EFF Begins Accepting Anonymous Donations via Bitcoin

[sgornick]

Get 0.05 bitcoins, for completing a captcha. http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

More on Bitcoin: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2010/10/10/a-short-introduction... http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/414452/b8bf16adf2d1564a/

[alanh]

Sounds like a marketing win-win for the EFF and Bitcoin, both.

[swah]

No wiki page for Bitcoin, perhaps now they get one?

[Estragon]

So is there already GPU-optimized code for generating bitcoins?

[hippich]

Yes

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1334.0

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1721.0

[pointillistic]

i think they should move to the gold standard.

[rmc]

There is a crypto-currency like Bitcoin that operates on the gold standard, eCache (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache). They operate on the tor network. You can see a photo of their gold supply (https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/audit/current.png)

[hippich]

Bitcoins are itself sorta of "gold standard". But unlike gold, community already agreed on total number of coins (think about price of gold if someone will find huge source of gold and accidentally will let know people about it)

[rick_2047]

Umm.... was just thinking, why can't someone set up a EC2 cluster (or a plain old home computer cluster) and get it cracking on this bitcoin generating program? I mean they are fast and if this thing ever gains some traction then it will be a huge win.

Edit: I would also like to see the list of people using this for actual selling and not donations.

[doublec]

Coin generation rate is tied to the amount of computing resource in the network. So if you bring a cluster online the difficulty to generate coins increases.

EC2 machines are a bit too slow to generate coins in a timely manner. Even a cluster of them wouldn't be cost effective.

[rmc]

If you could do this, then you can establish a currency coversion between USD and bitcoins. i.e. "You give me X dollars, i'll spin up my EC2 instances and give you Y bitcoins". This is essentially a forgein exchange rate and you have established the exchange rate.

And if you find someone offering USD in exchange for bitcoins, and they give you more USD per coin, then you can use arbitrage to exploit the difference in price and turn this into a magic USD making machine.

[kiba]

You would be competing against people with GPU cluster. Plus, you only get a part of the limited bitcoin mining pie.

[doublec]

There's some places listed here where you can use bitcoins:

http://www.bitcoin.org/trade

There are also other directories and services which you can find in the bitcoin forums.