I think you are conflating two values.   There is the money supply and then there is GDP.  Unless velocity is 1 the money supply will be smaller than GDP.  For example globally the M0 is ~$10T however GDP is $75T that implies a velocity of 7.5.  It is unknown what the velocity of Bitcoin will be but given the low transaction cost it could be very high.   Thus a money supply (I hate the term market cap) of $500B could support many trillions of dollars in annual economic activity.

The retarget period should be based on the % increase in hashpower.
If it undershoot then you are simply not predicting a high enough increase in hashrate each period. 

It makes more sense to raise your hashrate estimate than to keep using an obviously incorrect estimate and then hedge it by computing incorrectly off the incorrect estimate.  Right?
I mean it is like saying I know this model has two errors but they sort of cancel each other out so I am going with two known errors instead of fixing both of them.

The last sentence is incorrect.  All that matters is your hashrate vs current difficulty.  If tonight the hashrate of the network doubled you would still earn the same amount tomorrow that you did today.  The rate you earn won't change until the difficulty adjusts.

The Sierra is sold as 1.2 TH/s unit not a 3 chip unit.   IF (and I haven't seen any convincing evidence) they are doing 600 GH/s+ they could drop the Sierra to two modules and just keep the extra hashing power for themselves.  Does anyone think that is unlikely given all the other ways they have screwed over customers so far?

Even if it is 800 GH/s (which nothing is confirmed that it is) it isn't more than we were dreaming about.   Due to dificulty increases 400 GH/s on Oct 20 is the equivelent of not 800 GH/s but 1,532 GH/s on Jan 1.   That's right if HF delivered 1,532 GH/s per BabyJet on Jan 1 miners would be no better off than getting what they promised (400 GH/s) when they promised (20 OCT).

So still think complaints about MPP are moot?   Even 800 GH/s will be a 80%+ loss IF delivered on 1 January AND difficulty only rises 25% per adjustment.  Of course all this is academic but it likely is NOT going to be 800 GH/s delivered and it seems very likely it will be even later too.

It may be two modules but saying there is little chance of a 100% boost over design spec is well silly since we have a prior competitor doing exactly that.

KNC design spec was 300 GH/s my Nov Jupiter runs not at 500 GH/s, not at 600 GH/s but 672 GH/s.   Is that also impossible?

Well SEC filing always means an outside investor.  Raising funds from internal sources (employees, founders, etc) requires no Reg D exemption.

Why do consider that interesting?

Not likely.  Roth IRA contributions are phased out at $183,000 in income.  Just about anyone who is an accredited investor has no access to Roth IRA anyways.  Traditional IRAs aren't much better I mean if you are looking to buy a million dollars worth of Bitcoins does it really matter than the first $5,000 each year can grow tax exempt?


This is far more likely.  The wealthy are use to using experts to manage their wealth.  This is really no different then putting funds into a hedge fund.  They could pick their own stocks and day trade but they hand the money to an expert, they are already rich they don't need to do it their self anymore.

The US government criminalized private ownership of gold.  Read up on Executive order 6102.  Residents could sell gold to the government at the official exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce or face fines  and up to 5 years in prison.  Less than a year later the US government changed the fixed exchange rate for gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce.   Those that held (and millions violated the law) saw the value of their gold almost double in a year.  


Once again what government?  The terran overlord government which runs the single police state for all citizens of earth?   Millions of people violated the US ban on gold.  A ban by one government wouldn't wipe out Bitcoin, there are 270 nations on earth.   Unlike gold Bitcoin has deniability.  Pretty easy to claim you lost the wallet.  Prove I have Bitcoins.   People in the US risked hiding an easily discoverable and tangible object even when the US government offered to pay them cash for it.   The idea of hiding a highly intangible, deniable set of numbers which can be encrypted seems a smaller leap doesn't it?

SCAN-SPAM is a non-issue.  The email isn't considered promotional or advertising.  It was fall into the "transactional or relationship" exemption anyways.

Memory.  The average botnet node is a 5-10 year old machine (most commonly Windows XP).   A memory requirement larger than the average memory of botnet node that also increases at the rate of Moore's law (or possibly below it as a margin of safety) would be highly resistant to botnets. 

The one world government?  A government may do that and innovation and technology will simply flow to where governments are more realistic in their regulation.   I don't think cryptocurrencies will replace national fiat but they will coexist.  The genie can't be put back into the bottle.  Stilll the global money supply is on the order of $75T (M2) so even if Bitcoin grew to support a $500B money supply (the number from the OP), it is a rounding error and thus hardly is a danger that it will replace all national currencies.

Hashrate is unknown.  The network never knows the hashrate.  Hashrate can only be estimated based on AVERAGE block solving time.  Each individual block will vary significantly.

