I assume that's b.s. "Got some issues with MySQL due to a bug in MySQL. Will need a permanent fix later." (6 hours ago) from: http://twitter.com/#!/mtgox

mt.gox is back online

whats your experience with tradehill?

I'll admit that one of my concerns is an excessive reliance upon a single exchange. I'll feel more comfortable if more exchanges start showing up with reasonable volume.

Trade Hill seems to be a candidate. I can't vouch for them, but I'm giving it a try. Currently I'm trying to transfer a small amount of BTC there and it's taking a while to be confirmed, although that might be because I think smaller transactions receive lower priority. If it gets confirmed and processed then I'll update.

From what I gather, if you use a referral code (like mine: TH-R13113), then you get a discount on trade fees (mods, if referrals are frowned upon then I'm sorry and please remove the referral code).

Update: The BTC deposit appears to have gone through after I got ~6 confirmations on the transaction.

TH is interesting right now, as it's much easier to get BTC there than $ (since they just opened, and it's been a weekend). So you'll get lower prices buying there right now. I've seen some good arb opportunities, but need to transfer funds there. With Trade APIs, I'm surprised bots haven't already been created for it.

I too have noticed some price discrepancies, but is the volume enough to make it worthwhile? It looks like the volume at TH is pretty lousy right now, and I would expect that as that increases, arb chances would decrease. I'd also be concerned that transactions wouldn't occur quickly enough, causing only one half of the arb to execute.

Yeah, that's a concern, having only one half execute. It's a risk. Plus having someone take something off the order book quickly would cause problems.

TH volume is weak, but right now there is an arb opportunity to buy 116 coins for $20.20 or less, and there is that much volume to buy them at Gox for $20.70. TH fees are a bit less, but say you have a 1.1% total transaction fee, but you have 38 cents * 116 = $44 instant profit.

MtGox made a 450,000 BC transfer apparently over the weekend, that's a huge amount of bitcoins for anyone to have!

Anyone built a dedicated mining rig from scratch? Looking for a few tips.

there are tons of infos and discussion in the bitcoin.org mining and hardware subforums. however you should keep in mind, that the next difficulty steps will have a big impact on the profitability of new rigs (assuming flat prices). If you incorporate the risk and building time the golden times for miners are over.

I was really close to pulling the trigger and started doing the math.

If you started ASAP and use current rates (could rise, could fall) and look at difficulty projections using a 440 mh/s miner which costs about $700 to build you'd get:

$148 the first 10 days
$125 the second 10 days
$95 the third 10 days
$45 the next 10 days

it trends way down from there. Also, you need to take into account hardware failures, the large investment of time to get things running, cost of power, the enormous amount of heat it's going to pump into your house and it really starts to look unattractive.

So basically unless BTC start rocking upwards again you're not going to do very well and even if they do start flying up you'd be better off to just buy the coins outright.

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

basically unless you get can the hardware cheap and have free/nearly free electricity - it is always better to just buy the coins outright instead of mining.

The next two difficulty jumps will be 50%+, further crushing mining. Given the rate old, dormant coins have woken up the last 3 days, it's unlikely the price will be jumping until all of these new sellers are satisfied.

I have a script that monitors the unspent generated coins from block 60,000 and lower. The number of them finally being spent after so long since generating is up 300% in the last 3 days vs the last few weeks average. The likely destination is mtgox to cash out.

I'm still bullish long term, but pretty much the only reason these coins are 'waking up' now is to sell.

This is interesting analysis on it.

One possibility is someone hacking early adopters and stealing their wallets. There was a mention of this by lulzsec on twitter, with a suspicious transfer taking a lot of 50 coin inputs and sending them to one place.

300% is a big number, but it could be huge or nothing depending on what it was last week. I think we are going to see things stabilize a bit. It's super easy to move the price way up when a lot of coins are "dormant". When they wake up, that's when it becomes VERY hard.

