How about a USB stick miner? The current Avalon chip is less than 2.5W, the USB power limit. It's around 275MH/s and could probably be sold for less than $5 in quantity.

People already pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin. Why would that change?

I just don't buy this...no one rationally does that in a commercial concern....

they must be mining the crap out th BC before they sell them.
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Avalon ASICs are manufacturing at least 100TH/sec of mining resource. That's a comfortable majority of the network. Confidence drops in the bitcoin network because one entity is in control. The price of bitcoin plummets because no one wants any part of a tainted network. Avalon get thousands of coins worth $0.0000001.

From a commercial perspective, those working in the bitcoin currency are sensitive to the public's confidence in the currency. Avalon would be cutting their own throat if they mined with no competition.

Avalon wouldn't be an authority if the hardware is open source for the same reason Bitcoin software is not an oligarchy. EG: If the majority of bitcoin users don't like the changes in a point release, they can choose not to upgrade but fork the project instead.

If you want to create competition quickly, business savvy start-ups with limited engeering resources could bring clones to market easily.

If competing designs get pushed out of the market, the designs weren't good enough. That's the free market at work. It doesn't matter whether the competitor is a clone or an original design. It just needs to perform as required or desired.

FINALLY out of newbie exile...

Australia is 230VAC single phase, same as here. Europe is 240V. 63A is the standard pole fuse on a domestic supply here in New Zealand and probably most 220V-240V countries. Loosely speaking, this gives most customers 15kVA of supply in ideal circumstances. In fact, even if you have a 63A pole fuse, your switchboard fuse is likely to be 40A to grade properly with the pole fuse. This give a practical upper limit of 9.6kVA

Electricity supply availability is a concern, depending on the actual fusing circuit breakers, CoinHoarder has. I'm assuming each rig is around 800W = 5600W or 5.6kVA, assuming unity power factor. If CoinHoarder's house is limited to 9.6kVA, boiling the kettle when the light are on will pop the fuse.

More of a concern, though, is dirty power. Yep, I deal with power quality investigations on a regular basis. In short, if a customer's appliance blows up, we (network company) have no evidence that the fault was caused by our network. In actual fact, it probably was but we have to tell the customer to make an insurance claim on the appliance (or "tough luck"). Advanced electronic logging meters will change all that in the near future. Meanwhile, say a voltage spike fries our mining rigs: Even if CH proves it was a network fault, CH can't make an effective warranty or insurance claim. It'd be at least a month or more before the rig(s) are assessed, new rigs built, tested, shipped and commissioned.

I think the idea of co-location was mentioned earlier. I had a quick look at facilities in the states offering 1/4 of a rack for $400/month. That's a pittance for round-the-clock care, clean power, physical security, gobs of bandwidth and backup generators. CH can still get his admin premium. I just want to mitigate risk where feasible to do so.

I guess this is a conversation we'll have over the next month or so before the rigs arrive. Looking forward to making an actual contribution to the network, instead of just speculating.

Sam.

He didn't mention anything about exchanges.

You mean instant confirmation services like https://www.bitinstant.com/ ?

If you're asking whether bitcoin can handle the throughput of a point of sale network, then no. Not right now anyway. The block size can be increased to accommodate this in the future but it's not needed right now.

Sam.

Just read the interview with Yifu Guo. He's seems like an idealist - a true fighter for the bitcoin movement. He emphasises that their goal was to ensure no one entity ended up with a majority of mining power.

So why, then, aren't they making the chip design open source or license free so that market forces can drive higher mining power and more security?

What's wrong with paying value added taxes? Is it unfair that you should have to pay for social services like governance, education, police, roading, etc?

How come I can't post yet? I've done my four hours hard reading. Enough already! 

Hi there,

Another user wanting to PM/post on topic https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157930.0 . Never knew there'd be a newbie purgatory until I registered! I need to PM someone in the next hour or so.

See my related transaction with public note: https://blockchain.info/tx/8734273d0af893338d39ee5719f9e9a830534f5408ea95fdfeff5665d94972ae

Cheers,

Sam.