
EFF Begins Accepting Anonymous Donations via Bitcoin - mfukar
http://www.bitcoinblogger.com/2010/11/bitcoin-gains-legal-protection-through.html
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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://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2010/10/10/a-short-introduction-
to-bitcoin.html) <http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/414452/b8bf16adf2d1564a/>

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

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

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noagendamarket
Wikipedia deleted the bitcoin page :(

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

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hippich
Yes

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

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

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Estragon
Thank you

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pointillistic
i think they should move to the gold standard.

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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>)

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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.

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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.

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rick_2047
_So if you bring a cluster online the difficulty to generate coins increases._

I don't get it, I thought they were giving a bit coin on the computation
power.

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doublec
bitcoin generation is rate limited such that one 'block' is generated every 10
minutes or so. Generating a block produces 50 coins. As more computation comes
on board the difficulty increases to try and keep the average around that.

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rmc
How do they 'increase the difficulty'?

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arst
Roughly, bitcoins are generated by hashing some metadata about the state of
previous transactions together with an incrementing nonce until you find a
hash below a certain target value. If other users verify the hash and you were
the first person to find one this round then you get some bitcoins.

As the computational power of the bitcoin swarm increases, the hash target is
automatically decreased, leading to a roughly constant rate of generation.

