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Showing 20 of 27 results by semarjt
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: *grumble* CampBX still got rounding issues
by
semarjt
on 01/08/2011, 16:18:43 UTC
Ouch, not storing times in UTC??

Welcome to Servers 101.

In my opinion, this is a bigger red flag than some well meaning UI effort.

This speaks to incompetence or at least ignorance of basic best practice.

Semarjet,
    The times are stored in UTC, but displayed in Mountain Time.

We are already working on changing the feed to Bitcoin Charts to UTC.

Stay tuned,
    Keyur




My bad then. I apologize.
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: *grumble* CampBX still got rounding issues
by
semarjt
on 01/08/2011, 15:43:54 UTC
Ouch, not storing times in UTC??

Welcome to Servers 101.

In my opinion, this is a bigger red flag than some well meaning UI effort.

This speaks to incompetence or at least ignorance of basic best practice.
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Topic
Board Project Development
Re: [ANN] API for Instawallet
by
semarjt
on 08/07/2011, 05:31:14 UTC
just out of curiosity, why GET /new_wallet, when the other calls all seem more RESTful

GET should be idempotent
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: I need web hosting help
by
semarjt
on 08/07/2011, 04:52:07 UTC
Whats the bitcoin daemon? Huh Embarrassed
I dont have linux and whats a gui lol


Um, what's your website name again?
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Who was the original mtgox owner?
by
semarjt
on 06/07/2011, 22:59:24 UTC


What inside trading information can an exchange operator have?


Darkpools, specific knowledge of peoples login time / patterns, exact names and emails of "wealthy" people

Also, seeing an influx of cash means the price is likely to go up. (10x the normal dwolla deposits due for a day)
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin _is_ more convenient
by
semarjt
on 05/07/2011, 03:22:33 UTC
Right now I am renting from a landlord who is just a regular person (no company, no cc, nothing)

It is really painful to pay rent.

Options:

1.) Write check, give her check, she goes to her bank, deposit check, (trusts me), (2-3 days)
2.) Pay 20$ regardless of size to have money wired to her (close to instant)
3.) Get cash out and go and hand it to her. (Quick but inconvenient, she lives on the other side of town.)
4.) Pull out cash, drive to her bank, deposit money in her account. (same as 3, but less inconvenient, still a PITA)
5.) Money order, etc
6.) Have wells fargo 'Bill Pay' cut her a check and mail it automatically (takes 3-4 days, this last month I had it scheduled for the 25, which landed on a saturday, they said the check would arrive on the 5th! (plus then the time of the check clearing in her bank.)

Bitcoin beats the pants off of all of these I think. And this is where it shines; person to person transactions (loaning money, paying rent, buying crap)
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Have you held in your hands some actual euros and dollars as a result of mining?
by
semarjt
on 04/07/2011, 08:48:26 UTC
I don't mine. So I can't answer your question 'as a result of mining'

But it sounds to me like you are about to take the plunge and want to know "is this shit for real? Can I really sell bitcoins for real money?"


Do this:

1.) Open an account on mtgox or tradehill.
2.) Buy Bitcoins
3.) Wait a day.
4.) Sell Bitcoins
5.) Withdraw EUR/USD from exchange.

You will see that you can, in fact, trade BTC for USD.
As far as mining is concerned, It'll only be 1,4,5


As far as "is mining actually profitable?" That's a whole other enchilada.

EDIT: Re read your post to see you aren't actually solely focused on mining. But the answer remains, yes, there are always buyers for your bitcoins (or there have been so far)
I still recommend doing the above so you can see that step 4 is actually the easiest part.



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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Mt Gox - Fees
by
semarjt
on 04/07/2011, 07:32:16 UTC
Give Mark a break!

Yes, the fees are a bit steep, but he still has to pay for the franchise, after all he just bought the exchange and probably got a bit more than he bargained for... Wink



25.6mil 30d volume x .0130 (0.0065 on each side) leaves 330k this month..no?

Yeah, sucks to be him.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Goxed - 15:30 open
by
semarjt
on 26/06/2011, 17:31:48 UTC
This ought to be interesting..
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Goxed - 15:30 open
by
semarjt
on 26/06/2011, 15:50:54 UTC
This is incredibly painful for me to watch.

Just imagine for a second that you were a brilliant mathematician, you eat, shit and sleep math.

One day you see a big gathering, and someone has been chosen at random to answer a math question, and they will win untold fame and fortune.
The question is fun, if a little simple, but you have to squirm as you watch this nincompoop fumble around and fuck it up.

Guys like me who love servers, server architecture and scalability arguments, dream of days like this.

We love to overengineer even when it is not necessary (we try not to).

this is a no brainer, a quality problem.
If i knew that on date x, time y, that i was going to have n users hitting my server all at once, this would be an easy task.

