As a general rule, something might be profitable for a few days on EC2.  That was the case with YAC in the initial days.

After that, people are going to spin up 10,000 instances and drive up the difficulty to the point where it is no longer viable

This sounds wholly inaccurate.   It is perfectly legal to buy or sell bitcoins using a bank account.  Coinbase does tends of thousands of transactions every day.

Can you post the letter from the bank?

Must be more involved here.

It seems that for every slightly innovative new coin there are a swarm of naive "investors" willing to pay a 50x premium for the coin relative to where it will ever trade on an exchange.

Why do they do this?  Is this a form of charity?

Or are they just dumb ?

Latest example is primecoin.  Why are people paying 10 LTC for coins that some guy minted in one night on an i5?  Guys - the value of that much compute power is maddeningly close to zero.  You're getting ripped off

Nice quote from Umesh Vazirani, a professor at UC Berkeley on the D-Wave hardware:

"even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone"

Great skepticism out there as to whether D-Wave is doing anything truly Quantum or, rather, is just building dedicated hardware to create approximate, not exact (i.e. useless for Crypto) solutions to complex problems.

Nothing D-Wave is doing will have any effect of the strength of cryptography they are definitely NOT building general purpose quantum computers or quantum computers that can break high grade cryptography algorithms.

It's just a silly scam run by Trucoin - was the butt of a whole lot of jokes on here a few weeks ago.  If you were dumb enough to preorder, your money is gone.  Sorry.

(note his first scam was to sell a $7.95 gold bar USB drive, a widely available common retail item, for $100 claiming it was some kind of special bitbar vault)

(note#2 just because a web site says there are 3000 orders does not make that true.  My guess, friend, is you are the first person naive enough to place an actual order)

Are you seriously that stupid?  THAT IS A SCAM

Did you also send money to Nigeria to get your million dollar "inheritance"?  I bet you did.  Let me guess - you are still waiting on it ...

Or, more recently, you get crushed by inflation

Solve by inspection problem that you can't peg the value of a crypto coin to fiat using algorithms.  It simply does not work.

As a simple proof by contradiction, consider the case where NOBODY wants the coin.  How are you going to provide a liquid market where people can exchange their coins for that "stable" value?  Answer: YOU CAN'T.  Not unless you are willing to back that algorithm with a huge bank account that supports the fiat peg (i.e. the silly DGC bank idea where speculators for god knows what reason - perhaps they love losing money - would ensure that anyone holding DGC is guaranteed the price will never go down)

Ditto.  I also spun up an EC2 cluster to mine YAC in the very early days.

Anyone who dreams that their single CPU is going to make any kind of money in the early days of a CPU coin is dreaming ... You'll be competing against guys spinning up thousands of them on EC2 as well as botnets

Best bet is to find an obscure forgotten CPU coin that nobody is mining, mine it for months or years, and hope it returns to popularity

No need to worry Gox uses the best security measures in the industry.  I'm sure your cash is safe.

So now that we've established Jesus won't be saving GLD let's find someone who can:

First world concerns ... LOL ... there are millions starving around the world and this guy wants Jesus to save a premined copy/paste scam coin ?

Pray all you want buddy.  Nobody will be listening and Gox will never list GLD

Do you think it will get back to $100.00 by 2018?

Hard to get excited about a CPU proof of work coin.  How will you defend against botnets ?

Nice videos by John Manicotti.  If Don Pescatore corroborates his claims, I will be buying Feathercoin.

Pasta, anyone ?

He might as well just agree ... nobody will even remember or care about any of these Alt coins in two years

A more dramatic gesture would be if he buys 100,000 GLD for .5 LTC per GLD *RIGHT NOW*.  Why not??  If he honestly believes GLD will be worth 1 LTC in only 24 months, that is a great ROI

Seems that ASICS is have a detrimental impact on BTC.

(1) A huge amount of hashing power is now in the hands of companies that can stamp out one set of chips after another.  Few seem to make it to retail (i.e. BFL)

(2) Most of the former GPU miners, once a large support base for the coin, have lost interest due to the BFL fiasco and the fact Avalon shipped only a tiny number of retail devices

(3) Concentration of network power in the hands of a few is a disaster.  Precisely the opposite of what BTC was supposed to be all about

(4) Raw gh/s figures are irrelevant given that only a tiny number of firms have ASICS designs.  THESE COMPANIES NOW EFFECTIVELY CONTROL THE NETWORK

LTC is looking very strong right now.  Holding its USD value as BTC falls.

The two may meet in the middle

LOL I don't think a premined copy/paste scamcoin is going to unseat BTC and LTC

If PXC is the frontrunner, they are all doomed

I use these setting with the V7 CL:

yacminer --scrypt -w 256 --gpu-threads 2 --auto-gpu --expiry 1 --shaders 2048 --lookup-gap 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 --intensity 12 --worksize 256 --gpu-engine 900-1100 --gpu-memclock 1500

Getting about 265 kh/s per GPU