The mistake people make is they assume that 'the dreaded bubble' happens independent from market growth. In the case of bitcoin (don't ask me about other markets) it doesn't. According to my calculations real support is between 120 and 150. So my perspective on if it's even a bubble... some portion of it is, and since the exchanges are still small markets (not many users) it's very easy for one or the other of them to have panic selloffs or buyups that spike prices. Thus the perception of where the bubble started is often skewed drastically on the low side.

I seriously doubt that we'll ever see prices under 60 again. And really if you take a long enough view it doesn't matter the general trend over years will always be up as long we can keep bitcoin alive until it hits 21m coins.

As for me I got out at 220 and now am buying all the way down.

Agree with Myrkul.

@OP - No, the bitcoins aren't consumed by being spent. We're expecting a slowly declining actual number of bitcoins once we reach 21m - and are prepared to add decimal places to compensate for the associated price increase. Right now we're still inflating the currency via block rewards.

Have to disagree. mid-term is still up (the market kept it's parabolic shape even through this 'crash' - which means it was a reasonable correction) I'd say we'll be flirting with again before in 3 or 4 days at most.

I've been having this issue for the past week - takes minutes to login... and the pool keeps showing up as dead (at least failover is triggered in the middle of the night for me) and all my workers switch to backup pools. I'm seriously considering going back to other more reliable pools, just so I don't have to switch things back to here every morning.

Well see that's your problem... you're using them for storing out dated equipment. I've got one rack that's filled with my music mixing stuff (including a 42 tray dvd copy appliance) and the other with a couple of servers 2u servers and all my fpga-s... and yes they're on shelves, but I'd sure love to be able to buy rackable asics. The main reason I run them in the rack is because it's got it's own AC cart and that's by far the best way to keep temps where I want them.

The smart miners with fiat to spend are madly building GPU rigs right now... you can hit 100% ROI in 3 weeks if you're buying the right video cards.

And you're catastrophic failure scenario results in breaking even after 10 days (by reselling the gpus) if you're honest. or 4 days if you'd be willing to abuse your vendor by restocking the 'less than 3 week old video cards' (gogo shady dealings).

Anyway, most of us on the BFL (short?) bus aren't sending anymore money to any asic 'manufacturers' until they've got a solid delivery time table and we can count on delivery within a set time-frame.

Personally I'm desperately hoping that AMD jumps into the arena with a x530 card stacked 5 slots deep with sha256 cores... then we'd see a real arms race that wasn't dependent on flaky hardware developers overseas (or anywhere else).

Gotta love it when a thread turns into an idiot block.

IMO: datacenters are actually becoming smaller and more distributed. I personally know of several medium sized businesses who have broken up their single large data center and distributed parts of it out to various locations / branch offices.

Personally I have several racks inside the clean room I built in my garage.

Ultimately as hardware gets cheaper and connections faster we'll see more and more small datacenters springing up wherever they're needed.

workers are reporting pool is dead.

According to http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size we're aproaching 6 gigabytes for the blockchain.
According to http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-and-netflix-dominate-americas-internet-traffic-111027/ Netflix is 34% of total...

I can't find numbers on exact transfer rate of the internet. But lets say ~1 exabyte per day (someone got a source to the real data?) so we're looking at netflix transfering 333,000 terabytes per day. This means that even if you had 55,500,000 bitcoiners downloading the entire blockchain every single day... you'd still be consuming less than netflix does on a daily basis.

For real numbers, number of tx * number of nodes * time = transfer rate of bitcoin network  ... feel free to include an estimation of non-current blocks being transfered to out of sync clients.

I don't really know why you'd want to try and quantify this. Are you attempting to evaluate how 'green' bitcoin may or may not become? Bitcoin is such a small amount of traffic on the network relative to everything else that's going on there that I can't imagine it ever being an issue. Even if we imagined away all other currency and assumed all those trades were done using bitcoin instead... and scaled up the network accordingly.  it would still be so very minor compared to the bandwidth used by say facebook, google or netflix.

As already stated: wallets exist that don't need the entire blockchain.

As to your other issues, I think you've made the mistake of evaluating bitcoin as a standalone currency. Right now it isn't. It will become that eventually if quantum computing doesn't become reality first.

You do not need to concern yourself with price stability as a vendor, simply use a service that converts your inc btc to fiat. Leave the speculation to the speculators, they can hold or trade bitcoins and it won't affect you receiving payments through your service. As an end user, you also don't really need to concern yourself with the price stability most transactions will move in the direction of "purchase item, buy and send bitcoins" rather than a transaction directly from a wallet using bitcoins you already owned. As an early adopter (which is what we all right now) we're a mix of speculators and users... as for wanting to put in the a price and having it be stable over a period of time... why not simply tie it to the exchange rate that your pref exchange uses, then the price would update automagically to whatever fiat they were buying in.

