51% attack is unfeasible at current petaflops of computing power, it will also take a staggering, tremendous amount of luck to pull off.
The chance rapidly decreases as more blocks are added, and since there isn't a single network or supercomputer in the world coming even near the current computational capacity of bitcoin, the chance is reduced to practically zero,

Has anyone even read Satoshi's paper on Bitcoin from the beginning to end?

Would you feel bad about using toilet paper to wipe your ass if it was deemed a rare commodity 20 years later due to all the forests being cut down?

That's how I feel because there's no way to get it back.
Besides, that long ago people were using thousands of BTC for fun on bitcoin blackjack sites, or even that famous 10k pizza. It was more like a fun game and less of an actual currency.

I lost a wallet with about 15k BTC in it, mined last year. Formatted HDD.

Don't mind though (or even feel bad) because there was no indication whatsoever of bitcoin taking off so fast.
I only mined for the novelty factor just as people are now doing with namecoin. Bitcoins were literally worth nothing back then, or at most, had similar "funny money" factor comparable to zimbabwean dollars.

Only got relatively re-interested once I heard the price was up to 10 cents, and started mining again.

All of those carried major, unpredictable risks though (and spaceflights suffered massive losses in the first 40 years of operating including deaths).

In the end everything in the real world is a leap of faith. Pure mathematics and theory only works in simulations.

I'm not saying to 'trust your guts' and abandon due diligence.
I'm saying everything in the world is volatile, unstable, and ultimately unpredictable in the long term.

78C is just the core temp of the chip. It doesn't indicate stability. See the exploding gtx 590 on youtube.

Only way to measure the VRM is with a physical heatgun. (Or if there is a program I can't remember the name).

At default voltage I measured ~125-135 celsius on a 5770 and 5830 while mining.

Hahaha. That is awesome, sir.

It's now my theme song while watching the live order status on Mt. Gox.

Reminds me of those old black-and-white movies with people running stairs up and down fast.

Unstable overclock and massive overvolt.
The VRM will fry within 2 months or less since it already runs at 135c (275 fahrenheit) at 1.0880 voltage. You are destroying it running the core near 1.1ghz, unless you live in a freezer.

I prefer conserving the cards for resale value and future usage for a sacrifice of 20-30mhash/s.

Even though it takes a whole network to verify their authenticity, they are ultimately in your wallet.dat file which is physically stored on your hard-drive.
So she is correct.

If someone were to steal your bitcoins they'd need to steal your laptop or at least the HDD (not counting social engineering or trojans to acquire the file remotely)

Damn, that's not exactly a customer-friendly business practice.

Was thinking about trying out a few bags but probably not from this company, no matter how world-famous.

I have roughly 15ghash/s in use 24/7, and more hardware as a reserve, I could rent you 1ghash for $350 per month.
Hardware is in guarded datacenter with decent cooling, radeon 5830/50/70 and radeon 6990's.

At next diff. level it will generate roughly 8½ bitcoins per week (if you want solo mining then either much more or much less) so I think it is quite competitive with other services you will find on forum costing up to $500+.
You can recieve one day of hashing power as a sample before payment, for proof of capacity, more can be added at request.

It's not a bad idea, and historical data does suggest a strong correlation between difficulty and price (somebody post that chart, can't be bothered to do it again).

Taxes + suspicion of money laundering if you are not a corporation and recieve statistically abnormal deposits as an ordinary customer (whose normal traffic doesn't exceed a few dozen/hundred per day)

The entire reason why $10,000+ wire transfers must be reported to the police is anti-money laundering laws.

I was thinking $100 or so, but speculation has also proven to be very lucrative recently.

Hence, whenever the BTC I buy at low prices gains at least 50% added value. My mining proceeds, I save in a BTC wallet.

It's hard to withdraw sums that big. The bank is required to alert the authorities for wire transfers that large.

Tux will increase your limit if you send in ID with picture, but probably not that high.

Even at 9k per day (pretty optimistic) it would take 2 months just to withdraw 0.5m, and then you'd better have a corporate bank account or spread the withdrawals among 10-20 private accs.
You can't just "strike it big" with bitcoin and expect to get easy money.

Getting large sums out of the system is going to be very difficult if you want to stay under the radar. At the least you are going to have to spend a lot on plane tickets to open bank accounts in various countries where foreigners can do so legally.

Not implying BTC has a long enough history to be compared to BH.  I'm saying sharp spikes up or down are not a 'law of nature'. They only happen as a result of market conditions.
A ball that you throw in the air has no recourse but to fall back down.

Hell, I hope the price goes down every weekend as it has done in the past 3 weeks. It's the easiest few grand you'll make in a while.

I'm saying it's not set in stone and thus I'm not counting on it to make constant profits; Hence ultimately relying on mining.

You mean $23?

Ok, fair point. It does promote adaption of the currency.

But when it's done at the expense of 'real' withdrawal methods it's strange to say the least.

You are effectively limited to some prepaid credit card, and dwolla, if you actually want to cash out.

No, gravity is a physical theory. Physical theories have nothing to do with economical theory.

Take Berkshire's stock for example. It has been steadily climbing from ~$200 to $150,000 over the past 20 years while other companies have gone up and down.

I make maybe 20-30 on a normal day if active on Gox. I'm just saying.

5 trades: absolutely no room for price manipulation with large USD funds.

Unlimited trades: You can control the market with maybe 20-50k dollars (~2% of total daily volume) with a good bot and the profits will far outweigh 0.65% transaction costs per trade in the end.

Made a mistake at 10.25, thought it was going to drop sub-10's so I kept waiting. Had to buy at 11.9 when the rise was evident, lost $1.65/btc profit eventually at 19.98 sell.