Even if you have enough energy, if all the energy on the planet are owned by a few people, there will still be problems, it is the ownership caused all problems, not technology

Money is a measurement of ownership, since money have universal equivalence, if you own money, you own energy

250w at wall is impressive, but 76c degree on the chips! They are pushing it too hard, might need some powerful fans with 200+ cfm, it seems it's not a PWM fan like avalon used

Get 2.52 billion dollars and see how much bitcoin you can buy

Many interesting points here!

In my opinion, if your efficiency increased but your income did not increase, it means that the money supply is not enough -- more product chase for the same amount of money, so that each product get less paid

But there could be other reasons that your income can not increase by 8x even your efficiency has lifted by 8x

For example, if one business is more than 20% profitable, then capitals will enter this branch and increase the competition and drive down the profitability. Patent/secret process might delay that effect but eventually it will even out

And, the demand could not increase by 8x due to consumers do not have 8x income,  added production capacity will just lower the sale price. Of course various type of consumer loans could increase the sale, but it could never generate 8x more sale than before. Anyway, a big part of people's income in the next decade has already been sucked into housing, you can't expect a dramatic increase in spending for decades (Japan's lost 20 years)

The most possible benefit of an increased efficiency is that you could spend much less time to do the same work. But for employee, since the salary is decided by the amount of worked hours, this just means they have to sit in the office and do nothing. And when their boss see that they are not doing anything, they will fire some of them, and that will further reduce the income and demand for the whole society

Due to the limitation in total demand, reduce the working hours is the best way to benefit from the efficiency increase, but seems only a few governments are supporting this view, most of them still think working 8 full hours a day is necessary

Interest rate has already been low (0.25%) for a long time,  but average household still pay a lot for their mortgage interest, so most of those cashs are pumped into banks' pocket

QE3 and QEI money was used to buy debts (agent MBS and government bonds), but these debts will have to be repaid at a later time, it just like borrow some more money to buy some time to avoid the default, it does not improve the income, just increase the debt

I'm still running 0225 firmware, it has been up and running since my last recondition of the heatsink, more than a week. Periodically cgminer would restart after  FPGA ran into disorder and reported all strange values from sensors (thus no more submitted shares), but after cgminer restarted, everything would back to normal again, no reboot/hardware reset needed

With this firmware, I can confidently leave the machine running at home and go for vacation  

I also tried 0419 version, although the FPGA seldom run into disorder, but once it does, no cgminer restart will solve the problem, a power cycle is needed

1/21,000,000 of the world

1% of that QE money has reached the 99%

This clearly shows that currency's valuation has no direct relation to supply and demand, it is decided by consensus

People always use hyperinflations happened during war to prove that oversupply of money will cause inflation, but that is a very bad example of exponentially increased military spending combined with reduced productivity in the society, and a high risk of government being wiped out in the war. During normal days, even a 10x increase in money supply won't impact CPI that much, most of those newly added money can just sit in someone's pocket doing nothing

And this further proved that the current pyramid of central bank managing from the top is not a good structure for organizing the society

I suppose that most of them are payments when miners get paid from the pool  

Bitcoin is an investment vehicle, it has payment function, but most often there is no need to pay with bitcoin due to the existance of inflative fiat. In future people will be able to mortgage their bitcoin and get fiat loan to spend

I never think that central banks will dislike Bitcoin, one day they will like it so much. Their current system is unsustainable and is about to crash, bitcoin is the only hope that they could keep their game rolling without a total collapse of the system

Today's banking system works like a bloodsucker, and it has successfully sucked interest from many people's future income for the next decade, and they need to suck more and more blood to keep the system running. On the other hand, the efficiency increase and automation/AI development have dramatically reduced the labour force requirement, so the banks just could not find any more people to suck blood from

But bitcoin is a monster, it has endless blood that can satisfy banks' needs, and the more they suck it, the stronger it becomes

Mortgage backed securites will lose its value when more and more house were built and people lose their job, but bitcoin backed securites will never lose its value due to limited supply of bitcoin and forever increasing demand of bitcoin as a medium of saving

If one guy tries to buy 100 billion USD worth of bitcoin, the following happens:

1. The exchange price will shot up quickly until he exhausted all his USD, if he is lucky enough, he might get about 10% of all the coins, and one coin might worth 1 million + USD
2. The bitcoin economy will boom and generate many billionares in the mean time
3. Bitcoin get worldwide acceptance and become the de facto world currency reserve

Considering that FED is printing 85 billion USD per month, 100 billion USD is really nothing for those money printers, it's just a matter of their interest, and I believe they will be interested in it sooner or later

The only way to acquire a large amount of bitcoin without sending the price to moon is quietly buy it during a long time period, like twins did last year, but now when price has settled at this level, even if someone want to buy 1% of coin, the exchange price will at least double

You don't need to invest in anything when everything is already built, like now  

The only thing you need is more money to buy product from these already built facilities

I think it's possible to have an economy with slower and slower growth after reaching certain maturity level, when everyone on the planet can have a decent comfortable life without worrying about illness, jobless or retirement. But the banks and governments have went too long in the current path of exponential growth, and have built many financial infrastructures that are dependant on exponential growth, there is no exit for them, so they must seek the next biggest area of exponential growth, which IMO is virtual economy

The personal computer's performance did not get any significant gain during recent years and it is already a pain to download the whole blockchain with an average block size less than 256KB. The bitcoin client's setup time is already magnitudes higher than it was 2 years ago but you won't have magnitudes higher harddrive capacity and network bandwidth in 2 years



An interesting view... I suppose that who have the money decide if they want to spend. Of course merchants will give some discount for bitcoin payment, maybe it will work. Then we back to the already-too-big blockchain problem



The VISA transaction fee is very expensive, but that won't affect the value of USD. Same for bitcoin, the blocksize limit is there to ensure the value of bitcoin (decentralized to maximum), but if transaction cost is high, people will just stop use it to do small transactions

It's more like a social contract backed by mathematics and network, traditional money basically do the same thing, but never had so high credit as bitcoin. Bitcoin has the highest credit rating on the planet

Will you change a bank just because one bank opens 24/7 and another bank open only 4 days a week? I guess the priority should be based on the security and the interest that banks provide. Currently bitcoin bank pay you an interest of 1000%+ per year, and you still complain that you have to wait in line to withdraw

The value of a currency comes from trust and consensus, not supply and demand, this is the most significant difference between money's valuation and anything else's valuation. The demand for money is always endless, given enough trust for that money

Have OP watched this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZp7UGgBR0I  

This is always a political and economic discussion instead of a technical one. In one word: Scarcity create value, aboundant destroy value, as a currency you want it to have highest value possible, so transaction capacity should be scarce, people will adjust their behavior accordingly

VISA is transferring inflative fiat money for the purpose of spending, people will always spend inflative currency at the first place, so even bitcoin's network are capable of handle huge amount of transaction per second, it still will seldom be used to buy milk everyday

I wonder if one day, the government decided to give pressure to ISP, maybe it will affect most of the bitcoin traffic negatively, anyway the internet itself is firmly controlled by ISPs

At a higher level of abstraction, all the exchanges or platforms only carry one function: Provide price/deal information to guide people's transaction

Since bitcoin transactions will be done in bitcoin network, and fiat money transactions will be done in legacy banking system, there is no need for an exchange, just a platform that provide price/counter-party information and that's all

This is the reason I think localbitcoins.com is the right direction, it even eliminated the need for foreign currency exchange for non-USD/EUR countries

At a lower abstraction level, this is what an exchange provide

1. Provide the deal price
2. Matching buyers' order and sellers' order
3. eliminate the counter party risk

Localbitcoins can do Nr.1

Currently Nr.2 is manual, e.g. if you want to buy/sell a large amount of bitcoin you have to find enough counter-party orders, otherwise you will have to split your order into small batches, this is the part that can be improved by implementing an order book function in the website, or have some local market makers

Nr.3 is the most difficult part, you can guarantee a bitcoin transaction, but not a fiat money transaction. No one wants to send money first. If this can be solved, then a P2P based localbitcoins.com will be a huge success

So IMO the focus will be on Nr.3. Currently NashX.com provided some idea about having some risk fund before doing transaction, but maybe people are so get used to a secured exchange, it still feels not that convenient, especially for some new users who don't have risk fund in bitcoin

And a slow trading platform like localbitcoins.com will dramatically reduce the amount of speculation, so that most of the trades are driven by real demand, this is good for price stability