It would be fun, it would go smoothly, I would have a plan.

I can only think the guys at MtGox are either grossly incompetent or incredibly greedy (they still have all this stuffed on to some box under their desk).



Torturous...


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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: What have you purchased with Bitcoin?
by
semarjt
on 23/06/2011, 05:15:01 UTC
1 Subway sandwich. (I gave my brother a bitcoin to help me test my app, and he bought me lunch for it, (btc ~= $8))

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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Give MtGox a break
by
semarjt
on 21/06/2011, 16:17:33 UTC
if you can't afford a security guy you can't afford to open for business.


This is the hilarious part to me.

The things they are struggling with are not actual security issues

Locking your front door is not a security issue, it is just common sense.

These trivial things that have been solved a million times and can and should be automatic

You don't hire a security guy to come lock your front door.
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: TradeHill API was coded by amateurs
by
semarjt
on 20/06/2011, 03:35:44 UTC
Sending decimal numbers as numbers invites clients to interpret them as floats and thereby introduce rounding errors. It's not a bad idea to transfer fixed point decimal numbers as strings.

Correct. This is actually a feature borne out of wisdom dealing with lots of different languages and runtimes which may not support floating point math accurately or as expected when doing conversions to other types.

gigi is the idiot.

EDIT: and just to clarify, using a string type let's you, the API user, determine how to re-cast and interpret the value rather than dealing with side effects of some implementation which tries to "do the right thing" by default.


This is all correct and makes sense. I would also like to add that in order to serialize a decimal.Decimal() (which i can almost guarantee they are using).
 You have to cast it to a native type beforehand. Your choices are: str(), int() or float().

The choice is obvious
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: TradeHill API was coded by amateurs
by
semarjt
on 20/06/2011, 03:27:22 UTC
Indeed, this is not that out of the ordinary.

I heard tonight that they use python for their backend. (+1 over the php using mtgox)

So the are most likely using the Decimal data type from the standard lib. This is not strange.

What I think should happen is crap like this should be removed as soon as it is realized it is crap. You are tarnishing the name of a business.

Or the OP should have contacted TradeHill with their little 'discovery' before pulling this.

How many scrolled through the forums, saw "TradHill API was coded by amateurs" without taking the time to find out the truth?

That sentiment is now floating around in their subconscious.

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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Mt.Gox: No SQL injection happened, switch to SHA-512, offline until 8:00 am GMT
by
semarjt
on 20/06/2011, 03:18:24 UTC
The excuse given was to blame the auditor.  And for privacy reasons, they won't name the auditor.

This doesn't make any sense at all.  What use is an audit performed by unnamed entities?  It's the credentials of the auditor which give credence to the audit they perform, is it not?




What use is it for an auditor to have password hashes?
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: DIRECT DOWNLOAD LINK FOR LEAKED MT. GOX ACCOUNT DATABASE (CSV FILE)
by
semarjt
on 20/06/2011, 01:57:15 UTC
Isn't it ironic that bitcoin mining is essentially also cracking a hash?

No, because that is not at all what bitcoin mining is.
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Psychopath dumped 500k btc, at least 261k of it at $0.01 [screenshot]
by
semarjt
on 19/06/2011, 19:03:36 UTC
I think it's more in the trend of MtGox hacked, wallets of all customers emptied.

Or Satoshi knowing that the system is flawed and leaving.

Only Satoshi knows the algorithm.. no one else on this forum or from the developers know how it actually works since they can't break it (not even with the source).

what 'algorithm' are you refering to? sha256? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 ECDSA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_DSA

All algorithms used in the bitcoin protocol are very well documented. thousands of people 'know the algorithm'

So, what exactly are you talking about. ....I suspect you do not know. And I have just wasted 7 minutes of my life.
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Topic
Board Marketplace
Re: Software Developer Resume Trove - NO COMMENTS PLEASE
by
semarjt
on 18/06/2011, 20:12:27 UTC
Python Engineer, tons of experience with servers/databases, backends.

Moderate experience with front ends/javascript etc.


http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelsemar

Working full time, am only available for part time/contract type stuff.
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Newly minted idiot
by
semarjt
on 17/06/2011, 14:45:20 UTC

wow, maybe you are jealous? or just a rude child? I can't tell which.
Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Why the price didnt go up ?
by
semarjt
on 16/06/2011, 01:56:53 UTC
If you do the hard math to determine the actual value of btc based on capital investments, human resources, overhead etc. , youll see that BTC already has a premium built in for the increased difficulty.  The invisible hand knows everything!

In My estimation BTC is already overvalued by around 38%

And how do you know what the capital investments, human resource and overhead are?  You don't, and you can't.  No one can.


Of course he can! He even used a percentage that doesn't end in 5 or 0!! What more do you need??