Depends on which coin you are talking about.

My CPU made me more money than all my GPUs all added together.

I don't have an scrypt ASIC yet so I have not made as much on scrypt coins with my ASICs as I have made on scrypt coins with my CPU. But as I said I also have made way the heck less on scrypt coins - or any coins, actually - using GPUs than with my CPU.

(GPUs use a lot of electricity, it was way more profitable to use a CPU on a low difficulty coin than to waste electricity on coins people were skyrocketing the difficulty of.)

-MarkM-

Compared to my $13 GPU? Lots more. None of my $13 GPUs even have the programmability to mine.

Compared to my $150 GPU ? Lots more, using way the heck less electricity.

Heck its even more than my $400 GPU.

-MarkM-

A $13 USB ASIC compares how well against a $13 GPU ?

-MarkM-

Now you are back at "my pathetic crap is so worthless the company in control doesn't even consider it worth controlling."

-MarkM-

The second highest hashing power scrypt coin doesn't even have half of the amount litecoin does. Much less than half the miners mining litecoin could pwn more than one of the other chains at once while still leaving litecoin a clear majority of the scrypt hashing power.

Basically they are pathetic toys, they didn't even use a new different hashing method that the equipment used by the litecoin miners would not be as efficient at as the equipment used by the new coin's miners. Instead they from the start deliberately made a chain that even just a tiny fraction of the litecoin miners could PWN just for LULs.

Similarly when the scrypt coins started: they deliberately made a coin that the bitcoin miners could PWN for LULs any time without even buying new gear, the bitcoin miners could PWN it just with leftover obsolete equipment they otherwise would throw out or sell to gamers or whatever fergoshsakes. Oh great lets make a currency that can be PWNed so easily the attackers can put old dead junk to work to PWN it. Brilliant.

Kind of like saying oh lets make a new better armed forces that will serve the common people better than riflemen can, we'll use all those old black powder muskets to arm them, thats the ticket!

-MarkM-

So again you are saying you are at the mercy of just one company.

That is centralisation, it is totally against your claim of actually wanting to decentralise.

-MarkM-

Its a business plan, darn, shoulda pasted it to Devtome...

But since it works so well I can afford not to.

-MarkM-

Meanwhile the scrypt ASIC folk do not seem to have a problem of not being able to mass produce their products?

Or are you saying that since AMD cannot hire enough semicondictor manufacturers to mass produce more of their product the world does not have enough semiconductor plants for the ASIC people to get a timeslot to build their stuff because AMD has bought up all the timeslots?

(If so, seems like a market exists for more manufacturing plants...)

If GPUs cannot be manufactured fast enough to outpace the ASICs that makes the whole GPU line of FUD even more bullshit.

Seems you have not only made yourself be at the mercy of just one supplier but furthermore chose a supplier who is not competent enough to actually supply enough product...

-MarkM-

Which means that scrypt coins are more vulnerable than SHA coins because less companies have the tech to build ASICs for it competitively.

You on the one hand claim you want MORE DIVERSE control of the tech, then on the other deliberately design so that only one company can make the tech thus control it?

You are contradicting your own arguments.

-MarkM-

What percent of AMD stock do you own?

What percent would you need to pocket 51% of the GPUs yourself, or at least to decide how many to sell to whom?

What other corp could you buy to control 51+% of all GPU production?

Your argument seems to be that the one company that could screw you all is too myopic to even know you exist.

Which is only the case because you are too pathetic to be worth bothering with.

Which is only because your pathetic little coins still have a market cap less than AMD's or within only a few orders of magnitude of AMD's.

So basically your argument amounts to "my worthless crap is worthless so no bullies consider me worth bullying."

-MarkM-

You don't seem to realise how much massive advantage ASICs have over general purpose gear.

Try computing how many household GPUs it would take to match the power of just the tiny little amount of ASICs we already have in place.

Then for a laugh check how little difference all the household CPUs would make.

Basically the stuff that is not specifically designed as dedicated crypto mining gear hardly counts, and if it still counts that is only because we have only just a few months ago even started to actually deploy serious "not all that terribly clunky/ancient feature-scale" ASICs.

-MarkM-

Like, say, all the millions of AMD shareholders?

Who else makes competitive mining GPUs?

-MarkM-

You are thinking way too small maybe.

How many thousands of bitcoins does it cost to get your very own ASIC intellectual property?

Even right now while bitcoins are still pathetically low in value?

Making it more expensive to get your very own ASIC designed just makes there be less people / groups who will have them.

The cheaper and easier ASICs can be created the more different nations, corporations, early adopters, the proverbial "anyone who is anyone" to get their own, IF for some reason the masses choose not to spring for a free open source design.

The GPU crap was never about protecting the network, it was always about lining the pockets of the creators of the scamcoins of the day.

-MarkM-

The so called development team are a bunch of pie in the sky idiots who have not enough hashing power between them to even match DOGE's hashrate.

They are just scamming everyone like all the others, heck maybe they are even scamming themselves.

It has nothing to do with blocks, it has to do with what percent of the world's hashing power is defending/securing the coin.

Less than 51% of the world's hashing power and pretty much any world power or alliance of world powers could PWN it easily.

Only bitcoin is anywhere near being reasonably secure, and even it might not yet have enough ASICs dispersed among enough different interest-groups / demographics to be secure yet.

-MarkM-

Until ASICs are widely available and widely deployed no coin is safe.

