Is this a psychological question or a technical one? I ask in seriousness. Because Gold "coins" (for a 1oz coin) sell for > $1000 (still? havent checked in a while) without much issue. And without the benefit of being able to dice the coin into a 1e-8 piece to spend like you can with a bitcoin.

If you are asking about the psychological ramifications for people to think about spend .00000001 whatevers on something I guess that makes sense.

Good.

Tomorrow the US/Japanese federal gov'ts could confiscate MtGox and instantly add both legitimacy and fear to Bitcoin. Would you feel comfortable mining if you knew the US and Japanese government had confiscated ~300,000 BTC and ~$3 million USD of the single largest exchange for Bitcoin? Would you feel comfortable buying?

"Serious brokers" by any definition still see this for what it is, high risk and high reward.
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I'm not sure how this answers my question. If the US govt seized MtGox that would suck, but it is unlikely so I don't worry myself about it overmuch.

Still, what is a "serious broker"? The volume of trade for mtgox listed on bitcoin charts is $650,000 (50,000 volume). $7million in the past 30 days. Certainly to you or I that's a lot of money, to someone with a lot of money that is nothing. As an example Bank of America Corp  has a trading volume of 50million. This is why I see bitcoin as certainly a place for people to make profit but definitely not something that will necessarily be pulling in brokerage houses by the truckload (yet).

Or perhaps that is a mirror? You obviously have no idea how power works, Power in = power out, laws of conservation at work. Go do some study.

EDIT: I didnt say TDP was power consumption either, you need to learn to read.

EDIT #2: I can't resist a good internet bashing, it's one of my weaknesses.

TDP is the design maximum for heat dissipation before overloading of a chip occurs. If a chips cooling is rated for 188Watts of heat dissipation, can you explain to me in what world you believe it will be drawing more than 188Watts of power? I'm interested in your voodoo physics.

Well when my life revolves around proving to some internet guy that something is true I'll give you a call.

I will give you a quick lesson in power though just since I'm still here:

There is a thing called AC/DC conversion, that is what the whole premise of 80Plus is built upon in fact. Quality 750Watt PSUs are designed to deliver 750Watts (or as you correctly stated 744watts for an x750) to the system. That means that the draw from the wall can and is in fact much higher. "Conservative" estimates do not put a 5870 at 188w at load. 5870s TDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power (provided a link for you if you're wondering what that is) is rated at 188watts. And again, that's wall power.

So even if we go merrily chunking away at 200W per card on an overclock, and 45watts for the semprons TDP, being generous to you that is 850watts. 850 * .87 (gold rated units AC/DC conversion at 100% load) = 739Watts. Ta-Da! And yes, quality units are rated to deliver that much power continuously. That means 24/7 365 days a year, their peak outputs can and will be higher. If you are building for efficiency then yes you want to work your PSU like a slave, whats the point of wasted power exactly?

EDIT: To be fair to you though, if the OP wants to really really really really overclock everything to the maximum breaking point, there is potential go over 750Watts, and so perhaps an 850Watt would be a fair thing to look at. I will cede that point in the name of margin of error for safety.

I am running 4 overclocked 5870s on a seasonic X750 (I got a good deal and gold rated PSUs float my boat). Sorry I was editing my last post so you may have missed my previous commentary.

EDIT: Oops! I mean, yeah let's make that bet, how much money we betting here?

My favorite planet, planet Earth.

Run a kill-a-watt monitor sometime. I have.

Most people (including yourself apparently) have no idea how power supplies work and grossly over-estimate their power requirements. I will give you an example, 2 6990s have been measured under full load to pull 1000Watts from the wall. Not counting the AC-DC conversion you really think 4 5870s pull more power than 2 6990s?

Mining will be around as long as bitcoin is around (no one knows how long that will be).

Coins are slated to all be found in 2030-something I believe, but for practical purposes all coins will have been found by 2020 (85%). After bitcoin generation slows transaction fees will take over to keep the system running.

Where is kiba when you need him?

Bubble!

That's fair. Well on that note then to make up for my earlier comments:

If you can find them used MSI 790FX-GD70s are awesome. MSI 890FXTA-GD70s are better but more expensive (newer). Both can support 4 GPUs with no extenders or anything though the fit will be tight so try to get something to space the cards a little and some fans.

