A few things.
-You *can* mix amd and nvidia cards, at least on windows vista/7.
-64 bit OS does make some sense. For 3 GPUs , Im guessing a 32 bit will do, but for 4 or more, you definitely want a 64 bit OS.
-You dont want a quad core cpu. You basically dont need a cpu. Get a single core sempron or whatever is cheapest and lowest power.
-6970 is single GPU (one core). Its the 6990 thats dual.

Most important question; how much do you pay for electricity?

Just tried it, no problems here. Also 11.11 win7 x64, using either bitminter or cgminer performance is fine. Only one card on this machine though.

I never said it makes sense if you intend to sell 1 or 10 chips. I only said the per chip cost could be dramatically lower. Amortizing the NRE is just a matter of selling enough of them. I dont have numbers to back that up, but I would guess its a low triple figure number. Not exactly out of reach if you look how big the bitcoin mining market alone is.

You always point to the low unit price as suspicious, you think the hashrate too high and the power consumption too low. But all these indicators are perfectly compatible with s-asic with low per unit cost and relatively high NRE..


?
I dont think they will get a single working chip without paying altera or whomever they are sourcing from. Also, its not because Altera might require you order 1000 units minimum that you will get those all at once. Id be very surprised if they didnt do a test run with an absolute minimum number of wafers first. 


Yes, I agree, if this is a sasic, they should have working FPGAs for quite some time. But why would they show them? Obviously they are not going to meet the performance and power claims and they would have no intention of selling them. Whats the point?

Anyway, so far I have not seen a shred of evidence that what BFL is saying is untrue let alone impossible. Obviously we havent seen a lot that validates their claims either, the only sensible attitude IMO is to wait and see.

Compared to FPGAs you are looking at a reduction of die size of up to 80%. That actually means a cost reduction thats potentially more than 80% per chip (higher yields, more candidates per wafer etc).


I dont think anyone said they would only receive 100 chips. The point of presales is usually prefinancing.


Actually, an "implementation of both FPGA and ASIC technology" as they put on their website, fairly well describes a structured asic, without spilling the beans.

Im a believer of a few things;
- I believe its possible to achieve the kind of performance/W and /$ that BFL claims, if nothing else, using structured ASICs. Is anyone disagreeing with that?
- I believe it much more likely that BFL will ship a working product than you putting your money where your mouth is. Why dont you start by offering those 10% of purchase price you promised?

I dont think I ever said anything definitive about BFL.

Spur sales of consoles as mining devices? Reward loyal customers? And at the same time have a system that doesnt suffer from drawbacks of centrally issued digital currencies. Remember, thats the point, if customer dont care about the difference, then bitcoin will compete with all the other digital currencies anyhow. If it turns out consumers do care, corporations could implement whatever aspects of bitcoin that consumers perceive as its strength, even going all the way of opensource and p2p if they have to. What would Sony have to lose? If they would only accept SonyCoins at market prices for their shop, its not like it would cost them anything. They can just sell those coins like anyone else.

The question is if consumers will make that distinction; if enough consumer dont, then you have competition even if the competing systems arent p2p.

If they do, it still wouldnt preclude any corporation (or government for that matter) from launching one. Just about every second poster on this forum seems to have started an alt chain at some point. They might tinker with it, like giving themselves the option to generate coins with no mining, premine a shitload of coins, make it so that the mining only works on their devices (think gaming console) or who knows what. Frankly, I have no idea what they could come up with, but Im not going to assume there is not going to be fierce competition for bitcoin.

 

Why not? After all the hacking incidents, Sony might get the idea that p2p is more secure than centralized. Im sure they could come up with a mining algorithm that can only work with their hardware. I mean, thats just one thought: you can obtain SonyCoins by just running your console or sony laptop. Each playstation game or sony movie you buy gives you some key that allows a higher hashrate or mine on other chains within the SonyCoin system that would have a lower difficulty. Dont ask me how, I got no clue, and if I had, Sony would have to pay me for the idea :p


SonyCoin could be made orders of magnitude more efficient by limiting the devices that can mine by relying on some builtin TPM module needed to sign hashes or something.

