For higher MH/s drop your memclock low.  300Mhz is easy.  I run 160Mhz but some miners say memclock that low is unstable.  The reduced heat allows you to overclock the core and still keep it cool and stable (plus less power usage).

700 MH/s is trivial.   You can get 750MH/s to 780 MH/s depending on your luck, card, cooling, etc.

Given you need to file in the local court where the cardholder resides I doubt it unless your volume is tens of thousands of customers per month.

I am not saying reducing fraud is impossible but of all forms of fraud,  fiat->Bitcoin has to be one of the hardest to defend against..
1) It is new so the teminology and concpets like showing a tx in the blockchain is going to make any claims adjuster or judges eyes glaze over

2) It is irreversible.  Enough said.

3) It is fungible. Other digital goods aren't.  If I steal a game (via friendly fraud) from Steam I risk losing access to Steam forever.  Many gamers may balk at that idea.  1 "free" game vs losing access to all future games on Steam.  Given 1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin a thief doesn't care about a lifetime ban.   They can just buy (or steal) coins from another source.  Obviously this aspect doesn't apply to "black" fraud but I think we agree there are technical solutions that at least have the potential to fight black fraud.

I intend to start selling Bitcoins but with physical delivery (and contract w/ debt collection company which is advised to customer in advance).  If I can keep fraud costs down I am looking into technology to allow small purchases online with some ideas on customer verification.  So I don't want to be hypocritical and make it look like I am saying it is impossible while perusing it myself.  The bar is pretty high though.  

I have some experience fighting CNP fraud.  I made a good amount of money back in the internet dark ages (1990s) selling phonecards before selling the company (well brand, domain, customer list) to a competitor.  I moved quickly from physical delivery to online delivery.  Now with phonecards you at least have the ability to de-activate fraudulently purchased cards (if they haven't been completely used).  

What I learned is that organized crime is just that ... organized.  I estimate less than 5% of actual customers were fraudulent but if they found a hole in the fraud "net" they would spam it with hundreds of orders before that hole was patched.  So everything can look good w/ low chargeback rates for weeks even months and then a tidal wave of fraud just start rolling in.   I had one month where 37% of orders were disputed.  The other challenge is markup.  I was buying 1 million minutes wholesale @ <1 cent per minute and mark them up to 5 cents (effective w/ connection fee).  With fatter margins you can absorb more fraud.  

Obviously the margin on Bitcoins has to be much much much lower (or you only attract the thieves).  Less fat means you have to be nearly perfect.

Long winded but ....
TL/DR I don't think legal is ever a viable option.  Selling the debt (even for pennies on dollar litterally) may have some value as the friendly frauder gets stuck w/ full charge + $40 to $100 chargeback fee + $50 to $200 collection charge (max allowed by the State, not sure about international) plus penalty interest charged by debt collector plus negative hit on their credit report for the next 7 years.

It is my hope if I can weed out the "black fraud" that it will be possible to make friendly fraud punitively expensive and thus not so "friendly". .... Maybe.

Yes.  
Your merchant bank doesn't matter.  It is the customer's merchant bank who determines is chargeback stands.  Their customer (i.e. who they profit from) is the potential scammer.   The proof must be airtight for them to risk losing their eternally indebted cash cow.  Your merchant bank does like the cost of chargebacks so it just looking to drop you for business that has higher revenue:cost ratio.

In court? You are kidding right? Legal filings alone would be more than you would ever recover.  You must also PROVE that friendly fraud occurred.  Between the cases you can't prove, the ones you just lose because judges are stupid, your court costs, and your legal team costs you are talking a major cost likely 5x to 10x anything you recover from the thief.

So how do you pay for that cost?  Raise your prices?  Ok well you just drove away the honest customers (who will be price sensitive) and packed your sales book with dishonest customers (who don't care what the price is because they have no intention of paying anyways).

This.  Miners who upgraded have been rewarded with "bonus" compensation split equally by hashing power (it just sucks I got 2GH/s offline right now).  Negligent miners are facing financial consequences for their idiocy.  I would like to thank who ever released the "killer tx".

Why? I love it.  Tx processing nodes should be up to date. Period. Casual users don't need the latest code but miners form the tx processing backbone.  Could you imagine VISA releasing a major critical upgrade and a month after the hard deadline some merchant banks still hadn't gotten around to upgrading their systems? 

Miners need to take their role more seriously.  If they can't be bothered to upgrade even when given a months of notice, provided a deadline, and warned they risk losing all revenue .... well IMHO they shouldn't be mining.  Racking up huge losses may convince them to either a) take it more seriously or b) quit.  Either one is fine by me.  The network is made stronger.

