If I want to support the business, I use cash. If I don't, I use a credit card.

Most merchants indiscriminately pass on the cost of credit transactions to all consumers which puts cash customers at a disadvantage. Besides that, try purchasing some every-day items with cash like an airfare. You'll have to go to the airport, park ($), walk inside, wait in a giant line depending on the time of day, and pay an in person ticketing fee. Bitcoin would help with this at least, but today it's not there.

To be honest, credit cards have empowered consumers with extra protections though arbitration in the credit companies. If you get scammed out of cash (or bitcoins) you have to pursue a case in court which can be difficult, time consuming, etc. A credit card can issue a chargeback or provide consumer protection insurances (extended warranty, theft insurance, etc) which seems bad for merchants and good for consumers (legitimate use only). Even with all the benefits of bitcoins today, without effective escrow on everyday transactions, it is consumer-unfriendly compared with credit cards. As much as I like bitcoins, it will take a drastic change in the consumer ecosystem before I go buy a new TV with bitcoins or cash instead of my AMEX.

The bid ask imbalance looks a lot like the pre weekend dump setup from last week.

Why not up the ante and go with prices in uBTC? Given the global GDP in 2011 was $68,703,917,456,478 and the BTC market should be as large as the global economy by the end of the year, I'm going to go with $5.7/uBTC.

I can't decide if I liked Game of Thrones or bitcoin charts more for this evening's entertainment.

600 W is 2000 BTU/hr so a 1 ton / 1 kW unit can remove 12000 BTU/hr of heat and it has an EER of 12 that means you're using 2/12=1/6th of the unit's 1 hour duty at 167 W so I'd rule of thumb this around 1/3 of the wattage in additional cooling expense instead of 100%

33814 seems correct to me

I can pop open some distributed work servers on EC2 and get a pool open if it will help the network

The coins changed hands... well maybe into the same hands who know's but the trade was executed for the 20k+ coins that stood between 106 and where we are now.

Pool operator experience tells me

1) Incoming connections (port forward) are good
2) The default outgoing connection limit is bad for fast blockchains
3) There is no fool proof way to prevent orphans or stales, especially if the major pool operator doesn't take steps to make well connected nodes


So
Forward your ports
Recompile your xxxcoind with net.cpp modified to allow 100+ outbound connections and raise the incoming limit to 500 or something, you'll use about 500kbit/s of upload with 500 peers.

If you're dealing in dollars/euros, you have to play by their rules.

When pool mining, there is risk that you will earn coins and the pool's wallet won't get any. To mitigate this risk and offer a lower fee, some payout schemes use "Uncomfirmed" rewards, where you are paid only when the minted block is accepted fully by the network. Depending on the coin you are mining, this may be a long or short time.

It depends on your intentions. Mining helps the network become stronger, makes attacks more difficult, etc. Investing cash helps the market liquidity, makes the currency more useful.

Investing cash has the most risk since the market value could go to zero overnight, but it has the most potential for deflationary gains. Investing in hardware retains some residual value even if the coin goes to zero.

It depends on where you're mining, but the connection can become interrupted any time the work server gets slow or the network is lossy. Look at the pool's reported hash rate during these events to determine if there's a dip for everyone or just you. Another thing to consider is that whenever a new block is found, all the miners need to get the new block templates and it can cause a temporary overload of the server.

Yes, you can use PCI-E x1 for the x16 video cards since the OpenCL/Mining applications aren't host<-->gpu intensive.

The caveat is that an x16 wide slot can supply up to 75W of power and the x1 slot is not designed to do that, so it's recommended you get powered risers (pulls the slot power from the PSU directly instead of through the motherboard) to prevent trace burnouts, smoke, etc.