Bold part needs rephrasing or simply scratch it. Its not like all bitcoin users are honest.


Dont like that phrase much either. Let the reader decide if its magic or not. IMO, it isnt magic, its math. Magic is something without rational explanation. Its brilliant perhaps, but no hocus pocus.  A thread holding the whole thing together also makes it sound as if its very fragile, when in reality its ridiculously robust.


As many others, I dont like the word crowd. I think words like "public" and "Open" are more appropriate.

Nevermind, it was a caching issue after all, all looks great now. Fantastic work!

Awesome work. I particularly love the "luck" and 'reward' pages. But atm, the stats page doesnt seem to work. Dont think its caching issue as its not working on a fresh browser either.

I can think of a thousand reasons. At least . Seriously, different currencies could have different properties that appeal to other users. different technical features and economic rules. Some might be backed by precious metals, others could be issued by google/facebook/microsoft/sony and be the only crypto currency accepted on their app stores/wallet services, yet others could be marketed at specific niches or with some, I dont know, maybe an embedded loyalty scheme or whatever. And lets not forget at some point government sanctioned crypto currencies.

I think its a bit naive to assume bitcoin will be the one crypto currency to rule them all. In the short/medium term that seems reasonable, but once the concept gains acceptance, I expect fierce competition and some of alternatives may prove to be superior and/or become more popular.

Governments could one day make some crypto currency and make it legal tender.

Heh. Right

Even so, if bitcoin reaches a certain level of ubiquity, merchants are going to spend a part of their costs in bitcoin, and consumers will get a portion of their income in bitcoin. Aside from the banking and exchange fees, you will want to keep some bitcoins to protect you from price swings. If I have an internet shop and sell my stuff all over the world, and receive payments in Yen, dollar and Euro, I will want to keep a portion of those currencies proportional to where I buy my goods in Japan, US or Europe. I might also get, say, UK pounds and not buy anything in the UK, then I will only want to sell only all of those. It wouldnt be any different with bitcoins.


Every transaction involves two parties, a buyer and a seller. In the end, as a consumer you pay both, just like we now pay for the paypal/creditcard/currency conversion costs of merchants.

Looks like bitcoin is finally going somewhere, if people are literally selling their shirts to get hold of them!

If you are going to instantly sell every bitcoin you earn, and buy every bitcoin you need on the spot, you are taking almost no advantage of bitcoins. You are not using it as a currency, you are using it as a wire transfer.

Banks and exchanges Im sure wouldnt mind, but it would be stupid beyond belief to pay exchange fees and banking fees twice for each and every transaction when one of the key advantages of bitcoin is that transactions are essentially free. Im all for theoretical arguments, but this one is a bit over the top .

Then you are not seeing bitcoins as a currency, but as a scarce commodity. If bitcoin doesnt gain usefulness as a currency for trade, it has no value as commodity. You cant do anything with bitcoins other than conduct trade.

Again, the keyword here is theoretical. If I was convinced this would happen, and BTC would become the new world currency,  I wouldnt only have 100BTC. But even with its current flaws ensuring people only keep a fraction of their wealth in BTC and use only a tiny fraction of their consumption using BTC; assume your estimate is accurate, and there are 100k users today. There are over 2 billion internet users. Do the math.

There is a big fallacy in your reasoning. You count me as a bitcoin user, which I am, but I hold less than 100 BTC or ~150 euro. I can definitely support a few orders of magnitude more than that (and the same will go for most other users) if bitcoins become more useful and stable. That may or may not happen, but this was a theoretical question. If it does happen, theoretically, even the same amount of users could support a price level thats orders of magnitude higher than today.

Theoretically bitcoin could replace all existing currencies. No one really knows how much wealth there is in the world, but Ill take some guesstimate I got off google that puts the total around 2500 trillion dollars (long scale trillion, so  10¹⁸ ). IOW, 21 million bitcoins could be worth that much. That gives around $100 billion (current value) per bitcoin. But Ill settle for just a 1/1000 of that .

Im also interested, but I would have to know about the pool and backup pools. It makes no sense for anyone to have those machine idle if a pool goes down.