Just a thought of mine,
Bitcoin offers freedom of money transfer, privacy, zero government control.
mining bitcoin's offers Income to sustain and update brute force hardware and technology,  good profits.

With the brute force power in the bitcoin community decentralized this would give a lot of power to the people. If a government was to do extremely unethical things the miners could use the hashing power to help change the governments mind on there actions. With freedom of money transfer and huge brute force power decentralized and anonymous, the community should soon start to have a voice on the world stage. Government's should no longer have freedom of decision without caring for the opinion's of the people.     

am I wrong?         

Bingo.

75BTC is guaranteed money right now for Avalon. It's also about 5x the price of the first batch at current BTC prices.

you guys are also assuming profitability based on current prices. If indeed we are in a huge btc bubble and it pops...avy may very well end up making not much / day. Meaning that .5BTC could be nearly worthless =( and that would suck.

You're missing the point. Why would I have a miner running on my phone if it ups battery drain so I have to recharge the phone every 30 minutes instead of every 18 hours.

Ah yes, running a miner on a smart phone. Yeah, I can see absolutely no problems with this. I mean it's not like smart phones need to be recharged every 18 hours at normal use already. Throw a miner on there. Give those things something to do, right?

Australia changed from 240V to 230V in 2000. Sorry to be pedantic!  

I'm confused about the two independent circuits. I'm not sure about Australia but in NZ, buildings are only allowed one point of supply, for safe isolation in the event of a fire, etc.

Yep, running 3 phase or upgrading the existing protection on a single may be options.

I can't agree more
If you want to use pywallet with encrypted wallets, use the beta (yet stable) version, which is in the last page of the thread Ciyam gave you
Be sure to backup your wallet though, we never know

Here's a fun little scenario I came up with the other day. Below I describe the most profitable business model for an ASIC hardware company to follow if they are looking to solely maximize profit without regard to protecting the Bitcoin network.

I sincerely hope for the sake of Bitcoin that no company decides to go this route - but where there is massive profit potential with no legal repercussions, there's fire:

Step 1. Recruit the team needed to make a legitimate ASIC offering

Step 2. Get in bed with SEC/FBI/[whatever three-letter agency that wants to see Bitcoin fail while painlessly hiding their involvement in it's failure]

Step 3. Start taking pre-orders and begin furnishing all pre-order information (full names, addresses, payment info) to the given Three Letter Agency. Three Letter Agency now has a dataset containing a very large portion of the United States population that could be considered a legitimate threat to national economic activities. To make it into this list of pre-orders, it implies the following about you:

a.) you have a significant interest in anonymous, decentralized cryptocurrency (this could be argued as an interest in "anti-economic activities" depending on which Three Letter Agency and their interests)
b.) you have the resources to invest significant sums of cash into these "anti-economic activities"
c.) you possess a higher-than-average intelligence and capacity for critical thinking, and further
d.) you have taken definitive and documented action to utilize the above resources to further your interests in these activities (placing a pre-order for a mining device)

Step 4. Continue collecting large pre-order USD/BTC sums, assemble first batch of ASICs

Step 5. Slowly bring ASIC units online in different pools (maybe even your OWN mining pool for maximum control!) as well as solo-mining, and begin funneling your mined BTC to a central location

Step 6. Delay, delay, delay as long as possible to maximize mined BTC profits and lure in any stragglers for pre-orders

Step 7. At some point - the "tipping point" as I will refer to it - you announce that you are on the verge of delivering on all pre-orders. Several important things now happen:

a.) Take your substantial USD assets and artificially inflate the exchange rate (the "pump")
b.) Hold this exchange rate long enough to create a massive bid wall at a desirable USD rate
c.) Execute the "dump" at this favorable exchange rate, turning your pile of BTC into a monolithic pile of USD

Step 8. Congratulations! You've devalued BTC massively, walked away with pre-order profits + mining profits, all amplified by massive and controlled speculation, and to top it all off you got some extra cash from Three Letter Agency and a Get out of Jail Free card for playing ball with them. Now all you have to do is deliver on the (now essentially worthless) hardware, and you have mitigated all your civil suit liability as well!

BONUS ROUND: Do a 51% attack right before delivering to really upset folks' confidence in the market
BONUS ROUND 2: Cancel orders and return BTC to their owners (although they're hardly worth anything now). Continue 51% attacks to keep Bitcoin from recuperating!


I hope you all have enjoyed my theoretical scenario, and I'll look forward to your comments and speculations. Oh, I am so totally not writing this to implicate any specific company either, in case anyone was drawing correlations that I did not intend.

Wow you guys really don't know much about mains power if you think a modern US house is gonna be limited to 9.6kW.

The US standard for "regular" outlets is 120V, but they still run 240V into a most houses, plus a neutral leg which is used to make the 120V circuits.  A lot of the really high current appliances (electric stove, heat pump) are run on 240V circuits, for efficiency and to save on wire cost.

I have one of my "regular" outlets wired up for 240V, and I run my GPU miner on it when it's here.

FINALLY out of newbie exile...

Australia is 230VAC single phase, same as here. Europe is 240V. 63A is the standard pole fuse on a domestic supply here in New Zealand and probably most 220V-240V countries. Loosely speaking, this gives most customers 15kVA of supply in ideal circumstances. In fact, even if you have a 63A pole fuse, your switchboard fuse is likely to be 40A to grade properly with the pole fuse. This give a practical upper limit of 9.6kVA

Electricity supply availability is a concern, depending on the actual fusing circuit breakers, CoinHoarder has. I'm assuming each rig is around 800W = 5600W or 5.6kVA, assuming unity power factor. If CoinHoarder's house is limited to 9.6kVA, boiling the kettle when the light are on will pop the fuse.

