Maybe sell it on ebay?

Yes, I'm afraid there's some bad news. As you may know, BTCinch is shutting down and they were partnering with this endeavor.  I'll be updating the site with a new payment processor soon, as well as with some new information regarding hotels and venue. You see, the hotels I blocked rooms at did not receive a single reservation and I can't afford to pay for the minimum number of required room nights out of my own pocket, so I relinquished the hold on the rooms and the Group Rate will no longer available. Feel free to make your reservations at any hotel/motel you wish, but there will be no discount for attendees of the Bitcoin Convention unless someone with deep pockets steps forward to pre-pay for some rooms.

Speaking of deep pockets, I have more bad news. The company that originally agreed to front some of the money for the deposit at the Convention Center (not BTCinch) has not responded to any of my PM's or emails in weeks. Consequently, I've also released the hold on the exhibit space at the Convention Center. If you'll recall, they were holding much more square footage than we could possibly use with the understanding that we would only be charged for used space and that the deposit was due upon signing the contract and would be non-refundable. Of course, this is another expense I couldn't afford to cover without help.

But all is not lost! I've got some contacts at another hotel across the street from the Convention Center and they have space available to accomodate up to 45 exhibit tables that weekend. This arrangement would be more straightforward: $6,000 USD is necessary up front to book the space and if we outgrow it, we can always negotiate for more. What I need now, is a sponsor willing to come forward and front the money for this space, to be paid back with income from exhibitors in exchange for becoming the savior of the March 2012 Bitcoin Convention. There is no need to send any money to me, simply give me your word you'll pay it to the hotel and I'll work on the contract and put you in touch with the billing department.

If, for some reason this event doesn't happen, I'll refund every single BTC sent to me. (There haven't been many, which is why I'm finding myself in this predicament.)

Has anyone thought about this yet?

Bit-Pay allows for merchants to essentially accept Bitcoins as cash that gets deposited directly into their bank accounts.

Is there any way to extend this service to allow a miner to instantly convert pool payouts into cash that is also directly deposited into his/her bank account?

Edit:  I think Bit-Pay could REALLY profit from this.

Edit 2:  Hey Bit-Pay, could I arrange something like this with you individually?

Collision?

Howdy folks...  I notice some anomalous data having to do with low returns on short blocks, so I did some analysis and this is what I found:

This looks like some interesting data that seems to point at pretty substantial losses due to pool hopping in early parts of rounds.

Basically I ran a bunch of numbers and I'm looking at some anomalies that would be highly unlikely to be caused by chance.

Since I was seeing what seemed to be much lower numbers than I should have seen on short rounds, I had to do some data analysis with small sample set that had some progressive variance caused by systems going down from time to time.

So, my analysis is off a somewhat normalized figure of 5 chronologically continuous blocks average payout.  I compared the 5 block normalized average to individualized payouts as a percentage compared to the average of all payouts in the sample set.

It shows that in blocks that move faster (are shorter), payouts deviate from running averages to the tune of 85.34% in this small sample set.

Larger blocks have a mean average of 104.47%.

You can see the analysis here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AhhejNMzWwx8dGpYZE9FYXk3d05MQjVDNUxLcHNXZkE&output=html

In this small sample set, short rounds with the problem account for about 27% of the blocks. 

750$

Yes all disks, and box. Also 3 year apple care protection plan from when it was purchased (Feb 21st, 2010)

Too low, sorry

Great work Tony - I remember when you guys bought this domain over dinner at the NYC convention, so glad it turned into the real thing hahahah

This seems like a perfect item to viraly market on FeedZeBirds.com - not that it will necessarily get orders through that medium, but it's a fun, funny, and interesting product. Could be someone out there who sees it and writes a news article about it.

kujoking7: Suggestion.  Please don't accept any coins yourself, and direct the payment for the items to a reputable member who could make sure that the money is used to repay loans. 

This is disgusting. This is a clear "shut up" message to all companies that protested against SOPA. The level of authoritarianism and arrogance of the USA government is outstanding already, and it's growing fast.

I hope American citizens remember one day why their founding fathers gave them the second amendment. Its reason to exist isn't only so you can protect your home and family from burglars.