Bitcoins anyone?

[SkinnyPupp]

Buying some Vertcoin because I'm not sure how the LTC market is going to respond to the influx of scrypt... It can either go up because there is going to be a much bigger cap, or all the GPU miners are going to abandon it for Vertcoin which is designed (even more) specifically to be (even more) ASIC resistant... we'll see I guess

[Vale46Rossi]

I don't know if this goes here or Fucked up shit thread.... I lol'd

Guy says if bitcoin drops half in price... he will a hat... lol

Anndddyyyy comments on Can you guys stop bashing the bears?


I ate a hat : BitcoinMarkets

Reddit Hat Eat - YouTube

[Spartacus]

What's happening?

[Ch28]

The huge decline in BTC price is because China banks are banning bitcoin

[SkinnyPupp]

It's just China putting controls on how people spend their money, just like they have always done. They are desperately holding their currency together, and this is just the latest threat that could make the RMB weaker. This most recent action stops banks from being able to accept deposits.

Thing is, LOTS of things are banned in China, and how people can spend their money. People will just find a different way to do what they want.

[Ulic Qel-Droma]

does it feel like crypto currency has become a diff version of the stock markets.

and each coin is a diff stock.

[SkinnyPupp]

Not to me.. There is Bitcoin and for now Litecoin. Then there are all the goofball coins...

I did put a bit into Vertcoin just in case it's the one that replaces Litecoin when people need to switch to another Scrypt once their huge mining setups are no longer profitable with LTC.

[corollagtSr5]

Originally Posted by Ulic Qel-Droma

does it feel like crypto currency has become a diff version of the stock markets.

and each coin is a diff stock.

A 24 hour one that never closes.

[Vale46Rossi]

If anyone knows anyone that is looking to buy a bitcoin ATM.

My friend has 1 available, it's a Lamassu.

He purchased 4 of these in December and it has been dispatched to other parts of Canada.

One of his partners dropped out and he has 1 extra now.

If anyone is interested PM and I can set you guys up!

[ForbiddenX]

What sites can I use to get BTC with paypal?

Or is anyone selling any

[SkinnyPupp]

Hardly anyone is going to sell to you via payment, because you can just decline the payment afterward and they will lose the money

Best way it to use cash in hand, from an ATM or at localbitcoins.com from a reputable seller

[Mr.HappySilp]

Went to look for an apartment that's on sale and saw the owner have three racks of video card hook to a several PSU sitting outside the balcony.... Not sure what video card they are but my guess is he is minning Bitcoin?!

[Drizzt Do'Urden]

Originally Posted by ForbiddenX

What sites can I use to get BTC with paypal?

Or is anyone selling any

Not Paypal but you can purchase smaller amounts with interac through this site: quickbt.com

0.20 BTC daily limit.

[Tetsugen]

Jesus darkcoin went crazy

[Vale46Rossi]

If anyone is interested my buddies picked up 3 new Lamassu's and wants to sell them.

(Was going to sell to Asia but their friends ended up buying one already)

[godwin]

I verify this works amazingly well without the need of buying hardware! You just need to populate a dictionary of plausible usernames, I tried with Can411, a rather rudimentary python script and bob is your uncle.


How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in Amazon’s Cloud

By Andy Greenberg

Hackers have long used malware to enslave armies of unwitting PCs, but security researchers Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar had a different thought: Why steal computing power from innocent victims when there’s so much free processing power out there for the taking?

At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month Ragan and Salazar plan to reveal how they built a botnet using only free trials and freemium accounts on online application-hosting services—the kind coders use for development and testing to avoid having to buy their own servers and storage. The hacker duo used an automated process to generate unique email addresses and sign up for those free accounts en masse, assembling a cloud-based botnet of around a thousand computers.

That online zombie horde was capable of launching coordinated cyberattacks, cracking passwords, or mining hundreds of dollars a day worth of cryptocurrency. And by assembling that botnet from cloud accounts rather than hijacked computers, Ragan and Salazar believe their creation may have even been legal.

“We essentially built a supercomputer for free,” says Ragan, who along with Salazar works as a researcher for the security consultancy Bishop Fox. “We’re definitely going to see more malicious activity coming out of these services.”

Imagine a distributed denial-of-service attack where the incoming IP addresses are all from Google and Amazon

Companies like Google, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, CloudBees, and many more offer developers the ability to host their applications on servers in faraway data centers, often reselling computing resources owned by companies like Amazon and Rackspace. Ragan and Salazar tested the account creation process for more than 150 of those services. Only a third of them required any credentials beyond an email address—additional information like a credit card, phone number, or filling out a captcha. Choosing among the easy two-thirds, they targeted about 15 services that let them sign up for a free account or a free trial. The researchers won’t name those vulnerable services, to avoid helping malicious hackers follow in their footsteps. “A lot of these companies are startups trying to get as many users as quickly as possible,” says Salazar. “They’re not really thinking about defending against these kinds of attacks.”
The Caper

Ragan and Salazar created their automated rapid-fire signup and confirmation process with the email service Mandrill and their own program running on Google App Engine. A service called FreeDNS.afraid.org let them create unlimited email addresses on different domains; to create realistic-looking addresses they used variations on actual addresses that they found dumped online after past data breaches. Then they used Python Fabric, a tool that lets developers manage multiple Python scripts, to control the hundreds of computers over which they had taken possession.

