As a general rule, if you expect the difficulty to increase faster than the price of bitcoin, it will make more sense to buy bitcoin, and if you believe the difficulty will increase slower than the price of bitcoin, it will make more sense to buy mining equipment. This assumes the market is 100% efficient, which may not be a valid assumption. The timeframes are also over the estimated useful period the miner will last.

When you buy bitcoin, you are long bitcoin and that is your only position. When you are mining, you are both long bitcoin, and are short difficulty.

The above rule is valid even if you can find a miner for sale selling at below-market rates (and there are no caviots), as if this is the case, you should purchase the miner, and subsequently try to sell the miner at market rates quickly (you can mine with the miner while you have it listed for sale).

The only reason why the above rule may not be valid is if you assume that tx fees will skyrocket, in which case it may be acceptable for difficulty to increase somewhat more than price.

You can use a spreadsheet to calculate if you are paying an appropriate price for a particular miner, given a particular set of assumptions.

It is hard to make use of that particular stat because a miner mining bitcoin in 2011 (likely a GPU), would be useless mining bitcoin today, and due to advancements in GPU technology, it would probably be useless in mining most altcoins today. The cost of both mining and bitcoin were very close to zero in 2011, which changed the decisions for many people. There were also major advancements in technology, such as the ASIC for bitcoin mining that is not going to be repeated in the next 10 years.

Absent efficiency increases, difficulty should increase as additional miners are manufactured by mining manufacturers. In general, manufactures will create the most efficient miners, while as difficulty increases the least efficient miners will be taken offline as they become unprofitable to operate (the latter may not always be the case as operating costs vary throughout the world).

As long as the costs make the miners a net positive to operate based on estimates of difficulty and price, miners should move the miners (or in your case, fix them). If a miner cannot afford the costs associated with moving (or repairing) the miners, or if doing so would be infeasible due to time or other constraints, the owners should sell the miners at their estimated value less the costs associated with moving/repairing them.

Miners have a limited useful life, so any downtime is money being thrown away. 

Yes, it does appear we are coming off the local lows in terms of hashrate, but who knows how much of the local trough was due to variance. We had a local low in late June, that was preceded by a steep drop, but the hashrate bounced back a little bit and we have been bouncing around the same approximate hashrate since. I saw if we continue to hover around the same hashrate for another two weeks, the local low was driven in part by variance and we aren’t seeing large farms being brought back online.

In any case, we are still well below the ATH of hashrate. The price has gone up much more than difficulty did over the past year, so I would not blame the price decline on the difficulty reduction.

I think a lot of the larger (or even fairly modest) farms have employees that take care of routine maintenance to keep utilization of equipment fairly high. It is also not typical to have to pay tolls to travel through most of the country. Obviously gas is an issue if you are not local to the location of your mine. Most people are not going to save money on rent if machines in need of repair/maintenance sit unused, so broken miners being in a datacenter results in the miners loosing money.

I doubt the fallback has anything to do with multisig, however, I am sure that either cyrus, or other very trusted members of the community (trusted specifically by theymos) have access to the domain.

Further, I am fairly confident that cryrus has access to the server, and am confident that there are others who have access to the forum database. This means if there was ever an instance in which the bitcointalk.org domain were to become unavailable, and this fact was known in advance, a new domain could be setup and forum members could be directed to the new forum well before the bitcointalk.org domain actually becomes unavailable. The current domain expires in 2029.

Internet speeds have increased a lot over the past 30 years, but I don't see residential speeds increasing by a lot from what is available currently. In the 90's and early 2000's, if you were using a residential internet connection to perform some task using the internet, generally speaking, the internet connection would represent a bottleneck, for example, if you were downloading a song, the song would download at a rate that is slower than your ability to listen to the song, or if you were visiting a webpage with many high-resolution pictures, you would have to wait for the pictures to load. Today, if you are using a residential internet connection, you can download  a movie in HD in a matter of seconds or minutes, and your bottleneck is your computer's ability to process and save the information received via the internet. I also don't see things like video or image quality increasing the extent they have increased in the past because there becomes a point in which the human eye will not see the difference in quality of an image/video if the quality is increased.

The point I am trying to make in the above is that there will not be demand to justify the investment required to increase residential internet speeds by amounts speeds have increased in the past.

There is also the issue of processing speed. When a block is received by a node, the node needs to validate (or have validated) every transaction in the block, and it needs to do so very quickly so it knows which transactions to accept or reject, and if it should accept or reject a future block. The processing capacity of chips has improved, similar to how internet speeds have improved, and there is demand for increased processing capacity of chips, however, it has become more difficult to further increase the processing capacity of chips, and this will likely be the bottleneck that prevents bitcoin from scaling without a 2nd layer. There is the potential that advances in technology will make verifying on-chain transactions more efficient, however, there are theoretical limits to this technology.

Finally, in the year 2051, why should I care that you paid $5 worth of coin on a Starbucks coffee today in 2021? Why should I have to store this transaction, along with the millions of other people that bought coffee at Starbucks on a given day? Granted, there is a setting in bitcoin core that allows you to only save x number of recent blocks. If you have a billion people using bitcoin every day, a billion people will need to store every transaction that every other person makes. With LN, or other second-layer solutions, only a small number of users will need to even be aware of any particular transaction

If you have at least two channels with a lot of capacity, you potentially can charge higher fees because some transactions would need to be routed through your node, and you would potentially have a higher volume of transactions route via your node for similar reasons.

To my knowledge, it is not possible to route a portion of a payment through a channel. So if you have channels with BTC 0.001 of capacity on each side, you would be unable to handle any transactions above this amount.

You don't know that.

