Serge Litehead

100 BTC


Agent 488 and anyone wanting learn more about mining, here is a good starting point

Rowan, I haven't done any backing up yet, thus don't know what the exact procedures are. I know that wallet.dat file is located in win7 in users hidden "AppData" folder
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Bitcoin
search the other forum, i'm sure there threads about it

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Serge Litehead

Wiki: How to secure your wallet

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rowan

This might help get you started...

http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=7374.0

rowan

I'm using the -datadir option but it keeps creating the Bitcoin dir in the appdata directory on C:\

Tried deleting that dir to confirm - yep, it just recreates it every run like a new install.
Tried changing the \'s to /'s in the path, no difference
Tried running it from a cmd prompt, it complains about a missing directive in the conf file - the path reported for the conf file is on the C: drive, even though I have datadir=... on the cmdline



edit: finally got it working, I realised I had "datadir Z:\..." instead of "datadir=Z:\..."
Took about a minute to start, no sign of the program except in task manger, but once it did start my transactions, addresses and balance are all there. Yay.

rowan

Wonder how long it will be before we see viruses that look for wallet.dat and quietly send it to some eastern european cartel.

Or maybe zombie networks would make more money mining rather than relaying spam...

Emil

I would be very surprised if people didn't use botnets to generate coins already.

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rowan

Just figured out how to do a modest (~7%) overclock on my 5570 card. Went from 57Mhash/sec to 61.5Mhash/sec.

Serge Litehead

Who has mtgox usd and wants to or willing to trade small amount for paypal or paxum hit me up

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rowan

Found this interesting graph. It takes into account the difficulty level and market value of BTC.

http://bitcoin.atspace.com/income.html

Serge Litehead

Another good article explaining Bitcoins
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...rtual-currency

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rowan

Guy had 25,000 bitcoins stolen:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0

25000BTC ~= $500,000 USD

Serge Litehead

that is just so insane! almost overnight you turn up with 500k and next thing it is all gone for real.

at the time story unfolded, through out past Saturday bitcoin was down from 18 to 16 dollars (coincidentally?), but next day rebound back to 18-20 and keeps floating at this level atm.

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rowan

Yeah, it's made me a little paranoid. It makes it clear that someone doesn't need access (either physical or remote) to your machine in order to steal your BTC, nor do they necessarily need the current wallet file... if you received 100BTC 5 years ago and still have them a copy of the wallet from 5 years ago is sufficient to steal them.

Right now I just run my bitcoin client on my normal windows desktop, with the wallet stored on my NAS. The NAS (and its backups) are encrypted but that won't stop some virus or malware running on the 'doze box from accessing it "in the clear"

It's interesting that the official bitcoin client doesn't offer any attempt at basic security, like encrypting the wallet with a password. This wouldn't get past keyloggers but at least it would provide SOME protection if a copy of your wallet was acquired some other way.

If you're in it for the long run then maybe using multiple savings wallets would be a good idea - you send yourself some bitcoins to a 100% virgin account, then the media the wallet for that account is stored on is physically disconnected and remains that way. For safety it would be stored on at least two different media and stored in two locations.

Maybe also periodically regenerate your wallet by sending all your BTC to a new account?

rowan

Maybe BTC could be backed by the value of the USB stick the wallet is stored on.

Serge Litehead

I'm not completely sold on the password thing. what if you forget your password for the wallet? i've heard dev team will be working on encrypting wallet for the next update though so we'll see how's that turn out. in the past i've forgotten couple of passwords, one for 5-6 digit icq i had when icq first came out which could not be retried and another was for some zip or excel file, thankfully i was able to brute-force it with conveniently available tool from the web. I wouldn't want to forget my pass for the wallet, and i'm sure it will require some long string of text for good encryption so that will be one more piece to worry about it's safety and security.

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rowan

mtgox had a compromise and the market crashed.

The value of a bitcoin on mtgox got down to around ONE CENT!!

rowan

Anyone with a standing order for buying BTC at a seemingly impossibly low rate (say $1) would have done nicely when it crashed then bounced back up to $14+ a few minutes later... except that mtgox is busy winding back those transactions. If you cashed out fast enough, they can't do anything (except maybe close your account)....

Bet some guys had their dicks in their hand when it went to 1 cent, you could buy 500BTC for $5 and a couple of minutes later it was worth $7,000

rowan

Just received an anonymous email... someone is spamming every address in the compromised mtgox database suggesting people move to tradehill. The vultures are circling...

Boozer

got the same email. Got to love the referral code

Si

Not much longer now!

Serge Litehead

rowan, how much was BTC traded for throughout the day?
i was off line whole weekend

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Agent 488

hasn't mt gox suspended trading until the 20th? and reading tradehill might have suspended trading as well.

Agent 488

good breakdown of the weekend.

http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+...ticle21942.htm

Serge Litehead

thanks agent

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rowan

Tradehill is also suspending trading as a precaution...