So, A Sempron 140 (like $40) with 1GB of DDR3 ram ($10-$20?), 4x 5870s (prices vary, hard to find, lets say $225 each ebay prices), a cheap myopenPC platform ($50), cheap HD ($35), and a tx750 to power it all ($100) would run you about $1300 / rig and net you about 1.6GHash per rig. 2 rigs is about 2600, 3 is about 3900, so you pick your budget.

That should do you pretty darn well really.

I don't mean to sound like a jerk pushing people out of bitcoins but... if you are not tech savvy you really should not be building a mining rig. Building one can present technical challenges, cooling it presents further challenges, configuring and running it presents challenges and then continous monitoring presents further challenges. You need to know what you are doing or this will be an exercise in pain and frustration.

I don't know that now is the best time to buy either hardware or bitcoins, but if you are really dedicated to bitcoin investment I'd go with coins if you are lacking expertise in computing.

Define "serious brokers". The total valuation of the entireity Bitcoins is < 90million USD. That is chump change for wall street.

Well again as I mentioned, people are reporting full hashing rates utilizing x1 lanes. An x1 lane has bandwidth of 1GB/sec maximum, so unless there are some magical x1 lanes that can utilize x16 bandwidth, or for some reason cards mining request the full bandwidth of their PCI-E slot for no reason other than that they have it available, bandwidth is not a concern.

Here's a sweet setup I found while I was trying to find the wood one I was thinking of

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6128.msg98361#msg98361

I find bandwidth difficult to accept, why would it work under linux but not windows if there was a physical limitation? Moreover many users report 100% hashrates running cards via x1 PCI-E slots, which should mean theoretically you could run > 16 cards.

The best caseless rig I saw was posted on these forums a couple weeks ago by a user who built a cheap wooden double rack for 5 cards, had a simple crossbar to support the cards (connected via pci-e extenders). He said it cost like $40, supported 10 GPUs (2 mobos) and was basically just wood and nails. I wish I had bookmarked that page as I can't find it now.

I'm not talking about practical application, I am talking about software limitations. 4 Dual GPU cards still act as 8 physical GPUs. Are you saying that if I put 4 GPUs in my windows machine and then bought a PCIE Raid controller that windows would not be able to recognize the 5th PCIE device?

Confusing title I apologize, but as bitcoin price has spiked to $14 this morning, it's doubtful enough power will be brought to bear in the next 3 or 4 days before the difficulty increase to 530k, but the difficulty AFTER 530k... well I think it would be fun to speculate on, maybe even get some bets going (ala CydeWylde).

Price doesn't follow difficulty but you better believe difficulty follows price, so what do you think the next next difficulty will be?

I will get the ball rolling, I foresee 535 - 540k for next difficulty followed by ~900k difficulty. I'm not sure I strongly believe this enough to bet BTC on, but... maybe if the right bet came my way

In the meantime, I'm curious what others foresee, miners, do you see some real troubles heading your way?

Say wha? Bitcoin generation rate is not tied to mining rate (well, assuming no catastrophic drop off in miners causing a near infinite-length difficulty cycle). There is no need for more bitcoins, as they are divisible to 8 decimal places. People are used to thinking in terms of buying a loaf of bread for an integer value like "3 dollars", but it's not mandatory. You could buy a loaf of bread for .00000003 Bitcoins if the value of a bitcoin was high enough, it's just hard to think that way.

Yeah it's pretty interesting to see how big an effect luck can have. Deepbit got unlucky with a ddos (that's a form of luck I suppose) and then a wave of low block generation (even accounting for reduced hashrate).

BTCGuild had some awesome output for a few days when I first hopped on a while back to test it out, was breaking blocks like nobodies business at 200GHash/sec, and over the past few days got reamed by bad luck producing poorly with 500GHash/sec. If one were really obsessive they could monitor pool luck trends and hop their miners following the luck, but there's no real way to know when it will happen and how long it will last.

I like BTCGuilds owner (good sense of humor, very responsive and open) and pool features, and I like deepbits owner (very smart helpful active member of the community who implemented a ton of great features and helped pave the way for pool competition). Either pool is a great choice, as is btcmine and whatever. It's good to stay vigilant but for now there's no reason to suspect pool operators of any misconduct.