If I were puddinpop, I would release versions of my proprietary client that seem legitimate at first and really are, but gradually implement code to kind of taste what users are doing with my client and also of course monitor how much income I am receiving. If I notice that I am receiving more and more income, at a point where there are hundreds, thousands even millions of users who have established trust into my product because it is so helpful to others to generate bitcoins, on my next update I would then proceed in secretly changing the 5% sent to me to 100% as well as add code to send to me ALL bitcoins left in each user's wallet and then suffer having a bad reputation at the expense of others as is furiously posted to the forums and users gradually discover my evil intent, but I will have already exchanged the BTC for another currency. As far as I know, there is no illegality for doing this, because I haven't established any terms of service for my product. Instead I simply released it on a forum without any related informations or anything.
Don't give puddinpop any ideas!
But yes you make an excellent point: Gradually build up trust and then violate that trust for profit. That's a common scheme used by scam-artists/politicians/criminals...
I don't like what puddinpop is doing...I hope someone releases an opensource version. Does anyone know of any donation pools for generating and releasing an GPL opensource OpenCL/CUDA client? If not we should start one.
There are at least three other implementations around:
-artforz' but I'm guessing he's keeping his edge
-sgtstein hinted he was working on one too, and would release
-mine at
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12334 which I have a major update for being tested, currently giving me 6200khs on my laptop GPU alone.
I'd be willing to work harder on making this usable by other people without having to tweak too much code for some coins, sure. But frankly I see a handful of people complaining here about how puddinpop is closed, how it might be a scam, and that we need an alternative but, frankly, I've received zero feedback on the usefulness of my approach.
Oh, and keep in mind I'm releasing everything I do, but I'm only doing it on OSX 10.6 because that's the only cuda enabled gpu I have. Also, for all the ATI users out there, I'll try opencl soon, just don't know exactly when.
But I don't want to hijack puddinpop's thread, sorry for the shameless plug, if nothing else he did me a huge service by releasing his client close source, making me get my first cup of cuda, something I was meaning to do for a long time... I'll send him 5 coins for each block I generate with my client, if I ever do