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Bitcoin - P2P currency
decepto
Member #7,102
April 2006
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I know you're being a bit facetious, but security and liberty have an inverse relationship.

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Boom!

m c
Member #5,337
December 2004
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bitcoin makers know this, they just want someone, somewhere to believe the superficial claims and honour the currency, then they can effortlessly cheat and live rich.

There is a sucker born every second.

(\ /)
(O.o)
(> <)

Elverion
Member #6,239
September 2005
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I've got a Radeon 6870. According to everything I've seen, this card should get about 240 Mhash/s. I'm only getting ~70 using the tool located here. Am I doing something wrong?

Oh, wait. I found the "problem." I had a Youtube video (although paused) open in a tab. Why would a paused Flash video cause this?

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MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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Flash is using some of the card's resources.

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weapon_S
Member #7,859
October 2006
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Andresen said:

38:03 Is there infrastructure that has to exist or is it all just sitting on everybody's systems? Just sitting on everybody's systems. You don't have a server in your home town or Satoshi's home town where this is all being stored? No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve.

So when it gets popular and trusted, it will revert back to a good old centralized system. Am I the only one who thinks 'Satoshi Nakamoto' might not be so independent?

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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I think the idea is that anyone could probably start up their own processing centre, since it should still be distributed, but would need large amounts of bandwidth and cpu/gpu time to do the hard work.

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Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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I don't like it.

Money used to have REAL value. You had coins, which were made of metal that had value. Up until 1968 the Canadian quarter and dime were actually made out of silver. Paper money came from banks, basically promisary notes to pay someone money you had in the bank.

Since then we have switched to this stupid confidence game in the value of the dollar and now this?? I'll pass.

I'll use a credit card for online purchases.

I see no use for this what so ever.

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“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Billybob
Member #3,136
January 2003

Neil Roy said:

I see no use for this what so ever.

Micro-payments.

Elverion
Member #6,239
September 2005
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Flash is using some of the card's resources.

I can play RIFT, with everything on maximum settings, while standing in the Guardian capitol (Sanctum) and still get over double the Mhash/s as compared to having a single Youtube video paused. Additionally, a Google video (even while playing), or any number of XVIDs playing through VLC have absolutely no effect.

Seems like something is wrong.

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SolarStrike Software - MicroMacro home - Automation software.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I still can't get Bitcoin built. I've given up on resolving the Wxwidgets dependencies for now and am just trying to build the daemon, bitcoind. However, it's looking for some openssl file that isn't installed by Fedora's packages and also isn't installed by openssl's Makefile (I tried installing from source). :-/ #bitcoin told me to edit the Makefile to point to openssl's include directory directly, which seems ridiculous... Why wouldn't it be installed? Sigh... Seems very shifty. All the more reason to not trust the binaries. >:(

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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If you give me 500 bitcoins, I'll help you out.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Now it's complaining about not finding -lboost_thread-mt. >:( It's right there in /usr/lib: /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so! >:( I think they're trying to statically link... In Linux. >:(

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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Elverion said:

I can play RIFT, with everything on maximum settings, while standing in the Guardian capitol (Sanctum) and still get over double the Mhash/s as compared to having a single Youtube video paused.

Damn you!

I'm on an AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.4Ghz (will OC sooner or later) and an OC'd GeForce GTX 460 and I can play all the games I have at max settings, except for RIFT.

There is some compatibility issue with the DX9 they used in RIFT with modern hardware and OSs (like Win7). Trion needs to get their shit straight.

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"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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I just downloaded and started bitcoin on my server. Works fine.

append: Just for the heck of it I've installed cpuminer and one of the gpu miners, and setup all three of my quadcores to work on bitcoin. I've only got about 34Mhash/s though. Not a whole heck of a lot.

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Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Tobias Dammers
Member #2,604
August 2002
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Neil Roy said:

Money used to have REAL value. You had coins, which were made of metal that had value. Up until 1968 the Canadian quarter and dime were actually made out of silver. Paper money came from banks, basically promisary notes to pay someone money you had in the bank.

Not really. Even the Gold Standard didn't guarantee any real-world value; it merely made sure that each dollar was backed with a certain amount of physical gold. Since gold is practically impossible to synthesize, occurs rarely in nature, and is hard (and expensive) to mine, this means that the total amount of dollars in circulation is reliably constant, which in turn, given a stable economy, means that the value of a dollar is going to be relatively stable as well.
But still, the metals money was (and partially still is) made of doesn't have much practical value by itself - you can't eat it, and stuff like gold and silver has limited use in producing tools and machines; and if nobody is around to make food, then all the gold and silver in the world won't buy you a sandwich. The perceived value stems from the fact that these metals are relatively easy to verify (for medieval standards at least), they don't deteriorate over time (like iron would), and they are rare and hard to come by.
Metal money is an abstraction of debt already, and paper money doesn't make any fundamental difference.

