The difference here actually being that it is impossible to alter the production rate of bitcoins.

With oil/gold/anything else, capital investment can be used to raise productivity or fund innovation to raise production.  With bitcoins it cannot.

The best you can do is tip the constant production in your favour, you get more of that fixed pie; which is what BFL are selling.  When ASIC/FPGA miners push the total hash rate up (which is great for users, the blockchain is more secure) one of two things will then happen:

• The unprofitable GPU miners will give up; very slightly (relative to the new order of magnitude higher rate) lower the total hashing power of the network.  This will make very little difference to ASIC miners, since they will already be taking the lions share of the block rewards.
• The unprofitable GPU miners will upgrade to ASICs.  This will tip the reward ratio back to where it was.

In either of these cases, the end point is the start point just with a considerably more secure blockchain and a load of money in BFL's pocket.

I don't envy the miners; they're in a horrendous position.  They all start mining with CPUs.  Then one of them invents GPU mining; any CPU miner who doesn't upgrade instantly finds their share of the pie reduced to minuscule proportions therefore everyone becomes a GPU miner, and they have to invest in the equipment to do it.  Then one of them invents ASIC mining; any miner who doesn't upgrade instantly finds their share reduced to minuscule proportions therefore everyone becomes an ASIC miner.  Then one of them invents quantum mining...

Miners are doomed to constantly play catch up with the other miners, who are inventing better technologies.  It's no fun for them, but that is the nature of a free market -- innovate or die.

Bitcoin's peculiarities mean that the rewards for innovation accrue to the innovator, not the miner.  BFL are the ones who will profit from this, not the miners.  And there is nothing wrong with that, because for the rest of us, we see ever increasing efficiencies -- and more hashes per Watt means a more secure blockchain for less energy expended.  Great.  This is about as far from destroying bitcoin as it is possible to be.  Bitcoin ends up stronger (for example: malicious bitcoin botnets will vanish pretty quickly).

Difference here being oil is burned and bitcoins aren't. You need new oil being produced, no one "needs" new bitcoins being mined - old bitcoins will be traded over and over again.

You say that but 33 pages says otherwise.

Scammer tag still there too.

Following motion created on the GLBSE website:

Continue buying more FPGA's that won't be delivered maybe until September or wait until October to order ASIC's. Yes: continue buying FPGA's No: wait until October to order ASIC's (Please ignore other motion with same date).

The Spartan6 chips in the FPGA's we have already bought have a hi resale value (once there put out of date by ASIC's).  I've seen individual Spartan6 chips selling for £350 each - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/XILINX-XC6SLX150T-2FGG676I-FPGA-SPARTAN-6-LXT-147K-676FGGBGA-/260963720288?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Components_Supplies_ET&hash=item3cc2a65c60#ht_500wt_1156 - and we have bought eight of them on two boards so we should get some money back on selling them once there out of date.  I've seen Spartan6 development boards going for £440 - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DIGILENT-410-178-BOARD-DEV-FPGA-ATLYS-SPARTAN-/251002775415?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Components_Supplies_ET&hash=item3a70ee6777#ht_500wt_1156

Note that KNOWN stales in cgminer do not count towards disabling a pool. It is only if there is a 3 minute run of unexpected rejects in a row without a single accepted share. Only an extreme situation would cause this. Using --no-submit-stale does not change the chance of hitting this either... As always I put a lot of thought into my defaults. Using --no-submit-stale only decreases the reported stale rate and occasionally you miss out on a possible share you would have gotten paid for due to laxity at the pool end so you lose nothing but stats by submitting them.

Somehow I get the picture of bulanula just being that kind of kid that stands behind/next to more popular others and shouts "Way to go, pal!", "You're the best, I always knew!" and "OMG, you're so awesome!" weirding everyone out. Including the people being praised, as they don't know/care who that guy is.

Edit:
"Ponzi schemes" are usually called like this because they pay out interest from deposits. Gigamining currently does (partially) do this.

He has already taken in at least $200k from the bonds issued four boxes so far $60k so $140k in his pocket minus the ponzi payments over the last few months, the profit has already been made in his pocket/BTC wallet with no risk as it was other peoples money who paid for it all..

I chose Bitcoin first, because I can't think of a better medium to exchange and store value.  I chose plutonium second, because for everything we do, we need energy, and nuclear fission is one of the best sources.  I think the worst are bank notes, because they create the illusion of objective value.

IOUs?  You don't have to look farther than this community and GLBSE, that IOUs aren't reliable.  And they are a great tool for scams, just look at the Donation of Constantine (luke-jr will be offended).

Gold?  As I said posted many times, as soon as we start mining on asteroids, gold will stop being scarce.  And this is realizable with the technology we posses today.

I don't know that cloudcrack uses FPGAs, but there were a couple guys at Defcon last year doing WPA cracking on Spartan3-based boards plugged into their laptops.  I'll try to dig up a link; I'm almost positive the bitstreams were based on the OpenCores sources I linked.

My point is that you *could* run a cracking service using FPGA hardware repurposed from mining, and people *are* willing to pay for such a service.

Pics videos or it didn't happen.

*Goes and upvotes Bulanula +10 x100 with my many sockpuppet accounts, with an insulting comment on each rating.*