There's also a lot of transactions going to a single address (likely Mt. Gox), and it would be interesting to back-trace everything at that address to see where they are going. It also would be interesting to see how much of each day's mined coins make it to Mt. Gox or how many transactions they have on average.

Ok I've started mining on my current PC, as it's pretty new and I have a 5770 which isn't too bad. Getting ~180 MHash/s which isn't too bad. I can't get solo mining to work (wanted to gamble to get a 50 coin payout within the next month) so am with deppbit pool. Going to see how well this works out.

Talking to two successful traders on Facebook about BC in some depth (my sisters friends). They seem strongly convinced this is an asset bubble. "You really could not invent a better candidate for an asset bubble if you tried."

They seem to like the idea of Bitcoins, but don't think this implementation is the end of the line, more the beginning of progress towards an ideal currency.

I know this 2nd hand information isn't great for you, but I trust their opinions, and they have read a lot about them and aren't carelessly disregarding them as others have.

They referenced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory as well. I'm sure we are all aware of this technique, (as was I) but I didn't know it had a name.

Deepbit is dangerous, and they take 10%. Consider joining slush's pool with only a 2% fee. Other smaller pools have no fees at all.

Deepbit has reached 50% of the network power on over one occasion. I doubt the pools operator would ever fork the chain intentionally, but being hacked or "coerced" by a bitcoin adversary isn't out of the question. I encourage everyone to stay away from deepbit, and do your small part to keep the network healthy

Ok, will do! Will move over to slush as soon as I have enough to cash out on Deepbit.

Solo mining would be a huge waste of your time

Isn't it more +EV than a pool? (Much higher variance though)

Enormous variance, which is an understatement. Plus you're only losing a 2% edge to the pool operator which IMO is worth it when you consider it could take (years?) to mine a block on your own.

If anyone is interested in investing $1000 in me for a 40/60 monthly profit cut, let me know. I know how to build and program everything needed to make money from this new currency from scratch, I just need startup money. You'll make your money back in just two months depending. Also note that this is little risk, say bitcoins fail, you can still resell your computer for over 75% of its value. Or return it within 30 days for a full refund.

You can even order the parts and pay for them yourself from newegg.com to prove that I'm not just taking your money and running.. Of course I can take the parts and run, you just have to trust me I guess.. You'll have my address to come kick my ass if you want.

We can talk more over the phone if anyone is actually interested, shoot me a PM or send me an IM on AIM, IcyBlueHell -- I also have FB but I don't give that out to just anyone.

I figure I'm running my computer for 4 weeks doing this, in that time a pool would yield me ~$160 at current market rates, I'd rather spend that $160 on a 17% shot of 50BC ($1000) as $160 doesn't mean anything significant to me.

@Icy, why would anyone invest $1k in you when they could just build it themselves? Also, you say you get hardware costs back, hows that work? You sell it on the investors behalf or post them the parts afterward?

From my math on mining it still seems well worth it. The real risk is if the market collapses in the short term. You have some safety net from resale value, but that gets tricky though because it rules out some of the better cards. A 5970 is a great deal at $800, but if things change and you need to sell then you're selling a used $500 card in a market that's flooded with them.

I tried to wade through the mining forums but there's just SO much and frankly, most of it sucks. This makes sense because if you're mining the worst thing for you is new miners. These links have been great though:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_rig

Also, what I see very few people talking about over there is that there's obviously an equilibrium for difficulty/price. I see people talking about how there will be 40% difficulty increases going forward which will require a big increase in BTC price to stay profitable and thus you should just buy BTC.

This ignores that 40% increases are only sustainable if mining stays profitable. One of the most compelling topics of discussion hasn't come up at all over there from what I can tell. That topic is the equilibrium ratio between difficulty and price. I think it's probably somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 per $ of BTC value. That number will change somewhat if mhash/s/w numbers change with new hardware.

Because it requires work and strong knowledge of how to build and program computers, its not as simple as flipping a switch, plus you won't have to do anything at all.

I would only sell it if it becomes useless and yes that is what I would do.