Why would you be willing to accept 15% rate on $75K?  Is your credit that awful?

Um that $50B was just FRAUD.  VISA (and VISA only) annual transaction volume is $6 trillion (for FY 2011).

15,200 merchant banks
1.93 billion cards
78 billion transactions (~2500 avg tps, ~10K peak tps*)
$6 trillion total transaction volume (including cash advances)

http://corporate.visa.com/_media/visa-corporate-overview.pdf

* tps = transactions per second,

How would you know?  Pretty trivial for a major entity to relay a portion of its hashing power to appear <50%.

For a fork 51% has no relevence.

You could fork the blockchain right this second with 0.00001% is you want.

Actually a 51% fork is a worst case scenario and likely means the death of Bitcoin.  Coins will exist and be spendable on both sides of the fork.  People will have wallets, and tx on both sides so merchants may accept BTC1 and some accept BTC2.  Some mining on BTC1, some mining on BTC2.

In a fork you want one side to have overwhelming support of the ecosystem (i.e. installed clients, developers, nodes, exchanges, merchants, etc).  If the original fork has 90%+ support then the new fork dies off.  If the new fork has 90%+ support the old fork will die off.  Having a roughly 50/50 split is going to create massive chaos.

Clipse nailed it.

Lack of 0 tx blocks could be
a) mystery is getting orphaned out due to incompatible blocks
b) he started including txs


While "a" is certainly possible we should have seen a 15% increase in avg block time which hasn't happened over the last 4 days.

Loup why inject facts into a very good rant.

My take.  Creditors likely are getting next to nothing anyways.  Getting lawyers involved all but guarantees creditors will get less than nothing (pay out more in lawyer fees than is ever recovered).  Can't get blood from a stone folks.   Granted I haven't followed this "saga" closely but my understanding is Shakaru has no stable high income employment, no assets, no real estate, is behind on rent, lives (or lived) in a self described slum, etc.

I mean where do you think these tens of thousands of dollars are going to come from?  Forced human organ donation?

reference cards tend to be blower types which push all the hot air one way.  Non-reference cards tend to recirculate air mixing hot and cold air together.  They are nice for gamers who may have 1 or maybe 2 cards in a closed system as the total thermal load isn't that much so having intake air a little warmer isn't much of an issue.

Mining rigs tend to be much more dense with 4 to 8 GPU per motherboard.  Combine that with multiple rigs and you can be talking 20, 30, or more GPUs in a small space.  Having them all pull cooler air from one side and blow hotter air out the other side simplifies heat management.

Then again the preference for reference cards isn't universal.  Some miners prefer non-reference cards.  The blower wheel tends to be very noisy and they die at a much higher rate than axial fans.

BTW: "Ultra Durable"  blah blah blah is 99.9% marketing.  They take things that already exist and create fancy charts, and bold claims.  I mean honestly does Gigabyte also have the "Rather Fragile" version of the card for sale also?

If other products did the same thing you would see:

There have only been 3 0 tx blocks in the last 120 and remember sometimes 0tx blocks occurs naturally.  "Mystery" was never a real threat.  Economic pressure would have eventually forced all miners (including mystery) to include paying tx.

No merchant is under any obligation to accept legal tender.
Legal tender requirements only apply to debts.

Still why would US govt want to start Bitdollar when they can just keep printing trillions and trillions of increasingly worthless dollars.

If it makes you feel any better funds are still in escrow:
http://blockchain.info/address/1SAFECAGn5HnJ8ZMF8fWPn3aF6S3fSj3k

Order means power.

So 2 orders of magnitude is 10^2 = 100x.  3 orders of magnitude = 10^3 = 1000x

How are you going to pay your power bill 30 minutes after getting BTC?

Yup.

Step 1) Steal CC or buy stolen CC from wholesaler
Step 2) Use Stolen CC to purchase Amazon e-codes
Step 3) Find an victim who will trade irreversible goods for reversible ones (like hypothetically I don't know say ... Bitcoins for e-codes)
..... wait 30 to 180 days ....
Step 4) Victim finds fraudulent Amazon purchases on CC and reverses charges
Step 5) Amazon suspends account of e-code holder (victim from #3) and deducts balance plus chargeback fees, and demands payment in full for any negative balance.

I think not very long.  The details are very limited but it seems like all tx validation is done locally on the smartcard chip.  Hack that and you should be able to double spend at will.