I think in practice hardware wallets can't exactly work in such a way that you just buy a turnkey product right off the shelf in this manner. There is no way of knowing that the random number seeding isn't compromised in some way that allows the manufacturer to issue pre-determined private keys. As such you really can't trust a product like that any more than you might a web wallet that stores keys server-side.

The only way a product like this actually makes sense in my opinion as any kind of secure wallet is if the manufacturer produces the unit as a hardware platform with a completely open and documented API, and open-sources the software in such a way that you can confirm the checksum against an independently-compiled build, or where the process of initializing the device involves compiling yourself and loading the binaries directly onto the device.

This is a genius product for BFL to actually do business with, because all it needs to be is a cheap tiny Android tablet with completely trivial software to develop for it and the most basic interface imaginable.

On the other side of the coin, if even this trivially-easy product to develop ends up being vaporware, I see it much harder lying about this being "state-of-the-art" like their 65 nm fab hobbyist project.

Unless you're very skilled and knowledgeable about technicals, anything involving trading will likely get you eaten alive. Outside of buy and hold, your best bet is to figure out what kind of products or services you could offer as a small business that accepts Bitcoin.

There's a very obvious Occam's Razor-style explanation for why the price hasn't appeared to be so news-sensitive. Maybe it's really been reacting mostly to fundamentals all along, and our consensus of relating it to news is just ex post facto attribution error?

Since when was the core dev team responsible for saving the world in this crazy person Y2K-style scenario?

I'm not really sure it was ever Cloudhashing's fault that you failed to understand network difficulty to the point where you thought a BTC/year rate on mining made any sense whatsoever.

This is a very intelligent way to look at it.

The only way that Cex could actually function as a real futures market is if there weren't a monopoly commodity seller.

The fact that Cex themselves are the only entity that can put tradable GH/s on the market makes the whole thing a nightmare. It would actually be amazing if there were some standardized way developed that people could provably put their own GH/s on a market like that, a system like that would actually function like a real commodity market.

The only possible use for gox anymore is to trade on volatility to increase your BTC position, then move the BTC elsewhere. That begs the question though, why not just do the same thing somewhere else?

It baffles me why anybody even considers gox an exchange anymore, when you can't actually exchange.

I wonder to what extent it might be possible that the lack of IRS guidance is putting an upward pressure on price.

Personally, I have no desire to take profits in fiat whatsoever yet (I don't necessarily mean cashing out of Bitcoin entirely a la what the cynical mainstream media pushes as the "bubble" narrative), simply because the risk of having to deal with audits and scrutiny is not worth it even if you have nothing to hide and everything is completely above-board.

Could it be that the lack of guidance actually promotes the fairly commonly-held notion that "once it's time to cash out, you won't need to cash out"?

On the subject of trash-talking Dwolla, Ben Milne's blog is absolutely terrifying. The biggest show of sock-sniffing narcissism I've ever seen.

This would be accomplished trivially by mining to produce a coinbase transaction that specifies that result, but as far as it being mandatory, you would have to code the node clients in such a way as to reject blocks that do not comply with that payout. It's doubtful that anyone would participate in such an alt-coin, because all you would have accomplished is a transparently-obvious way to premine indefinitely.

China has exactly the same workweek.

Your assumptions of always negative ROI in Bitcoin terms are completely false and superficial nonsense.

You're basically asking me to deliver a business model to you on a platter in order for my words not to be "meaningless", which is retarded.

Mining hedges against price stagnation by producing modest BTC income (possibly with principal risk entirely in BTC) with reasonably easy-to-calculate assumptions about power consumption and pessimistic difficulty projections.

Not everyone is a competent technical trader, and mining allows you to accomplish frequent modest profit-taking.

It only doesn't make sense because not everyone has the same goals in this entire financial enterprise as you, just a blanket statement about buying and holding is projecting your own objectives onto people who may have entirely different objectives over completely different timeframes with a desire to be exposed to different amounts of risk.

Andreas Antonopolous put it best on an episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin, basically making the observation that the only reason you ever heard of Dwolla in the first place is because of Bitcoin.

Law of Large Numbers.

You can't say anything about the next difficulty jump based on blocks JUST AFTER re-targeting.

This is what P2Pool is.

This business model is just as exploitative as any cloud hashing service you describe. It's brilliant because you hold zero risk.

The entirety of the risk in ASIC mining is in the upfront cost of the units themselves versus difficulty suppressing Bitcoin returns. There is no ASIC unit in existence that doesn't at least outperform the average US electricity cost @ $1000 Bitcoin.

So if you're taking a percentage of Bitcoin revs from your customers, doing the pre-orders on the units, getting a commission on handling sales, etc., you're exactly like a cloud hashing service without any of the principal risk of a cloud hashing service.

It's a very clever idea, but anybody with any common sense knows the sales pitch here is completely disingenuous.

If we want to be objective, the technological/scientific predictions in the Quran blow all of this away.