I haven't really looked into VPS pricing.  After the linode hack (and the next one, and the next one, and the most recent one) probably the absolute best decision I have ever made related to Bitcoin is not using VPS.  I always use bare metal.  Either my own hardware (colocation) or renting the datacenter's bare metal (dedicated server rental).  I always personally install the OS right onto bare metal using IPMI.   No backdoors, no superuser accounts, no password reset possibly by the hosting provider.

The bad news is hardware rental or colocation is likely beyond your limit of what is reasonable.

Are quarter rolls ok?  Do you have a dumptruck handy?

This.

Another example is that remittance is generally done by the "unbanked" and poor.  More than $400B is remitted annually and companies like WU on average collect 10% off the top.  That is $40B in wealth transfer from primary poor third world families to rich first world shareholders. Think about that OP, $40B a year spent by the working poor to simply move money and you are boycotting Bitcoin?  

http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/

Now Bitcoin will never be "fee free" (especially converting local currency to fiat) but imagine years from now a worker in the US uses a Bitcoin ATM to buy BTC for a 2% fee.  He then send then BTC to his family on the other side of the globe for a negligible cost (~$0.05 right per KB right now).  The family uses a local exchanger who converts the BTC to local currency for say another 2% fee.  USD cash to local cash around the world for a 4% in fees vs 10% round trip.  6% saved on $400B is $24B additional wealth kept by working families.  That is just one year.  In a lifetime we are talking about something on the order of $1T and that is just with a 6% savings Bitcoin in time will probably drive costs even lower.  What do you think the poor could do with another $1T collectively?

Well your points (which I agree) indicate it won't be much of a drag.  The losses at PSU and DC regulator are perfectly linear, if efficiency is doubled then at the chip then (excluding controller and cooling) is going to be doubled at the wall as well. Also 55nm has 1/4 not 1/2 the transistor density of 28nm (55/28)^2 ~= 4.   While a 400% improvement in efficiency is unlikely 200% maybe 250% wouldn't be that unusual.  0.9/2.5 = 0.36 J/GH.   The controller is negligible (5W maybe 10W) so A lot will depend on what wattage is needed for cooling.  Still lets look at a Cointerra rig you are looking at two 8W pumps and six likely 6W fans plus maybe 10W for the host so that is ~62W which is only a 4% overhead.  So yeah that 60W or so isn't going to be reduced but it is a minor drag.

Of course who knows if Bitfury can pull it off, or be able to take the time needed given the more competitive environment, to do a hand placed 28nm chip.  Still it does make me lower my own upper bound on what efficiency I think is plausible for 28nm.   I think 0.4 J/GH (at the wall) might be possible compared to ~0.8 J/GH for all existing specs and rigs.

The entirity of your posting history is:
Why I'm boycotting bitcoins.
You know what I find the most disturbing about the bitcoin community?
Bitcoin is fundementally flawed, here's why and how it can be fixed

So why did you register?  Why are you here?  And since you already find the community disturbing, and believe Bitcoin is flawed then you don't need to Boycott bitcoin obviously it is going to fail anyways. 

Well 0.6 J/GH at the chip isn't <0.5 J/GH at the wall.  I honestly could give two craps about the at chip efficiency unless the company selling them is willing to a) pay for all the non-chip power use or b) I was designing my own miner and buying raw chips by the reel.  "Full custom" has no standard definition in the industry anymore.  So nobody can say their chip isn't "full custom" and it also means absolutely nothing.  

Why?  Please identify all of Satoshi's coins.

Also Satoshi did "spend" coins ALREADY. One of (or was it THE first) non-generation transaction was from Satoshi to Hal Finney (Finney attack named after him).

Impressive.  It makes me think a 28nm die shrink of Bitfury (Bitfury28) could be <0.5 J/GH at the wall (with high efficiency PSU).

What client?  Are you running both bitcoin and bitcoind on the same machine?  If so why?

Agreed.  Even if a country adopted those principals the final regs would be about 2,000 pages.

See:
http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=58a4710ef2e133da3a818025e103c41c&node=31:3.1.6.1.2&rgn=div5


Still some of those are likely already in effect (at least in some jurisdictions).

#2 & #3 applies to anything of value, Bitcoins have value, courts have even indicated so.  Case in point Pirate@40's defense that Bitcoin isn't money didn't hold water.

#5 as least so far hasn't been made illegal.  Generally things are legal until they are explicitly illegal.  Countries rarely pass laws stating something is legal.   In the US FinCEN's focus has been on the "virtual-real" boundary.  Entities not involved in real currency are not subject to FinCEN regulation.

#6 is probably true in most countries.  To my knowledge no country has said Bitcoins are themselves unlawful and obviously if something is unlawful (gambling, illegal drugs, prostitution) changing the method of payment doesn't magic it to lawful.

#9 is generally accepted in US bankruptcy law (and most if not all countries).  The concept is called a "bailor arrangement" however it doesn't protect you from fraud by the bailor for obvious reasons.

