Thank you for your thoughts canyoncry, they are very helpful.

I realise this is old news now, but I was looking at an old post by Slush relating to the hack on his pool (as a result of a vulnerability in Linode's web management interface).

The original topic is here.

I followed the coins a bit from the original destination address and found that they haven't really gone anywhere, beyond being recycled several times : https://blockexplorer.com/address/3HNSiAq7wFDaPsYDcUxNSRMD78qVcYKicw
Although it looks like today and yesterday they started being split up again.

Did anyone ever find out who perpetrated the hack ? Is anything being done to recover the coins or prevent them from being used ? Anything interesting someone can add ?

I'm just curious.

BTC lending on all the platforms I've seen so far (BTCJam, Bitlendingclub and BTCPoP) is exceptionally dodgy.

BTCJam's autoinvest feature is a brilliant way to lose a ton of BTC and their API is really quite useless; they don't expose loan history via their API, so it's difficult for members of the public to do their own research/calculate their own statistics. By contrast, BLC does expose loan history via their API and in general their API is sensible with language-neutral documentation. I have a copy of BLC's entire loan history in a MariaDB database, so I can go and query their loan history and generate my own stats whenever I want. Transparency is important.

Both BLC and BTCJ are filled with scammers, but BTCJam more so as a result of their forced-APR. Good borrowers on BLC will work towards a good reputation and will eventually demand lower interest rates whereas borrowers on BTCJ always pay ridiculous rates and as a result the platform attracts scammers.

I only invest on BLC these days. I use a machine learning system (the results of which are publicly available) to filter out loans with reasonable rates of success and then I personally scrutinise those loans. It takes time to work out the tell-tale signs of a scammer and the signs vary depending on the type of scammer (incompetent individual, scammer individual or group of scammers).

Point is, don't use BTCJam's Autoinvest, it's dangerous... and in general be very wary of investing in BTC P2P lending platforms, it's a great way of losing your BTC. Also, don't invest large amounts of BTC (greater than 0.1) in a borrower/listing unless you're absolutely sure that they (1) can pay you back, (2) will pay you back and (3) you'll be able to recover the debt legally if all else fails.

lol @ think outside the box - solar panels are expensive and you can't connect them directly, you need a charge controller and the charge controllers are also expensive.

Just bought four of them on the 15% discount .

This application is awesome, thank you azeteki.

I've been considering using something like a Trezor for storing my BTC for quite some time... but I think that putting an old PC to work as a wallet is better (seeing as it's in a safe, is secured behind multiple firewalls and is only electronically accessible via SSH). At the moment I do everything on the CLI, but your app makes it a lot easier/visually appealing to work with bitcoind on a terminal.

Thanks again .

I want to link my Bitcointalk name with BTCJam's. Verification code: 3a53ee0c-6df0-47b1-a859-fd46a753252b

Thanks Xiangfu. To answer my own question, this was the process I used :

CGMiner does not detect the Avalon2 by default. CGMiner is primarily a USB-only application and while the Avalon2 singles have USB ports on them they are essentially still serial devices (just with a Prolific RS232 adapter stuck on them). For this reason CGMiner doesn't auto-detect Avalon2 units, this has two implications :

1. You always have to compile with --enable-avalon2 and something else (CGMiner just quits if I only enable Avalon2 and nothing else)
and
2. CGMiner must be given the serial device to which the AVA2 is attached : cgminer -S /dev/ttyUSB0 .

To start from scratch on your own Ubuntu/Debian system (I followed this process on both Raspbian and an x86_64 machine) :

Install dependencies as per ckolivas/cgminer git readme :
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libcurl3-dev libudev-dev libncurses5-dev

Then clone the repo :
git clone https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.git

change into the directory :
cd cgminer

Autogen :
./autogen.sh

Then configure (with the pipe option so that everything is done in RAM) :
export CFLAGS="-pipe"
./configure --enable-avalon --enable-avalon2

Then compile :
make

You can also go "make -j 4" if you have a 4-core machine (or however many cores your machine has).

Once it's done compiling, you can optionally install it with "make install" or you can run it from the directory with "./cgminer". Either way you'll need to execute cgminer with the following arguments :

./cgminer -S /dev/ttyUSB0 --avalon2-voltage 10000 --avalon2-freq 1500 --avalon2-fan 100

The ttyUSB0 device is your first USB serial port. CGMiner seems to handle multiple -S arguments correctly (multiple singles per cgminer instance).
avalon2-voltage at 10000 is 1.0V (the max is 1.1V).
avalon2-freq is the core frequency... the default is 1500... but I've overclocked mine to 1700 with a 1.1V.
avalon2-fan is obviously the fan speed as a percentage, I just keep mine at 100%.