Reputation features are a non-starter on the network level. We're concerned with providing a platform for exchange. This would be best handled by a service or site that does it as part of it's other business. If you see a need for this feature - make that site and transmit the messages on the blockchain, call it something cool, then get wallet providers to include your API to pull that information relative to a public address.

Escrow features are a bad idea on the network level. I know I'd like them also... but really... how could you prevent someone from simply not releasing escrow? Much better to provide this a service linked to the reputation site imo.

I'm not even going to talk about alt-coins.

~

The only tweak I'd love to see would be a massive increase in block generation rate. I want lower difficulty, more blocks (like one ever 30 seconds or per min), the linking of transaction fees to both 'size of tx' and 'difficulty' along with an proportional decrease in the block reward. IMO this has to happen soon and really should be the focus of the devs (or at the very least the foundation) for the simple fact that if we can't service potential transactions we're placing a very real barrier to adoption. I'd love to see 10 confirmations take only 5 mins - lets really focus on exploiting the tech available instead of just saying "it's already way faster than a wire transfer' - because what we really need is for a vendor to be able to take a payment a point of sale - wait 30 seconds and know that it's paid.

Sorry for arriving late to this thread... but I think your plan is silly.

Why not simply allocate some small percentage of fiat and use it to buy and hold bitcoin... throw enough money at it, drastically deflate it...

Say central banks now own 90% of btc.

How much of what's left is horded? How much is actively being traded?

By forcing a massive bubble over a long enough period of time you might actually slow down the growth of the bitcoin economy. Since the supply is fixed - eventually it gets to a breaking point - where you have to start selling some of your holdings (for insane profits I might add) or stagnate the economy.

So if we give the bankers a choice between making an insane profit over a period of 30 years or consuming their investment to kill competition... which are they more likely to choose?



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Also, this isn't about "real market value" in the same way a commodity is. . . bitcoin isn't a basket of goods. Even bubbles that exist for long enough will persist after you 'pop the bubble'. It's all about how people perceive the value - so there's no inherent value to a bitcoin.

OP - I think the premise of your original question is invalid.

The 'energy cost' of bitcoin network does not matter to the network and it never will. Precisely because miners are the ones providing that energy. Miners have already proven that the network hash rate will continue to increase (and thus the total energy expended in the act of mining) until it isn't profitable to increase it.

The goal of 'adoption' is to generate transactions fees that amount to greater than the block reward. There's no way for force an increase except by transaction size and this is completely fair to each user.

Assuming bitcoin is in general (global?) use the network hash rate will grow to any size that it needs to in order to process the volume of these transactions. Once this happens there won't be any disincentive to mining.

So energy is covered...


Now bandwidth, that's a different discussion... and may at some point become an issue... but I'd imagine we'll be able to develop some sort of supernode system or some bitcoin specific protocol to deal with this once it becomes a real concern.

~

Another thing to consider if we assume adoption... some of the big boys (aka other payment processing services) will eventually convert or at least support bitcoin. Once Amazon or Paypal take them directly they'll be contributing to the network as well (at least some fast nodes so they can send payments directly without using another service).

Quick someone call the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaambulance.

So, I'm not much for auctions - care to quote me a price for everything - including the APC and laptops?

No. That's a concrete floor and the stations are exactly what you'd expect to find in any sort of electronics assembly shop. metal workbenches with anti-static pads to work on... exactly the same as used in every manual solder line on the planet.

Well I had a thought.

Is it possible that the manual payout button is only initiating a payout of the balance of greater than the auto-payout setting? That would explain why manual wasn't working for me. As I check this morning having passed the threshold and the payment had already been sent automatically.

I haven't gotten an autopayment in 2 days either - manual doesn't function. I can only assume that the hot-wallet is empty.

Just pointed 2.8 gh at your pool to try it out.

I don't suppose you have any plans for adding an automatically updating 'price per share' - maybe put it on the accounts page so you don't have random non-members pulling that data at will.

Also - how often is that page updated for workers hash rate?

Are there any plans to offer an email (or better yet sms text or other im) notification feature for when a worker's been offline for X period of time?

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Not trying to overwork you or anything, infact if you needed a code monkey I'd be willing to write some of these features for you.

Negative - you can go pretty deep. There are even some chip designs that interleave metallic layers to transmit heat out from deep chips.