Received the messages, noticed each had a unique ID as part of the link, so I never clicked on anything. Looks like an attempt to collect IPs of bitmessage users.

No. All I have done is propose a method for the community to protect itself from vaporware scams. If the product really exists, it makes no economic difference whatsoever to you or me who mines with it for a few days. It makes a big practical difference, however, to know or not know whether a product exists and performs as advertised. Would you rather have employees of the company secretly ot openly mine purely for profit, or a forum moderator mine and publicize the specs?

By the way, a company could also pay for the mod to visit them and test the finished product. Seeing your comment above, I suspect you would object to a moderator getting a paid trip, too.

Yes, unless the scheme is advertised as a Ponzi - in that case, I have no problem with the whole thing. I wouldn't take part, but it wouldn't bother me. Everyone knows how it works, and they gamble trying to get out just in time.

Yes, I assumed that was understood. The moderators here would receive a product and make sure it works as advertised. It makes sense for them to get compensated by keeping the coins mined during the test-drive (for bigger units) or by getting the unit for free (for smaller units, at the discretion of the vendor).

We would still have screaming related to backlogs, canceled orders, etc. - like any other product forum out there. Still, all the screaming related to vaporware, scams, and failed engineering would disappear. I see no good reason not to implement this.

The exchange is not selling you bitcoins. They provide a service of matching orders between buyers and sellers. They charge the fee for this service, and tax is included in this fee. The rest is between you and the CRA?
Am I right?

...which makes them, in the long run, a competitor of Bitcoin. You should see their actions and excuses in the light of that fact.

Vendors who are past their NRE cost can provide practically unlimited quantities of chips at the cost that is orders of magnitude below today's prices. Thus, the answer to your inquiry is mostly in the domain of psychology of the miners, not in the domain of engineering of the vendors.
The hashing power that will be coming online through the gaping anus of all these preorders is elastic in the sense that vendors will simply keep selling as long as (pre)orders are coming in. Once the supply of suckers starts diminishing, the vendors will simply drop the $s/hash ratio. This will attract new customers, and also force some of the old ones to keep ordering so they don't drop out of the game (monarch anyone?). Then the price drops again. And again. And again. Only when we get close to the production cost, and vendors start operating on thin margins, will the game of power efficiency begin.

What does it cost to produce high volumes of ASICs? A couple of tens of dollars per chip, which is thermally limited to a couple of hundreds of watts, which currently might provide a couple of hundreds of GHash/s. There you go. Let's say ~0.2$s/Ghash. Next, we account for the RoI period miners are comfortable with - a year maybe? That's 1.3M coins up for grabs. Their value is anyone's guess, but let's say $400 per coin in the next year or two. That's half a billion dollars to be made, ignoring fees. The miner's investment then translates into 2E9 Ghash/s. Give or take. Once we hit that, the J/hash will become more important, and that's a whole another amazing story full of exotic technologies, exotic places, and politics.

Only product-specific threads allowed, once you, or your apointee, receive(s) a working device. It is up to vendors to supply these, including an optional prepaid return shipping if they desire them returned.

No product, no thread.

This is guaranteed to eliminate the majority of madness on all sides. You would be left with legitimate vendors, legitimate customers, and an occasional shill or a troll, much like in other subfora.

It is not a Ponzi until someone receives the 40% weekly payout. It is simply a scam. Send me your money, and you will get rich. Thank you. Goodbye.

Lots of ideas in this thread. What would be a good first step - something realistic, and within a reach? I lack in-depth understanding of Bitcoin networking and of the mesh networks being developed, so I can't really cast a meaningful vote untill we get specific proposals here.

What are possible scenarios regarding ownership of the "bitcoin" trademark (currently held by Mt. Gox) if owner goes bankrupt, or dissolves, or fails in other similar ways?

Why wouldn't he withdraw it to his bank account? I hope you realize there are  banks in this world outside of the U.S.

He had balls, did the right thing, and I will support him.

That's our money.

Seriously, what is the fate of seized funds in cases like this? Can I ask for Uncle Sam for my withdrawal that got snatched?

Don't forget the HAWP.

You have chosen a particular state of brokenness of the two sources of entropy, so they tend to have bits in common, and so that xoring indeed leads to low-entropy seed. I have chosen a particular state of brokenness, so that one of the two sources is broken, the other is not. In that case, xoring will be at least as strong as the stronger source itself (the extreme case of broken source always returning the same number).
Having said all that, I can't remember why I thought concatenation might be worse - I was imagining a broken hash function whose output depends, for example, more on the first half of the input block, and less on the second half. But that still wouldn't help my original claim, since presumably my two inputs are the same size or larger than the block size - definitely not smaller, as that would be a glaring mistake.
Thanks for being patient with this. I've obviously realized a few things in the process, most importantly that amateur cryptography makes as much sense as amateur brain surgery.

And Trezor.

Do what? I still don't see what PP would do with coins.  Unless they want to be the new Gox.

I presume the above warning about the clipboard access also applies to a jpg exported to the SD card...?

I was nice... it was a zen koan!

On water skis, how do you pump tires?