Yes however the only method of deposit is an international bank wire.  Most banks charge a huge ($40 is common) fee for making an international bank wire.  Often you can't do it online unless you have that setup and need to go into the branch.  So for smaller frequent deposits ($40 on $500 is 8% fee) it is more of a pain.  I have used them for over a year.  However they do require you to provide KYC information.  Not sure the exact info required.  You can make an account for free and they will prompt you.   If you want to trade smaller amounts CampBX "may" be a better option once they enable ACH again.

Remember ALWAYS minimize the amount of funds you keep on ANY exchange and use 2FA (make sure to print out a backup of your 2FA "key" before activating it).  Deposit, buy, withdraw to your wallet.   Don't leave large balances on the exchange it likely will end in heartache.

Correct.  DOH.  Seeing the link link ("75000 BTC") caused me to go into the article with a predisposed opinion.  Human brain is funny sometimes. 

I still think it is a false flag but at $75,000 the odds that it is some legit moron increases.

Somewhat off topic but 517 GH/s?  I thought it was more like 400 GH/s stock.  Did you modify the boards for overclocking?

Based on the history of cryptographic breaks the later scenario is many magnitudes more likely.  Flaws usually begin as academic breaks on simplified versions of the algorithm, then eventually evolve into faster than brute force attacks on the full algorithm.  Those early weaknesses are usually impossible to implement.  For example is a weakness reduces the security of SHA-256 from 256 bits to 102 bits well that is worrisome however a preimage attack would require more energy than the entire human race uses in a year.  Eventually the combination of Moore's law and improved cryptanalysis reduces the cost/complexity of an attack until it is economical.

A good case in point is that SHA-1 has been considered "weakened" for almost a decade now.  However the current estimated cost to perform a SHA-1 preimage attack is on the order of millions of USD (and months of time).  Bitcoin could use SHA-1 for pubkeyhashes and unless your address holds tens of thousands of BTC you would be in no real danger.  Remember the cost is NOW in the millions of USD after SHA-1 being considered degraded for almost a decade. 

On a long enough timeline it is highly likely new stronger address types will be deployed.  Bitcoin can survive cryptographic breaks just fine.  Intelligence agencies use the same kind of risk model.  If the Chinese get a hold of an encrypted classified document it is only a matter of time before they will gain access to the secrets so NIST sets encryption standards to ensure that so much time will have passed that the information will have very little value.  For example say a document which had specs on the first stealth fighter was stolen (but remained encrypted).   If cryptanalysis and Moore's law eventually break that protection 50 years from now well it has done its job.  US stealth technology will be so far advanced from that first version the damage from the loss will be minimized due to the effect of time.

Where did you get the stats from?

I am running a relatively large node (200+ connections, 50 kbps upload, uncapped download) and would be interested in graphing something like that.  I probably will be moving my main node to datacenter and connecting to it via secure RPC calls.  The client locally will just be "dumb wallet".

My first reaction is false flag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

It is a really bad headline which undermines Bitcoin even if fake.  It gives ammunition to Senators, isn't there going to be a hearing pretty soon?

The reward tx is part of the block.  I always find it humorous when people believe they need to change Bitcoin in order to save it yet have not even the most basic understanding of Bitcoin at a technical level.

When a miner solves a block he is finding a nonce that when ADDED TO THE REST OF THE BLOCKHEADER and hashed produces a hash below the target.
The blockheader contains the merkle root hash.  The merkle root hash is a hash of all tx in the block.  One of the tx in the block is the coinbase tx.

It doesn't matter who broadcasts a block the reward is tied to the block created. Changing anything in the block will result in new hash thus the "solution" (nonce resulting in hash below target) is tied to a particular block's values.

No.  It isn't just tx which are psuedo anonymous, NODES are also pseudo anonymous.  Generally in decentralized networks this brings up a problem called the sybill attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Say there are 50,000 nodes.   What you don't know is that I personally control 49,900 of them.  Not very decentralized huh.  To the network all the nodes appear as equal peers but in reality a super majority are controlled by me.  Given the low cost of running a node security can't rely on majority of nodes.  It would be easy to circumvent.

Bitcoin sidesteps this problem with the proof of work.  A hash is a hash that is all that matters.   100 TH/s from a single node is no different than 1 TH/s from 100 nodes.   If such silly measures were attempted pools would simply operate out of multiple nodes or split into multiple virtual pools (where miners are transferred from virtual pool to virtual pool automatically to load balance).


Still topics like this make me wonder why so many people fear free markets.  Luke has miners because he built a pool and people saw value in it.  If in the future they don't see value in it the share of his pool will decline.  Case in point take a look at DeepBit.  At one time people feared DeepBit would 51% the network.  Seems quaint now.

How do you do a chargeback on cash?  Bitcoin closest equivelent is cash not VISA.

How exactly would you force a chargeback system on cash?  Simple answer is you can't.   This doesn't mean that someday VISA couldn't operate on top of the Bitcoin network. Stealing your money when customers lie about not receiving a product.  You can opt in to such a system.  I am 100% sure they will arrive eventually but VISA can't make cash tx irreversible.  They never tried.  Instead they built a higher level network ON TOP OF the existing cash banking network. 

If you want chargebacks that roadmap is the only way possible in a cryptocurrency.

Well to be correct he bought some 50 BTC worth which has lost 80% of its value.  He started believe his own nonsense and became the bag holder.   Need to get a bunch of suckers to cover those losses for him.