That didnt take very long.

They cant. Its only a matter of time.

Bankrupt? just think of how much money gox could make on this. Buy coins on cheap exchange and sell them on their own site at 5+% markup. Whatever financial problem you think they had would be solved pretty quickly.

IM not saying they are doing this (if they were, one would expect the difference with other exchanges to be lower), but it sure is a way they could raise a lot of money.

I like that analogy:).  But lets do the math. I dont have a KnC, but how much downtime is there when installing a new firmware and rebooting? Surely less than a minute?

To win back one minute of downtime during the following day, all you would need is a 0.07% performance boost.

As mining profits dwindle, hardware prices will follow suit, until margins on hardware also become too small for vendors to bother with. That part I think basicaly everyone agrees with. Where the opinions differ rather dramatically is where this point will occur. You will find opinions ranging from 10 to 500+ PH at the current exchange rate. So, quantify it.

For the record, Im putting it somewhere between 100 and 250PH (at todays BTC rate), when growth will no longer be exponential (some % of the network per month), but will become linear (fixed amount of TH) and begin to slow down. The actual % may decrease next year, as I am not sure we will be able to maintain 3+% per day, but 1% or more will continue for quite some time IMO. Note that 1% per day is still a doubling every 2 months, and is still exponential.

Please define "soon", so we can quote it for posterity


Exactly. And the same effect works on price and price/difficulty. "I would buy some asics if only their price or profitability was more reasonable", and that too is a self defeating prophecy. Which is why we will see lower prices, but no improvement in mining profitability for the foreseeable future (which admittedly, is only a few months in this universe).

I predict tears.

Hot damn, even I almost fell for it :blush:
A friend wanted to buy some USB mining sticks for the heck of it, and that site was pretty much the first result on google. I wouldnt have fallen for fake presales of custom asics, but as a reseller of asicminer or bitfury usb sticks (the page I ended up on),  its not that difficult to get fooled - at least until you see they expect to send bitcons to a static address.

The scam is also working. They use 2 different addresses for all their "orders":

https://blockchain.info/address/1ibY2cWoEYFVM2bRXaNVm2brBD1uvrjUg
118.4 BTC

https://blockchain.info/address/1GW68rAn3h5nvwJeM4PNG4GHK2n277cpqa
64.5 BTC


Total of 182 BTC so far. Not bad for a scamsite that takes an hour to put together.

You could put a raspberry Pi or beaglebone or something in it. It wouldnt survive the radiation very long, but then neither would the satellite anyway. Without motors and fuel, it will come down fairly fast again. IM not sure if anyone has done it so far, but have a look here:
http://www.zdnet.com/raspberry-pi-in-space-putting-the-linux-pc-into-orbit-7000000577/

Could it actually run a full node and keep it in sync? Im not sure we'd have the communication bandwidth for that, so I kinda doubt it.

thats what people said before we had bitpay and ever since the idea of a bitcoin payment processor doesnt look so silly now.
You may also want to ask BFL customers if they think the idea of third party conflict resolution / escrow/reversibility is something they really dont want in the bitcoin realm.
Never mind the possibility of being able to purchase bitcoins with a credit card or paypal balance. Just imagine how awful that would be!

Id do something like this:



Just make sure the qr links to bitcoin.org

Because small rockets cant escape earth's gravity, much less reach the moon. Escape velocity from earth is about mach 34. What small rocket did you have in mind?

That said, a micro/nano/pico satellite is feasible and economically doable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

Darn. Couldnt we have had a flag saying something like "Hell froze over and I am still waiting for my BFL order".

ebay/paypal doesnt need escrow because of its reversibility. But since pp already implements consumer protection and conflict resolution, adding escrow for bitcoin (or making the payments reversible, even if through fiat) seems pretty darn obvious.

Ive always said paypal and bitcoin are not enemies, but natural allies. Paypal and bitpay would be enemies, well, competitors really, but paypal brings a lot to the table that is really useful for bitcoin and that no one offers yet.

My bold prediction: in 2014 paypal will buy bit-pay and it's tony Gallippi's turn to retire young and rich or start building space rockets and electric cars

That sounds entirely plausible to me, and frankly, not unexpected. That would have been a respin, but it would have happened after they started shipping and wouldnt have affected their schedule. You can still produce, dice and slice the rev A chips and mount and ship them while the revised mask for rev B is taping out.

Ok, the first link to BFL-engineer's post is clearly pre tape out. The same with the refraction issue, thats something that would have shown up during the tapeout process. The last link doesnt contain any relevant info from BFL, just someone inferring a respin and BFL not responding to that, just to the "who pays for this" non issue. Josh just didnt want to go on record saying they hadnt succesfully taped out yet.

Its clear to me that BFL's full custom design didnt pass validations tests by the fab, and they were sent back to redo their homework. Thats a fuckup allright, and could be a big part of the delay in 2012, but its not a respin and couldnt have taken place after they (allegedly?) received first silicon.

To be clear, respin is a fairly specific term. It means you produced masks and wafers, and then have to change the mask (probably throw away the wafers). Failing a tape out process is not a respin.

ITs all here:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-3.html

First hashing around early March as I remembered. No mention of a respin or anything that could be considered a respin. No 8+ week gap either. No time for a respin, let alone 3. Just a long list of fucking up missing design parameters,  packaging, firmware, PCB's, supply chain, software, pretty much everything else you can fuck up. Maybe they did one or several respins for later products, as is often done to improve yields or tweak stuff, but the ones that shipped in April must have been made with the same maskset (ie, no respin) as the one that they published in February/march as their first prototype.  Thus, that is not what caused the delays.

You may suspect it, but Ive not seen any evidence (what "Josh words" are you referring to?) and your own logic argues against it, since the chips were delivered at 250Mhz, the same speed they observed in first silicon in late February. More over as I argued above, the timing just doesnt leave room for one, much less 3 respins, unless you want believe they received silicon back in 2012 and didnt talk about it.

Their FPGA took about as long, if not longer to materialize. Yet I doubt they "respun" someone else's FPGA .

BTW, IIRC they received their first silicon (which was wirebonded for testing) in late February or early March. A respin takes 6-8 weeks at least, its basically redoing the tapeout, and waiting for new wafers to be processed, and thats after you diagnosed and fixed the problem. Realistically, more like 10 weeks.  It would have been impossible to do 2 respins in that timeframe. Even one seems impossible.

I agree its best predictor out there, but about that track record, assuming you refer to their charts, do keep in mind the difficulty axis is exponential.  Its a lot easier to achieve what appears like a straight line if the axis isnt linear .