How about after the next one, and the one after that, etc?  Are you including the shortness of the retarget cycle into your projections?

I just picked up a bunch of capacity at the alarmingly good rate of 1.7 Mhash/sec per dollar.  I don't expect to ever get that money back.  I actually think that the magic day of no return was a couple of weeks ago.

Then again, if the exchange rate improves, which I find highly unlikely, new gear purchased today could still pay off.  Maybe.

Not really.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

The problem is that some people "get it" automatically, and others do not.

If you get it, you'll read these questions and wonder how the hell could someone be so stupid that they can read how it works and not understand how and why the hashing is done the way it is.  If you don't get it, the descriptions that work for the "get it" crowd are meaningless.

I've tried several times to think of better ways to say it, and I've got nothing.

Is there a command line option to generate?

I know I'll win the lottery first, but I still like running one core of my quad on the off chance that I'll get lucky.

The bar for this is pretty low.  The target market is a single operator or a small shop with a few employees.

The real pain won't come until big operations (Fortune 500, etc) get into it.  And they'll probably all choose to deal with it in-house or by (closed source) contract.

There is a world of difference between "I trust you to be a local resident" and "I trust you with my financial transactions".

By the way, a clever attacker will set his client to calibrate to the local hashing speed.  The attack you need to watch out for is a dude with a modern Radeon (with more hashing power than the entire rest of your network times 100) will find the hash quickly, and then sit on the result until the last second that still gives him a 95% chance of being first.  Four or five blocks is just a lucky streak, but it buries the bad block pretty deep.

The main line is vulnerable to this type of attack too, except that by getting the whole world involved, the cost of doing can be raised to what we hope is a prohibitive level.

999,999 times out of a million, there is a pwn3d box on that customer line and the customer has no idea.  The other time, you know better.

Props to AT&T for doing their small part to help.

Ha!  What are the odds of finding $100 worth of data on those drives?  Hopefully better than the odds (0%) of recovering 2 grams of gold out of the box.  Sorry, off topic, but I had to chuckle.

For what it's worth, I'd love to see ebay offer BTC as an optional currency for sellers to specify.

Mental note to read the first post again when I'm not so tired.  My initial impression was that trust was being pushed around to (allegedly) trusted third parties, like bubbles under wallpaper, not being minimized.

By the way, I highly advise anyone interested in third party services to read about the history of ISK banking (AKA scams) in EVE Online.  The odds that a third party will remain trustworthy once the incentive to cheat becomes high enough has been holding steady at zero percent there for like 8 years now.

You need a way for a new node to find another node to connect to.  The stock client checks a well known IRC channel, and if that fails, it tries a few hardcoded hosts.

By the way, this is not a trivial problem if you expect this network to be largely isolated from the global internet.

Inno?

Happy to see it back up.  Don't miss working in a datacenter at all.

Modify the client to require remote nodes to authenticate.  Then you've reduced the problem to merely key distribution.  A global password is probably too simple.  A centrally managed password database, maybe?  Or a GPG-based web of trust?

Can we please get a sticky at the top of this forum asking, in the nicest, most pleasant way possible, that people refrain from posting new threads unless they have convinced themselves that they have a very solid understanding of the differences between wealth and money?

First, we can change from 64 bit to 128 bit at any time.  My guess is that we will do it for technical reasons LONG before economic reasons show up.

Second, there is rampant confusion between "bitcoin" the name of account for a single unit of this currency and "bitcoin" the thing that lives in your wallet (and can be lost with your wallet) that gives a claim on some arbitrary amount of bitcoin (in the first sense) units.  A lost wallet can lose a bitcoin (in the second sense) with an arbitrary value denoted in bitcoins (in the first sense).

Third, essentially no one cares beyond 0.01 btc (first sense).  Maybe we should reconsider this in AD 2215 when the minimum (current) resolvable amount is something that people actually care about.

The goal is to have each block come out in 10 minutes, on average.

The difficulty target is increased every 2016 blocks.  So, if hashing power is growing, the blocks just before a retarget will be coming in much too quickly.  If the retarget shoots for a 10 minute average based on the pool at the time, before long we'll be spitting them out in seconds.

So, you calculate the rate of growth and extrapolate it out a week.  The first 1008 blocks take too long, and the second 1008 blocks are too quick.  Hopefully, if you guessed right about the pool growth, you get it more or less right overall.

Check here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Islands_(GPU_family)

Personally, I wouldn't hold my breath until the press has seen demo cards.  The problem with shooting for a Christmas release is that if you miss, you really miss.  On the other hand, if this is merely a die shrink, maybe they can pull it off on time.

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

October 2005 (R520) -> May 2007 (R600) = 17 months
May 2007 -> June 2008 (R700) = 13 months
June 2008 -> September 2009 (Evergreen) = 15 months
September 2009 -> October 2010 (Northern Islands) = 13 months

As of today, I suspect that mining is not profitable any more, unless you already have the video cards.  Honestly, I think it passed a couple of weeks ago.

If you buy hardware for mining, you will probably never make your money back

That said, lots of folks still hopping on.

Check the wiki to see what you should expect for hashing rates with your equipment.  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Slot 4 is 4x only, by the way.  That is perfectly fine for mining, but might not be great if you plan to play games on it too.

Ahh, good point.

What exactly do you mean by insulating material?

2E appears to be somewhere in the vicinity of setting up the video device; well after setting up the initial slice of RAM it needs for booting, but before the initial video display.  Make sure the aux power for the video card is plugged in (I forgot to list it, but it is essential for botting).