But less profitable than switching the miner off and buying the equivalent of the electricity cost at market price.
So it was unprofitable from an immediate perspective. (The only one that matters)

That doesn't stop them from trying. Who knows what their real expenses are.

And the price increase is much less pronounced in these quantities. There are only a little over 20 mil dollars on mtgox. (at least according to the order book)

I get the strange suspicion that Avalon tried to leverage their way into a larger Bitcoin stash, (payed for expenses on credit) and now are looking for the easy way out.

That they fake something like this could mean that it isn't going to well for them.

I'm not, and I disagree.
There are only certain mechanism which have the same basis as a ponzi but even so they aren't entirely based on that. These are for example compounding interest and deflation. They are neither necessary nor a inherent property and I don't see any reason why these mechanisms can't be minimized or even eliminated.
Look at regional currencies, which only failed because the bureaucracy did shut them down.

As in the other, now deleted thread: They could also just get pissed off by this.

Here is a thesis for you:

The positive feedback caused by competition between miners and the latency between ordering equipment and the deployment results in an anti-bubble in regards to the price of Bitcoins.
This was the case in 2011 and I expect that effect to be even stronger this time, since it isn't retail hardware which can be utilized within a week time-frame but mostly pre-ordered equipment.
Ultimately the ends in a classical recession period where the inflation further suppresses the base economy.

Not entirely true, if you get them only because you think somebody else holds them at valuable. Granted it's only a marginal difference between the two, but I do think it matters.
There were people who knew very well what they were doing when they got into the pirate ponzi early. I'm not saying that Bitcoin has to suffer the same fate, but it could. The risk of that happening is directly proportional to the spread between valuation due to economic activity and valuation due to speculative demand.

I expect a period of about a year where hard core enthusiasts (previously described as suckers) run their asic rigs at a net loss.

Wow we truly are in the golden age of Bureaucracy.

Well, yes and no. I said computational power, that is on it's own much more than solving a particular problem. Obviously we have to take a compromise here and define the resources that a eligible to be worth money.
Consider FFT for instance, it is used in pretty much any application and it can be used for cryptographic purposes too.
 

This is a complicated problem.
The size of an economy should be somewhat related to the available computational power, with a catch....
In any case we wouldn't be able to measure the whole magnitude, only the amount dedicated to the system, which results in an interesting problem:

The percentage of computational power which can be wasted is proportional to economic growth. So during a recession period the monetary base would be inflated despite the need to do otherwise, resulting in well inflation beyond economic growth and so currency devaluation. I think the crux of the matter is how useful the cryptographic work can potentially be, in case of Bitcoin it is useless, but I don't think it is necessary that proof of work should consist of wasted resources.
For instance we could compromise the granularity of the currency base and come up with a way to make only certain transactions possible which correspond to the result of useful computational work. It isn't really necessary to have a system where you can send any amount of currency down to a certain precision. For example one would only be able to choose out of certain predetermined amounts.
Every address would have certain amounts it could send to any other address, which corresponds to a certain fraction of the available funds.
In detail if an address currently has 10 credits, there could be the option to send 23/1234, 83/991,... of the available balance to one adress and  53/256, 3/10, ... to another address.

A more down-to earth alternative would be some sort of contest where currency would be allocated to whoever comes up with a solution to a real problem first, despite several people working on the same stuff, efficiency wouldn't be that high but it's better than nothing.

If all else fails and proof of work really requires truly wasted resources we can at least choose one which is based on a complicated enough mechanism which can be useful if otherwise needed, like FFT.

Just tie the monetary base to the computational power. Currency is added or removed based on the difference between current and previous "difficulty".
Of course that requires some working incentive to provide computational power except currency generation.

If this is possible however I think that would be the ideal case.

The more smug the posts are now the longer, not deeper the depression gets.
Looking forward to a good 2 years of lulz.

I can't wait to laugh at the next breed of suckers. Mining with gpus was unprofitable during the capitulation, the same thing will happen this time.
Just this time it'll be first generation avalons, BFLs and those really, really dumb USB miners.

Says one early gpu miner about the other.

I have no idea why somebody would announce something like this... None.

buy, buy, buy 

Time to come up with a more hardened alternative to tor. The problem is that on a hidden service the content is accessible in clear text at the physical location. With 3rd party hosting the cloud should run on a shared virtual machine where information is encrypted at all points. This might be possible to do even with tor, or not.
There is supposedly this thing: https://github.com/Miserlou/OnionCloud

But I get the feeling that's not enough.

Well whoever knows the facts in that regard first will have the advantage.

Hmm to be honest I haven't realized the magnitude. What happened exactly?

Was this strictly a client side exploit or was something used to reveal the real ip of the server?
The way it seems, people should probably stop from using SR for a while, at least until there is more information on the exploit that was used.


So yes, in contrast to my previous assessment this might really spark some panic regarding SRs future and so the price of Bitcoins.

No its only satoshi, artforz, vladimir and a bunch of suckers.

Yes but that's a little too far fetched for my taste.