Yeah that is what we were discussing already. 

I would guess most don't.

However moving BTC between exchanges has no effect on capital gains.

If you buy a BTC @ $100 and sell a BTC @ $250 you have a $150 capital gain.  The withdrawing or depositing of coins on an exchange isn't a taxable event.  Similarly people transfer stocks and cash balances between brokerage accounts all the time.

The blockchain if fully distributed.   Every full node has a complete copy.  It isn't possible to be more distributed than that.

Yeah once again for every Madoff there are 10,000 other fund managers who just do a job and collect a cut off every dollar under management.  Anything can happen but then again a lot of "smart" techy people have lots utterly staggering fortunes of Bitcoins they directly controlled so for someone not tech centered the idea of having it managed has appeal.

Then again the topic was about the fund being used to day trade the market.  It would seem pretty easy to ensure that doesn't happen.  Not sure what kind of audits SecondMarket is planning on using but the nice thing about Bitcoins you can't move them and then move them back in time for the audit without leaving a record. In time I am sure an entire set of best practices for running and auditing a Bitcoin trust will emerge.

Most people (there are some vocal dissidents) believe the tx limit will need to be raised.  The real debate isn't on should it be but how, when, and to what limit.  The 1MB limit wasn't part of the first version of Bitcoin it was added later as a safety mechanism.  It was and is a denial of service prevention mechanism.   With unlimited block sizes someone in the early years (when solo mining your own block with a CPU and later GPU was possible) could create hundreds of say 1 GB blocks and the blockchain today would be measured in Terrabytes.  TBs of real tx data is a cost Bitcoin will have to deal with.  TBs of "attack spam" would have hindered adoption.  Today with much higher difficulty, miners having to watch the bottom line, and a much larger network in general pulling that type of attack would be much harder and more expensive so eventually I think the (1024KB) training wheels will come off.

Still even with a higher block size it is unlikely that every single tx will be on blockchain.  How much is on vs off chain remains to be seen but off blockchain txs are faster and cheaper (at the expense of centralization).  However while a larger block size means more room for on block chain tx it has its own type of centralization in that the resources for full nodes will be higher.  Higher resources for full node mean less full nodes.  The "perfect" block size would be one which balances these two risks.  If you want to take two extremes: 1GB blocks (in 2013) are probably bad, 1MB blocks (forever) are probably also bad, a better block size is probably in the middle. 

I don't have the answer but I know some questions to start thinking about:
How do we get "there"?
What size blocks make sense? 
How do you balance the two different risks of centralization?
Should it be a new higher fixed limit, no limit, or some dynamic limit?  
How do you manage that in a decentralized network?
Should we look to make a perfect change on the first try or maybe a temporary increase to "buy some time"?

Neither the time between blocks is <10 minutes.  It is just the number of transactions per 600 seconds is significantly higher than the number of tx per block.

If txs are getting added to the "unconfirmed pool" at a rate of say 0.5 tps and miners are confirming them at a rate of 0.1 tps then overtime the pool is going to get fuller and fuller.  Until either the transaction rate slows down or miners confirm more transactions the trend will continue.

For example at the time this block was mined there were >4,000 unconfirmed tx including paying tx with fees >0.1 BTC.
http://blockchain.info/block-index/438682/000000000000000412cd1343f0361f49c9f493a159ce95e72e220ca1bc3b97b5

The pool/miner decided to include only 130 tx (3% of waiting txs) and more silly only included 0.02 tx worth of fees leaving behind almost 80% of the available paying tx.  I guess this pool/miner doesn't like fees.  Maybe they are making too many BTC already?

For whatever reasons (chance or intentional) there is a much higher than normal number of no fee and low priority txs awaiting confirmation.  Also it appears the average block size has been lower than normal.  Not sure if pools are being more conservative or it is one large miner, or just the shift in hashing power from larger block miners to smaller block miners.

Put it all together you got more transactions per second and less transactions per block.  Confirm times are going to go up.

http://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=


Still miners pools need to step up their game.  Blocks are downright tiny.  <200KB.  <100KB?  Recently there was a 47KB block (130 txs) with >5,000 tx awaiting confirmation.
It is one thing to delay/block low priority tx and spam w/ no fees.  It is another one to cap your blocks so small that hundreds of paying txs are waiting 2 or more blocks for a confirmation.

I think miners need to start having a discussion with their pool operators.  Yes larger blocks mean a small increase in orphans but most miners and pool operators should be forward looking enough to not want to kill the goose.  When Bitcoin is <1 tps and <20% of even the 1MB hard limit and thousands of tx are just idling it just is bad PR.  Everyone talks about mainstream, forget mainstream how are we going to handle even 1 tps if miners can't start clearing backlogs of txs now?

The the rise is sustained, it has set a new floor, it shows a new leg upward, etc.

However as pointed out MtGox has lost marketshare so volume is a false indicator.  We would need a chart of all exchanges combined price and volume to draw anything from it.

Twice?

