Suppose I have $1 USD in my checking account.

I transfer my $1 to Bill online, who has $50.

Next, Bill transfers Mary $5.

Where is my $1? Does Bill or Mary have it?

The question is meaningless with anything fungible. Ownership doesn't track through a fungible account.

They've halted all trades due to the Mt. Gox closure, but still processed all withdrawals (I cashed out about 12 hours after trading stopped and got it a few hours later). Kudos for an orderly shutdown with good communication, and I look forward to resuming when they find a real exchange

Lol sorry - didn't see your post when I wrote mine

1. Go to www.bitcoinwisdom.com
2. Select Bitstamp (or MtGox if you ignore this month), 1 week interval, and choose Logarithmic in Settings.
3. See if you can detect a pattern beginning in 2011...

While past performance is no indication of future results, patterns often repeat.

You can place trades for the minimum (I think about $10 or so) to get used to how it works - that's what I did.

I've been depositing and withdrawing pretty much every day for the past ten days, and trading in and out of 2-10 positions per day, all with no problems (deposits show up in about 30 min and withdrawals are processed once every 24 hours). It looks like they're making funds available after 1-2 confirmations, but of course you couldn't turn around and cash that out until your deposit was fully confirmed.

Can't vouch for other users, but I've been very happy with BTC.sx (although I haven't needed to contact support lately). Only minor complaint is that if you buy or sell in a rapidly changing market, it can take up to 3-5 minutes to fill, which can mean the market has moved significantly against your position in the meantime. I.e. If you see BTC at 400 and rising rapidly and you place a buy, it might not get filled for a few min, at which point the price is 410. By "rapidly changing", I mean $10-20 or more per minute where the chart goes vertical, not normal fluctuations. So don't try to buy based on split-second changes.

They were also nice enough to post a message saying transaction malleability hasn't been affected, and even when MtGox was crashing to 300 the site worked fine (and I made about 5 times my money in 48 hours).

With the caveat that you'd better be pretty comfortable making "investments" that can double or disappear in a few hours, I would definitely recommend them. Keep bitcoinwisdom.com (mtgox/USD) in one window and btc.sx in the other and go to town. Start small until you figure it out.

When your wallet is opened (assuming you have set up the .conf file as explained above), it is opening as a node - there is no additional step needed to make it a node that's able to link up with other wallets.

Try opening the wallet on two computers in the same network, and using addnode to point each one to the other's internal IP address (no port number needed). If this works, then your issue is network/firewall/port related, not a problem with the wallets/nodes themselves. Firewalls and port forwarding can be tricky depending on your network configuration, but is more general IT than an altcoin config issue.

Quote from The Fifth Element scene matching the avatar image: "Leeloo Dallas - Multipass".

If the following happened to you, this guide is for you:

1. You created a new altcoin on coingen.io, ready to change the world with your own altcoin!

2. You downloaded the zipfile and installed the xxxcoin-qt wallet to Windows. While you are reasonably knowledgeable about Windows and maybe a little about Macs, all you know about Linux is that it involves penguins in some manner and there seems to be quite a lot of typing involved.

3. You ran the wallet and waited for something to happen - but it just sat there, saying "Block Source Not Available", perhaps a number of hours (or days) behind, and a computer icon with a red X on the bottom right corner. No matter how long you waited, nothing happened.

4. Searching the web, you found some mining software and downloaded it - one called CGminer looked like Microsoft DOS circa 1989, so you went with GUIMiner (scrypt if you chose "scrypt" in your coingen.io setup screen). You installed that too, but weren't sure what should go into any of the fields. When you pressed "Start" anyway, nothing happened.

5. Confused, you googled "coingen.io" and spent several hours looking for documentation, guides, walkthroughs, friggin' ANYTHING, to help you set it up.

6. After a while, you realized all the people who know how to set up altcoins REALLY don't want any more altcoins floating around. It is not a coincidence that they are not falling all over themselves to help bring new altcoins into the mix (basically, "my altcoin #94 is going to get all messed up by your altcoin #298, you charlatan!")

7. You also read a lot of posts saying what a scam coingen.io was, and began to think you wasted some BTC. You may have cried a tear or two for all the lost beer that represented.

But all is not lost! The coingen.io software really does work - so I wrote this to summarize what I was able to find out in a couple of days from various sources, but isn't actually clearly stated anywhere for an altcoin novice (like me) to easily grasp. The following information is insultingly simple for people who know what they're doing, but is pretty damn hard to find if you don't.

