, what’s important - cells that are getting into stipe are losing ability to reproduce, while cap dwellers keep this ability. Stripe is critical for survival of the whole organism, but getting into the it is completely unprofitable for a single cell (remember - it’s a quasiorganism, a temporary formation of otherwise competing unicellulars).
Eventually some of such unicellulars developing ability to always get into the cap, and survive at the expense of others. However, after a while all altruists in this “community” extinct and the cooperation ability is lost completely and has to be reinvented from scratch in next generations.
Result - complex and effective distributed system cannot be formed of nodes with different source code.


Society

Similar approach can actually be applied to the human society.
Consider these DNA differences and natural selection pressure - and origins of the stratified classful society structure becomes quite obvious, also it’s also obvious that a complex, effective and fair for all society cannot be based on nonaugmented human beings. If individual acts only for his own reasonably selfish interests - the total benefit for society is likely to be negligible. If the individual acts for the sake of whole society - it’s likely for him to be unsuccessful in personal reproduction and his altruistic genes are likely to be lost.

We can and should consider not only DNA, but education, culture, legal restrictions and other conditionings applied to every members of any society. These mental and social conditionings are acting similar to DNA, effectively being transferred from parents to kids and from older existing members of particular society to the newborns.

However human is not reliable in this matter because:
- there is a need for rearing and education process, lengthy, expensive, error-prone and with unpredictable final result, and it has to be applied to each individual separately;
- a human can and will eventually forget conditionings applied to him;
- there are underlying DNA-defined contradicting altruistic and egoistic programmes that interfere with social conditioning and each other and often provide weird results;
- information processing capacities of an average human are quite limited.

So in the end of the day - structuring and labor division do exist in the world, but it’s complexity and effectiveness is limited by the capacity of single nodes of the executing network - human beings.

Through the history humanity consequently increased effectiveness of universal society codes of conduct. Laws were created and enforced, centralized education and state propaganda were introduced, commandments were saved on external devices (books). Eventually codes evolved and overall effectiveness increased. However the basic limitation is still there - all possible society codes of conduct are executed by weak mortal humans with all possible side effects.

Solution

Now we have our beloved computing devices entering the scene. It allows effective saving, quick and reliable replication, unified and fast execution and potentially unlimited complexity of “codes of conduct“, all of which is impossible for humans.

So if the altruistic behaviour is implemented in the software solutions and protocols - the whole distributed software system can reliably expect every it’s member to act in agreement towards mutual benefit.

The obvious conclusion - to improve certain social interactions it should be implemented in some kind of p2p software, and this software should use an unified protocol that will imply and enforce altruistic approach for every node of the network.

“Natural selection survival” of the software

Okay, let’s think what software should look like to succeed in the competition. Survival and replication of the software depends on how good it fits into the environment it lives in. The “environment” here means actual software users, humans owning devices that run programs. Users decide to install or delete the software based on the usefulness they feel.

Requirements applied to software
A p2p software with unified protocol is likely to be more effective than competing non-p2p software and is likely to be chosen by users.

It is important though that decision making has to be hardcoded into software and not delegated to users. If it’s given away to users - we again have all sorts of unwanted side effects and system falls apart.

It’s also important that software should be able to “mutate”, to adjust and improve itself to fit ever changing user requirements. An open source software allows rapid parallel multiple mutations, allowing effective and quick improvement. Also every mutation has to prove itself useful through network adoption, and useless mutations will not survive the competition.

Torrent protocol proved itself to be more useful than anything else for file distribution and downloads, and it won the evolution race.

Requirements applied to user
User has to donate some part of it’s PC resources and data input to the network.
Obviously user would prefer to consume useful resources and not give back anything, so the system has to either apply restrictions or provide incentives for the user to give back.

Torrents, especially at the early days have been issuing strict seeding requirements to prevent leechers from ruining the system.

Bitcoin implements a mining mechanism that is monetarily rewarded.