Capitulation after the last crash was ~$70.  Doubled would be $140.  Doubled again would be $280.  Doubled again would be $560.  Doubled again would be $1,060.
If we hit $500 in a straight shot without a breather I would sell off some (always some, never all) and not lose sleep. If it hit $1,000 I would dump a lot more and be confident that I get another chance.

Large moves with little volume show less conviction then large moves with high volume.

Meh SecondMarket is pretty well established and has a good rep.  For every Madoff there are 10,000 funds which follow the rules.  If Second Market "loses" the coins they are getting sued.  This isn't some anonymous guy living in his mom's basement with no assets that only has to worry about getting doxxed or having unpaid pizzas show up as his door. 

Guesstimating from the 70% of all coins comment means 2.0 PH/s to 2.5 PH/s shipped.

Not sure how money towards the next mask is good news for you or me (unless you own shares in KNC).  New mask means potentially superior hardware at an even cheaper price point which means more miners and higher difficulty and less return on our existing hardware. 

Don't use an exchange then.  You can't opt out of the banking system if u hold dollars, even if you choose not use a bank your money is still affected by the fractional reserve system.  You can CHOOSE to not use an exchange and just use Bitcoins.  Maybe it is tougher but nobody said it is going to be easy and perfect.

That is weird that there would be so much variance in reported power.


Most units are in the ~600W +/- 10% range and then there are some >700W?  That can't be explained by differences in power supply efficiency.

Perhaps?

It is the single most expensive component on the boards other than possibly the ASIC itself.
$20 ea and removing 4 per board is $80 per board or $320 per Jupiter.
If they shipped 5,000 Jupiters that is $1.6M USD.

I think we can safely say it was definitely.

Well it is a trust.  The operator is obligated to hold the coins for those who have shares in the trust.  The operator using the coins to play super whale day trader would be violating the law and give the shareholders 15 million reasons to ensure he is sued into the poor house.  Remember this is Pirate's HYIP Ponzi this is a trust eligible only to sophisticated investors with a certain net worth. 

Unless the OP is wrong.  There is no announced orders.  The title contains the word "estimate" for a reason.

Well 180,000^4 = 2^70  Most passwords have far far far far less than 70 bits of entropy.
While it is harder than brute forcing a private key (which is impossible) it is beyond what is computationally feasible with any reasonable cost/time constraint.

The fact that multiple people might be using the same password doesn't matter in this case.  We aren't talking about a brain wallet.  The attacker would need a copy of the wallet.dat and attempt to brute force that wallet individually. The QT client uses a random 64 bit salt when hashing the passphrase which means there is no precomputation or shared attack possible.  Each potential password has to be salted and check against a single wallet file (which the attacker needs to have access to first).  The QT wallet also employs key strengthening by hashing the password many tens of thousands of times so instead of the attacker getting to use 1 hash = password attempt it is 56,000 hashes = 1 password attempt.

So putting that all together.
2^70 possible passwords.
Assume 2^16 hashes per password so 2^70 * 2^16 =  2^86 hashes needed
A high end GPU can attempt ~1B SHA-2 hashes a second.

2^86 / 1000^3 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365 =  2,453,426,321 GPU years.   So if you had 1 billion GPUs you would have a 50% chance of brute forcing a single password on a single wallet in a year.


For the record most people probably would use a smaller dictionary so to be safe I would use more words (an additional one or two words adds significant security while still being memorable) but even still it is probably more secure than 90% of the passwords people "think" are safe.  That was the whole point of the cartoon.  The complicated garbage password people try to come up with actually has very little entropy.  A purely random password "h23j2hF@xl-hd$ij" has about 6.5 bits of entropy per symbol so to acheive 70 bits of entropy would require 11 char/smbols.  In the real world most user's password that they think are strong have much much less entropy.  NIST estimate is the average user select 8 digit password with upper, lower, number and symbols has about 18 bits of entropy. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength

Diceware is another example of a method to randomly pick a password by rolling dice and comparing it against a much smaller word list.  The words are chosen to avoid words which may be hard to remember, have alternate spellings, may be mixed with other words, etc.  Even with a much smaller word list diceware is ~12 bits of entropy per word.  6 or 7 words combined with random salt and key hardening is impossible to brute force.

http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

The thread is about orders not shipments.   Still you listed <2 PH/s and the network is ~4 PH/s you and you said it doesn't add up?

For the record no company has every in black and white stated how much they shipped.  Ever.  The are very opaque about that and if anything they have a huge incentive to lie to the downside.  Say a company said "yup we are shipping 1 PH/s per week and have orders booked for the 20-30 weeks" (it doesn't matter if they are lying or telling the truth) do you think that would make it easier or harder to sell more rigs?

Why would the Nov batch be smaller than the Sept/Oct batch?  If KNC knows they can ship X units in ~30 days the first month with the most problems, the most unexpected delays, and the most stress why would they anticipate only selling a fraction of that the following month after having 15 days to mass produce boards, catch up on some sleep, improve their shipping process?