If deflation is so bad, then how horrible would a bitcoin based economy be?

I might have some, I will check later. Where do you live?

Even if he is proven wrong on this one (and I think he will be, eventually), his batting record will still be roughly 10x better than most regular posters here who gave Micon the same shit when he warned them about pirate, hasking, mybitcointrade, why-I-love-patrick-harnett and half a dozen other once respected members, that are now all known scammers.

Why not just sell the cards/codes on bitmit with escrow?

Some googling and wiki-ing suggests you can achieve about 300W per square meter and per kilogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panels_on_spacecraft). Especially the latter is a major issue (I thought those panels were lighter, they pretty much look like alu foil), seeing that an entire nanosat weighs about a Kg. Given that weight is obviously the number one cost issue, I think 100W would be an upper limit, and that is assuming cooling 100W isnt a problem..

Speaking of the latter,  since the sat wont have attitude control, how do you keep the radiator pointed away from the sun? Or for that matter, the solar panel pointed to the sun?

I came across this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-emission_electric_propulsion

Is that at all feasible yet for a "farmshed built" satellite ? (Im guessing not, but hey, wikipedia article claims small and cheap, so who knows ).

Hate to break it to you, but before or after asics, there will still be only 25 BTC per block that are mined. To a large extend, I suspect they will even be mined by the very same people.

ARM would be silly. Anything on the performance level of a raspberry pi or smartphone still has a TDP of ~2 watt. As I recall, a single avalon or asicminer chip has about the same thermal dissipation. The difference is the ARM will not find a block in 100 years, with the avalon asic there is at least a chance it will find one before it burns up in the atmosphere.

Question: how do these pico satellites orient themselves? Do they have tiny engines ?

as for communicating with it, there is already a project underway to achieve this:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16367042

Would be useful to get some estimates, like what sort of power we could generate up there, if an unfolding solar array is at all realistic (price wise),  costs for launching for various orbits and sat sizes etc. Just ball park figures would be great.

Not that I think I will be promoting this as an actual project, better to have someone who knows at least something about space. If the shoe fits...

Depends how you define lie. It certainly was a running program in the military intelligence services.
Anyone with any interest in the subject, I cant recommend this movie enough:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/

I believe it to be a fairly factual representation of remote viewing and similar psychic techniques.

There is nothing really significant about that high mark, since the supply has increased substantially since then. The valuation of all bitcoins is already higher than when the price was $32 per BTC:
https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/market-cap?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

My guess is that Pirate finally ran out of coins, or stopped selling

Ahm. google, market cap $258 billion.
Bitcoin money supply: $270 million.

Today we could own 0.1% of Google!
Not that its true, nor does it make a great headline, or does it.

This started as a joke, but when researching it a bit further, it actually seems like it could be doable.

Lets put a bitcoin  satellite in to space!

Somewhere out of reach of governments, where solar energy is abundant and cooling may not be a problem (not actually sure about the latter lol).

Of course, the idea is not for this to be a profitable mining enterprise, it would be first and foremost a fantastic publicity stunt. Unaffordable? not so sure, have a look here:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/cheap-space-satellites/story?id=17165740

$8,000 and that includes putting it in orbit. I suspect we might get that sort of money on kickstarter, particularly with a few corporate sponsors, like say BFL. Wouldnt they love to have one of their asics orbiting earth? Imagine the press this could generate!

There are some caveats, but none too serious I think. current asics wouldnt be radiation hardened. They will get destroyed by cosmic radiation if not properly shielded (and possibly even if shielded). So it may not last 10 years, it might even break a lot faster than that, but thats ok I think. If it lasts only a few months, its mission accomplished as far as Im concerned. edit: apparently for the above price, you get so low orbit it will only last a few weeks anyway. Oh well..

It would have to connect to the internet. I have no idea how to do that in practice. We would need only a tiny bit of bandwidth, but you do need a permanent uplink. anyone have a clue how to do that and what it would cost?

