I have two Radeon 5970s or so at home. Should I let them generate bitcoins for the summer while I'm in Vegas?

Edit: I don't mean like "can i has fr33 money plx?" but more "would anyone be interested in seeing how it goes?"

The trouble with creating a market is complying with regulations. MtGox is in Japan, so they can avoid a lot of the trouble. Unless MtGox is inferior for some reason. One thing you could do is have your own market, then trade MtGox if you need to (you could automate the trades on MtGox if you don't have sufficient market depth, and account for the fees).

The market is interesting in that sometimes the spread is thin, but there is very low volume for orders on those. To get any significant sized order, you need to have a bigger spread. Perhaps just monitor the bid/ask prices, and put orders based on that?

What regulations do you need to conform to? I thought the whole idea of it was it wasn't under any sort of regulation at all apart from forced constraints by design. Do you specifically mean cashing out $$$?

I'm talking about government regulations wherever you operate your exchange. If you are making a money exchange, you very likely need to conform with a lot of rules.

You should make enough money to easily cover the electricity costs. Difficulty is rising like crazy, but the price is high enough you should be fine.

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen by Jason Calacanis and the LAUNCH team
http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html

Bitcoin Discussion with Gavin Andresen and Amir Taaki on This Week in Startups #140
http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/bitcoin-discussion-with-gavin-andresen-and-amir-taaki-on-this-week-in-startups-140/

Haven't had the chance to read/watch these yet, but it looks like they get into some substantive stuff - more so than many of the other articles or commentary have. Jason Calacanis, while surely a blowhard, asks good questions and is a member of the poker community having appeared on The Big Game.

The first one is pretty terrible and is getting ridiculed at Slashdot.

Anyone reputable have dwolla and want paypal?

I'm currently writing an online store, and am looking at the possibility of accepting payments via bitcoins for two reasons:

- Good publicity, there seems to be a hunger for online merchants accepting bitcoins on the bitcoin forum, they are also technically minded people which is our target market
- Next to nothing transaction fees

If we decide to go with it I can post the development process in here of how to accept them, and follow up at a later date with anything I've learnt if anyone is interested.

The publicity angle seems solid. A lot of people are buying just to buy stuff. It's not gonna get you rich but it's gonna get some attention.

I'm curious how you set up the funding for them. I was thinking of using them for funding a game I was developing, but I use a shared server, so I couldn't install the client on that machine. I was thinking of installing the client on my machine at home, and have it just generate a ton of addresses and populate a database, then just use those addresses. Then run some daemon at home that checks for transactions and publishes to the database to keep track of when payments are received. I wish there was some API I could plug into of some website to just call the client on their machine. I think it exists, I just need to find a server that responds to my requests.

We work on removing bugs. Yes - this is not big player in poker world, but it's something. The whole thing started as some hobby/idea, just like bitcoin itself. And I am trying to focus on transparency (that's why you can download source code) and simplicity.

BTW, there were major code update during weekend. One big change - now all stakes are in bitcents. I.e. on 0.01/0.02 tables you can play for as low as 0.0001 / 0.0002 BTC! (It's especially good for me when doing testing since I am so bad at poker... =)))

Now working on re-implementing Omaha games and then - tourneys. =)

I'm not too sure on how I will approach it, I still need confirmation from my partner but I think it's a good niche to attack so I will persuade him to go with it. Ideally a completely automated system would be best, we will have a dedicated server so we can install whatever we want on it. However I'm not sure if I understand the system well enough to do this, if I can find a tutorial or do some more reading I'm sure I can though. The publicity added EV should make it worthwhile in my opinion.

There are lots of publicity angles to take with it, the more I think about it the more angles and ideas I have so I think it's a good option. I'm not worried about volatility of the market at all as we are probably not going to be selling a large enough volume to worry about liquidity, and even if something bad does happen we are well positioned as we are selling virtual goods so any loss will be limited.

How do you process deposits if you don't mind me asking, was there a guide you used? Custom software? Have you written an API by any chance?

Here is library I developed as part of the project - http://search.cpan.org/~pkaroukin/Ca...del/Bitcoin.pm

It's based on top of another library written by Tobi Inkster - http://search.cpan.org/~tobyink/Finance-Bitcoin-0.002/

Basically, I assign separate address for each user account and all money sent to this account are added to user balance on site.

No guide, but using API of two libraries above (if you are using Perl) should let you code it easily.

Thanks for that!