TradeHill has recently learned that a large number of user accounts at a competing Bitcoin exchange have been compromised. Because of the possibility that our users may have used the same password on multiple exchanges, we will be halting the ability to trade or withdraw funds for a few hours. We hope this will give all of our users time to reset their passwords if needed. You can reset your password by clicking on your username in the upper right of the website. This merely a precaution, and we do not have any evidence that our site has been compromised in any way. More info soon.

Wonder how many speculators are using exactly the same password on each exchange?

rowan

Here's the guy that bought up a bunch of bitcoins (about $5m worth once value is restored) at just over 1 cent.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20207.0

HarryMuff

Thanks to all who participated

Chris GAMBA

Haven't you guys ever heard of bulk mailing? lol

Chosen

No. What is it?

rowan

Been mining with the ATI5570 card for 13.7 days now; have earned 1.339BTC ($USD19.42) in that time, or about $1.41/day. Electricity costs are about $0.30/day, leaving a whopping profit margin of $1.11/day.

On the +ve side the effective value of the card is pretty much covered, if I had to I could fairly easy sell it at 30% less than retail.

I'm assuming the difficulty level went up which is why I'm earning less per day than I calculated at the start of it...

The micro mining experiment continues.

rowan

http://bitminer.info/ 8 days ago:

5570: $2.20/day, 29 day break-even
6870: $8.19/day, 24 day break-even

today:

5570: $0.97/day, 69 day break-even
6870: $3.72/day, 58 day break-even

Definitely getting harder... and I just ordered a 6870!

(I don't know if the $ values are skewed by the recent mtgox problems...)

johnnyloadproductions

Bitcoin is a novelty for techies but I find that I will not tamper with it much. I guess the way to go is if you lived by a nice stream of water and built your own hydro electric generator to run all your bitcoin machines.

I've read several people getting raided by the police because of the power all their machines consume. Bitcoins are power hungry. People who consume a lot of energy are thought to be producing drugs perhaps.

The people who should salivate the most though are those with really illegal intentions because bitcoin makes it harder, much harder to trace and hell if you lose your key good luck. People who peddle drugs, illegal porn, weapons, and terriorism are the happy ones.

Still I think bitcoin is neat.

Serge Litehead

cash is also not that easy to trace btw which makes it perfect for all those intentions listed in the post above and it is even more discreet than bitcoins are. and hell if you loose your wallet or suitcase good luck.

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johnnyloadproductions

Just don't store more than a couple hundred for each bitcoin account and keep important passwords in a hidden truecrypt volume. Funny thing about truecrypt is you can make a database of files layers upon layers deep. Hell you could probably do 20 layers and they'll never get to it. But I digress.

I actually hope they don't come up with any password recovery or method of recovery, this gives a sense of security.

Use a password manager if nothing else.

Serge Litehead

very true

after keeping an eye on bitcoin world and seeing how shit gets stolen i'm upping my password management.

tip: never talk online how secure or un-secure you may be or how you store some particular things.

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johnnyloadproductions

speaking of which, this whole thing google is coming out with there chrome book. The laptop that is essentially just a browser and you store everything in the cloud. FUCK THAT!!! I don't want to store my smut in the cloud. I like to have all my content on an encrypted hard drive that I can beat off to.
I really don't care about people being able to view what I have but I usually like to keep things organized here. On top of that my ISP outs at critical times and I need to be able to do a lot offline too.

It will be a novelty to some but it won't catch on like mobile devices have or like smart phones.

mayabong

I got 3 rigs running some 6950's and linuxcoin software running straight from the USB. No hard drive or anything. Hopefully the price goes up. lol

EDIT: saw an interesting post on the forums throwing around the idea of a cam service with bitcoins. I believe the post was called bitcams. Is that someone on here? Seems like it would be sorta like myfreecams but with bitcoins as the tokens. Seems like a very interesting concept..

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Bitcoin Gambling Sites

rowan

That thing could almost market itself - rather than thinking about how you're going to get people to use bitcoins to buy <random_product_or_service>, think about what a typical bitcoin early adopter might be interested in. BOOBIES!

Fuseblown

Mine bitcoins, buy drugs:
http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underg...rug-imaginable

rowan

Set up my 6870 now, I bought one that was factory overclocked to 950Mhz (up from standard 900) so I could have a go at pushing it further. So far I have it working at 1025MHz stable which gives me 250Mhash/sec (I also tried it at standard 900MHz, 219Mhash/sec)

So I put the 5570 into my Windows machine. Strange thing is that on the dedicated Linux machine, with a faster CPU and newish mainboard, it was getting a max of about 61Mhash/sec... but now in the windows machine, with a slower CPU and older mainboard, it's getting 69Mhash/sec. WTF? Maybe it's a driver thing...