MAIN POINTS:
1. For a brand-new altcoin to run, there must be at least two computers running your xxxcoin client. This is the sort of thing that's a "well, DUH" fact for experienced people and a "HTF was I supposed to know that?" for newbies. These can be on separate networks, or you can manually instruct your client to look for another computer on the same network. For now, we'll assume you have two computers on the same network or workgroup (doesn't need to be a work domain, it can just be a couple of computers in your house that use the same router).

2. So go to each computer, download your altcoin zipfile from coingen.io, and install it on each computer.

3. While your kit doesn't come with a preset configuration file, you can create one with a text editor. Assuming you created "xxxcoin", this file should be located at C:\Users\(your name)\Appdata\Roaming\Xxxcoin, and should be called "xxxcoin.conf". This configuration file needs to be created manually, and includes some vital parameters if you are starting from scratch. You will want to create this on each of the two computers.

4. Here are some basic parameters you can use to get started:

server=1 (I think you need this to solo mine)
daemon=1 (not sure what this does)
listen=1 (this makes your client listen for other clients - this may be default anyway, but I tossed it in there just in case)
rpcuser=(a username you choose)
rpcpassword=(password you choose)
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 (this is for solo mining setup)
rpcconnect=127.0.0.1 (this is for solo mining setup)
rpcport=9527 (you can set this to any port - this does not need to be the same port as you chose in coingen.io setup, which is the TCP port for your firewall)
addnode=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (this is very important - when starting from scratch, you will have to tell one of the two clients exactly where the other one is. When there are hundreds of clients running, this probably isn't necessary anymore. If you are running two computers on your own network, you should type in the IP address of the other computer (google how to find a computer's own IP address if you don't know how in Windows - don't use www.whatismyipaddress.com, which will return your network's outside IP address - you want your computer's internal network IP address). This "internal IP" will probably start with either 10.1 or 192.168. You can also enter the addnode line on the other comp, pointing to the first one's IP.

5. Save each file in C:\Users\(your name)\Appdata\Roaming\Xxxcoin\xxxcoin.conf. Make sure it doesn't accidentally save as "xxxcoin.conf.txt".

6. Now start the xxxcoin-qt.exe client on both computers. If the IP addresses are correct, each one should now show a little green check in the lower right, with a connectivity icon next to it showing one bar. On the right, it may still say "Block Source not available" but we will take care of this shortly.

7. Another thing that isn't very clearly disseminated is that you can mine your new coin directly within your client - you don't need a separate mining client, although it's probably much faster, and definitely faster for scrypt. To mine, go to "Help", then Debug Window, then click the Console tab. This seems daunting but is actually very useful. Type "help" to see all the available commands. The one you want right now is "setgenerate", which tells your client to start mining. Type in "setgenerate true -1" and hit Enter. After a few seconds, it should start mining coins! You will see them pop up in blocks on your main wallet screen - you can click "Transactions" to get a list of mined blocks. Note that blocks are "immature" until 120 more blocks have been created, then they are added to your balance.

8. Now go to your other computer and run "setgenerate true -1" on that computer too - it should also start mining. If you are curious about how fast you're mining, go to the console and type "getmininginfo" and look for hashespersec - 1000 equals 1kH/sec.

9. You can also type other commands in the console - type "help" to see the list again. "Getpeerinfo" should show the other computer's info. You may notice the IP address ends in ":xxxxx" - this is the port number corresponding to that IP address, which is not important when on the same network and is auto-generated.

10. Once you have mined 120 blocks, try sending some coins from one to the other. On one computer, go to "Receive" and copy the address listed there - e-mail or write down that address. Then go to the other computer and click "Send", and paste/type in the address you got from the first one. When you send them, they will be transferred from one computer to the other when the next block is mined, and then fully confirmed after 6 more blocks have been processed in total. This is a very simple example of how the whole bitcoin blockchain works - I found it pretty cool because my raw newbieness rating is so high.

11. Now if you have a scrypt-based coin, you will want to download GUIMiner-scrypt, and run that miner instead of the built-in one - it will generally be 50-100x faster. Once you have downloaded and installed it, make sure your xxxcoin-qt client/wallet is already running - then start the miner. I was not able to get the default miner scenario working, so had to go to File-New, and created a reaper miner. In host, enter 127.0.0.1. In Port, enter 9527, or whatever you chose to use in your "rpcport=" in your xxxcoin.conf file above. The username and password should also match what you put in your .conf file.