One of their first experiments with their new cloud-based botnet was mining the cryptocurrency Litecoin. (That second-most-used cryptocoin is better suited to the cloud computers’ CPUs than Bitcoin, which is most easily mined with GPU chips.) They found that they could produce about 25 cents per account per day based on Litecoin’s exchange rates at the time. Putting their entire botnet behind that effort would have generated $1,750 a week. “And it’s all on someone else’s electricity bill,” says Ragan.

Ragan and Salazar were wary of doing real damage by hogging the services’ electricity or processing, however, so they turned off their mining operation in a matter of hours. For testing, however, they left a small number of mining programs running for two weeks. None were ever detected or shut down.

Aside from Litecoin mining, the researchers say they could have used their cloudbots for more malicious ends—like distributed password-cracking, click fraud, or denial of service attacks that flood target websites with junk traffic. Because the cloud services offer far more networking bandwidth than the average home computer possesses, they say their botnet could have funneled about 20,000 PCs-worth of attack traffic at any given target. Ragan and Salazar weren’t able to actually measure the size of their attack, however, because none of their test targets were able to stay online long enough for an accurate reading. “We’re still looking for volunteers,” Ragan jokes.

More disturbing yet, Ragan and Salazar say targets would find it especially tough to filter out an attack launched from reputable cloud services. “Imagine a distributed denial-of-service attack where the incoming IP addresses are all from Google and Amazon,” says Ragan. “That becomes a challenge. You can’t blacklist that whole IP range.”
Law-Abiding Citizens

Using a cloud-based botnet for that kind of attack, of course, would be illegal. But creating the botnet in the first place might not be, the two researchers argue. They admit they violated quite a few companies’ terms of service agreements, but it’s still a matter of legal debate whether such an action constitutes a crime. Breaking those fine print rules has contributed to some prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as in the case of the late Aaron Swartz. But at least one court has ruled that breaking terms of service alone doesn’t constitute computer fraud. And the majority of terms of service violations go unpunished—a good thing given how few Internet users actually read them.

Ragan and Salazar argue that regardless of legal protections, companies need to implement their own anti-automation techniques to prevent the kind of bot-based signups they demonstrated. At the time of their Black Hat talk, they plan to release both the software they used to create and control their cloudbots, as well as defense software they say can protect against their schemes.

Other hackers, after all, haven’t been as polite as Ragan and Salazar in their cloud computing experiments. In the time the two researchers spent probing the loopholes in cloud computing services, they say they’ve already seen companies like AppFog and Engine Yard shut down or turn off their free option as a result of more malicious hackers exploiting their services. Another company specifically cited botnets mining cryptocurrency as its reason for turning off its free account feature.

“We wanted to raise awareness that’s there’s insufficient anti-automation being used to protect against this type of attack,” says Ragan. “Will we see a rise in this type of botnet? The answer is undoubtedly yes.”

[TOPEC]

stumbled upon this on kotaku, a bitcoin farm in china,

Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine - The CoinsmanThe Coinsman

how the hell can anyone compete with that? $40,000USD in electric bill each month!

[Presto]

There's a Newegg.ca promo.


Pay in Bitcoin. $75 off when spending $300+ or $150 off when spending $500+

Code: BITCOINDEALCA

Expires Sept 1

[trancehead]

for the merchant, not using credit card is about 3% savings right?

for eg
3% off $300 is $9.
That user would then need to return about (75/9 = ~ 7) 7 times and pay with Bitcoin again for newegg to reap these benefits long term.
(not to mention it also spreads the word that newegg is bitcoin friendly)

okay it gets good in the long run, looks like an aggressive initiative.
they must have hashed out the numbers. dont believe they would brute force this

[SkinnyPupp]

It's been a while but here's some cool news

Microsoft Adds Bitcoin Payments for Xbox Games and Mobile Content

Microsoft beats both Apple AND Google to the punch. Pretty impressive.

Paypal is slowly rolling out bitcoin support. When it's fully employed, Paypal merchants will be able to accept bitcoin simply by flipping a switch. Of course they'll not really be enjoying the benefits of it, but still it gets it into their hands.

[Hondaracer]

Hmm..interesting.

I'm holding about 1.5 left, kind of looking to sell them off before the holiday season lol a nice little spike would be great

[SkinnyPupp]

Bitcoin isn't a stock, prices don't go up and down on news like that

[lilaznviper]

hondaracer how much are you selling it for?

[Hondaracer]

Actually only have 1.1 right now

For the 1.1 Id be looking for $450 CAD right now If I was selling it privately, otherwise I'd just wait and use CAvirtex

[ae101]

wait i thought bit coin was dying/dead already