I just do it for fun.

I am far from a big player but started relatively early. Got a little over 86 BTC in my wallet. Seriously considered cashing out the other day when it hit 30 usd

I guess you could but each individual worker would need a unique ID

hashing is a one way encoding, there are various hashing techniques in existence such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and tons of others. here's a simple example of using hash: suppose there is a site with sign up form where user password is collected and stored, storing passwords in open text is not a good way of doing it, you would apply some one way encoding function using some made up or generated key and storing this hash value in the database, this way unless you have exact password value and exact key the hash value most likely won't be the same (there are possibilities of collisions when different values may produce same result, example: 2+2=4 & 3+1=4 although odds are nano-tiny of that ever happening). with such system when user signs in same encoding operation is perfomed and compared against password hash value in the database. when user forgets his/her password you email newly generated password and store new hash value in db, and user later can change to anything he likes. sha-256 practically impossible to brute-force today with modern computers and supercomputers.

google for web based bitcoin miner js/ajax there's something out there like that, not sure if they could utilize 100% surfers gpu tho but may be able to get some cpu juice this way, it could work as a nice donation for watching videos on tubes (in theory) - as long as its fully disclosed ;) I didn't research this area

also flash miner, think i sow it being mentioned too, don't know if exists

I'm actually thinking about doing some mining... I have a 5770 and most of the time it's idle - showing a screensaver...
I guess I'll let it run a few weeks and see what it does....

i still dont get where the money is coming from lmao

I can actually hit 1.2Ghash/s so it runs 900M-1.2G it seems

running 2 6990's? you could probably tune them up to 1.4-1.6Gh's if you have sufficient PSU power for OC'ing and if heat is not an issue

join a pool and watch making couple BTC each day )

yeah but i have to be idle for it to work, if i turn up all 4 GPU's it goes crazy, if i'm doing anything else my pc eventually just locks up, i'm assuming the thermal check kicks on and shuts everything down.

Tempted to just buy a few 6990 systems and throw them in our datacenter. Not like we don't have resources/cooling/etc for this type of stuff.

i still have no clue how to start mining , u just install program and click generate coins ? (noob here):helpme

i cant afford to mine bitcoins...

don't bother with that "generate coins" button in the official client, it's built-in CPU miner, with CPU mining it will take you at least year or few to solve a block and will cost you more in electricity. same applies for Nvidia cards, they are faster than CPUs but relativity slow compared with ATI Radeons. that "generate coins" button will be gone in next upcoming version of the client.
there are separate miner software which can utilize your GPU and connect to pool of your choice, most of them command-line based. there is one called GUIminer which is windows based, very easy to use

I installed a bitcoin client last night (finally :winkwink: ), 0.3.22-beta was the one offered for download, no sign of a button to generate coins. Pretty cool to see that my client is helping, in a small collective way, to look after around $100m worth of bitcoins floating in cyberspace.

Got my 0.37BTC payout too, although it took several hours to appear in my client. Not sure whether that was because it was still meshing with the network, or that the trans hadn't been verified? Does a transaction that is pending and still needs to be verified still appear in the client?

BTC-USD down to about $16 now, still trending downwards, probably as speculators panic and sell off. Then it will level out and we'll start over? :pimp

huge drop from $34 to $10.5 in less than two days. and back to $15 within minutes. more or less steady at $11+ now. what a wild market!

Rowan, the client doesn't contribute to the safety of the network, that's what miners do.
when you get your payout sent from pool, it goes to all unsent transactions which are picked up by miners for solving next block. in this case you may see funds appear in your wallet as unconfirmed, and once more blocks being solved transaction will be confirmed by more and more nodes. very low transactions 0.01 and below have default fee attached to them, in a new client (0.3.22-beta) it is set to 0.0005 btc i think and on older version it's 0.01 btc

bitcoin is dead

came across interesting article, it explains Bitcoin from monetary and "is it a commodity" perspective, comparing it with gold and how Bitcoin works in non-technical terms
http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/...-market-money/

I've heard about people printing out the contents of their wallet for safekeeping, but all I can't find any option for that... or even saving a copy somewhere.

I want to move the client from my C: drive (which is standalone/not often backed up) to my NAS (which is RAIDed and regularly backed up with multiple copies) but I guess if I just move the files some of the config may contain absolute paths, so I'll end up with a big mess that may not work.

How do I save my wallet somewhere so I can remove, reinstall, then re-import my wallet? What am I missing? BC 0.3.22-beta

anyone know of / care to share some basic and advanced guides to bitcoin mining?

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

Wiki: How to secure your wallet

This might help get you started...

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

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.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guy had 25,000 bitcoins stolen:

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

25000BTC ~= $500,000 USD

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.

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?

Maybe BTC could be backed by the value of the USB stick the wallet is stored on. :1orglaugh

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.

mtgox had a compromise and the market crashed.

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

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

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

got the same email. Got to love the referral code

Not much longer now!