300 posts in 13 hours!!!

The troll is strong in this one.

Not necessarily, but for now that seems to be the pattern.

  That is a tautology.  If the line held, bitcoin price would increase at least exponentially from then on.

He was just talking about a movie where the protagonist could see the aliens taking over the local political scene... as long as he was wearing his sunglasses.  Muwahaha.

Slightly OT: how do mining pools prevent miners from taking successes out of the pool and keeping them for themselves?  Do they track the nonces used in recently minted bitcoins?

So, how'd it go?  Did you get any play?

More $ chasing fewer btc ==> higher btc/$ rate.  It's a simple supply & demand relationship which an honest prognostication on the exchange rate won't ignore.

The salient problem with nmat's reasoning is his belief that S has based his predictions on technical features of the Summer bubble.  Actually S is working from two earlier price-reversal time points, which he draws a line through on the graph.  He says that line represents an important price threshold, but provides no rational basis for this belief.

Technical analysis is just barely mathematically elaborate enough to be intellectually intimidating to most people, and set the chart reader up as someone with arcane skills.  But there doesn't seem to be any empirical evidence for its predictive power.

I have essentially no experience with hardware design but I gather you could make a custom sha256 ASIC for under $500K.  If that's the case, I estimate it would take less than $1M to dominate the bitcoin network's hashing power.  If I was working for a government agency trying to disrupt bitcoin, I would start there.

On the other hand, the way the MtGOX hackers drove the USD exchange rate to approximately zero did seem extremely inefficient, and a perfect way to discredit bitcoin as a secure store of value.

If you're asking what's the best hash rate per joule of electricity you can get, it appears you get the best rate with the 5970 (see first table on this page.)

OTOH, it's released w/o source code, which will make the analysis much harder.

  Wow, that was an impressively precise and accurate prediction.  How did you infer that?

God this ugly.  On both sides.  How can you win?  What would be the endgame?

There's more at stake here than personal fiscal security.  The central question OWS is asking is "What kind of society should we be?  Should we value and foster community support, or let the Wall St. focus on personal fiscal security continue to destabilize our social supports?"

  I'm not, I'm agnostic.  It's really the only honest position one can take at the moment, given the public information about bitcoin.

S dropped the "o" from "counts" once, and it came out funny-sounding.

My strategy so far has been to stay on the sidelines.  Haven't regretted it, so far.

I have no dog in this fight, but the fact that it communicates on startup is hardly surprising.  It is a peer-to-peer protocol, after all.

No, but at these levels, relevant pricing data is getting pretty old.

The real danger here is modeling error, not sampling error.  You are already big enough that if the pool of traders have balanced positions, you will, too.  My concern is what do you do when the pool itself is skewed.  "We'll stop trading if we're moving to a position we can't hedge" is a good start, but also unsatisfactory, since most people want to shift their position quickly in response to a crisis. 

Anyway, we've covered this before.  I know there are no simple solutions to these questions.

It would pay for a truly magical Caribbean holiday for the four of you and your familes.