Thanks for the explanation. However,

1. Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, it's a brokerage. All the hedging will take place if our clients place orders in a particular direction. The spread seems high now, but will be eventually lower.

2. We don't bet against our clients. We never want them to lose. There's no incentive to do that.

3. There are large scale transactions coming in Bitcoinica. First day we got 3700+ BTC, ranked number 3 among all trading platforms. Bitcoinica has more than 5% of total Bitcoin/USD trades. A bucket shop can't survive this amount of volume.

4. Because of stop orders and margin calls, we are partly responsible for the crash. Our orders are already influencing the market.

5. I'm not a Singapore citizen. I just live here. Thank you for teaching me the culture.

Itsagas,
      I think there may have been couple of miscommunication on your call - McAfee has three products.  (1) McAfee Secure  (2) McAfee PCI Certification, and (3) McAfee Saas Vulnerabilities Scan.

Sales teams are not the best source for technical answers.  Please open a ticket with their support team, who will be able to tell you far more details.

Essentially, the test includes a set of probes to guess what software / versions you are running, and then the specific tests battery starts.  I have the full log available to me, and can share it with a reputed member of Bitcoin forum for independent verification.

And as I mentioned couple of messages back, McAfee is just one facet in our approach.  We are using everything from Nmap to peer-reviews to find holes before launch.

Hope this helps,
      Keyur

Hi everyone,
      The results are in!  https://campbx.com/testnet/main.php

We were tested for >1,000 known vulnerabilities specific to our platform and services by McAfee Secure (formerly McAfee Hacker-Safe), who are ranked #1 in security industry for threat detection.  This is the same auditing service used by well-known brands like Costco, Petco, and Roush Racing for their e-commerce websites.


Here is an executive summary of our results:

OWASP top-10 web vulnerabilities:
    A1: Injection - Pass
    A2: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) - Pass
    A3: Broken Authentication and Session Management - Pass
    A4: Insecure Direct Object References - Pass
    A5: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) - Pass
    A6: Security Misconfiguration - Pass
    A7: Insecure Cryptographic Storage - Pass
    A8: Failure to Restrict URL Access - Pass
    A9: Insufficient Transport Layer Protection - Pass
    A10: Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards - Pass

Distributed Denial-of-Service attack: Pass with no noticeable slowdown in response time

All vulnerabilities are classified on a scale of 1-to-5, with 5 being Urgent and 1 being informational.  Camp BX final scorecard is:
Sev 5: zero
Sev 4: zero
Sev 3: zero
Sev 2: zero
Sev 1: 29
(Sev 1 includes information like "DNS Server detected", "NTP Server detected", "SSL Certificate mismatch on Testnet.CampBX.com"...)


This makes Camp BX is  the first Bitcoin platform certified for compliance with 7 information and data security standards!  

We have also achieved all requirements for the McAfee Secure Trustmark, and on our livenet launch Camp BX platform will proudly wear this badge.  A HUGE thank you to Alex and Yuriy for burning the midnight oil to fix all issues identified, and ensuring that we are able to achieve this crucial certification prior to our launch.


Going forward Camp BX will be re-tested daily for all known vulnerabilities.  We realize that security is a process, and we have put together alerts and escalation procedures in place to ensure that anything higher than Sev 1 is fixed within 72 hours.


Thank you and good night,
      Keyur

"(formerly McAfee Hacker-Safe), who are ranked #1 in security industry for threat detection"

"We were tested for >1,000 known vulnerabilities specific to our platform"

We have also achieved all requirements for the McAfee Secure Trustmark

certified for compliance with 7 information and data security standards

We don't really know that. Could be mostly a secret pool and the rest solo mining.

then use the legal system.

what you propose opens the door for chargebacks.  then bitcoin would suck worse than paypal.

I have 2 6950s..both reference...one his and one asus...i went on techpowerup and searched their bios collection..they have unlocked bios of both cards..

ALWAYS use an unlocked 6950 bios rather than flashing it with a 6970 bios...the later will cause your card to run hotter, break the voltage control, and has know to cause damage due to the memory using different timings..

as for increasing the overclocking limits, i dont use the unofficial method in msi afterburner as then i cant clock down the cards at idle and i lose the power control 20+ option in CCC..

to get around the 840mhz limit, i used racerx's registry CCC hack and set my own upper and lower limits, that way i didnt have to enable 'unofficial overclocking'..google it

Yes, doing the maths is a good idea. It will give you a more clear vision of what could be. Im doing it.

The problem is that at the end of the day all your maths could account to nothing. The bitcoin price exchange could skyrocket again and give you record profits as the new miners take a while to set up new rigs. Or the bitcoin price exchange could collapse and you would eat all the hardware.

You can do all the maths you want to get a clearer vision of the "what if", but no math is going to tell you what is the right decssion.

The problem is that it is not that simple. To calculate you need to know the difficulty of mining and the exchange of bitcoin and the currency you pay electricity with (dollar, euros, ...) for the next months. And if you knew that you would probably make more money speculating.

The difficulty changes (roughly) every 14 days and depends on the power of the Bitcoin network, which changes as new miners and new rigs are added. Can you tell me what difficulty is going to be in 2 months? In 4? In 6?

The exchange ration changes even more. Can you tell me what the exchange ratio is going to be in two months? In 4? In 6?

Basically you can not do the maths. You can speculate and make your guess, but at the end of the day its not guaranteed. Mining is risky. You can end up eating your hardware if the difficulty goes up a lot and the exchange does not. And the difficulty is going up a lot in the next iterations.