You should contact [email protected] and get an official verified user ID (I believe it allows you to have a community thread in one forum on this site, with some stipulations attached). I think that would be nothing but good for your project and 2p2.

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Came across this, what do people think? http://lightheartedandheavytailed.bl...g-with_14.html

Sure thing =)

BTW, you might want to check github repo for this project. I am using it to deploy my copy, so you see verbatim copy of sources powering betco.in - https://github.com/hippich/Bitcoin-Poker-Room

I hope you don't feel insulted, it's great what you are doing. For the kind of effort and funding you have, it's great you have done what you have. I really hope this is the beginning and you are able to become successful. I was a bit confused by the games being in bitcents like that. I wasn't sure if I just wasn't looking in the right place.

Hopefully you can get some traffic on the site from 2+2.

hippich, if you want this to take off, my advice would be to focus on making the software really solid (fast, reliable, clear UI) so that people will feel comfortable putting their money on your site and playing. Adding new game types would be a lower priority IMO. (Of course, if you're just doing this all for fun, do whatever you like!)

Three requests:

1) Some kind of timeout display. If one of my opponents is not responding, I'd like an indication of who it is and how long I may have to wait before he times out. (In part, I'd like to know that it is not me timing out.) Oh, also, if I am taking a long time to act, I would like some kind of warning before I time out. (Maybe you already have that, I haven't tried playing slowly.)

2) Some kind of way to view the hand history. I would like to be able to see the results of the last hand. See what cards I had, what my opponent had (if he showed), what was on the board. What happens to me (and to everyone I think) from time to time is that I misread the board and I wonder why I lost the hand. Currently people may end up thinking your software is buggy and that they got screwed. Having a way to see the last hand should mitigate that.

3) Some explanation of how you handle timeouts/disconnects would be good. Is there "disconnect protection" or not?

Having said all that, great to see what you've done. I'm impressed.

Thank you for feedback,

1) This was always here, since it was implemented in original software - there is bar on top of player avatar.

Over weekend I added warning popup if you are slow to react.

Room had issues with connectivity requiring to refresh room window in order to continue to play. That's why I set 180 seconds timeout. Once I make sure it do not affect players anymore - I will lower this timeout to something more realistic.

2) Hand histories is next in queue. Server do record hands, but not in very readable format. I am going to work on this and then allow player to review hands.

3) I dunno what is "disconnect protection". Basically, if you lost connection - just refresh window and it should be back (in fact I implemented in code packet re-sending feature which should show you warning if you disconnected and continue to try to connect to server). But if you are disconnected from server for more then timeout period - your hand will be auto-folder and you will sit out until you reconnect.

Thanks for your response.

Here's a little article on "disconnect protection" (and how it can be abused):

http://www.pokerkingblog.com/2006/04...ct-protection/

I assume you don't offer "disconnect protection" (in the sense described in that article), but that's probably for the best since it's abusable.

Another request: it seems the reporting of your balance (the "User Account" page) is not always up-to-date. I won some amount (somewhere between 20 and 40 bitcents, I think) a while ago (maybe 1/2 hour to 1 hour ago?) and it's still not reflected on the User Account page. (My username is Dangerhorse.) This may cause anxiety for people, as they wonder whether they have been properly credited with their winnings.

For me this "protection" sounds as a call for not honest people to do not good things. So I probably pass it.

As for balance - balance on 'my account' show all money in your account except money currently sitting on table(s). Or you mean to show money from table on Account page as well?

Actually, I left the table a while ago (maybe roughly 1 hour ago) so I guess the account page should be updated by now?

But, yes, in general, I think it would be good to show people on the Account page both the amount they have "in their account" and the amount sitting on tables. Just to give people a comfort level that their money isn't vanishing...

Yeah. It should be on your account page. Please send me details to email [email protected] and I will look in to where you money are. So far I never had lost money, so probably it is something easy, but if this is something serious I need to take care of it asap.

Oh crap, this is my mistake. I was playing on a 0.01/0.02 table. With the new update, this means the small blind is now 1% of a bitcent, not 1% of a bitcoin. Somehow I was still thinking that I had won 20 or 40 bit cents, not 20 or 40 hundredths of a bitcent. Even though I did see your announcement.

I'm guessing I was properly credited with my fraction of a bitcent. (I'm rich!)

Apologies.

(But I'm sure other people will be as stupid as me, so the more reporting you can offer on the flow of money (deposits/withdrawals/winnings/losings etc.), the fewer spurious complaints you will get.)