So in general the system should rely on these principles:
- there are some resources created by the system that allow to solve certain real world problems
- the system provides these resources to the users in return of some work of the sake of the system

So the effective system will be:
- distributed;
- with no privileged nodes;
- with one unified protocol;
- insensitive to node destruction;
- working out of the box;
- without any competition between the nodes, only with cooperation;
- opensourced;
- enforcing or incentivising user altruism.

Examples
Obvious examples are torrents, bitcoin and partially skype (before it was bought by M$).

Torrents for free gave us download speeds that otherwise would require massive infrastructure investments.

Bitcoin allows secure, fast, reliable and cheap transactions and majorly outperformes conventional currencies in these areas.

Skype set new standards of international call costs.

However these systems are obviously imperfect by itself and are far not enough.

Skype is well known to be not fully decentralised, and unfortunately now it tends to centralize further.

Bitcoin is often accused to have no real value. Some may argue that fiat currencies have no real value also, but there is an obvious demand for such functionality, and it’s just yet not implemented in any currency.

What systems might be useful?
In fact almost all of the existing interactions within the society are still centralized, so there are plenty of places to go. And in most of these places p2p implementation will bring more benefit to it’s nodes than a centralized one, and of course it will bring less benefits to the currently existing privileged central authorities.

For example - baking with real values for the currency. In the real world we have various ledgers, databases and accounts of property, cars, all possible goods in fact. If all these real world values will be hashed and attributed to the blockchain, and any transactions with these real values will be always accompanied by the opposing money transactions - it will make cryptocurrency effectively backed by all real world values that sit in the blockchain.

Another example - a secure and reliable storage of socially important information. We have Google Cache, we have Wikipedia, we have Internet Archive, but all these are more-less centralized services, vulnerable to legal attacks, human errors, natural or artificial disasters.

It’s still long way to go, but eventually it might incredibly rise overall society effectiveness. And we already see results.

The one thing I'm still not sure about is how to show the prices - in USD or in BTC. Apart from that the thing works as I described - you can pay either in BTC or in USD, both work in parallel but do not intersect.

It is a bitcoin project, just I think the main value of it is not the fact that it uses bitcoin, but the rather unique service it provides, so I'm not accenting on bitcoin strongly.

However in fact I see a fundamental problem in my concept. It may not work in practice because there is a need at the same time:
a) for people to have tight personal relations and intensive personal monetary relations (personal borrowings, local business etc), without banks or other institutions involved. Only this way they will be able to judge confidently on each other.
b) for people to have understanding of modern financial instruments, understanding of long term planning, financial discipline and possible delayed consequences of their actions.

The a is not possible in the First World, people there rarely have direct monetary relations.
The b is not possible in the Third World, people there rarely have such understanding and long term plans.

So the a and b will never meet, and that's why this will not work. Unless there is a way to solve this that I've missed.

-------

There is the Second World between the First and the Third, but it will not work there either, because people there don't have neither a nor b.

oh wow, I've missed a few things in here in last two days

Ok, I don't want to argue if Ripple is a scam or not. I don't like Ripple because of some core assumptions in it's concept, but that has nothing to do with my concept.

So, yes, Ripple assumes trading of IOUs between random people via gateways or directly. In this narrow meaning it's completely same as bitcoin - it allows trading certain rather virtual tokens of value between entities via a public ledger and without any trust between the parties.

This has nothing to do with microlending.
Microlending is when a set of lenders gives money to a set of borrowers, and
a) each lender gives his money to multiple borrowers at once, spreading risks between as many borrowers as he can reach
b) the amounts lent are rather small and have a strict upper cap, keeping it apart from classic banking system
c) interest on the loans is paid
d) the system is not trustless, and there is no trust by default, trust between borrower and lender has to be established via due diligence

Ripple has nothing like that because
a) there is no risk attached (at least explicitly), so there is no need to spread it
b) there are no caps on the amounts exchanged
c) there is no interest involved
d) system is trustless, as the XPR exchange is maintained via trustless cryptosystem, and the XPR-fiat exchange happens offline and in person between exchange and gateway and there is no prerequisite trust needed between them to operate.