Serge Litehead

LOL what a revelation! NEWSFLASH: cash is used to buy drugs EVERY DAY

cash is safer to buy drugs with, who is in their right mind would use that site after getting so much media attention? it will be used as a honeypot by authorities to go after buyers, the same way they bait men looking for hos.

be very scared! lmao

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Serge Litehead

I upgraded guiminer to latest newer version which has Phoenix miner integrated which allows to set flag such as BFI_INT VECTORS AGGRESSION=12 -k phatk (i use aggression=8 because my cards perform unstable at 12) huge improvement in hashing rate with the same gpu settings, I was doing 500-510MH/s before upgrade and now they are crunching 550 stable. over 10% improvement in hashing rate!

find guiminer thread and at the end of OP there is a link to instructions how to use it with phoenix phatk miner if you haven't done so

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rowan

I've been using linuxcoin and the poclbm miner, because I'm not familiar with linux, or X... LC is still a work in progress though because the default settings do not maximise the throughput. Today I read up on the options and adjusted a couple of the commandline args and managed to leap from 250 to 299 Mhash/sec on my 6870, which is a massive difference. this thread also describes a simple optimisation which added a couple more Mhash.

Similar commandline option tweaks on the winbox got the 5570 past 72Mhash/sec, but before that I was running it for nearly 3 weeks with the defaults on the Linux box only getting to 61Mhash/sec...

The realisation that I was 20% down for 3 weeks is made worse by knowing I'm getting into this too late. According to http://bitminer.info/, at the moment the cost of electricity versus income with a 5570 is now about 50%, with a projected break-even of 106 days. A couple of weeks ago it was <20% and 29 days to break even. The 6870 fares a little better, but it's still trending downwards as the difficulty increases. At some point in the near future the cost of electricity will exceed the value of the coins it's creating. I'll hit that limit sooner because I pay a bit more, but others won't be that far behind. I wonder what will happen then? Will the value of BTC increase as they become more rare?

porno jew

anyone who is entering now is entering too late.

Serge Litehead

anyone who doesn't believe value of bitcoins will go up has no reason to mine or enter mining and especially invest in smallish mining equipment, that's for sure

if you believe bitcoins will increase in value it might be worth of risk to keep at mining especially if it doesn't take huge investments

next difficulty increase/s is promising to be tiny. UNLESS bitcoin value will shoot above $30 in my opinion, then it will be profitable again for some time before more hardware added to the network. it is constant race and re-evaluation of profitability =)

I'm myself contemplating whether i should invest more in mining or just buy bitcoins at current rates atm. Some oldtimers have optimistic outlook that BTC will hit $50 in some near time future.

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Chosen

It's never too late... hopefully...

rowan

Hmmm. If the value of BTC doesn't go up to match the increase in difficulty then the market for 5970 cards will probably crash. They'll no longer be worth buying second hand at artificially inflated prices (I've seen them on ebay for $1k+) as they'll be worthless for mining, so they'll go back to being a last gen model that most hardcore gamers will have zero interest in. They're still useful for other things like password cracking, but that particular niche doesn't have the same buying frenzy that bitcoin has caused...

I guess it's possible that people will decide that a 5 or 10% profit margin isn't sufficient and drop out (maybe to try to sell their hardware before it's too late), so the difficulty increase trend will taper off, or perhaps even reverse and start decreasing?

A 10% profit margin at the current value of BTC would only net me about USD 10 cents a day with my setup... even for those with generous rigs of a couple of ghash/sec it would be less than a dollar per day. Worth it for all the noise and heat? Probably not. Let's hope so.

dev777

i see lots of people jumping on this mining bandwagon, buying big computer setups, trying to make a quick buck.

So that means more bitcoins being introduced to the market. What happens though when the trend doesnt pickup with merchants? I'm having a hard time seeing Amazon accepting bitcoins in the near future.. As a currency.. it has no room for growth outside of the black market.

supply will soon outweigh demand and the value will shit itself.

Serge Litehead

how soon?

bitcoins are produced at very predictable quantities, difficulty variable keeps that balance. more miners and hashing power more difficult to produce block of bitcoins, less miners and hashing power easier to find new blocks. difficulty resets each 2016 blocks, which averages to every 10-14 days. it tries to keep production to 1 block (50 BTC atm) every 10 minutes or 10 blocks/hour. based on this you can calculate how many bitcoins are introduced in existence annually, at the end of 2012 and on 1 block will have reward reduced in half to 25 bitcoins. its made to reduce reward in half approximately every 4 years

If supply outweighs demand it simply means price per BTC will decrease. miners mostly try to hoard bitcoins (who wants to sell at cost or below of production?) unless they need money right away. this means that most new bitcoins don't get introduced in the market right away which keeps supply in check with demand.

Amazon is far away, you are right about that, which gives leverage to smaller merchants to get head start.

I'm not sure if black markets can go totally unnoticed being on internet and using bitcoins, unless they going to be very private with limited members, they surely would not want to be in the spotlight of media and authority's attention.

Overall there is a long way to go although it's been growing exponentially thus far .

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rowan

Anyone else getting a heap of nigerian scams sent to their mtgox email?