12. Next, go to "Solo Utilities" in the miner and choose "Set Bitcoin Client Path" - this should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Xxxcoin\xxxcoin-qt.exe. Make sure to click on the filename to replace the "bitcoin-qt" default, then click "Open". Next, go to Solo Utilities - Set Bitcoin Data Directory, and set to C:\Users\(your name)\Appdata\Roaming\Xxxcoin instead of Bitcoin. You don't need to start the client as a server since you already included the "Server=1" parameter in your .conf file.

13. Now choose a "GPU default" most closely matching your own GPU, and click Start. After a few seconds, it should start creating blocks, and a "xx khash/s" number should show up in the lower right. In some cases, the block problem is so easy that your GPU will just kick out stale/invalid blocks (basically tripping all over itself) and not create actual blocks. In this case, click File-Quit in GUIMiner, and create a desktop icon for guiminer.exe on your desktop. Right-click on the icon for guiminer.exe , and add " -s1.5" right after guiminer.exe in the "Target" box, so it shows the path, then "guiminer.exe -s1.5" at the end. This introduces a little pause between solving, and provides a better balance of accepted/stale (or did for me anyway).

14. Now start the miner again, and start the particular mining scenario you created - if it's correctly solving, you should see little pop-ups of new blocks created, just like when you were mining through the qt client, but hopefully a lot faster.

15. Fool around with different combinations and settings in the miner to get the best performance.

16. (Different Networks) If you don't have two computers on your network, or want to try this with a friend when they are on a different network, you will need to do a couple additional steps. I only tried this with static IPs, and I'm not sure how to set it up if all you have are dynamic IPs. You could probably make it work by going to www.whatismyipaddress.com from each computer, then entering that address into the "addnode=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" on the other computer's xxxcoin.conf screen. But for at least one static IP:

a. First, on at least one router's firewall settings screen, create a new port forwarding rule that forwards incoming traffic on the port you chose during your coingen.io creation to the internal IP address of the computer on that network that's running the coin client. You can find this port number again by going to "
Help-Debug Window-Command-Line Options - Show Details" then scroll down to "-port" and it will list that port number. This is the TCP port number you want to forward in your firewall. (If someone more knowledgeable than I thinks this is an extraordinarily bad idea, please speak up).

b. Next, modify the xxxcoin.conf file on the OTHER computer (not the one behind the firewall you just set) so that the "addnode=" includes both the IP address and port number for the first computer behind the firewall. So for example, if the computer behind the firewall has a router with the external static IP address of 222.222.222.222, and you just opened TCP port 9555, then the .conf file on the OTHER computer should say "addnode=222.222.222.222:9555".

c. If you configured the firewall port forwarding correctly, you should be able to start both clients and both will see each other. You don't need to modify both firewalls, and if one computer isn't behind a firewall at all, you might be able to connect without the port forwarding or adding the ":9555" port number. Try it and see, and only do the firewall stuff if you cannot connect otherwise.

I hope this guide comes in handy and assists some people in getting their coingen.io projects up and running!

CAVEATS & DISCLAIMERS:

1. I realize I'm a frigging idiot and total newbie, and that this is full of errors I'm not aware of, some of which could make your computer explode, and potentially break the Internet forever. I know just enough to be dangerous, and only wrote this guide because I couldn't find one that anyone else had written, and wanted to save others some time.

2. I would love it if someone more knowledgeable made corrections, comments, and/or criticisms. However, please use your "verbose" setting - very smart IT people tend to say things like "oh, just do the addnode and forward the port - easy/peasy" - which makes it frustrating for people like me who don't know WTF an addnode is, whether the port means the rpcport, or the port you gave in coingen.io, and is that a TCP or UDP port, and where do you forward it to, and why the %)*# they use "port" to describe everything assuming you know all the various ways ports can be used, etc.

Just FYI, I did a transfer from blockchain.info at 8pm (recommended settings, 10-15 BTC) and it's only at 4 confirmations 4.75 hours later (first one wasn't until an hour ago).

Get some sleep and check it tomorrow.

I read some posts discussing the fact that BitInstant is somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, and if you have an issue, it can take several days to get a response. Has anyone had a good/bad experience with them recently?