8T is only 123 machines if each handles 65G

For purpose of testing, they should run them for a couple of days before shipping, that is normal

You mean they started to mine by themselves

They are waiting for BFL, so that everyone have roughly the same start time

It's too early to talk about global significance, bitcoin is not going to heaven

Current hype will over when most of miners have migrated to ASIC devices, from then on there won't be fast expansion of hashing power and the price of bitcoin will not rise that fast as it doing now

And bitcoin have a long road to go before it reach widely acceptance, transaction capacity is such a small issue if you consider so many  legal and human factors. Even today, when I talk to my computer scientists friends in multinational company, most of them still doubt it is a scam, they have a good income and a good life, they might never care about this little thing

On the contrary, if it really gained mainstream acceptance and acknowledgement from government, there will be banks and institutions waiting in the line to solve this transaction problem with their existing mature and sophiscated clearing system, bitcoin will become a new digital gold standard. Do you really need to use a tiny bit of gold to buy milk?

If you are really that service minded, then you should consider remove the 21 million supply limit, and adjust the daily supply to keep the exchange rate fixed at $21,  then the merchants will feel safe to use bitcoin due to lower exchange rate risk

I had a strong impression that bitcoiners are so proud of the limited supply nature and I'm convinced this is really a different view in today's world, and I hope they are not walking towards a direction what everyone familiar: overproduction, plenty of supply and cheap

Although miners do affect price, there isn't any direct relationship between mining and txn, the number of blocks per day is fixed no matter how many people are mining, even there are thousands of ASICs mining, each block is still the same as when there were only hundreds of CPUs mining

The price is mostly decided by sentiment, not mining profitability. In 2011, difficulty dropped while price also dropped, it can go on for a long time

But it is bitcoin and there are many old infrastructure that support it, with a fork the transaction on legacy net dereased so it works as good as before

Little bit like windows xp, microsoft has dropped support for it, but I'm still running it on most of my windows computers after it's release 12 years later and it's still rock solid, in some of the labs, even windows 2000 runs fine. I usually compensate new functions and features for increased speed and resource utilization

In my estimation, those who are interested in bitcoin technology itself (blockchain/transaction/mining etc) are almost all here, it is impossible in today's internet world that after 4 years of introduction and many times of media coverage, there are still some people in the world who have the potential to become a true bitcoiner and he has never started his mining operation

So from this point forward, the technical user base will not expand that much, and the late adapters will unlikely to have a full node installed, web based services will become popular, and they will provide a service similar to bank today (they only provide saving and transaction service with a fee)

Once the majority of people are using web based services, many retail level transactions will just be cleared inside these system without go through the blockchain, and the end user don't even need to know public key/sha256 such kind of tech noise, what they only need to know is that total amount of bitcoin is fixed by protocol and supply is decreasing

Fractional reserve banking will be very unlikely to happen, since the bitcoin is deflative. Bitcoin borrower will take a very high risk, it is a common sense to borrow the inflative currency and buy the deflative currency

Still too early to draw the conclusion, CPU and GPU are mass available tools, but ASIC is different. Low speed miners do not leave because there is still only one chain

Since it is bitcoin. There are many alt-coin out there, anyone can start a new coin with little modification of bitcoin source code, but none of them has gained enough attention and value

By 2020, someone called shitosa has created a much more intelligent solution for bitcoin legacy to fast process all the transactions and the scalability is unlimited with fixed usage of block space

My story just to illustrate that a hard fork is totally different than a software upgrade. Actually I don't believe that the scenario I described on bitcoin 2.0 is going to happen (without support of miners, it will quickly lose momentum, this is also I worried after ASIC roll out, since this dramatically reduced the amount of people that can be involved in mining, which is the backbone of bitcoin)

Once above old high, it is all free sail

The year is 2015, bitcoin had a hard fork with 99% of users vote to raise the block size limit to 10M

As usual, the original bitcoin blockchain by then was called bitcoin legacy and disgarded, exchange rate falled to under $0.01, and all major bitcoin sites already run the client version 2.0 and will not accept newly mined coin from bitcoin legacy chain

One day, Tom came down to his basement, found there is a dual 7970 card gaming machine with bitcoin client 0.3 installed, he can not do anything with that machine on bitcoin 2.0 network, so he play it for fun to mine some bitcoin legacy. Surprisingly he found out that he can mine 10 block per day! He experienced exactly what those early btc miners did in 2010... Slowly that chain were picked up by more and more gpu owners, the difficulty on the chain is low, every one can mine a decent amount of coin

