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alanh
Sounds like a marketing win-win for the EFF and Bitcoin, both.
swah
No wiki page for Bitcoin, perhaps now they get one?
pointillistic
i think they should move to the gold standard.
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.

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.

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.
rmc
How do they 'increase the difficulty'?
tomjen3
Whomever gets the solution first wins, if there are money people in it, you need more computer power to be the first.
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.

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.

haribilalic
Mt Gox (http://mtgox.com/) and others let you trade Bitcoins for USD and vice versa. I don't know how much computational power you need to generate a Bitcoin, but the current exchange rate seems to be 1 Bitcoin = 0.280 USD. The few other exchanges I checked out having similar exchange rates.
rick_2047
but wtf do you do with these?
guelo
He just told you, you can turn them into 28 cents.
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.

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