My concept is about replacing formal due diligence with something else, not about a system to exchange IOUs. These are just completely different things.

Not really. Somebody actually pointed me about the similarity, but I don't see where this analogy is coming from. Ripple is a network of exchange gateways and an internal currency called "ripples". My thing is mainly about creating a trust network of actual and potential borrowers based on their personal relationships and offline agreements.
I don't really see much similarity, can you explain your point please?

------
Yes, I know about IOUs exchanged between the gateways and users, but that has nothing to do with microlending, it's just a mean of payments and exchanges. My thing is about exactly microlending, so it's a different application, and the only similarity as for me as that both are money-related services.

Hi all

About a month ago I've launched a crowdfunding service called bitfund.org. It's not a kickstarter style crowdfunding, it's more like an improved subscription button, with option for budget definition and donation subscriptions. It's working in both BTC and USD, but with no exchange between the two.
The core problem of mine is that I'm not too good at advertising and promotion, so have hard times getting it off the ground.

So I'm looking for a business development cofounder willing to make it real together.

Anybody interested?

Ok, I see what you mean. It's a misunderstanding, I didn't mean to claim that I can wipe out ALL SCAM AT ONCE and I don't intend to create a hype. Of course it's not possible to stop all scams neither with this, nor with classic formal due diligence process. If be realistic some scam will always be there, it's a scam/non-scam ratio that makes the difference.

Here is my grounding for the thing:
How do we stop scams in theory?
The only thing that really matters is how much it worth to run a scam comparing to the output of scam itself. I.e. the net profit of scam is what is really important. In case of formal due diligence to create successful scam you need to trick due diligence auditors with stolen of fake documents, cleverly crafted legend etc. Depending on auditors experience and thoroughness it can be hard or easy (expensive or cheap). If it's cheap, assuming same level of gross scam profit - net scam profit grows and invites more scams.

How do I stop scams in practice?
This is microlending, so gross scam profit has a top cap, assume fro example that no more than BTC50 loaned at once. Also assume that getting this kind of loan will require three other established respectable borrowers to support you, i.e. risk their reputation and future loan interests for you. How much effort is needed to trick three different people into this, if you don't know them at the beginning? How much effort and time it will take to persuade them to support you, starting from scratch? Does it worth the gross profit of BTC50? Generally this is not easy to measure, and depending on different situations, communities and countries scammer expenses will vary greatly.
In general I think it's possible to maintain scam costs high enough in the way I propose, in detail the swift balance between keeping scam costs high and honest borrowers hassle low will be found based on actual performance stats.

Of course the whole thing will not keep ALL scams away forever. But it will allow to maintain acceptable level of scam/non-scam ratio at lower costs than the formal due diligence.

PS: I've updated original post to make sure it's clear that I'm not claiming to weed out all possible scams.

I'm trying to get clever criticism and peer reviews of the idea. There is no platform yet to create hype around.

So, why do you think it's impossible to weed scams out? Classic lending and microlending institutions right now are tossing scams away effectively, but at a cost of formal due diligence applied to every potential borrower. And still a well prepared professional scammer will get through, because he will prepare and provide trustful legend and supply trustful (fake) documents to support it.

My idea is that we can replace formal due diligence with an informal one, run by those who know potential borrower in person. If you know someone personally, you can judge if he is a scammer or not, and most likely - a real scammer will not even go to you with this, as he knows that you know that he is a scammer. 

My idea is not about giving out referrals to anybody you're "in friends" on facebook. It's about to refer only those few who you know and trust in person. And I think it's a matter of giving people right incentive to on the one hand - be willing to get into and get benefits, and on the other - to choose wisely.