Does that math take into account that each found block is worth 96 coins instead of 50? I've not used that site, but in most cases the online calculators do not allow you to change that value...

So here's my latest bit of analysis:

We can approximate an "instantaneous" difficulty if we know the current network hashrate as follows:
Difficulty ~= Hashrate * 0.13969625
If we assume the 133,367 MH/s currently operating on the only IXC pool to be the entire (or at least the majority of) network hashrate then that gives us an estimated difficulty of ~18631 once we get past the "initial climb" difficulties. Assuming this difficulty holds (which it won't) that would require IXC to trade for about 0.005137 BTC each in order for them to be exactly as profitable as bitcoins. At current difficulty of 4096, breakeven value is around 0.001 BTC each. Given that these are the bounds between which price seems to fluctuate, I feel pretty confident in those estimations.

Realistically we won't get breakeven values under normal circumstances, but if we use NMC as an example, they tend to average around 68% of their breakeven value, so we should expect an instantaneous value for IXC somewhere around 0.0035 BTC

Of course there's a lot of assumptions there:
1. 133,367 MH/s is the total network speed - it's not, but with no better tools it's an ok guess
2. The same ratios that hold for NMC will hold for IXC - probably not true as NMC has added value
3. Price follows difficulty - it seems to be the other way 'round actually (but they ARE usefully related for "instantaneous" math)

Does anyone have anything else to add or spot any other flaws in my logic/math?

I somehow doubt that the kind of comments you're going to get on that post will be "welcome" 

I'll see what I can do. NMCWatch looks quite promising and I thank you in advance for the regex Sukrim. c00w, I'd completely forgotten we already have NMC difficulty as well as bitparking, so I'd just need to do the math and override the percentages where necessary... And perhaps add a new role, similar to what you did with mine_slush (mine_nmc perhaps?).

Could also let someone else do the math for us and just compare the USD figures from http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/ - easy regex too, from the look of it.

It might serve as an interesting test, though. I'd be interested to know precisely how many participants p (over time) BTC, NMC and IXC have and compare the exchange rates to the relative values p(B)^2, p(N)^2 and p(I)^2 expressed in Metcalfe's Law. It would at least be an interesting exercise (if I could find the data)

I'll see if I can find the time this weekend to give it a shot. The big hurdle is that, to my knowledge neither of the bitparking exchanges has an API available, and I'm not exactly a regex master.

If anyone knows of such an API or happens to have some already-existing regex to get the current NMC value I'd be forever in your debt. 

So all this craziness with IXCoin recently has me thinking... How hard would it be to code in some checks to automatically compare the profitability of BTC, NMC etc. to automatically make the switch for the brief span in which NMC mining is more profitable? Once difficulty settles down on IXC we could do the same for them (easy enough since bitparking runs both the NMC and IXC exchanges). We could hack together the logic and just have the appropriate bitparking pool represented as some arbitrary low percent when it's more profitable and use the standard 10^10 when it's not, all configurable of course.

Anyone know how hard it would be to do this?

We're still in the "initial climb" stage for difficulty, so analysis is difficult. That said, IXC has gotten a LOT of attention this week, certainly enough that as many people are aware of it as are aware of NMC. NMC may have an actual use aside from just currency, but bitparking NMC volume vs actual dot-bit registrations should prove that it's NOT being traded because of its intended purpose. I expect to see IXC on competitive par with NMC, perhaps moreso considering that it's far easier to use than the current command-line-only NMC implementation. That said, I'm holding on to most of the IXC I generated when difficulty was 4. I could maybe get a few hundred USD out of them right now but I think this market is just getting started.

Edit: Oh, and as for this:
As I mentioned, we're still in the "initial climb" phase. Whether you're of the school that believes difficulty influences price (or vice versa) I think we can all agree right now that difficulty is meaningless. If you've got some analysis once it STOPS climbing by factors of four let me know  

On a related note, look what NMC profitability was like during their "initial climb" - http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/ (the light blue line).