At a clock of 1500 and 1.0V the device at a room temperature of 24 degrees C with good airflow hits about 64 degrees C. At 1700 with a 1.1V set the device hits around 74 degrees C in the same environment. Both of these assume the fan is at 100%.

The device does not have a thermal throttle/cut-out, so it's important to watch the temperature when overclocking. Xiangfu indicated on IRC that 80 degrees C is acceptable.

You can monitor temperature by adding "--api-listen" to cgminer's arguments and compiling cgminer-api :
gcc api-example.c -Icompat/jansson-2.5 -Icompat/libusb-1.0/libusb -o cgminer-api

If you run "./cgminer-api stats" one of the fields output will be the temperature. Another useful field that's output is the hardware error %.

A bit off topic, but on the subject of BFL being questionable; I love the way on Black Friday they reduced their pricing on their 28nm miners by 25% ( from $4680 to $3510 for a 600) ... and then shortly after that on new year's day slashed the pricing on their 28nm miners again (from $ 3510 to $2100). In other words, if you got on the pre-order train early, you paid 100%, but if you got on the pre-order train later you got a 55% discount. Is that... reasonable ?

Hi

I recently received a second generation (55nm) Avalon2 Single unit. Avalon sells 2U rack-mount units for 4.5BTC that have three of these "single" units inside them. When you buy the single unit on it's own you get a small interface card with it that let's you connect the machine to a PC via USB.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like support for this module exists in either the latest CGMiner or BFGMiner. CGMiner has a driver-avalon2.c file and xiangfu has been contributing to it, but it appears as though cgminer lacks the linkage from identification to driver library to actually identify the device and start mining with it.

Can anyone help with getting CGMiner to recongise this device ? The device presents as a USB serial port under Linux :

I have a lot of Raspberry Pis... they all use 5V PSUs. A few months back I bought some Chinese wall worts and used them with my Pis. The Pis ran fine... but when I happened to touch ground on one of the Pis and another grounded metal object nearby I got a massive continuous shock. A multimeter showed that 240vac was present between the USB charger's ground and earth. So now I make sure I test wall worts before use.

So yes, you could put 500v down a standard USB cable, the voltage isn't the issue, it's the Amps. A prolonged short circuit at high voltage will draw enough amps to destroy the cable.

I ordered a 30GH unit from BFL... I didn't think they'd deliver and it took ages... but to my astonishment they did deliver and the machine in question is working just fine. The PSU of the machine is big, more than adequately specc'ed for the purpose and certainly isn't "leaking" electricity.

My only gripe, apart from the delays, is that the unit I ordered and received didn't have a strong enough airflow to keep the chips running cool enough to avoid thermal throttling (at 21 deg C), but removal of the grilles on either side of the case fixed that problem.

BFL has made mistakes... Blackmagic Design has recently too with their incredibly late 4k cameras... but I think a lot of the issues BFL has been experiencing are self-fulfilling prophecies (our self-fulfilling prophecies).

It looks like this point has been touched on before but :

I'd love to buy a Trezor... but a price of $ 697 for the plastic unit is far too high (according to Mt Gox the price of BTC is currently 697 USD and the plastic Trezor is 1 BTC).

Are the creators of this device intending on reducing the price ?

Same here @ "inceptor" - also just a got a message from that user :
I'll definitely take them up on their offer .

Hi

I'm looking for someone who can supply reasonable volumes* of BTC for South African Rands** in the near future (next 2 months).

I'm located near Cape Town.

Thanks

*Reasonable = 50 BTC at a time, perhaps 50BTC per month.
**Can be cash or EFT.

Herro

I currently use Mt Gox for most of my trades, but I'll give Bitstamp a try .

I'm a junior member now - I couldn't do that previously (I hope "junior" means "you can post on the exchange forum").

Mt Gox seems to be fine as a trading platform... I've really mostly used it for trading; ie. I deposit BTC and then periodically withdraw BTC. It's mostly BTC I've mined myself but I sometimes buy through VirWox which amazingly still works out cheaper than using sellers on localbitcoins.com lol, even though it's a credit card transaction - through PayPal.

And on a side note... wow difficulty increase = BTC vs USD increase (in BTC's favour).

Thanks for the advice guys . I'll post an ad on the exchange forum.

...ouch

Hi

I'm South African and I'm looking for other South Africans that have bitcoins to sell.

Assuming a rate of $200 USD per btc, I'm looking to buy between 50 and 200 btc per month starting from (and including) December 2013.

Hopefully when I've become more established I'll be able to move this topic into the correct section.

And as a general introduction : I started mining Bitcoins via Slush's pool with an OC'ed ATI GPU in June 2012. I have found 2 blocks; 200279 and 216293. I'm now mining with a BFL 30GHash/sec unit and a DE0-Nano FPGA (lol), both using BFGMiner on a Raspberry Pi.

Thanks