The 7950 has a Power (Max TDP) of 200 watts.  But you need to OC it to get that.  The Default TDP is 160 watts.  I'm running 4x7950 on an 850 watt Gold PSU.  I have no plans to OC those cards as I expect to make them available for resale in the future.  I don't want to burn them out.  If you want to give yourself some room then I would go with a 1000 watt PSU but anything more than that it overkill.

It strengthen the network in the past but CPU to GPU was an easy transition for most miners because the hardware was easily accessible.  ASICs are not easily accessible.  There are only 2 maybe 3 producers and they are slowly deploying them to their clients.  As a result early adopters capture the majority of the coins mined.  They profit the most and have more capital to deploy the next round of technology (100Gh/s units???).  So the bigger get bigger and the small guys are just out of reach. 

My guess is that most casual miners will walk away, cash out what little in bitcoins they have or hoard them as an investment in hopes it appreciates.  Over the next year the ASICs will drop in price and fewer of them will come to market as they become less profitable to produce.  Look what happened to FPGA boards. How easy are they to get now vs 1 year ago.

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What makes you think they aren't doing that already.  Mine with the ASICs during the "test" phase.  When the difficulty skyrockets to the point that it is not profitable or they start seeing too many cancellations start shipping a few of the less profitable miners like the Jalapenos.  Difficulty goes up higher, sell the bigger models.

Then next year market the new 2500GH/s miner take another batch of preorders, rinse and repeat.

The reality is that it is about the business model.  Why don't gold miners mint their own coins or make their own jewelry.  Its not their business.  If you spread yourself thin you will have lower profit margins.  Better to focus on one thing and be the best in that market.

i did forex for a while too about 5 - 7 years ago.  never went 100:1  I was alway 20:1 and was a dividend hunter.  played the NZD/JPY JPY/USD for the cashflow before the housing market collapsed and everything went to hell.  I never liked the daytrading aspect.

But I'm seeing this as a ground floor opportunity.  Cryptocurrencies smells a lot like the late 80s early 90s of daytrading when people ran trading pools and were quitting their jobs to daytrade for a living.  When you see the first how to main bitcoins for dummies book it is time to get out.

this is a major security risk.  If you ever sell the computer you have your wallet on  it wouldn't be too hard to recover the data off the drive that the dat file was on.  If it wasn't encrypted I could just recover the file catch it up to the network and transfer all your coins from your account.

This is a warning to everyone, physically destroy your hard drives.  A data wipe may not be enough.  If you do loose your wallet or your computer Immediately transfer your coins from it otherwise you run the risk of losing it all.

it could have taken BFL this long just to get 400 produced.  I doubt that they will be able to meet their full backlog by the end of this year.  My guess is that if they don't shutter their doors by the end of the year that they will eventually get everyone's "preorder" by the end of 2015.

ASICs won't destroy bitcoin.  It will only be profitable for those that own it right now.  As more ASICs come online  the profit margin on mining will collapse even for ASIC owners.  In a year's time I expect that more Bitcoin miners will be using ASICs and ASIC units will cost about $1500 per 50GH/s.  It will still allow the average joe to get in but they will have to buy an ASIC to participate.  That might dissuade the newbie from getting in.  Especially when the margins will be thin.  Instead the average joe will be better off daytrading bitcoins against other cryptocurrencies and against the fiats.  As miners jump from currency to currency trying to anticipate the next one that has a lower difficulty increase traders can try to trade ahead of the miners.

There will always be an arbitrage between the currencies that will provide some miners an opportunity to squeeze some profit.  As difficulty increases and more miners appear the profit margins will get tighter and these small percentage differences will be all that is left for profits.  Its like what happens in the big exchanges.  First it was program trading, then high frequency trading for fractions of a fraction of a penny.  Only the big traders will be able to turn that profit.

it would require some computer forensics and computer security gymnastics to be able to get them back.  Legally there is no law protecting your asset.  cryptocurrencies are the wild west right now and everything is more or less unregulated.  buyer AND seller beware.  Protect yourself as much as possible.  Unless it goes mainstream and the dumb joe gets on board there is no legal statutes or penalties.  At most you could get them on hacking your account, data and possibly identity theft but most law enforcement organizations are so computer illiterate that it would be difficult to get anything out of them.

At some point security firms will appear out of the cryptocurrency economy like Wells Fargo did in the Old West.  They will protect your coins for a small fee.  You can choose to hire them for protection or take the risk of fending for yourself. 

But risk is where the money is made.

ok I'll bite.  how do you use an escrow for coin transfers.  I know how to do it with USDs, banks, law offices, etc but how do you set it up online?  What is the process?

this is pathetic.  and against what I feel is ethical forum behavior but I guess Im in the same boat.  been here over a week, 10 hours of actual surfing time and one post but still no posting privileges.  I feel guilty for posting like this to get my posting rights.

hello all lurker and week old miner.  I noticed I have over 10 hours on the forum but I still didn't get the ability to post on other forums yet.  I guess I have to post at least once.  So here it is.