Has the actual existence of said "fat cat" actually have been confirmed?

If not.. why do you assume this to be a truth?

Certainly is entertaining

The fact people can't put 2+2 together continues to amaze me, likely will forever.  Sigh.

Bruce - re-reading my post, it looks like this was a personal attack on you, and I guess it somewhat was.  This was not my intent and I do apologize.  I actually enjoy reading your stuff and think you bring a ton (way more than I have, or am likely to!) of value to the community.

I just hate to see Bitcoin develop a PR problem because we as as a community can't do something as simple as having reasonable, respectful, and *truthful* conversations with detractors.   Trying to tell people not a single person has used a bitcoin for Silk Road purchases for example I believe is counter-productive to the cause - it's a completely made-up fact that is demonstrably false.

Otherwise, let the revolution continue!  It takes all types, and the community diversity is what will make this idea take hold and become strong!

-Phil

I think as long as reporters find these types of "mouthpieces" for bitcoin, you're going to continue to see these types of articles.  This one honestly isn't too bad, as far as tech journalism goes.  Anyone that thinks otherwise simply has not dealt with the media before.   I do agree it *is* a wake up call as to how inaccurate things are reported if you're first becoming exposed to this.  Bitcoin is being treated no differently than any other tech in that regards, however.

Honestly, after seeing the e-mail sent to this reporter by who appears to be the primary contributor to the story, I'm very surprised this article was as fair as it was.  We deserved worse, given that input.  Garbage in, garbage out - most people here should realize that.

Bitcoin definitely needs at least a few people who can be counted on to give professional, rational, and accurate responses/interviews to the media.  Those who cannot really should take a step back and consider the damage they are doing to the perception of Bitcoin, regardless of how technically "correct" they are in their paranoid rants.  A well reasoned and properly toned e-mail/conversation/interview goes a hell of a lot further than some idiot on the internet flaming a reporter in all caps.  You can be correct, but still horribly wrong at the same time.

My advice?  If you're talking to the media, pretend you're talking on behalf of an employer.  Is what your saying accurate?  Is it professional?  Will saying this get you fired?  Can you disagree with someone in a more reasonable sounding manner regardless of how idiotic or wrong their statements are?  Take the high road.

Remember folks, a US Senator has a hell of a lot more immediate trust instilled on the media and general populace than some otherwise well reasoned and respected person on the Internet.  It's not even a competition when it's against a few whacko-sounding net kooks talking in a disjointed, disrespectful, and completely embarrassing manner.

Also remember, the media will *always* try to contact the net kooks for stories once they become known, since they provide good antics and quotes to write about.  Hey, it's probably some of the only fun a reporter gets to have these days

To those whom presented themselves professionally in this piece - for what it's worth you have my thanks!

Just my .02btc, coming from someone who could care less about the speculation angle and wants this project to be an overall long-term success.

Just busting your (and others) balls a little.  The trolling was pretty funny to me, especially when it's off by such a wide margin.

Perhaps, and I don't doubt there may be some here who have done this.  Or perhaps this is a "rich" geek with too much time on his hands that finds the project interesting from a long-term perspective, and happened to know someone who was able to get him a deal on all the remaining 5770 video card stock if he agreed to buy it all in one order?  Just rampant speculation of course

I feel Bitcoin has a future, and hopefully this guy does too.   Mining gave me a way to both operate this as a business (aka get the creative juices flowing) and really learn how things function and what the community/market needs as a whole.  Now that my mining investment is relatively paid for and operates in a completely automated fashion, (assuming no $0 crashes within the next 4 weeks) I've been focusing on other things such as launching some services that accept bitcoin, or provide services to the bitcoin community.  

These take time to develop, much more time/expense than simply buying $10k (or $100k) of commodity readily available computing gear.  Paying good designers, developers, and taking the time to really lay out a solid business plan is *way* more effort and risk than this relatively tiny mining op you see here.  I have first hand knowledge of other mining ops that make this one look small in comparison, and I still wouldn't call them "large" to any degree when compared to scientific GPU clusters and other such short-term computational projects I've either been involved in, or heard about.

While I didn't buy this much gear (no cooling for it!), you can ask me I suppose, as I put my own money into dedicated mining gear about 2 months ago, and expanded it 3-4 weeks ago as well.  I will say the current (and last week's) market fluctuations do not worry me in the slightest.  I put one month's disposable income into my op, generate below 10Ghash/sec, and if I make exactly $0 on the BTC generation it will simply have been a sorely needed fun hobby/diversion from my real work.  Basically, in my opinion, it's already paid for itself simply in personal enjoyment.  It's been a long time since I've needed to pull out the dremel and soldering iron (to unlock the "unlockable" 6950's of course.).  Reconnecting with some really smart friends in various segments of the industry to hack on specific aspects (hardware, code, etc.) has also made this project more than worth it for me to boot!

