i don't understand the line of thinking.  the US government could for all intents and purposes crush bitcoin with less funds, just manipulating the market and such, then with the funds required to build the computer hardware, man hour compensation, and electric consumption required to break encryption and use it in any way with enough breadth to damage bitcoin.

Says who?  Rated power is rated power.  "50% rule", "80% rule" are pure nonsense.  People need to stop babying their power supply.  Run it at full power.  If it is solid (Seasonic) it will run for years at 100% load.  If it is a piece of shit well then RMA it, and break it again, and RMA it, and break it again, and RMA it, and break it again and RMA it.  Post of forums that it is a piece of shit, give it 1 egg on newegg, make a blog about how company xyz rips off customers.

Rated power is rated power.  If a PSU can't put out more than 1000W CONTINUALLY then it should be rated at 1000W not 1200W.  Consumers that baby the suppliers only subsidize substandard products.

I mean it would be like someone selling you a sports car which has a top speed of 160 mph but if you drive it faster than 80 mph it explodes and people say "dude everyone knows not to drive a sports car faster than 50% of rated speed).  It is just as foolish to hold PSU to the same low standard.

Semi offtopic rant aside, the listed spec for RigBox is ~2500W so a 50% unit would likely be ~1250W.

what kind of weird person would join a pool versus solo?

Very interested in this. At $15k it is a much more flexible option and I suspect you would get more uptake than the $30k units.

One thing: as has been mentioned a few times here, it is important that this be able to run continuously on a 'regular' household circuit. For continuous use it must be derated to 80%. For North America, that is 15Ax120V (1800W) * 0.8 = 1440W. If it can run within that envelope, it can be run in any household.

I believe the current claim is that its a custom asic, but of course, whats in a name, a structured asic like fast path I guess is also "custom" and .. application-specific, and its an integrated circuit.. so, it wouldnt be a real lie.

s-asic always seemed the obvious way to go to me, I was even convinced thats what BFL did. Compared to fpga, it seriously lowers per unit cost with reasonable volumes, it has good potential to lower power consumption considerably and the NRE is not nearly as extreme as with a full custom design.

One day someone will build a standard cell based ASIC for Bitcoin mining, and that will cost $5-10M NRE and it will be a monster.

the fact that the article published a map of the facility makes it highly suspect to me.  perhaps they're playing Ben's game of perception management.

Taking into account that PSU weighs as much as the unit itself, shipping discount should be offered as well.... I'm just saying. 

Kano, can you tell me why you think Ozcoin is "in direct contrast of trust"? It's one of the few pools I have trust in, so I'd like to hear an opposing view point.

If you’re talking about a brute-force attack on a 256-bit AES encryption algorithm then probably not but it’s possible if you have a small defined search space. The key length used determines the likelihood of a successful match. I'm sure you know with a 256 key size 2x256 permutations would yield a maximum brute-force time of 50,955,671,114,250,072,156,962,268,275,658,377,807,020,642,877,435,085 years. A specialized supercomputer that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second would require about 3×1051 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space. Not likely but I suppose it's possible and luck changes the mix because you would not always need to exhaust the key space.

Search for LargeCoin on this forum. May or may not be legit, but it appears someone has bit the bullet already.
Asics (and to a lesser extend, s-asics) have been the prime reason I have not committed to FPGAs. At least GPUs I can resell to gamers, but its gonna be tough reselling your 80W BFL single's if asic based products really hit the market.

I've been trying to get the mushkin chronos deluxe 240gb for about 2 weeks now. Whenever I get an email that they are in stock, they are already out of stock.

Those DPS-2000BB power supplies are a nice find.

WTF? $580 for400 mhs? That's nuts!

I am figuring it is a botnet.  With botnets reaching past 1 million computers someone must have selected a group of computers with good GPU's in them.  Imagine good GPU's in 1% of machines, breaking them off as a seperate botnet.  Now run them at low levels, do not run them hard enough for fans to get aggressive or any slowdown.  10,000 machines could make 2TH ran slowly.  The internet connection usage would be kept to a minimum by only getting the bare minimum information (no transactions) and relaying back only when a block is found.  This could live under the radar on a machine for a long time if they did nothing else with the pwned machine.   And for $3000 a day, they would not have to resort to any other uses. 

Of course it could be 5000-50000 machines in play....  But this is what I think it is. 

If the malware also provides work effectively stealing a portion of the hash rate it would still have the impact I mentioned.

I was running it about 95 for a few days, then backed it down and it was wandering around in the low to mid 80s. But it also may have got much hotter for short periods while I was fiddling with it all.
Still that was quite interesting... and when I wasn't mining it was nice to have something that was OK for games (compared to what I'm used to). Now to keep an eye on ebay again, with my new found knowledge.