More of a concern, though, is dirty power. Yep, I deal with power quality investigations on a regular basis. In short, if a customer's appliance blows up, we (network company) have no evidence that the fault was caused by our network. In actual fact, it probably was but we have to tell the customer to make an insurance claim on the appliance (or "tough luck"). Advanced electronic logging meters will change all that in the near future. Meanwhile, say a voltage spike fries our mining rigs: Even if CH proves it was a network fault, CH can't make an effective warranty or insurance claim. It'd be at least a month or more before the rig(s) are assessed, new rigs built, tested, shipped and commissioned.

I think the idea of co-location was mentioned earlier. I had a quick look at facilities in the states offering 1/4 of a rack for $400/month. That's a pittance for round-the-clock care, clean power, physical security, gobs of bandwidth and backup generators. CH can still get his admin premium. I just want to mitigate risk where feasible to do so.

I guess this is a conversation we'll have over the next month or so before the rigs arrive. Looking forward to making an actual contribution to the network, instead of just speculating.

Sam.

I really don't think this picture applies to something like Bitcoin. I'm not going to elaborate further. I'll be happy to eat crow if I'm wrong.

It's a little hard to work out exactly what your problem is but perhaps you are wondering why after encrypting a wallet your old wallet backup is no longer to be relied upon?

If so the reason is simply that (most likely) the very first time you make a tx with the encrypted wallet a new *change* address will be used which the old wallet has never seen (the pool of unused addresses is replaced with new ones when you encrypt your wallet).

So if you have encrypted your wallet then be sure to back it up!

I'm sorry, my friend, but it's you who does not understand... and don't feel bad, because you're not alone in having no clue what technical analysis is, how/why it's used and how it works. So I will, again, try to be helpful and explain this in a very simple, easy-to-get fashion not only for your benefit but for the benefit of the community...

Technical analysis does not concern itself with the underlying asset, but instead focuses on the behavior of the human beings buying and selling that asset (and nowadays the bots as well -- which are coded to use TA of all things). It can be anything; a stock, commodities, currency, tulips, real estate, interest rates, money (e.g., gold or silver) and even non-financial sets of data. In fact, I know a doctor who analyzes candlestick charts of his patient's blood-sugar levels and is able to accurately forecast how each patient will respond to different types of food and medication (one of the coolest forms of TA I've ever seen). Interestingly enough, he is also a successful investor. Bitcoin has all of the necessary elements required to use traditional (financial) technical analysis: 1) price 2) it is bought and sold 3) past market data and information.

Technical analysis is sort of a study of "mass psychology"; the psychology of "the crowd". Human beings can behave in very predictable patterns, and often repeat the same behaviors over and over. We are still the same creatures we were 50 years ago, 100 years ago and beyond. And it is unlikely we will change anytime soon. And it is also unlikely that our key "money emotions" (e.g., greed and fear) will be changing anytime soon. Our innate greed pushes us to buy something we believe will bring us pleasure or increase our wealth, and our fear of losing money drives us to sell things before the value decreases causing a material or financial loss.

Where does Bitcoin derive its value? From scarcity? No... there are plenty of things that are unique and scarce which aren't worth anything. I can pick a booger out of my nose that is unlike any other booger ever picked, but I doubt people will be lining up to buy it for thousands of dollars (or even a penny). So if it's not scarcity, what is it? Bitcoin, like all other things, derives its value from our belief in its value. In fact, the concepts of "money" and "value" are abstract concepts our species has invented for the benefit (or as some would argue, to the detriment) of our own society. If you throw a handful of $100 bills into the air in a nightclub people will push, shove and fight to get them... toss a handful of $100 bills into a cage full of cats and they will not be aroused (in fact they might end up urinating on the cash lol). While I share a similar philosophy to jubalix about the evils of central banks, fractional reserve banking and the merits of bitcoin, this absolutely does not exempt bitcoin from the basic social and economic forces that push and pull all things financial; those very things technical analysts care about.

You can look at any bitcoin price chart priced in any currency on any time-frame and you will see a plethora of well-known technical patterns which behaved exactly the same way they have in the past with other financial assets. A BTC/USD chart, for example, is full of patterns like double/triple tops, double/triple bottoms, tombstones, cup & handles, head & shoulders (and inverted h&s), you name it. We can also see the exact same indicators we use on stocks, futures and other assets behaving the same way with Bitcoin as they do with other assets. In fact, the bots trading on MtGox and BTC-E (some of which are making loads of money) are using TA to trigger trades and manage risk.

Technical analysis can work with anything, my friends. Sometimes (in fact, quite often) the analyst is wrong. He/she misses something important, draws the wrong conclusion from the data or makes a bad call... sometimes a major market-moving event occurs that totally changes everything and overrides the factors that were previously in play... But TA is not purely about "right vs wrong". It's about looking for hints, ideas and opportunity... it's about making forecasts and educated guesses rather than making "predictions"... black and white logic does not work here. The great thing about using technical analysis with a good risk management strategy is that you can be wrong more often that you're right and still be highly profitable. TA is a tool, not a religion. And you're a hell of a lot better off with a good toolset than you are blindly stumbling about in the dark and making trading decisions based on philosophical rhetoric or political ideology.

That will be all, for now... 

Regards,

--ATC--