Hmm...my address (BSAL3Gm4ckPbygyoyf2X6ZHBUdtBa1BFrn) is showing as a payout of 0. Shouldn't it drop off the list? Or should the payout not be 0?

I searched but didn't figure out if this is normal p2pool behavior so in this case I don't know if I'm pointing you towards a problem or just showing my ignorance.

-Mo

Woohoo, got my first little bit of BTB! Thanks, baloo_kiev, for all your hard work and help.

redcoins.co seems not to be working right now. It's telling me to calm down, which is amusing.

And has anyone else noticed that, despite trying very, very hard to make it look legit, the free bitcoin lottery seems to pay out small winnings on about 1 out of 3 plays? Doesn't that seem an order of magnitude too easy for a 6/49 game? Not that I'm complaining, it's fun to feel like I'm 10x luckier than everybody else, but it smells fishy.

The fact that they're effectively getting 3-5 captchas for about the same average payout per hour as each of the clone faucets makes me think they're just a classier captcha farm. Oh, well, I enjoyed it for a while, I'll keep doing it until I hit the coinbox payout and then stop until something that doesn't feel sleazy comes along to legitimize coinbox.

I didn't mention this in the newbie thread because I don't want to turn off newbies from bitcoin. I imagine the pitiful ROI discourages most of them before they enrich the spammers too horribly much, anyway, if that's what's really going on here. *shrug*

-Mo

Thanks for explaining! Setting up my own instance of P2Pool is probably beyond my current capabilities, but I'll read up on the technical details and see if I'm up to it. Probably about the time I get it working, you'll have yours back to accepting outside connections...

I have been unable to connect to the pool since yesterday, either with minerd or a web browser. It just times out.

Is it still at http://78.27.191.182:8333 ?

Well, coinbox looks a whole lot more professional to me, and they actually have a contact email address, which also adds a professional touch. You could email and ask, since you've sent them so much business via this post.

I'd be shocked if whoever is running coinbox isn't monitoring this thread, though. Maybe they'll chime in?

-Mo

I use adblock too, so I dunno if they even display ads. I figure their profit is from either ads or spammers buying captchas, or both. I get a bad vibe off of all of those that are just clones of one another. The lotto one doesn't bother me as much, so it's the only one I use regularly.

I hope these sites aren't related to coinbox itself, because as a micropayment system it's a good idea, and I don't want it to get a bad rep.

-Mo

They're all like that, I'm afraid. With 1BTC trading at over $100US, these free places can't give out much...

Thanks! I'll go RTFM now.

Never mind, I wasn't abstracting far enough. I was thinking blocks:pseudoshares, not blocks:shares:pseudoshares. So minerd won't know, but what's the difficulty difference between pseudoshares and shares so I can estimate?

I guess the difficulty difference between blocks and shares is bigger for the ltcoin pool, meaning I got 4 much smaller shares last night. Presumably after your estimate of 10 hours, give or take (a lot), I'll get one share from P2Pool that's a good deal bigger than the ones I got last night from ltcoin, right?

Thanks, that's how I understood it to work.

So is there a number of pseudoshares I have to submit before I show up in the "Payouts if a block were found NOW" list?

Edit: Er, an estimated number? And, does my minerd know the difference?

Yeah, I figured hashing at such a low rate would make for delays in various ways, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't going to waste, otherwise I'll just solo mine and cross my fingers.


So, my minerd telling me "accepted" isn't the same thing as having submitted a share? Because quite a few were accepted, which I'm sure is how P2Pool figured out my hashrate.

Is there a number it has to accept before I have a share?

Thanks!

-Mo

Edit: Mining for a few hours in the btb.ltcoin.net pool last night got me 4 shares and an eventual payout of around 0.00005. Useless since that pool pays out at 0.02, but it showed me that my minerd is working, at least. So what has me worried is that my address didn't show up in the P2Pool "Payouts if a block were found NOW:" table, even though I mined for longer last night under P2Pool than ltcoin.net and had "accepted" figures in the double digits. I'm back to P2Pool and I'll let it run for the day and see what happens.

I think in this case it may be an insufficient number of posts to include links in the sig. Isn't the minimum 10...?


*shrug* Fine either way by me.

Testing, with my paltry 1.7Kh or so from an old CPU.

One thing I noticed, the BTB address I'm mining with is listing in the local stats with a hash rate, but even after a few hours of hashing it hasn't shown up on either the users or the current payouts pages. I've heard P2Pool can be a bit slow to show such things, and my low hash rate probably doesn't help, but is this a problem or should I just leave it running and be patient?

Also, if I mine at such a low hash rate for a few hours but don't show up in the users or payouts, and then I shut down the machine, have I wasted all of the time I spent mining? I assume the payout stats indicate a payout for a block already found, so if I do show up in the payout stats and then stop mining in the pool, I'll eventually get a (small) payout...?

Good luck with the pool and the currency!

