it's not just the fans on the GPUs.

put a Kill-A-Watt on a miner sometime, and compare the power draw in the first five minutes of operation to the draw at steady-state.

you mean this:


?

no.  i don't think i'm missing it - i just don't think it's valid.

on a practical level, no miner does this.  it's a ridiculous amount of effort.

and on a strictly financial level, i suspect it's more expensive (in terms of both electrical power and wear on equipment [starting and stopping fans, etc.]) to do this.  do you turn off the engine of your car, waiting at a stoplight (some new hybrids - which are designed for that - excepted)?  no.  you use more gas starting an engine than you use in 30-60 seconds of idle.

i just can't see starting and stopping my miners six times an hour as a particularly efficient strategy.  even if i were to write a script to automate it, it would still - i offer - use more power and degrade the equipment more than would be offset by any tiny, theoretical profit.

block creation is perfectly stable and predictable.  it was designed that way.

but it was designed by someone with a long-term vision, and you simply can't look at it in the short term.

but who owns bitcoinawards.com?

yeah - i'm not sure either.

what comes to mind is a solo miner - because running the client 24/7 is identifiable on the 'net.  which means there's a helluva lot more people mining and using than we've been thinking.  does this node chart detect pooled miners?  i suspect not.

mmmm.

firstly, you should look into brazil's Parallel Program of the 1970's and 80s.  you will find that your premise is not quite as accurate as you believe.  brazil may or may not have had nuclear weapons - accounts differ - but they entered the arena.

secondly, i will also point out that nuclear weapons only have value as a threat.  using them removes one's leverage.  and almost certainly one's self as well.  they are suicide weapons; excepting the case of their first (and anecdotally only) use by the US, against japan.

robert heinlein wrote a story once, examining the premise of this thread.

it took place on another world with an unbreathable atmosphere, which had homo saps living inside environmentally controlled, protective domes.  maybe it was the moon - i'm not sure.  somebody who has heinlein fresher in their mind will come along, i imagine.  they usually do...

anyway, the upshot was that any weapon an individual could make, buy, own or carry was perfectly fine - as long as it couldn't breach the dome that sustained life for the humans who lived there.

seems pretty clear - and i've never run across a better solution.

this is profoundly true.

then you understand not to pay much attention.

ma'am - it's a fine tat in a fine place on a fine body, put there by an obviously fine mind.

you win.  the losers lose.

carry on.

* sigh *

i think you probably take cash out of the credit card, and send anonymous money orders (or something similar) to the exchange to buy Bitcoin.

bankruptcy judge:  "what happened to the money you took out?"

you:  "i have a gambling problem."

judge:  "i hereby sentence you to counseling.  and eight lashes with a wet noodle."

what time is it?

http://home.earthlink.net/~drbarrall/RCCClock-sm.jpg

yes.

take a look at the Bitcoin Chart.  set it at 1 year, log scale.

look at the peak at the end of the first week of november 2010.

what's happening now - starting with the peak of june 8th - looks exactly the same.  i've never seen that kind of perfect fit, in any financial chart.

yeah.  i get that a lot on the 'net.  and face to face it's usually: "oh, about 45".

alas, i have no six-pack these days - but i still got at least a two-pack. 

he's not dead y'know.  only resting...

nah, sorry.  it's a loser.

learn to read a decimal point.  it's less ambiguous, has no medical (i.e., color-blindness) issues, doesn't depend on your monitor (there are still an awful lot of B&W displays in the world), and can be communicated easily and effectively:

"how much is it?"

"uhhh, 23 green, 14 yellow, 92 blue.  plus postage."  yeah.  that's gonna work...

how old are you?

you will discover that the definition of 'old' changes as you age.  no shit.  wait.  you'll see.

me, i just turned 60.  i feel the same as i felt when i was 30.  good genes though - so i can't take much credit.

but you go ahead and die "when you get old".  (or even before - are you a Who fan?)  i'm sure you won't mind at all, and will consider it to be an insignificant planetary occurrence.  or perhaps an honor for the greater good?

as for roads...  those little pathways in towns aren't roads; those are footpaths.  and the difference is clear.  one builds civilizations.  the other makes you feel safe in the night.

we never built our own roads.  they have always been a construct of either military necessity or interstate/intercity trading constructed by states/citystates/etc. with the vision to see the advantages of them.  any road worth mentioning has always been built with either taxes or slavery (actual slavery - not some ridiculously-defined 'cultural/political/ideological slavery').

yeah.  sure we took care of our own elderly.  there's only one problem with continuing on that course:  global warming has seen to it that we're running out of ice floes.

snark aside, you have no idea, obviously, how it has gone for the elderly (you know:  those folks who built what we consume?) in the past 5,000 years of world history.  or in the past 80 in the US...

in the US, the metric system has been mandated since 1866 in the legal and commercial spheres:

http://ts.nist.gov/WeightsAndMeasures/Metric/upload/HR-596-Metric-Law-1866.pdf

[PDF ALERT]

i note that since NASA booted a mars landing, they've used metric exclusively.  since 2007.  not counting the odd, existing spacecraft put together with imperial wrenches.

i hate imperial measurement.  i stopped thinking in it when i got my degree in physics, and i simply can't understand why it still exists.

feet, fer chrissakes:  real goddamn FEET!  and some bizarre number of grains of wheat to the inch.  shit.  my head hurts...

i'm completely bewildered by that.

not a goddamn clue.

we have no basis for a bet, being in complete agreement.