What I'm pointing out is that kjj is preaching from the Free Software Foundation bible in the church of Hardware.

The actions that make sense in software business are frequently suicidal in the hardware business. This is because of the cost structure: hardware is mostly front-end-loaded, whereas software is mostly back-end-loaded.

Yes, Avalon made a mistake by using a code requiring GPLv3 compliance. They should've designed a separation layer like many hardware vendors that support Linux. But the Avalon team is young and inexperienced and they didn't design for that.

My position is that rational supporters of Bitcoin would attempt to come up with some middle-of-the-road solution to safeguard the existence of viable competition of multiple vendors in the Bitcoin ASIC business. What I see is almost exact opposite: they are asking Avalon to nearly commit suicide for the sake of an ilusory freedom. Ilusory, because for the gain of few pages of source the whole Bitcoin ecosystem is paying the price of severely disadvantaging one of the ASIC vendors, to the point that in the next iteration we could have a monopoly.

The rational behaviour would be probably along several possible lines:

a) disclose the code only to Jeff Garzik. He's professionally involved in Linux kernel development and may be able to offer some useful advice on how to both comply with GPLv3 and TSMC/whoever-else NDAs.

b) offer to escrow the code with Bitcoin Foundation and have a programmer at B.F. to produce an obfuscated code that complies both with GPLv3 and NDAs. There are already multiple precedents in escrowing the information with Gavin Andresen, but thus far the escrow was security-related.

c) I personally think that the "binary blob" workaround isn't viable here for purely technical reasons. But I may be wrong. Maybe somebody willing and able to sign the NDA could help Avalon to develop such a solution.

d) take a chill pill and make Avalon folks pinky swar that they disclose the required information after the competition shipped and after the subsequent batches are locked in with TSMC.

But this thread isn't about being rational. It is about militancy, a very short-sighted militancy of playing open-face chinese-rules poker at the traditional-rules poker table.

Think for a moment: What would Richard Stallman do if he had a single tapeout to his name before he received his MacArthur Fellowship? We wouldn't have a Free Software Foundation. We would have maybe a Free Logic Foundation or Free Computation Foundation or something else. But I believe that we would be better off: maybe we could have open-source processors and disk drives in our open-source computers.

It could take anywhere between two weeks to four months. Yesterday there were only three blocks found, which means it would take almost 130 days until the difficult drops.

how is the not dying going on?

anyone knows:

- how many blocks to retarget?
- time to retarget aproximation ?
- next difficulty aproximation ?

The spectacle of watching laymen giving themselves a promotion to copyright attorney is truly worth watching.

overheating is not the issue here. see http://imgur.com/a/5Gqix

I'm sure Jeff can confirm these numbers on his device as well.

as for memleak, we found it but that didn't solve all the issues.

expect a controller update soon and a newsletter.

jed
   
 Post subject: ledger resetPosted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:20 am

The ledger was just reset. So ask me or arthur for credits again.
This will be the final ledger baring some catastrophe.

and this is why we can't have nice things.

The ripple payment system also contains a virtual currency called Ripples (XRP). These are the internal currency used by the system to protect the network from abuse. By requiring a fraction of a Ripple for every transaction, the network prevents an attacker from creating too many transactions and overloading the system.
All Ripples were made at the network’s inception (100 billion). No more will ever be created. The founders donated 80 billion to OpenCoin, Inc., the maintainers of this site. OpenCoin, Inc. plans to give away the majority of these for free.

changes:

FRC moved to "dying" as mining stopped.