-Mo

Edit: Forgot to mention, BTB address is: BJH5ykFQisPAnwnAkeqgvisDbxnJs6owGt
Edit 2: Switched my meagre mining muscle to another pool for now. I'll be back if it'll help you test, I like P2Pools.

Hmmm...leave it to me to find an oddity...

I tried to sign up, but clicking on the signup button doesn't seem to do anything! Neither does the login button.

I'm using Firefox 21 on XP. I run NoScript, but I temporarily unblocked all scripts on the page, and everything seems to work except signup or login. I can see the chat going on in the main room, switch to full screen, or click on other buttons and get an appropriate response (like please register or log in to chat!). The little kitty even opens her mouth when I mouse over her.

Anybody run into this before? Suggestions?

-Mo

Done, and done!

@MoTLD
1MoTLDxxwp73ftUVy476DPzmcCQJRtNyQT

Wish me luck!

-Mo

I signed up a long while back but have been offline for months. Now I'm back and I see there's a newbie lotto. I hope I still count!

Here's an address I'm not using for anything else: 1Pb28oPWbw7LeTKYvjadFF13NV2n6JDQWv

Thanks!

-Mo

Duly noted, and thanks!

I'll be back on the road next week, and will thus have lots of time to meditate on this. When winter rolls around again and I find myself indoors with a soldering iron and lots of free time, this might just be the project I take up. And if before then I find myself struck by sudden inspiration (or a pallet of cheap printers) I'll let y'all know.

Thanks again, everybody, for all of the great ideas, refinements, and discussion!

-Mo

PS - It's a credit to this forum that so many pillars of the community hang out here in the newbies section!

'Cause I was a newbie when I started it.


It would. But I think I've learned what I wanted to know from this thread, so I'm going to summarize it and, after a little time for comments, close it. I'll then organize my thoughts and start a new topic in the appropriate forum later, probably when I've got a prototype (unless my flights of fancy take me elsewhere...).


Well, while these things are all excellent and useful; I think the easiest way to make them happen would be for someone42 to add printer support to his ongoing project. I haven't read more than the first few posts of his thread, but from the sound of things it already does most of what's been discussed here in terms of connecting to a computer and dealing with transactions, etc. I need to read the rest and get up to date.

Also, it sounds like a POS term would be the easiest and cheapest OTS hardware for this purpose, so maybe casascius and someone42 should be collaborating on the best and most cost-effective hardware wallet around? Or...competition is always good...

But the device I had in mind is truly air gapped. It never connects to a computer, and it doesn't even store keys. It's a wallet generator, not a wallet. Some folks don't like paper wallets, and I can understand that, but I do.

A hardware wallet is a replacement for a checking account or a real wallet full of cash. They don't have nearly the attack surface of a general purpose computer, but they do have an attack surface. Think of my proposed device as a savings account generator instead. It makes wallets which never have and never will touch a networkable device until the moment you're ready to transfer the entire balance elsewhere. When you want to do so, you boot your computer with your handy live CD and generate an offline transaction and when it's gone through you throw away the old paper wallet. Since the paper wallet is a one-time thing, you might not even need the live CD/offline transaction hassle if you're reasonably sure nobody will be able to snarf your private key and empty your wallet before your own transaction goes through.

So I guess the point of this thread, for me, was to see if anybody would be interested in dedicated hardware to do what GP hardware and a dedicated live boot CD already does very well. It seems to me that if you generate enough wallets with a CD boot you won't need to reboot to generate wallets as often as you'll need to reboot to generate transactions. So there probably isn't a market for an air gapped wallet generator unless it also generates air gapped transactions.

However, there does seem to be quite a potential market for hardware wallets. Someone42 and casascius seem to be on similar paths for a convenient but reasonably secure daily-use type hardware wallet. I'll keep thinking about how a proper savings account generator should work, and whether one is even useful versus something like a brain wallet or just CD booting a computer once in a while.

Maybe I'll just put together a bitcoin-tailored live CD. :-P

-Mo

PS - Feel free to post your closing comments, but I'd like to close this topic soon so if there's a good discussion to be had it should have its own topic.

Actually, I kinda had in mind users who are already so distrustful of their computers as to boot from a live CD every time they create new wallets, and even to create transactions if those wallets are intended for more than one use. This device would simply be a more convenient way to do the same thing.


All true. I would love for the device to generate transactions, too, but like you said, manual input of addresses is problematic and adding a camera or the like increases the complexity beyond what I had in mind. But I'll keep brainstorming. Manual input, annoying as it is, wouldn't add too much complexity if the device already had a keyboard and screen (like casascius's POS terminals). Hmm...casascius, do your POS terms support a barcode scanner? Maybe the printer could output an old fashioned barcode instead of/in addition to a QR code...?


Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that thread yet. Looks like I've got some more prior art reading to do!


Are you really gonna make me finally learn C? I've managed to avoid doing so for over 20 years now...

-Mo