"Anonymous" claimed credit for taking down FH in late 2011 in an alleged anti-CP campaign.

Reported for being OT thread-hijacking BS.


(ETA: Someone should create a sock just to "loan" 200BTC to it for the lulz. Maybe have a sock loan out the coin to the first sock asking for a loan.)

DX lg consumes ~1.28KW w/10 modules. 180GH/s = ~$237/d profits (~$242/d rev, ~$4.61/d power cost) @ $.15/KWh and $100/BTC, IF difficulty remains constant at its current (~37M). However, we know difficulty's increasing ~40% every two weeks. So, if you ordered today and it arrives at next difficulty change in a few days and it's another 40% increase, you're looking @ ~$140/d profits (~$145/d rev, $4.61/d power cost). At the next difficulty change (when you're more likely to get a unit), ~$82/d profit (~$87/d rev, $4.61/d power cost). So multiply that by 14 for ~$1218. At next difficulty change, look for ~$44/d profit (49-4.6). *14 for ~$616. At next diff change, profit ~$25/d (29.5-4.6). *14=$350. And it keeps dwindling from there -- let's say there's another $800 total profit left in its lifetime. 1218+616+350+800=$2984 mining profit in its lifetime. $10500-$2984=bad investment. This doesn't factor in diff changes occurring in less than 14D due to the rapidly increasing hashpower on the network -- it's more like 12D at current pace instead of the targeted 14D, which just means the potential earnings will deteriorate that much faster.

With a 2-4 week lead-in assuming they have chips (I have no idea, I stayed away from ASICs), there's virtually 0% chance of recovering investment without the price of Bitcoin soaring - but if you're factoring in a price increase, you may's well just buy the coins straight.

(Or I screwed up on the maffs, or there's a more cost-efficient or power-efficient model than the first one I clicked on - very possible. This also changes a slight bit if you have free or near-free electricity, but it's still almost as certain the initial investment never pays itself off, while you're taking on quite a bit third-party risk + time & effort.)

ETA: fixed all my screw-ups, I think.

I wonder if anyone went into ASIC manufacturing/sales thinking it was a long-term investment. I mean... after the first batches, either BTC price needs to go through the roof, or the components need to be immediately available for shipping and at least 5x as powerful at the same price (or some lesser combination of the two).

Maybe mining was just a diving board for them?

A list of essays will eventually be maintained here.

Don't feel like wading through posts for four hours, making 5 or 8 garbage posts? Skip the garbage!

Here, through this fun experiment, you may post a formal essay, set of graphs, and/or other technical information for community benefit. If it is well-done (since this gets around the 4h waiting period, it should look like you at least spent two hours on it), you'll be whitelisted. You may provide information and/or insight on any topic relevant to Bitcoin. I will not provide prompts given there are plenty of topics for discussion posted on this forum, often where newbies can't post. Just so it's clear - you absolutely do not need to cheer-lead for Bitcoin. Thought-out arguments against Bitcoin would probably be more interesting. 

Prompts PMd to me by other members may be included later, which'd just indicate someone's interested in extra information on the topic, not that you're limited to those listed prompts.

All contestable claims require a publicly-accessible link to others' research/information or an attachment including original research. Unoriginal content and discussion of this topic or essays posted will be removed (unless they can stand on their own as an essay -- you are definitely allowed to write counter-essays here).

Until mods come forward with interest in reviewing content in other languages, only information presented in English will be considered.

Also used Dave for a custom ring w/ his gems a year or two ago. Awesome service. Still worn everyday to this point (well, except for one week... that was my fault)! 

Yeah. Capping (or "lite" HSI) was a hot topic in Canada when the discussion came up here. Capping was popular in the dial-up era, when you bought "minutes," but when cable and DSL came out, I don't remember any company talking about caps. Faded from memory. Pay-per-use billing seems reasonable when the infrastructure is unable to handle the demand, and ISPs regularly oversell their bandwidth by hundreds or thousands of percents. It's very difficult to determine real Internet speeds vs. what an ISP advertises in the US, and they aren't required to provide any type of data on that. Hughesnet, for example, previously sold me an "up to 15mbps" connection, with the idea being that it must be faster than the "up to 10mbps" connection. In reality, speeds while people were home (including myself) was ~3mbps.

The trouble with pay-per-use (or capping) being sold as any type of efficient consumer-oriented "feature," is that it doesn't actually solve the problem with peak times (~3-10pm), when the vast majority of users are online and experiencing poor service. People using an obscene amount of bandwidth per month are most likely downloading files throughout the day (esp. if torrents), not streaming them, but because people stream when they're home, all that streaming at once leads to congestion due to ISPs' abused ability to oversell their bandwidth. So really, bandwidth caps are just another arbitrary limit imposed to get consumers to pay more, but ISPs are trying to keep the discussion about "over-eaters" rather than their inadequate, oversold service.

