No it isn't.  We pass the pubkey as a binary blob to openssl, and openssl will validate the signature using either form.  The same private key can actually correspond to two different addresses, because the hash of the compressed pubkey is different from the hash of the uncompressed pubkey.

My old estimate was based on dollars per hash/second.  ASICs provide roughly 25-35 times the hashrate per dollar cost, ignoring operational costs.  Thus, my short-medium term projection was about 75 million difficulty.  As the fixed costs of ASIC production dwindle and devices start being sold closer to their marginal costs, I expect another doubling, to around 150 million difficulty. *

My current thinking is that those two moves will appear as a single steady rise, rather than two discrete actions.  I would expect we'll be near 75 million by July, and 150 million by October, roughly a 50% increase every month, starting more or less now.

After that, I think a 10% monthly growth rate is fairly reasonable.  The network will be big enough that each new batch coming online will be a smaller fraction of the whole, but the units will also be cheaper.  10% seems like a reasonable balance point.  In my projections, I use an abrupt transition, but I expect a rounder corner in reality.

I'm hoping that my estimates are very aggressive.  If I'm underestimating the difficulty in any given period by very much at all, then the second or third Avalon batch, and other units with similar costs and delivery timelines (which might possibly include BFL) will be at best slightly profitable over the first year.  The biggest winners could very easily be those that got in on the very first batches, and those than come in much later, when the per-unit costs are dominant. **

* Note that I use difficulty in my work, not hash rate.  The exchange rate is roughly 1 Mdiff=7Thash/sec.  My 75 Mdiff short-medium target is roughly double Korbman's minimum 1st gen estimate, or about 525 Thash/sec.  My medium-long target of 150 is roughly 1 Petahash/sec.

** I place an upper bound of $200 on the part cost per module in Avalon, not counting the fixed costs.  This is using very rough estimates for a bunch of things.  Napkin quality work, at best.  I could refine it a bit if I had the board specs (dimensions and layer count) along with the part numbers of the non-ASIC components on the boards, but I probably won't bother.

I'm keeping mine for vanity address mining.  They've already paid for themselves, and I have good electrical rates.  I don't see much point selling them into the glut that will be coming to ebay soon.

Great post, you really get right to the heart of it.

In real numbers, you can feed an error term back into the algorithm to improve a guess.  In discrete math, and even worse, modular discrete math, you don't get any error term, so you can't get any feedback.  Well, you can get a little, here and there.  Better algorithms attempt to extract the tiny bits of feedback, which in some cases makes them much better than simple brute force, but that is just a reduction in badness, it doesn't get you down into polynomial territory.

The catch is that we really don't know why we can't get feedback. *  And we can't prove that feedback is impossible either.  For all we know, there is some trick just waiting to be discovered that will reduce a big lump of currently impossible problems to triviality.

* The Wikipedia example is (3^k)%17=13.  If you try solving it, you can see that classical techniques for using the error term to improve successive guesses don't help you much, but why we haven't been able to find any techniques that do work is, again, one of the biggest open questions in mathematics today.

What you are describing is much worse than a mere fork, the only word I can think of for it is a shatter.

If car dealerships sold cars for however much you were willing to pay, down to and including free, you can bet they'd limit the number of cars they "sold".  And I doubt you'd even get 10 out of them.

The problem is that we really don't know yet how to operate with the system we have, much less a different one.  In a decade or two, when the subsidy is no longer the dominant part of the block reward, maybe then we'll have some idea how to price transactions, and we will be able to think clearly about mechanisms to adjust the block size.

You know, probably a hundred different people have all said this on the forums since S.Dice opened.  Surely if one of you were right, this thread would have gone dormant long ago, crushed by the flood of S.Dice users rushing to the better site.  And yet, here we are, still talking about them, still no real competition in view.  Perhaps you are missing something in your analysis.  Or maybe a couple million dollars a year isn't enough motivation to replicate their simple site.

I hope you will allow full price orders to convert.  When they came back into stock today, I didn't want to miss my chance, so I placed my order.

Sigh.  Please google before you necro next time.

You use the same password on both sites?

You run a pool that has not just one, but two different ways to generate payments that can't be returned in the way they are planning to do.

There is no FROM address in bitcoin.

Are you also planning to reimburse people when you send their payments into the void?

Each click on the site led to a random shopping cart.  Eventually, I had the 2 units that I wanted and was able to check out.  Of course, when I got to the payment page after entering my info, it wanted by to send 0.0 BTC to the address.  Then it thanked me for my payment once it realized that the amount pending was zero.

I sent 0.01 just as a placeholder.

Checkpoints are in checkpoints.cpp.  As of 0.7.1, the latest was 193,000.  I'm not sure if 0.7.2 moved it up.

There are problems with limiting rollback.  I've proposed a scheme where reorgs become exponentially more costly, but it still has the problem that it adds new state to the system and messes with automatic convergence.

DC Power supplies are marked by the DC wattage provided, not by the AC wattage consumed.  There is nothing at all strange about a device marked "450W" pulling 600+ watts from the wall. 

Yes, make sure that you set the client up to validate the certificate.  If you skip this step, you might as well not be using SSL at all.

Basically, when listtransactions runs, it looks at every output of every transaction that you are involved in, even the outputs that are not yours.  This causes these messages to show up in your logs, because p2pool uses a bogus txout for internal pool tracking.

See here and here.

ASICMINER 10 shares @ 0.44 BTC each

No, sorry, your math is outdated (by like a century, or at the very least 45 years if you start counting from 1967).

The crisis in Mathematics that resulted from Peano's non-differentiable monster curves was successfully resolved.  We even have the word fractal now specifically to describe curves where the Hausdorff Dimension is not equal to the topological or Euclidean dimension.

Heh.  My point was more about the missing dollar.

But that service looks like a mess.  To verify a timestamp, I get to download every single message that was ever signed by it to check the chain?  Ugh, no thanks, I've already done that once.  At least with bitcoin I already have the software, plus I know that the whole world has a financial incentive to make sure all blocks are correct too.