Lets look at Bitcoin.  Average block time is 10 minutes.   This month we had a 2 minute block.  Was it because intra block the hashrate rose 500% to 50 PH/s?  No of course not it simply was good luck.   Hashrate is unknown and variance (lucky) can't be differentiated from actual changes in hashrate in the short term.  It is only over a much longer period of time (hundreds of blocks) that probability separates the variance from the real change.

Last time I checked my government was still fighting a pointless and utterly futile war on drugs (estimated $1 trillion spent in the last 40 years excluded the oppertunity cost).
Last time I checked people still grew, smoked, consumed, bought, sold, transported and generally used those things the government doesn't want them to.
Someone interesting the estimated value of the global drug trade is pretty close to your headline number ... $321 billion USD annually.

Note this doesn't mean I advocate a war between crypto-currencies and global governments.  Bitcoin will "bootstrap" much faster if it can springboard off the existing financial system.  The point is that it doesn't really matter what governments want to do, it is what they are capable of doing.  Governments are generally able to attack centralized institutions (like other governments, companies, singular leaders, etc) rather well but they tend to be rather inept at killing decentralized global networks even when they waste forty years and a trillion dollars trying to do it.

Fixed your post for you.  The same people use PayPal, credit cards, online banking, VOIP (even if they don't know it), etc.  If Bitcoin gets big enough they will use "Bitcoin" as well. The company who can make Bitcoin brain dead simple for the masses will laugh all the way to the wallet.dat.  We probably are years away from that but it will be an evolution over time.  Will they use the QT reference client, participate as a full node, and maintain regular backups of their wallet.dat protected by a strong passphrase?  Of course not but they won't have to.

As much as I think Apple is massively overhyped (and overpriced), you have to give them credit.  They are very good at making complex things insanely simple. They just work.  Apple is the toaster of the computing world.  Nobody reads the instruction manual on a toaster, you plug it in, put bread it, and <magically> toast comes out.  It might have something to do with magnets or quantum mechanics, but let the magnet engineers and physics nerds figure it out.  Bread in, toast out; the consumer doesn't need to know more than that and doesn't care enough to know more.  If the toaster stops working, you toss it in the trash and get a new one.  Don't try to open one up, I heard that if the quantums fall out and then you need to call the EPA.

Nobody has made the Bitcoin (wallet) equivalent of a toaster yet but it will happen.  It probably won't be trust free, because zero trust means 100% responsibility and honestly most people don't really want that.  They want to be protected, if it is backed by a big company, with an insurance policy they will gladly use it.

I don't have the time to maintain this.  I am very busy through the end of the year.  Still the original goal was served.  It gave us a ballpark through the end of the year and when people were making insane predictions (<2 PH/s in Dec or >100 PH/s by Dec) it got us within shooting distance of reality.

Honestly it probably makes sense to start a new thread for Q1-2014, link to this and use it a template for projecting pre-orders over the next 3-6 months.  Going beyond that is really just rolling dice.

Of course it matters in the context of an attack.  It will cost you at least 0.08192 per MB added to the blockchain in fees to miners excluding any value sent to outputs.


Larger blocks take longer to relay and confirm.   Orphan rates depends on relative differences in block size.  If the average block is 10 GB then making a 1 GB spam block is just pissing in the wind.  It would be like trying to take down the internet by emailing everyone you know.  

Spam is only an attack if it is large relative to genuine traffic.  If Eligius was making 1 GB blocks and the other miners were making 0.5 MB blocks Elgius would have a much higher propagation time and thus would lose a much higher % of revenue to orphans.  Net revenue (after orphan losses) would plummet, miners would leave in droves (if only to protect their own bottom line) and the power of the attack would be greatly reduced.

Eligius is not free from any fee.
http://eligius.st/~gateway/faq-page

Of course like I said using a public pool would be short lived.  If Eligius made massive, spammy blocks which took excessively long time to confirm the miners would simply leave.  Some would leave because they woudl view it as an attack on Bitcoin, others would leave simply because orphaned blocks are in effect lost revenue.  Why mine at Eligius (in this hypothetical scenario) and lose 5% of gross revenue when you could mine just about anywhere else and lose less?

Not in any meaningful way.


What if you are a big miner, a pool owner for example, and you can produce such block with such transaction by you own will? This block will be declined by others only because of IsDust function.
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No it won't be denied.  It isn't illegal, just non-standard.  However the block limit still applies and larger blocks (but smaller than 1MB or current limit) are more likely to be orphaned.  Of course running a massive hashing farm with a significant fraction of the network is a non-trivial cost as well.   If you are a public pool, your attack is very public so I would imagine miners simply leave for other pools very quickly.  If you are looking to build a private multi-PH pool plus continually upgrading to keep up with network growth I hope you have tens of millions of USD handy.   

Then again average block is currently 250KB so you could add maybe 750KB to the blockchain per solved block.  With 10% of the network it would only take you 100 or so days assuming 0% orphan rate.