It's quite unlikely that the Washington mining facility is making $8 Million per month today. Unless they have continued to upgrade/replace their hardware, at some serious cost, they will see a declining number of Bitcoins each and every month. The largest facilities are as exposed to difficulty increases, and the volatility of the Bitcoin price as even a puny 100 GH/s miner like myself.

Just think of yourself as the "CEO" of such a mining facility walking around and realizing that every 12-14 days, difficulty will adjust, and you will make fewer Bitcoins next month than you did this month. And you you still have to sell some of your Bitcoins to pay for the electric bill (in US $$$, not Bitcoins) at the end of the month. You just hope that Bitcoins didn't also go down by 5% in value during the month. And sometime, you will likely have to report back to your investors that you didn't make $8 million this month.

While the numbers are jaw dropping, the finances are every bit as precarious as they come.

I don't expect hat it's trivial to use the old S1 boards, but they still have value. Poke around here, and see what folks try, after all once you have new S3 boards hashing, what's the downside to experimenting with the leftover S1 boards. You cold also sell the S1 boards, they still have value to somebody. Don't just discard them in the trash, they still have value, even if not toyou.

So maybe somebody can follow on with "Pretendium" or perhaps "Unrealium". Those both sound way better than "Crapium".

For what it's worth, BFL claims that they will ship some Monarchs this week. How many, and to whom, has not been disclosed. I think these are supposed to be operating at 600-700 GH/s.

Not a BFL supporter, just reporting current info from their website.

I don't see this as particularly different from the ownership distribution of financial assets in the USA for example. While the scale is entirely different, and the counts of folks, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the percentages are fairly similar.

I don't even know what it would mean to "bail out Bitcoin". Does that mean to try and prop up it's price relative USD for example? It's hard to see who would want to do this, and why.

Just to be picky, the correct question is "who is actually delivering miners". As we have seen with multiple companies, there is a HUGE difference between manufacturing and delivering to a paying customer.

Congratulations!!! A journey of TerraHash, begins with but a single GigaHash (or something like that).

    

While it may not be accurate to say that gold has "absolute" value, it clearly does have "use" value. By that I mean it can be made it into jewelry, used in dental work, gold plating has a variety of uses, including electronics.

By comparison, Bitcoin has zero use value.

So where do you get 2 S-3's for .128 BTC (i.e less than $100)?

That sounds like the steal of the century, or is the price wrong?

I won't debate the human impact of a "Internet goes away", because it's mostly pointless. I would however argue the speed at which it manifests will be hugely different between the human impact, and the impact on Bitcoin. If the "Internet goes away" the impact on Bitcoin, will be fast and furious. The value of a coin will fall to nearly zero. This won't take weeks, it will happen in a timescale much closer to hours or days. Th value of mining hardware will also plummet. It will take weeks/months/years for the impact of Internet loss to actually kill off humans. It will be more like a gradual acceleration of the death rate over time. As was pointed out before, Bitcoin is an "invention of the Internet". Human health and associated care has centuries more experience, both good and bad.

One other small item to remember. In less than 1.5 days, the difficulty will adjust upwards, by about 4-5%. That will likely reduce your Bitcoins earnings per day by a similar amount. Sorry if I am being a wet blanket.

It will arrive in "Two Weeks", just like the Butterfly Labs Monarch.

Actually I m not trolling. I am sure dell designs, spec's and buys a ton of PCB boards. The ASIC's that they place on those PC boards are almost certainly made by some other company. I guess it's possible that Dell gave an ASIC design firm specs and had something built for them, it's way more likely that it's already a part that's in production, and sold to a variety of companies besides Dell. Dell could clearly pick an existing mining ASIC and then design everything else around it, but the ASIC itself will almost certainly have been designed and fabricated by something else.

ASIC design and fabrication is a very specialized business and usually requires a much bigger engineering investment than Dell is willing to make, IMHO.

I would be stunned if DELL had ever manufactured an ASIC. They BUY lots of ASICs, but I can't imagine that they have any actual engineers to design, layout, or fabricate an ASIC. I would also be surprised if they have any clue about what ASIC process is "current" besides what it costs to purchase 10,000 of some widget designed and built by somebody else.

What says your room-mate won't also bring his/her own ASIC rig? Who gets to use the outlet?

Electricity may appear free, but it isn't.

This is a key weakness for Bitcoin in my opinion. No Internet = No Bitcoin.

This is another reason it won't become "real" currency. I don't have to postulate the demise of the Internet, just it's lack of being truly widespread. How much of the worlds population has Internet access? Quite a bit less than will accept some form of physical currency I expect.

While I don't expect the answer to be popular, Bitcoin has no role in any preparations I would make.

Could you make such a comment about Slush's pool? Maybe your "inverse luck" will push out a bunch of blocks there! 

The $250 for a Jalapeno may actually be coming from Tiger Direct, or Walmart. I am pretty sure you can order a Jalapeno, for $250 from either one of them. I don't know if that's "new" or "used".