It's not any different than the brief periods of time where namecoin is more profitable than bitcoin, really. Check out http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/ if you're not familiar with this phenomenon. Specifically go to the "all time chart" at the bottom and watch the relationship between the green line (BTC profit) and the blue line (NMC profit). If we had several more popular and well-known forks we might see network hopping as widespread as pool hopping is today. As long as you can determine (in real time) the BTC value of NMC/IXC/whatever and the difficulty of each network, it's trivial to determine where your GPU will make the most cash.

For the record, I do expect the profit differential to be arbitraged away quite quickly, but we probably won't see a stable exchange rate until we see a stable difficulty. Every increase thus far has been a factor of four (currently at 4096) and block times have been well under a minute. With the exception of the brief times when NMC mining is more profitable, NMC seems to have a stable value of 0.03 BTC or so, meaning that it's usually worth about 68% of what you'd get for the same time/equipment mining BTC. We're still in the "initial climb" phase of difficulty with IXC, but I'd expect a similar result once the initial climb is over.

Only time will tell of course.

As for the "value" IXC adds? I'm not so sure that too many exist, certainly less value than namecoin - but one look at the trade volume on bitparking's NMC exchange compared with the actual number of .bit registrations should tell you it's as much a speculative commodity as bitcoin. Speculators in NMC are betting that its potential as a DNS replacement will make it more valuable in the future, and with IXC the bet is that hitting a deflationary curve earlier than BTC will increase its relative value as it will be deflating while BTC is still inflating.

If nothing else, trading BTC for IXC or NMC and then trading them back goes a long way toward anonymizing non-generated BTC since the IXC and NMC exchanges don't deal in regular fiat and therefore don't care so much about who their customers are.

Fred Twingham at least isn't immediately apparent as an anagram of anyone I know in the bitcoin community (Thomas Nasakioto ≅ Satoshi Nakamoto)

View the source you must... Difficult, the path of the hacker is, mmm yes - but walk it you will! Your destiny it is.....

On an unrelated note, level 6 can die in a fire... Why? Because f**k math, that's why. I'm 99% sure I'm failing due to rounding errors... When you say [8 dec places] do you mean to ROUND to 8 or TRUNCATE at 8?

D'OH! that was pretty obvious. I knew it had to be something stupidly simple that I was just missing.

Which makes it no different than a couple old versions of the bitcoin client. An oversight in the code doesn't make it a scam, though I am keeping a close eye on how quickly this one gets fixed...

Yeah I saw that but it's not helping...  Maybe I'm still just looking at the wrong thing 

Stuck on L5 also. I'm hoping it's just me being blind to the obvious because the difficulty was scaling quite nicely on 1-4 but compared to the time I've spent on 5 they were trivial...

Last Price:   0.00214300   High:   0.00249800   Low:   0.00023231   Volume:   346938.55050340   Time:   08/13/11 04:31:50

Increasing block speed has been discussed. All it would do to double block speed is to halve the security of each block so instead of needing to wait 6 blocks before considering a transaction to be confirmed/secure you'd have to wait 12.

Again with the people seeking higher purposes and making obvious fallacies: "why do we need another blockchain?" we don't, necessarily NEED another blockchain, but someone thought bitcoin would be better with a steeper initial rise so we get to the deflationary fun faster so they made one simple change. "But we're diluting the bitcoin brand by allowing IXCoin to exist!" Maybe there's *some* truth to that one, but in the long run is FireFox a better or worse product when it must compete with Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE etc? Is there a need for silver bullion when we have gold? Do we really need as many varieties of sliced white sandwich bread as I see in the supermarket? And how many kinds of toilet paper can one grocery store possibly sell? Competition isn't a bad thing and not every competitor need offer a drastically different product.

Edit: and while I was posting, dancupid said it much more eloquently and with fewer words

I like how we all pretend that forks have to have some extra purpose or other functionality aside from just using different math and Namecoin is always everyone's favorite example. Sure, it serves a meaningful purpose and that's awesome, I'm happy it's there and agree with its purpose, but really look at the trade volume on Bitparking's NMC exchange and look at how many registrations ACTUALLY happen on the namecoin network in a day and tell me it's not just another den of speculation...

I have boost in my MinGW libs folder, but there aren't any hpp files at all. Did it not install correctly or something?

And no, now that I test the vanilla client won't compile for me either