Ha! My browser is more intelligent than Littleshops! :-)

Seriously, though, good idea. For sites like MtGox users really should only access them securely.

But you won't be paying higher fees just for security - you'll be paying higher fees so that your transactions are processed speedily. Security will just be a pleasant side-effect. Higher fees won't be "enforced": they'll come about through the natural operation of a free market.

Interesting. I tried http just now (while you were editing your post!) and it redirected to https. Maybe MagicalTux was redirecting while you were editing and I was testing? :-)

I think the system is - if there are any payments ready then they're paid when a block is generated. In this case I suspect the payments weren't ready, and weren't paid.

To be honest, I'm not too worried because I figure Slush will process back payments manually when he reappears. I appreciate other people may not be able to be as laid back as me, however. (I'm also slightly worried about Slush - I know it's the weekend, and I don't expect Slush to monitor the pool all the time, but I hope everything is OK, and Slush isn't hurt or ill...)

It's every 210,000 blocks. The graph (linked) suggests 2012/2013, but as Grinder mentioned it depends on difficulty. Difficulty adjusts to try and ensure that, on average, a block is generated every ten minutes. In practice, it may be that the network grows consistently faster than this, and difficulty increases lag behind - so more than six blocks per hour are generated over a long period, and we reach the 210,000th block faster than expected.

But why would fees get that low? Wouldn't the market kick in? As I see it, as fees diminish and miners stop mining, transactions take longer and longer. This incentivises people making transactions to pay a higher transaction fee, which in turn incentivises miners to start/resume mining.

And you think I know what I'm talking about?! I'm basing this on a decade-and-a-half ago study of pol. sci, and I'm arguing for things I don't believe in :-)

Communism certainly pre-dated Marx, and as I understand it doesn't always assume the necessity of a state - the earliest split amongst communists was between a pro-Marx faction (authoritarian, pro-state) and a pro-Proudhon faction (libertarian, anti-state). Proudhon believed not in the state but in small-scale communities. However, I've seen good arguments on this forum for even small communities like this being, effectively, state-surrogates. So don't take Proudhon as necessarily a good example of a non-statist.

I've also seen good arguments here that we need nothing, even food. I'm not sure I'm convinced by these arguments, but definitely food (sorry!) for thought.

I don't need any bitcoins :-) And isn't "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" specifically Marxist, not necessarily communist per se. This is the trap I'm trying to highlight: "we" identify communism with Karl Marx's ideas and with Marxist-Leninist states, states which claimed to be only socialist, and claimed to want - one day in a happy future (!) - to be communist.

It did! Back on topic, Slush's pool is advertised as (well, it's forum thread advertises it as...) "cooperative mining". I realise that there are different models of cooperative enterprise, but pools seem to be fairly good examples of "workers and consumers cooperatives": profits are shared between members and employees. That seems fairly close to the original ideals of communism (and fairly distant from the Marxist-Leninist reality...) to me.

The ones I mentioned weren't state-run. ;-) I'm less and less convinced that state-run anything can be good...

Agreed. And, at the risk of being pedantic, Warsaw Pact Communist parties never presided over communist systems, only over socialist systems (Western academics of the period referred to the study of these countries' economies as studies of "real existing socialism). As Marxist parties, they believed in state-socialist economies and "dictatorships of the proletariat" which would - eventually - "wither away" leaving communism behind. Never quite happened. Still, it might yet happen in China, Korea, Vietnam or Cuba. I'm not holding my breath waiting, however!

I'd argue that the only examples of large-scale "real existing communism" are Ukraine in the 1920s (before the Red Army crushed the anarchists and replaced anarchist communism with state-socialism) and Catalonia in the 1930s (before the Soviet Union crushed the anarchists and replaced anarchist communism with state-socialism).

I'm speculating, but I think this group is one that's possibly most influenced by difficulty. Sure, fixed and variable financial costs are near zero, but they're not stupid - they know that running their machines hot 24 hours a day will mean buying a new gaming rig sooner than they'd planned for. They look at current difficulty, think "free money", then think things through harder once difficulty increases. Additionally (and this is why I was thinking about "natural wastage"), this group of miners is more likely to be semi-itinerant - my mining operation (such as it is...) is very fixed - I'm not likely to move house any time soon. Gamers are going to consist of a higher proportion of young people and students, who move houses more frequently (leading to down time), or who share houses/apartments (leading to objections to noise/heat).

