It can go down to 80 for all I care. I'm not selling a single satoshi

Your software is the best and safest by far without any real competition. You are the main expert. When Bitcoin becomes sufficiently mainstream you will be approached for:

1) Creating customizations (either open source or proprietary)
2) Performing other services (such as coaching and setting up the software)
3) You will likely be offered rather lucrative contracts by business wishing to enter this market (the equivalent of a buy out if Armory was proprietary)

Of course I hope you will not take option 3 and will have time to keep working on Armory (out of my own interest) . But if you monetize on this it is truly deserved as this is a magnificent piece of work. Thanks!

Is the speed of the initial bootstrap limited by my hard disk drive read/write performance?

Thanks for all your advice, I think I will delete everything and start over, its been 4 days so somethings happened, better luck on my next try hopefully.

for the time being im going to use multibit. it synced in about ten seconds!!

so lets see how round 2 goes
thanks again

Buying BTC at $130 is a huge gamble and unrealistic for a most people.  If I had the money to invest considerably in BTC at the current prices, I'd pony up for an existing ASIC.  But, as it stands, the mtgox price is down 2% already.

I think the takeaway for me is, I should have got into mining earlier and/or bought bitcoins at $10.  Just missed the boat.  Nobody to blame but myself.

^ This is the problem. 

I'm trying to get into mining, but roadblocks are pretty much everywhere.  ASIC's are being only shipped by one vendor, at the moment - Avalon - but in small numbers and those are all spoken for.  Most miners that have been mining a while can afford the $5k,$10k,$20k USD equivalent price (which keeps going up) for those machines due to the demand.  BFL has reasonably priced equipment, but hasn't really shipped anything and, in my opinion, isn't even close to shipping a real product that meets their advertised specs.  FPGA's and GPU's aren't cost effective to invest in at this point, due to the difficulty.  Besides, even if I wanted to buy FPGA's, hardly anyone is selling those anymore, either.

So really, there aren't options for new people interested in mining.  This "decentralized" currency is ending up in the hands of the few that actually have the few ASICs out.   Believe me, I'd love to "buy an ASIC rig and enjoy", but I can't reasonably do that.

Until more vendors are really shipping equipment or turning out more equipment than they have orders to fill, the ability for someone to break into mining now is slim to none.  That is simply the state of the scene right now.

Hmm not familiar with that; could you provide a link/source? I don't see how that could be implemented properly...

I say this tongue in cheek somewhat, but when did they say it would be delivered?

you could always try a web based wallet like http://blockchain.info

The bitbet one was clearly won by those betting against BFL. It only allowed +/- 10% of hashrate, which BFL has failed to meet so far.

Although... I'd have expected a competent judge to contact me and ask my opinion on whether the device is capable of the 27 Gh/s required, in case my current results were the result of software issues. But it's immaterial, since as best as I can tell so far, I'm getting the most performance out of it that it can handle.

Vladimir Law: "chances of a 3rd party running away with your bitcoins asymptotically approaches 100% over time"

"run away" includes "getting 'hacked'"

It is basically the same as amount of mined bitcoins asymptotically approaches 21 million.

People! FFS! Figure out brainwallets, paper wallets and best of all truecrypt containers, preferably with a hidden partition and decoy partition and standard bitcoin-qt with encrypted wallet.dat. Do not forget your pass phrases but still use very strong ones.

Store not only encrypted images but truecrypt distribution/installation too.

This is all you need to know and do.

Remember risk management formula: Risk = Asset * Vulnerability * Threat. This means you can trust 3rd parties for small amount of BTC for short time. The smaller the amount and the shorter the time, the better. In this case Risk is acceptable. For large amounts and long time you simply cannot trust 3rd parties without taking on disproportional risks.

Too bad nobody is gong to listen to the above. No matter how often I (and others) repeat it. So fuck you, you deserve all your coins to be stolen eventually then.

I hate blaming the victims, but people you should have more sense. Phinnaeus Gage, I am really sorry, hopefully it was a trivial amount.

I had my doubts too, but ultimately it finished. Made my system very slow while fetching chain, grinding away on my hard drive.

I had a bid for all 8 shares at 2BTC, but it was via email.

Current Bids are:


Phil

The rate the price is jumping is starting to look ridiculous. 50% in one day, there is no way that will continue very long. Looks like we will see the top soon.

It never works Vlad, they never listen.

¿Que no? Con 100$ el BTC hay gente que ya se ha hecho rica, pero rica como si le hubiera tocado el gordo de la lotería tres o cuatro veces. Antes "tirabas una piedra" y te salía un bloque de 50 BTC. Literalmente, con un "share" o dos lo tenias resuelto. Hay anecdotas en el foro de gente que, en aquellos tiempos, simplemente perdía cientos de BTC porque había borrado el disco duro y se había olvidado. Así como otros que se han encontrado un "señor" monedero en algún backup. Imagínate lo que puede tener un ferviente creyente inicial, o un desarrollador del cliente original.