So thats only about double what they promise on their website.

A few things;
First of all, bitcoin mining would be perfectly suitable to switch dynamically from one location to another, far easier than any other form of data processing. You are probably thinking it cant because the hardware is so expensive, but thats only temporarily. IN the long run, electricity cost will be far more important than the hardware cost.

Secondly, varying electricity costs over time for a google/facebook/ebay datacenter is something else than for bitcoin. Those companies look at 10+ years to select a location for a major DC, miners currently have an horizon of a few months and I figure, in the future of at most a few years.

Lastly; at least in Iceland they guarantee you the price for up to 20 years.
http://www.greendataisland.com/whyiceland.html

Anyway, the main point is that at current exchange rates, electricity price of all mining really isnt going to make a difference.  So what if you max out a local small hydroelectric plant causing local prices to go up (which would be unlikely already), you will just put your miners somewhere else, or if you dont, someone else will. This is about as "profound" as one particular collocation provider running out of rackspace and therefore increasing its prices. So what?

Sounds far fetched. Most of those cheap electricity area's have cheap electricity because there is an abundance of eg hydroelectric power. There are enough of such regions that I cant see bitcoin mining making a difference there, not at todays exchange rate anyway. You speak of dozens of MW, but the larger hydroelectric installations have a capacity in the thousands of MW (and are often under utilized). The entire world uses 20000TWh per year, just how much difference can you imagine bitcoin mining will make?

What do TSMC magins have to do with anything? The cost Im projecting is the processed wafer cost for the fab customer.  Feel free to disbelieve my estimates, but as yet another public reference:

http://www.soiconsortium.org/pdf/Economic_Impact_of_the_Technology_Choices_at_28nm_20nm.pdf

For a 100mm² chip, die cost is estimated to be around $7 and that includes a *very* low yield estimate (probably because the document is a few years old, 28nm has matured tremendously since). Moreover bitcoin asics are so simple and so redundant that yields will be far higher, probably close to 95% after harvesting chips with a few bad cores.

For some perspective, the industry ships 10 billion ARM based chips per year. Yes billion with a B. While those are much smaller, far lower power etc, they still use the same fabs, still need PCBs, need to be packaged etc, so no, bitcoin asics will never be so high volume as to cause systemic shortages anywhere.

The only place I can imagine were you might see temporary shortages is (water) cooling and highend PSU's, but those vendors should have no real problem ramping up production given a bit of time. After all, the PC industry ships a million PC's per day, so the supply chain and infrastructure is in place (and increasingly running idle as PC shipments dwindle).

If I were a labcoin victim or potential cointerra customer, Id be sure to let cointerra know how I felt about them hiring theswede.

Word.

A few few weeks ago, before the complete unraveling of Gox, but I think after they stopped BTC withdrawals, I read a post on this forum that said that Mark K had said a long time ago that there was a big secret that needed protecting, because unveiling it would cause great damage to bitcoin. The context of the discussion where I read that was the malleability bug.

I dismissed it at the time, but it stuck in my head. Now on hindsight, when it appears Gox may have been operating fractional reserve for many years,  obviously Id like to find it again. Does anyone remember reading that too, and who made that claim, or even better, does anyone know what the source for that claim is (assuming there is one) ?

It is impossible,  because the shills are not interested in level headed, they are fishing for the 5% discount that AMT promises to shills.

Also, I do have to lol at clenell. If only someone told you all that last year. Oh wait, I did. Still waiting for an apology for all the shit you called me

No they werent. They were creating liquidity on gox, supporting a non zero price for GoxBTC which didnt exist.  This isnt very different from Pirate's ponzi. In both cases people lost fortunes in BTC they thought they had, but that didnt exist. IN this case some of the victimes may also have lose dollars, but what difference does that make? Its not like those dollars are being pulled from actual bitcoin markets, if at all, they are wiped out from a non existent fake market.

An amount of bitcoins close to 5% of all bitcoins currently in existence was just wiped away as fakes. And maybe 0.000001% of all dollars in existence. Probably not even that, I suspect gox still has the majority of its customers dolars.


You really dont get it. First of all, almost certainly, no bitcoins were actually lost, they were probably stolen many years ago.  But even if they did get lost, say EmptyGox lost the keys to their wallet, it doesnt matter. What matters is that bitcoin supply just shrank a whole lot now that people who had BTC balances at Gox realize their Gox BTC's were counterfeit BTC instead of the real thing. How does that directly hurt the valuation of the real thing? Again, if it turns out the US secretly sold all their gold 50 years ago and Fort Know is empty, or their gold reserve was swallowed by a sink hole, would you panic sell your physical gold?


The gox dollars are probably safe for the most part, but even if not, they represent a very small percentage of the bitcoin economy and ~zero percent of all dollars out there. And what you seem to forget is that the price also depends on people with ACTUAL non counterfeit bitcoins.  These just got a lot rarer than we thought, and those people probably a whole lot more reluctant to trust their BTCs to an exchange. Good luck replacing your counterfeit BTC with real BTC at a steep discount, you wont get mine.

Because they were hacked in 2011 and kept their losses silent. Keep in mind in 2011 500K BTC was "only" a few million dollar, and Gox probably thought they could earn that back in trading fees in a few years. Had the price remained roughly where it was, it might even have worked, but as the price rocketed from <$5 to >$500 that few million dollar hole became a quarter of a billion.

I didnt say it was a joke. But if it turns out there is no gold in fort knox, would the price of gold collapse?

Price is going down because speculators expect a panic or try to create/accelerate one, but if you think about it, Bitcoin investors now own ~500K less bitcoins then they thought they did. If anything that should eventually drive prices up.

Im fairly sure Peter R has the answer to all your questions:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=488058.msg5397869#msg5397869

TL;DR: the coins were lost many years ago when its dollar valuation was still in the single or low double digits. Ever since Gox has been operating as a fractional reserve bank, trying to recover the lost BTC through trading fees. Which might have been doable when a bitcoin was worth $5 (x ~500K lost BTC is "only" $2.5M)  and but became untenable when its price went ballistic.

I agree this is the most plausible explanation.

There is another piece of evidence pointing in the same direction Im trying to dig up. A few weeks ago, well before Gox went down, someone posted that Mark K once said there was a "secret" that needed protecting, and if unveiled, would cause tremendous damage to bitcoin. It was not a direct quote, I cant find a direct quote, I dont recall who attributed it to Mark. Anyone remember reading anything along those lines?

Cooling on the AMT rig looks downright horrible. Top 2 boards dont get any airflow from the rear fan.  Not gonna help that the heatsinks are mounted face down, trapping the hot air under them.

All they do is cram someone else's board in someone else's (ATX) case, and it seems they cant even get that right.

I remember reading someone claiming that Mark at one point said something along the lines of there being a big secret that when revealed would have a huge impact on bitcoin (price). I cant recall who said it where, much less find a direct quote, does anyone know what Im referring to?

Sounds plausible, but if the leaked document is accurate, Gox has over 700K BTC in liabilities (and just 2K in its hot wallet).

To be fair, its a lot of work to make a credible video of a product that doesnt exist.