On two samples, sure. This is pure speculation on my part. As regards difficulty influencing price - I'm surprised! It seems intuitive to me that difficulty affects supply. OK, supply is growing steadily, but as demand grows that demand can be met by mining, purchasing bitcoins, or by selling a good or service in exchange for bitcoins. With difficulty increasing, mining yields less, so the options for obtaining bitcoins are reduced.

I suspect you're correct, at least for the gamer/miner demographic, and probably for much of the rest of the mining demographic as well (I realise that there are some miners - myself included - who mine mostly to hold, believing the future value of bitcoins to be substantially higher than the present value). Playing Devil's Advocate, however... the gamer/miner can possibly afford to mine-and-hold more than the investor/miner who needs to recoup the cost of their mining rig...

Yes, I think you're probably right (at least on the first paragraph), but... we've been here before. In late January we'd hit USD parity, mining was easy, difficulty manageable. Then we had six weeks of increasing difficulty and declining price, which led - in part through the perceived scarcity of bitcoins caused by increased difficulty - to a rapid rise in price. Mining is easy again.

My point is that I believe this is likely to be cyclical, and your second paragraph suggests an end of easy mining that I think is overstating things. I strongly suspect that mining is going to get difficult again - but it won't last.

I think it's an unlikely scenario, and I agree that the total outflow would need to exceed the influx, but I was factoring natural wastage in as well as the hypothetical OCN influx/exodus - I'm assuming that in any given period miners will stop mining (possibly for short periods) due to equipment failures, higher-than-expected utility bills, moving house, etc. (Incidentally, I'm also assuming that this wastage will decrease as miners become increasingly sophisticated - I'm assuming that most mining operations right now are largely hobbyist).

Correct. A decrease would follow a period in which bitcoin generation slowed down, for example due to a large number of people becoming interested in mining over a short period of time, and then losing interest over an equally short period of time (which I speculate could happen in the next month or so, iif the recent influx is largely due to the coverage in OCN), or a large-scale miner (a botnet, a render farm, or whatever the current theory for "Mystery Miner" is) going offline. I can think of several scenarios in which generation drops (all somewhat unlikely and of relatively minimal impact given the comparative number of increases) but that I can easily imagine occurring at some point.

By all means provide an explanation for one of the occasions on which difficulty decreased - my point was that it had decreased on more than one occasion, for different reasons. And that this suggests that it may, just maybe, decrease in the future, for different reasons. If you want to infer that I'm trying to appear smart, fill your boots.

I have no idea what your last sentence means, so I'll acknowledge that I'm clearly not that smart.

Except that's not what I'm thinking. I said it had dropped twice before. "Mystery Miner" accounted for one of those drops. I believe it's entirely possible that "OCN folk getting bored" could account for a future drop. Heck, I believe there could be any number of reasons for future drops, just as there are different reasons for the more than one previous drops.

"My hopeful wishes"? Excuse me? Citation, please.

...because it can only ever increase? (Hint: it's gone down twice before...)

Personally, I believe it will continue to increase for at least the next month. But suggesting exponential increases for ever and ever is naive.

Well, Vasili commented before you edited your post to indicate the thread was closed. I commented to suggest that you might want to reconsider closing it, as it still seemed do-able - but you'd need to bulk import from outside the US, not go direct to a US wholesaler/manufacturer. But it's your choice, so do as you wish.

This forum's Mrb has done some work with multi-GPU systems - check out their blog, as they detail the motherboard etc they use. You'd probably need to look at 6990s rather than 5970s, but with four 6990s you could hit 2800 Mhash/s - at 100 Mhash/s per slot that's 28 slots. Might annoy your circuit-breaker, however... and I suspect that heat would start to become an issue.

You'd need a mobo with four double-sized PCI-e slots, but x8 isn't necessary - with a bit of hacking you could get by with x1. Mrb used PCI-e extenders, but mentions that literally hacking the mobo is an alternative option (though one I'd avoid, since it's an expensive mistake if you do it wrong...)