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Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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paper money doesn't make any fundamental difference.

Could you then explain why things cost nearly 10 times what they did when I was a kid? I remember buying a bowl of chili in a restaurant for 15 cents, Snicker bars for a nickel, and licorice whips etc. for a penny. The only reason I can think of is that the governments counterfeitedprinted 10 times as much money, actually more since the population has risen. The politicians ultimately use this funny money to buy votes.

[EDIT]

I also remember when they started making counterfeit silver coins (dimes and quarters) by using a copper layer in the center circa 1964. Our Weekly Readers (kid newspaper) explained how this "saved precious metals" but I was doubtful about it even then. In 1986 I was shown how US cents aren't solid copper alloy anymore either. That's the only way to allow this funny money to be tied to a fixed resource.

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Jonatan Hedborg
Member #4,886
July 2004
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The only reason I can think of is that the governments counterfeitedprinted 10 times as much money, actually more since the population has risen

Well they don't actually "print" the money, but put out loans. And it's called inflation. It's pretty much how our current economy works (and I use "works" in the loosest sense possible).

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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I also remember when they started making counterfeit silver coins (dimes and quarters) by using a copper layer in the center circa 1964.

Canadian Pennies haven't been pure copper since about 97 or so. After that they started copper plating zinc, then moved on to steel sandwiched between copper plated nickle. Theres less than 1% copper in our pennies these days.

Most of the silver coins are also made out of steel these days instead of nickle (they were all made out of nickle for as long as I can remember, even the dime, quarter and obviously nickle).

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

ImLeftFooted
Member #3,935
October 2003
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Government money is always cheating. Originally they stamped coins to tell you how pure it was and eventually how much it weighed. Once trust set in the sovereignties could make the coins less and less pure and weigh less and less (which of-course they did). At the end of the Romain empire their coin was down to 1/24th the promised purity.

But, even with this problem, it's still better then trading cattle. I think that's why everyone still does it.

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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Actually the coins meant for daily circulation were never made of the pure metal, they'd wear out way too quickly. You could probably bend them with your fingers. OTOH, it'd be a fun way to troll a politician at a rally, if he promises to fix the economy, ask him when they'll "make the coins right again". Of course you'd quickly be removed from the scene.

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They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Billybob
Member #3,136
January 2003

I bought $20 worth of bitcoins. Do you think they're going to deflate?

Well, much to my surprise, the markets jumped back up towards $0.90USD these past two days. So I guess you just made some money!

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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Most of the silver coins are also made out of steel these days instead of nickle (they were all made out of nickle for as long as I can remember, even the dime, quarter and obviously nickle).

Canadian dimes and quarters were pure silver up until 1967. Then in 1968 they were only partially silver and then nickle after that. I used to look for silver dimes and quarters 1967 or earlier and sell them for quite a bit when the price of silver was really high. You could make quite a bit selling these to people who then melted them down. Probably not as many of them around from that era any more due to all that got melted down. That's why the Nickle was always larger than the dime, yet worth less, because the dime used to be pure silver.

Edit: Here's a history of Canadian silver coins (about 80% silver up until 1967)

Canadian Silver Coins 1858-1968

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“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Jonatan Hedborg
Member #4,886
July 2004
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Billybob said:

So I guess you just made some money!

Only if he actually sells them ;)

Karadoc ~~
Member #2,749
September 2002
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I've got the bitcoin client running now. After letting it sit for quite some time, it has downloaded 107,000 blocks. According to this site the current total is 118287 blocks. So apparently I've almost downloaded enough blocks to actually start using it.

The thing is, relatively recently there were far few blocks: "As of October 30th 2009, there are about 26000 blocks." If it already takes ages to download all this junk, and it's going to grow much bigger, then this system is really going to be pain to use.

(while typing this, my download has stalled somewhat. It's still at roughly 107k.)

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bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I've got the bitcoin client running now. After letting it sit for quite some time, it has downloaded 107,000 blocks. According to this site the current total is 118287 blocks. So apparently I've almost downloaded enough blocks to actually start using it.

The thing is, relatively recently there were far few blocks: "As of October 30th 2009, there are about 26000 blocks." If it already takes ages to download all this junk, and it's going to grow much bigger, then this system is really going to be pain to use.

(while typing this, my download has stalled somewhat. It's still at roughly 107k.)

I don't think the mining is actually the way you're supposed to get bitcoins for practical use though. You would get bitcoins the same way you get dollars or euros: either from work, business, or by buying them with existing currency. I consider the mining as more or less a controlled way to "mint" the bitcoins. Participating in mining is optional though, AFAIK. It's a possible way to contribute and maybe even make a little bit of money in the process, depending on the speed and consumption of your computer.



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