I'd think if the US really wants to see change, we'd be asking why ISPs, industry-wide, are allowed to advertise a meaningless maximum speed  without giving typical speeds, nor guaranteeing a minimum speed. I'm not saying "there ought to be a law," but if enough people are aware of what ISPs' marketing departments are doing, maybe consumers would be more willing to select a service willing to publish meaningful details about their service instead of their arbitrary speed/volume caps on plans.

Oh, yeah, I remember seeing a documentary on that. You old farts had those big corkboards up in the village square with a bunch of crude drawings (lithographs in population-dense areas) of peoples' faces who bounced checks so the village could shun the person. During a waning moon, the local leech-doctor would do a song and dance to curse the malefactor with infertility.

Is there a difference?

Bitcoin's an attractive option for tax cheats, but really anything not involving a bank, CU, or legal payment processor (like Dwolla) is the analog equivalent in this regard. Nothing new. Governments' only defense is unenforceable rules on how much physical cash may be used in a transaction, and having "large" bank withdrawals and deposits require the bank file a SAR. If you are committed to cheating, though, just skip the bank (or put only a fractional amount in the bank) and stick to physical cash, Bitcoins, PMs, or whatever.

Yeah, HDMI ports on a miner aren't very important unless you're mining Scrypt. Believe it or not, what you really need is a quality sound card. The quartz in the frequency regulator causes an effect known as symbiotic vibration increase in the GPU, resulting in a dramatically higher clock rate without any of the cost or risk involved in conventional overclocking. BFL and Avalon both utilize this technology in their VaporMiner lines.

Fry's Electronics: Players are sent here when their computer crashes and must pay a fee to get their computer repaired, or wait a maximum of 3 turns before paying the fee. If the player can roll doubles, their computer is fixed for free and they can leave that square immediately.

That's a pretty generous description of what happens if you go to Fry's. 

Any chance of a physical game coming out, or is that treading too far into copyright issues?

They're used as commas, not decimal points. Thousands. BTC was a good bit cheaper back then. AFAIK, nobody's sure where Pirate's sheets came from, though Moustakis claims he did have a phone interview with Pirate, so maybe he sent them in hopes of a lesser charge (for example, a civil case rather than criminal).

No mystery there. USG told him to comply with spying, shut down, or face criminal prosecution.

ETA: Before the "show me the citation" comment -- the USG doesn't need one. It's not a lawful government. Just look at how they handled the coup "complex situation" in Egypt. They're very willing to get around the spirit of a law by reinterpreting the letter.

Holy shit - you get DSL AND cable options where you live in the US? Only in my dreams..... ....  (seriously, I have to use a tethered phone in 3G -- THAT sucks)

US ISP infrastructure is notoriously garbage, and usually there is only one DSL company and one cable company in any given area, but the US isn't densely-populated like in Europe and Asia, so... is what it is. Many flat, farm-y areas usually have a wireless ISP option which is outrageously expensive, but for those in hilly or forested area, may be SoL and need to use Satellite, dial-up, or a cell phone. Bandwidth caps may be a huge problem in the US when considering Bitcoin. Bitcoin-qt loves to upload as much data as possible whenever running, with no option in the GUI to change its behavior, so you need to use an application-level bandwidth throttling utility unless you're on cable or a fast DSL connection (and yeah, 25mbps is really freakin' fast considering the nationwide average is 7.4mbps, and that's a ~25% increase over last year, but mostly because faster options are rolling out in densely-populated areas which already have high-speed options, while rural areas are still neglected). Blocks are growing in size every day, and it's already a major problem. With the blockchain ~10GB in size, it already passes Hughesnet's $50/mo (plus bullshit grey fees) plan's monthly allotment.

  Awesome! Since Russia denied extradition, perhaps "Bitcoin don't give a shit" could be in faux cyrillic?

Example:
ЬITКФIИ DФИ'T GIVЭ Д SHIT


Damn..... now I want a banner.

What? The SEC, FBI, DoJ, and DHS are all very interested in BTC and prosecuting cases it's involved in. A primary Bitcoin dev was asked by the FBI to speak at a conference way back - a year or two ago. That's just in the US. It's definitely on governments' radars.

AFAIK, there are no large exchanges which'd be able to help you.

There is a local exchange appropriately called Panamabitcoins.com which should be able to help you. I can't vouch for it, and it only just popped up in July, but the guy running it is fairly reputable. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=49941

Prices for a person-to-person transaction (without an exchange) will vary wildly, largely determined by how fast and safe the fiat payment methods you can use are.

I may also be able to sejj (depending on your options to pay), should you need it.   

Had a Panamanian Spanish instructor. Later switched to a Mexican. She'd always laugh at us... Mei jahmo ess....