locksley

You mean, Blockchain is the platform and 'currency' is the first killer app?

Why is this Show HN? Can a mod please remove it, so we can respect the other Show HNs.

"... blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs" (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

The mind is a sophisticated algorithm with a shit database. So why not replace that database by taking notes?

Not many musicians expect to make money from selling records.

It used to be "do free shows to sell records". Now it's completely reversed to "do free records to sell shows".

There's also a block explorer - https://helloblock.io/latest

Any word on how they were Hacked?

I know that Bitcoinica, Gavin Andresen's faucet and TradeHill all got hacked through Linode's support system a while back, in which the attacker managed to reset all their passwords.

Not all miners are relaying OP_RETURN transactions. The plan is the use OP_RETURN once v0.9 is released.

We were hoping it would've been released before 14th Feb, however that's not the case.

Ahhhhh, but it worked so perfectly!

Oh well, thanks for the heads up :)

Yeah, Coinbase does this.

At first I thought the hex was ridiculous, but I guess it's a good PR stunt. I mean, we're all talking about it now.

Thanks for the feedback. We're following https://code.google.com/p/crypto-js/#SHA-2

Could you let us know how it's incorrect? Otherwise, feel free to make a pull request on https://github.com/BitcoinMafia/SpareCoinsExt

Your encrypted private keys are stored in Chrome Storage, they are encrypted via your password digest so your password is never stored.

No self-respecting DDoS attacker would fail to spoof the User-Agent. This is even Web Scraping 101.

Attacks these days are getting rather sophisticated, where significant amount of attacks are using javascript enabled headless browsers. (http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/ddos-attack-used...)

I think you're right about this. Any suggestions for UI/UX elements?

Great question.

That's exactly what we want to eventually do. For an efficient market to run, there needs to be a way to manage risk.

However, if you mention "derivatives" to any normal BTC user, the mostly response of "huh?", or "aren't those the things that made the world collapse in 2008?".

Future Block, as it currently stands, is an entertainment site to bet on something novel. However, our hope is that:

1. It serves as an education tool to introduce people to derivatives, because derivatives are essentially about taking one position or the other.

2. To build liquidity for a derivatives exchange. Parimutuel applications are great for this because you don't have the 'chicken & egg' problem where you need 2 types of customers for it to work.

Hope that answers your question!

Good point.

1. Blockchain.info is relatively trustworthy.

2. However, we have our own hash rate calculations by directly interfacing with the actual blockchain. This isn't in production yet. This is because hash rate is always going to be a guestimate. Depending on the time intervals that you pick, the guestimates vary. So we asked overselves, what helps us to maximise transparency. So we decided to go with blockchain.info's hash rate because everyone can check that.

You'd need ASIC Miners, but even then, you'd have a minuscule impact.

More importantly, if you have that much Gigahashing power, it's not worth manipulating this. You're better off sticking to mining Bitcoins.

Parimutuel betting is where all the bets are placed in a pool and when the pool closes we then distribute the winnings amongst the bets. [1] In fact, this is how a lot of horse racing works

This means you are not guarranteed betting X pays out Y. And this does change as bets are made on either side. And so one may think, why not just bet the last minute? House fees are initially 0% at 6 AM (PDT) but roll up linearly to 20% by 6 PM (PDT). This is to encourage betting early and discourage bet sniping at the last minute. [2]

Having said that, we do plan to move towards a floating model, more similar to the futures market as we gain transaction volume.

Current prediction targets are set by us. And bettor bet on either sides. As we gain liquidity and transaction volumes are increased, we plan to then turn this into a real time exchange so that the transactions are settled real time and we essentially have a moving prediction target.

In fact, this how we got our name at future representing futures market and block representing bit coin. :p

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting [2]: http://www.futureblock.com/how-it-works [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_exchange

Shorting will require more borrowing/lending in the BTC ecosystem. But there are other ways to mitigate downside risks, such as hedging (put options in particular). This is really our goal, to create a futures/options exchange.

As we get more volume, then we can do stuff like this and let the market dictate things like "Prediction Target" or "BTCUSD Strike Price".

Because of the nature of this site, we are very sensitive to any security related questions. Sorry!

Without revealing anything specific, we have a number of trigger conditions and any bet size over or under the limit is a trigger condition. That marks the bet as invalid and manual admin action is then required to refund the bet.

Actually, we're using Network Hash Rate rather than difficulty. Difficulty changes every ~2 weeks.

This is the API endpoint we're polling is https://blockchain.info/q/hashrate

Hash Rate is an inferred number though. See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11139/how-is-the-...

Haha, given the daily hash rate volatility can be +/- 300,000 GH/s, there is a 1/300,000 chance that'll happen.

But in all seriousness, if that does happen, we'll refund all the bets without taking any house fees.

Thanks!

Well the nature of Bitcoin is that all transaction are anonymous but transparent at the same time. For example, you could check out all the bets we've received and payouts we've made. e.g. http://blockchain.info/address/1DXa2tKkoKiR1p7nbt2xSCFdUxzGd...

I'd encourage you to place a small 0.01 to 0.02 BTC bet just to test out the site, and see that it'll update the pool/odds dynamically.

There's a max limit of 1 BTC, if anyone accidentally bets more, the bet is refunded (without the house fee). There's also a min limit of 0.01 BTC.

Not worth it, you can sell an iPad 2 for $270 on eBay.

proof: http://www.thepricegeek.com/results/ipad+2

Rails (without ActiveRecord/Database) Heroku Unicorn Server

I guess this would be simple enough. From what I know, it'd just be adding a title attribute with the full text in the anchor tag.

Thanks for the pick up.

Yeah this would be interesting and I can certainly do it for popular searches.

To do it for all items would require collection of lots of data in my own database though. Will have a think about this.

That's a good point. Ebay takes around 9% and Paypal around 3%. After postage, it'll cost you around 15% of sale.