If people spent more than they can afford to lay on black in Vegas, then I absolutely agree with you!  I think we likely have the same line of thought there, but you just don't really understand the scale of things quite yet

I will also point out that if all these "early adopters" had been putting their money directly back into their mining operations, they'd have operations that would absolutely dwarf this one - with almost no initial out of pocket USD (or other currency) investment.

Given the screwup that this picture was linked publicly without the shipping labels being obscured, I can say with almost absolute assurances than he is in no way scared whatsoever, and is likely reading this thread laughing a little bit  Heck, this thread probably already made the whole project worth it to him!

-Phil

The amount of fail at math here is pretty awesome.  You guys can't even come up with a number resembling anything remotely close to what this gear actually cost, and you think you can predict future profitability for this guy?

Hint: newegg gives distributor pricing to large accounts.  Hell, 10 seconds of google and you'd figure this out.  You are not likely to get much better pricing unless you are buying in lot-sized quantities directly from AMD (which you can't, because you're a hater posting on the bitcoin forums  Having made buys similar to this from both Newegg, their competitors, and directly from distributors like MALabs, Ingram, etc. I can say the discount off of most high-volume items is negligible at best.

This also is pocket change for many folks who run tech/R&D consulting groups - an interesting investment from the geek side, hire a couple high-schoolers to put it together for you, spend a night or two scripting your installs/pool/whatever and then let it run for a few months without ever having to touch it.  Pay said high-schoolers to come by once a day and swap out any dead gear.  

Free money, or not - but very little effort or work required to start a relatively risk-free investment.  It fails and you lose every single dollar you put into it (not likely)?  Guess what, you just reduced your tax base for 2011 with a nice sized write off.

Many folks also have blank lab space - just like this - to do projects a lot like these (I have one, but not quite this size).  Given some personal knowledge of this specific situation, I'd say this is some guy with disposable income who finds this sort of thing fun, and happened to have most of the infrastructure handy and unused so it was convenient.

Basically I'm saying more is spent on a fun weekend in Vegas quite regularly, and this has hell of a lot better chance of payback than that does!  Plus, it's a lot more fun to some people

Edit: spelling

This has been bugging the crap out of me since I saw you refused to release the actual problem.

I'm offering to pay you 5BTC should you release a detailed explanation of the problem, and the fix.  I don't even mine in your pool (I actually hopped on IRC the first day you started to give you a couple suggestions/features that I would have needed to join).  This way, you are now splitting the cost and the entire community as a whole benefits.

Or heck, just PM me the problem and I'll write up the problem/solution myself after I test it in a dev environment.

-Phil

Currently a bit over 5Ghash/sec myself

Same as Zapeta here...

I rarely post, but have lurked for 4 or so months now, only recently registered.  In fact, in the past few days I felt I had enough background reading and experimentation done to finally start posting useful information/help/whatever to the various forums.  Go figure!

I can only hope this is a very temporary condition, as it will certainly remove folks like me from the community.  Definitely a very effective way to kill interest for many newcomers...

I have less than 1,000 posts on around a half dozen message boards throughout the Internet, all of which I've been a member since either the late 90's or early 2000's... I simply don't talk much!  But when I do, I like to pretend it's at least somewhat valuable to someone

I refuse to make a bunch of useless spam posts in this forum, simply to increase my post count so I can participate.  Find a way to allow posting, without the need to generate useless spam perhaps?

-Phil

Clearcoin ok?

Very interesting.

Even more interesting to me, since my family operates a small organic farm (most revenue via CSA, some via farmers markets) in the Minneapolis area...

-Phil

I like it!

However, this math doesn't quite add up to me...

Currently, 100 MH would give you 0,17728007 BTC/day. At rate $21,70 per BTC this gets you $3,8470/day

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get $3800/day for 100MH, but I don't think that is correct

-Phil

Where (roughly?) is local?

What is your rough price?

You'll likely get a lot of interest around $125 and less, above that I'm not certain

This makes a lot of sense - there would likely be a very strong market for this, developing over time.  It pretty much already exists, both in legal and semi-legal forms (mailorder prescription drugs from Canada?)

While you can certainly make strong arguments for restricting the use of antibiotics to "the masses" - I think that time has yet to come for this forum   This is one of those life-saving medications I feel are critical to having a non-expired course or two around "just in case", you never know when you can be cut off from easily available pharmacy sources due to natural disaster or $other_conspiracy_theory_here

Certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea though, of course - but it appears some may be surprised at the strength of this market already using other currencies.

Just my .02btc

Are the powered 12" cables $56/ea, or for the lot?  I'm guessing each, but wanted to be sure.

Thanks!