This spread quickly, since the availability of GPU is much higher than ASIC, the amount of people join the bitcoin legacy game are magnitude higher than bitcoin 2.0, this in turn revived pools, exchanges and web services based on bitcoin leacy

The amount of participants and pupularity on the legacy chain get higher each day, the exchange rate on the bitcoin legacy also crawled back and on a steady rise. Since the price developement is quick, lot's of capital were attracted, another 1000x rise happened, bitcoin legacy made the miracle again and cleared $10 mark, this attracted many ASIC miners to turn their hashing power towards bitcoin legacy network and those ASIC manufacturer also got good sales

While on the bitcoin 2.0 network, it is totally different: one bitcoin worth $1000, huge transaction volume, a rich boy club with a few thousand guys holding ASIC farms, power plants etc. They periodically meet investment bankers, hedge fund and pension fund managers from different countries to discuss how to take over the world finance market by the next fork ...

I mean, why other people's hasing power has anything to do with me if they are hashing on a different chain? The difficulty on the original chain will drop quickly and maybe gpu even cpu miners will be able to mine some coin

I like OP's post! Seems many people here are just too technical to grasp the obvious

Under the cover of all of these excuses for increasing/holding block size limit, there are basically 2 motivations:

1.Afraid that bitcoin will fail to function and lose its adoption and value
2.Afraid that bitcoin will lose people's trust and fail

Functional view is the view of most of the developers, if an application failed to provide an intended function, it will fail

But this is a service provider view. Central banks never view things this way, they know that scarcity cause demand and abundant cause abuse. They never provide enough money, they even put every money as a debt, and all people work hard to repay those debt and it will never get repaid fully, in this way, they successfully command the whole society to work for them

How could they achieve this? Through trust. Although they are stealing people's money and making profit, people still trust them, since they always take the most expensive and good looking house in the city and wear nice clothes, professional looking, very consistent, seldom changes, looks stupid, but that is how it gained the trust of majority

IMO, it's the same for bitcoin, it really doesn't matter how difficult the transaction will be, as long as bitcoin holds it's promises, it will gain people's trust and support. When you have the support of merchants/exchanges/miners, no matter what kind of problem there will be, all of these people will come out with brilliant ideas and help. But if bitcoin could not hold what it promises, people will just simply abandon bitcoin

The last statement is strange 

Actually I'm quite satisfied with 50 coins per day, if I took 3600 coins per day, then I will be the whole network, I think many of people here will compete with me to avoid this from happening

I think many bank-like transaction services can be beneficial, since the purpose of bitcoin is to replace debt based money issuing of central bank, not replacing all those financial services. Just like gold, although itself are difficult to move, that does not stop people from building financial services based on them

Limit those transaction heavy apps like satoshi-dice

It does not matter, I'm a true believer of original bitcoin, I want those coins deadly no matter what they cost 

You know what, on some of my virtual machines, I have full nodes still running bitcoin 0.3.24, if the fork day arrives, I will hope all the people run to the new chain so that I can quietly and quickly mine the rest of the coins on the original chain

Some of my view:

Fast online payment is just an additional feature for bitcoin, not core value, and it will never be. People comes to bitcoin because of it's value (generated from its unique properties), not because it is 2% cheaper than CC (with CC consumer have the advantage of performing a charge back if the seller is a scammer), people will spend fiat instead of bitcoin since they know the value of fiat is going down constantly and btc price will rise in long term, if bitcoin's value holds, they even can get a fiat loan backed by bitcoin and spend

If we really reached the status that many transaction can not be done quickly, then satoshi's idea about "phase in the change" is a good implementation approach, and it may require several intermediate versions, the process should take at least one year. But the core question now is wether we really need such a change

Actually many people here are just hoarding coins, there are not really a lot of transactions happening everyday, especially miners who connected to a pool. If we remove satoshi-dice, I think at least in the latest 2 years it will still work fine. Satoshi-dice is just an execellent example of no matter how big the block size is, there will be applications flood that space with meaningless transactions

A fork means the amount of coin will get doubled immediately, a 100% inflation in the whole system, and this directly destroyed the promise of there will never be more than 21 million coin. If this happens once, it will happen again, then bitcoin is not in any way better than fiat today, just the inflation control has been shifted from FED to a couple of programmers, people won't have incentive to hold their coins, they will sell before these programmers come up with a new idea to improve bitcoin and inflate the system again with new coins

Bitcoin is not only some software code, it is a spirit, if it split itself into two personality, then it essentially lost the soul