Then there is the building of satellite itself. Probably not something we should do in our backyard shed, but the above price seems to include the cost of building one. A bitcoin mining satellite with a few low clocked asics is probably about as simple as it gets, assuming you dont want to generate 1000s of watts.

Thoughts?

No sign of asics that I can see, more noise than signal:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png

Anyone making firm short term predictions is either lying or manipulating. There is no way to predict it, price is just the result of the collective of sentiments. It can go either way and fluctuate wildly. Odds of making money daytrading are IMO no better than on Satoshidice (even though Im sure a dozen people will now post how they have been making profits fairly consistently because they think they are smarter/have crystal ball or draw fancy meaningless triangles. Of course those that lost just as consistently will not speak up in so far they are still  reading and posting here).

TL;DR. Buy some, use some, keep some, see what happens.

Start by asking how many of them know anything about bitcoin. Probably very few or even no one.
Then show them what they have been missing out on:

https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/market-cap

And explain that still  no one has heard of it, let alone uses it.
So far. Then make your case for why thats going to change.

You really really dont understand how it works....
Im baffled.

Not likely.  Even if every miner starts selling every coin he mines, thats still only 3600 BTC per day, which isnt that much. And even that is not likely to happen, most people who invested in ASICs believe in bitcoin and will want to hoard them. If anything I expect an opposite effect, I imagine many miners at least sell enough coins to pay for electricity, and that ratio is about to drop.


GPUs and FPGAs were very different. They were never going to drop massively or suddenly in price, because most of the demand isnt from bitcoin mining, its from other applications like gaming and relatively stable. ASICs on the other hand, can only be sold for mining, its market value is determined almost only by bitcoin difficulty. Once difficulty raises substantially, and sales start to dry up,  prices will drop and keep dropping through the floor, causing difficulty to explode.  best of luck with June deliveries.

Use an SSD. It speeds things up tremendously. I switch between a SSD and  a HDD  on my laptop (work/private), and on my desktop I multiboot various OS's on SSDs and HDDs. Regardless of the machine or the OS, on the SSDs it syncs a week in a few minutes or so. on the HDDs, it just keeps going forever and ever and ever. Ive given up on it, the full client is unusable on a harddrive unless you keep the machine on 24/7. If you dont have an SSD, might be worth just trying a USB stick.

I do think this is something devs should tackle though. They have to be doing something wrong or using a crappy DB. Synching the Bitcoin client uses far too much disk IO. Surely some or most of that can be done in RAM, no?

No, but it will probably stop them from making a profit.

Here is a clue; as with almost anything,  price of bitcoin is determined by supply and demand. Supply is now 25 BTC per ~10 minutes, regardless if you are the only one mining on the planet using a $25 raspberry pi or if 10 million miners spent $100,000 each on asics. Supply is fixed by the algorithm, and demand doesnt come from miners, it comes from speculators, hoarders, gamblers, drug users and anyone else wanting to buy BTC. The notion that mining cost has anything to do with bitcoin price is ludicrous. The only thing that it has something to do with the mining cost, is mining profit, and if everyone is as clueless as you, that profit will vanish real quick.  I dont know what you are mining with today, but I do hope you understand your GPU's and FGPAs are about produce only ~10% of what they used to and potentially less than 1% in a year or so. They will still cost exactly as much to run though.


Nonsense. If almost everyone except you stopped mining tomorrow, it would barely affect the price. The only thing that would really change is that you would make a killer profit. The opposite is much more likely though.


Just realize that your chances of making a profit depend almost entirely on how many others will take their chances. You might get lucky, if you ordered asics early and get your asic before most others,  but my gut feeling is that people are and will continue to overbuy mining equipment creating a loss for everyone.


Since you dont seem to understand even the basics, thats only due to luck and the fact BTC has been going up almost consistently.  As long as you kept holding at least some BTC, it was pretty damn hard to make a loss.