Even bitcoin might not have a large enough deployment of ASICs widely enough distributed yet to be safe, but if any are going to get there it would hopefully be bitcoin.

Scrypt is crappy for ASICs so all the scrypt coins are crippled by making it harder to get more brands of ASICs made and distributed to more different people, demographics, etc etc than SHA coins might be able to achieve.

All the anti-ASIC coins are basically botnet-fodder, ripe for any botnet to PWN for the LULs any time.

-MarkM-

If it is an scrypt coin it is just a honeypot for suckers, waiting to be PWNed if some idiots ever do pile enough value into it to make it worth PWNing.

The number two hashrate scrypt coin is still DOGE I think and even it is pathetic compared to litecoin and the nearest contenders even more pathetic than DOGE are way the heck lower still so even just the tiny few miners mining DOGE could PWN any other scrypt coin except litecoin.

Basically all the scrypt coins except litecoin are total garbage, most having less than half the pathetic hashrate that DOGE has, which in turn is way less than half what litecoin has. While even litecoin is still pathetically vulnerable itself until scrypt ASICs become widely available and widely deployed.

If it is a SHA256 coin then even if it is merged mined it likely has only an insanely pathetically low hashrate but at least with merged mining you can mine it almost for free while still mining all the serious coins that actually have not so insanely pathetic hashrates.

If for some idiotic "reason" you actually imagine it is worth your while to set up merged mining for this "moon" piece of crap, by all means go ahead and implement merged mining in it, then maybe at least a few lone miners might add it to their merge. Stranger things have happened.

-MarkM-

If you are willing to risk leaving coins on an exchange (e.g. Vircurex, that has made good both times they did suffer a hack) you don't even need to hold, you can just chop up your coins into, say, ten portions, and place then as ten sell offers on the sell side of the order book.

If you are conservative and think the next few upswings might not touch 200 Satoshis but don't mind waiting through maybe a bunch of upswings to get such a price you could pick 200 as top spot, or if you actually would prefer to hold long term yet would like to get a nice hot price sometime you could pick 300 as your top spot if getting that much would compensate you enough in your view for having even your topmost dearest coins get bought.

Then step down, like maybe 200, 180, 160, 140, 120, 100, 90, 80, 70, 60 or something like that.

Or if you really want ten percent relatively soon albeit at a low price, maybe even step down to 50, which still looks like it might easily get bought any day now on random ups and downs.

Personally I have half a million for sale at each and every Satoshi of price all the way to up over 300 but it took me a long time to get there, a lot of input coins originally then at least three or four swing cycles that went up near or over 200, one of them over 300 then back down to 30 or even slightly less.

(I replenish my supply by having lowball buy offers on every Satoshi of price too, with the offers being for more and more coins the lower the price. I have picked up oodles of coins at only 30 Satoshis or less by my offers having been there already in place when such moments - or weeks, or months - came.)

Once you have gone through a swing cycle you can easily get all your original input to the exchange back out and from then on all the coins "at risk" by being on the exhange are pure profit earned by being on the exchange, plus then also milk it some each swing cycle to get some added income while still also increasing the volume of pure profit left lying around on the exchange to make more pure profit with...

This also has the advantage of making times when the prices go low be nice times, times you look forward to, because they are times when your lowball buy offers get gobbled up, giving you lots and lots of coins to sit back up on the sell side as highball offers ready for the next upswing.

Plus Vircurex even pays you to have bitcoins sitting there, so your lowball offers are earning bitcoins for you in the meantime.

You can also save on Vircurex fees by signing up using a referral URL.

( Such as mine, which is https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636 )

-MarkM-

Doesn't the payments protocol cover this?

All the purchase orders, invoices, receipts and so on involved in communicating what you want to buy how much you are to pay and to what bitcoin address are all signed.

Presumably alongside that you would use some kind of lookup to "prove" the entity that signed was the same entity that signed a certain website's https certificate, or signed a certain passport/ID/etc scan, or is shown in a know your customer database as being a certain person, or whose government ID shows the public key the government attests to belonging to that person or whatever.

Get them to PGP sign their bitcoin address with a known PGP key for example, and compare it to the bitcoin-OTC web of trust.

Take a video of them signing using the bitcoin address a photo of them holding their drivers license.

Have them sign using the address they show on their myspace, facebook, linkedin etc etc etc massively connected social networks.

Look them up in namecoin to find the locations and hashes of all kinds of proofs of their identity.

Etc etc etc.

-MarkM-

It seems kind of short-sighted, maybe in a sense "stupid" for a huge major retailer to accept bitcoins without stockpiling a bunch of the first.

Afterall if by your action of accepting them you increase their value significantly wouldn't it make sense to capture some of that increase yourself?

It seems like a positive feedback loop should arise, whereby the more they promote it and the more their customers use it convert to it adopt it and so on the more profit there would be in holding lots of it...

Also the volatility can be harnessed too: place highball sell offers so you cash in when the exchange rates go high, convert incoming bitcoins into fiat faster when exchange rates go low, depending on how fast you need the fiat and how large your buffer has grown.

Pretty soon you could have a nice extra earnings department just in buying low and selling high.

-MarkM-

So the tracks available there are free to use? For example we could put them on our music-archive site when we create such a site?

And our visitors could in turn grab them from us to use on their own sites, to chop up into soundbites, make dub-mixes of and so on and so on?

It didn't seem to shout loudly right up front exactly what form of free open source license it is releasing the material under...

-MarkM-