The reason the Trump org was charged with the crimes it was charged with is that prosecutors were unable to find evidence of more serious crimes after looking very closely at their business records and tax records. I'm sure both the Clintons and the Bidens are involved in much more serious illegal activity. Both the Bidens and the Clintons have run influence-peddling schemes basically out in the open, and no one in federal law enforcement even bats an eye.

IMO the name of the coin is a little tacky, and I agree that by running the campaign, the campaign manager is associating his name with the project. I would not go as far as to say the campaign manager is vouching for the project, but he is very clearly associating his name with it.

Royse777 is trying to get his foot in the door of the campaign management business. I guess this means he is taking projects that may be less than desireable for most campaign managers. I would not personally associate myself with this project, but I don't see any ethical issues with someone working on this project.

As a FYI, "signature is misspelled in one of the graphics.

Both Hilary and Biden are clearly either running or have run (in the case of Clinton) bribery schemes, pretty much out in the open, and neither have faced any kind of prosecution.

a0af7f52ee3142915548d52ad8168babd124cdc030b0e4e10e3ff03084012b05

I have sent your prize to the requested address.

I apologize to anyone who may have been confused as to the requirements to win. I will be more clear in the future.

Congratulations to both winners.

That is exactly what this is -- an upsell. Trezor has a number of other 'upsell' products, mostly that are marketed to help trezor customers keep their seed backups safe. IMO most of these upsell products are designed to help protect against the edge of the edge cases, and these edge cases could otherwise be protected against by keeping backups in multiple offsite locations.

You cannot always avoid spending your coin when you are around other people. If you are limiting the instances in which you are willing to spend your coin to when you are alone in your bedroom, locked office or basement, you will miss out on many opportunities to spend your coin that other hodlers have.

The profit a dealer makes on a $60k truck is several thousand dollars, probably in the 10%-20% range, depending on how much you negotiated the price down. The profit on a $300 paint protection is probably somewhere in the range of $295, or around 98%-99%. Dealerships may also sometimes give customers $100 off the price for some point they made in order to keep you in the office but would be making another $300 ($295) on the paint protection they sell you after you agree on a price for the truck.

According to John Bolton, Trump was very close to liberating Venezuela but ultimately decided against doing so. Several of his generals are anti-Trump and anti-American, and didn’t want him getting the win.
Very few people support the government of Cuba. The government jails dissenters, so few are willing to take affirmative action against the government. Except for those associated with the government, nearly the entire country is oppressed and living in poverty. 

What if your trading partner is willing to have you send the coin via the blockstream satellite? Or if the transaction is conducted in space?

I hope they are able to overthrow their government, but I have serious doubts. The communists control access to things like food and electricity and the people have little access to weapons.

It’s too bad this didn’t happen last October. Trump might have intervened and defeated socialism in Cuba. The imagery would have been overwhelming and we might have been more mean tweets but we wouldn’t have racist and other evil policies. Plus there would be one less communist country.

I may consider doing that sometime in the future.

I was also thinking of hosting a giveaway something along the lines of allowing people to enter once per day, and allowing each space to be taken multiple times. The payout for the winner(s) would depend on how many shares they have in the winning number and how many shares were issued for the winning number. At first, each guess would allow the person to have many shares when choosing a number would be little more than a gamble, but over time, each entry would result in the participant fewer shares as guessing the number (or a range) becomes easier with certain assumptions.

As I noted above, you can guess within a range the correct block number, however there isn’t a guarantee that the door will be available if only one person can guess each number.

You can use the level 1 bitcoin network for this, as long as the person receiving the payment is willing to accept the risks associated with unconfirmed transactions.

When someone write a check for payment, the person receiving the check has no way of knowing if the bank account the check is being drawn on has enough money, or if it is even still open (or even if the bank account exists). To mitigate this risk, stores accepting checks document the identity of the person giving the check, so they can go after the person if the check does not clear. Similar precautions can be made for physical stores accepting modest amounts of bitcoin. Also, the store can only accept transactions that meet certain criteria, such as minimum fee rates, or the RBF flag being sent to false.

It would probably be better to use the LN for in person crypto transactions, as these are generally instant (assuming there is an available route), and are much cheaper than on-chain transactions.

Yes, as long as your altcoin supports SegWit, it can implement its own Lighting network (or something similar thereto). If your coin supports SegWit, its LN can even support atomic swaps with the bitcoin LN (or any other LN), provided there is at least one node supporting this. I am not sure if LN is being actively implemented, or if there are any LN nodes on any of the altcoins, such as Litecoin that support SegWit.

I considered using the block hash, however doing so would result in there either being too few spots (if I only used the last digit), or way too many spots (if I used the last two digits).

Each spot can be guessed by only one person, so while you might be able to correctly guess the block number two hours out, there isn't a guarantee that spot will be unoccupied two hours prior to the cutoff time.

Sent -- 7de445730482f6e42422290f28610c49d103bf12e4c851c50ef07f8946e2007f

Once bullrun2020bro responds to my PM and/or posts his address in this thread, I will send his prize.

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Thank you to everyone who participated. I hope you all had as much fun as I did. I may host another giveaway sometime in the future.

Being that 690604 was the first block to be found after 5:00 PM UTC the winning number is 04, and the runner-up number is 05.

I ask BTCLiz and bullrun2020bro to each post a SegWit address they can receive their prizes to. I will send your prizes shortly, once you both post your respective addresses.

Thank you to everyone who participated. 

I have added you to the list. Good luck!

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Based on my calculations, number 89 is likely to win, although due to the number of empty spaces as of now, number 95 is the most likely to be the grand prize winner.

Participants can choose any open number, however, numbers 92 through 94 have the greatest chances of winning based on the current block number, estimated hash rate, and currently open slots.

Good luck to everyone.

I have added all of you to the list. Good luck to you all!