Difficulty doesn't have to increase exponentially forever to reach 1 billion by early 2014.  I would estimate that >6 PH/s has already been sold.  The various companies may be delayed a month or two but even so that would put us near 1 billion difficulty in early January.  The fact that "BFL sucks" is pretty much irrelevant.  They have 3 PH/s worth of chips, those chips will be deployed.  There is no reason not to.  They are a sunk cost at this point.  The people who bought rigs may end up negative ROI% but BFL has no reason to not delivery them.  Even if their anemic rollout doesn't improve they should complete shipping of 65nm pre-orders by January.  It is highly likely that even if the long term growth rate slows we could see a couple of very high difficult gains (>100% in 2 week period) if the various companies happen to ship in volume over the same period of time.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820

It would be nice if crypto-exchanges used standard terminology.  Allocated shares vs issued shares.

There is nothing to do.  The money is gone you are never getting it back.   Sorry if it sounds harsh but the reality is harsh and someone trying to give you hope will just be giving you false hope.   Quite often victims waste days, weeks sometimes months trying to track down the scammer after the fact (the irony is that 1% of that time spent BEFORE the fraud would have actually paid dividends).  The reality is the money is gone, you are never going to hurt the thief, you are never going to get your money back.  Chalk it up as an expensive life lesson and be thankful you didn't buy 100 units.

When people wonder why there are so many scammers they can look at this (and countless other) examples.  Even if the scammer never gets another mark.  ~$1500 for a couple hours of photoshop work and a website.  Not to bad works out to $300 to $500 per hour.  If he can con 20 people this month before never getting another mark well that is more than many people make in a year.  Collect a years salary in less than a month.  Yeah I think scammers are going to keep trying.

The thing I don't get is the OP hadn't registered here BEFORE getting scammed.  I mean a quick post would likely have prevent a loss.  Say 10 minutes to make an account, make a post, get a response that it is an obvious scam.   £1000 * 60 / 10 = £6,000 per hour.  The OP must be rolling in money for his time to be that valuable.

You can edit the first post.  At first glance it still appears you are looking for a loan rather than looking for information.  Cleaning up the OP will likely prevent future (mis)moderation.

Once again the CODE ALREADY EXISTS.  They don't need to "work hard" to release it as open source.  They just do it. They could do it in all of 5 minutes if they wanted to.  Over a year later and they haven't .... that means they don't WANT to release the source code.

Ripple will never be open source.   It is just the bait to build the network.  Once it is large enough there is little reason to open source it.  Does a lack of open source hurt PayPal?  OpenCoin's entire business model has been to own all the coins, give away some, and sell of the rest in the future.  If Ripple is open source it can be cloned and the cloned version can have the "premine" removed.

They also do (or did) make rubber boots.  Nokia the corporation has existed for far longer than cellphones have.

Please stop quoting eve.  Why?  Why do you do it?  Even if you wanted to post such a masterpiece as calling him a retard do it without quoting his nonsense.

They aren't "working hard" at open sourcing it.   The code exists, you release it with open source license .... TADA it is open source.

Ripple is simply bait and switch.  Ripple has no good mechanism to handle fradulent servers so they won't open source it.  Of course saying that means it is a DOA so they will let it linger on with the bait of open source.   It has been years and it is no closer to being open source then when initially promised.  In a couple more years once it has enough marketshare it will morph to "an open network" which is marketing for closed source but anyone can obtain a license to run a server.   OpenCoin will issue and revoke licenses of peers to ensure that only compliant ones exist.

As stated upthread Middle coin is ~1.2 GH/s this was 2.1 GH/s.

Um buying isn't stealing.  Did all the people who bought Bitcoins for $0.01 "steal" them from the people who voluntarily decided to sell them at that price?  I am pretty sure even Gates had no idea how big Microsoft would eventually get.  The seller could have accepted (highly risky) equity in the startup instead.

FinCEN makes no distinction between selling Bitcoins, buying Bitcoins or buying and selling Bitcoins.   

This.   There is no way to undo Bitcoin transactions.  The receiver could send it back but unless Satoshi is reading this well you are SOL.

Never going to happen.

Use mBTC (most clients support it).

Nothing beats the efficiency of an ASIC.  Nothing else even comes close.

RISC processor is just a type of general purpose micoprocessor and as such it is a jake of all trades and an ace of none.  General purpose processors trade flexibility for performance.  ASICs trade performance for flexibility.

None.  Unless you are willing to do a lot of self research and critical thinking you almost certainly will lose money.

1) NO SHA-256 altcoin gives even a tiny fraction of the value of Bitcoin.
2) Many SHA-256 altcoins can be merged mined with Bitcoin. Why switch when you can mine 2 (or 3, or 4) coins simultaneously?

They allow refunds.

Nope.  This is a common misconception.  You can't change Bitcoin because you can't stop the existing network from running.  All you can do to is create a fork.  I find it hard to believe the masses would choose the "inflat-a-coin" fork over the tried and true real Bitcoin.  Of course those with massive wealth would pound down the value on the new fork by selling into any rallies and dumping massive quantity at market.  Still given the overall chaos and loss of confidence by there being two supported but incompatible networks called "Bitcoin" it is highly unlikely no controversial fork will ever be successful.  Then again we never know for sure.

If the company shares are priced higher than its actual value then there is going to be a bagholder no matter what.  It is just a question of who and when.