Got my coins.  They are beautiful.  For fun I checked every public key and every one was worth exactly 1 BTC.  Another very happy customer.  Keep up the good work!  Getting ready to order some more soon.  I am also looking forward to seeing the video showing someone cracking one open and moving the stored value to their electronic wallet.  Has anyone done this yet?  I am going to install pywallet when I get some spare time but as someone else pointed out I feel kind of like I am "killing a unicorn" by ripping one of my coins open.

Zakcy,

No.

I agree it is a total waste of time to try to convince these inventors that their invention will not work.  I had a run in with a guy named Dennis Lee a few years back.  He was trying to advertise his product on the television show of a friend of mine and my friend had me look over the product specifications before he would allow the advertisement to run on his show because he thought it “looked suspicious”.

I got the plans from Dennis and actually had some very nice conversations with him about the product.  He was very excited to have an electrical engineer prove out his concept for him.  After wading through and stripping away all the techno babble and paranoid ramblings about persecution in his documents it turned out to be just the idea:

You can convert electricity to heat using a heat pump, right?

You can convert heat to motion using a heat engine, right?

Motion can be converted to electricity with a generator, right?

So if you connect up these three devices to each other and run the wires from the output of the heat engine/generator to the input of the heat pump the combination will run forever!  Not only that but he claimed that in his design the efficiency of the devices was (actually will be – given enough money for research) so good that there will be electricity left over!!!  He then went on to envision a world where everyone bought one of his refrigerator sized devices, cut themselves off from the evil grid, and simply plugged in their house to the device to get all the electricity they would ever need directly from the heat content of the air!

Not only that, but get this:  the design was given to him by a revelation directly from God himself!

Cue the evil oil/gas/coal/nuclear empire and all its attempts to protect itself from him and to suppress his every move, throw him in jail, etc. (which only proves he is on to something – right?)

I then spent HOURS on a final report to my friend and Dennis which I crafted to meet Dennis’ level of understanding, using only the absolute minimum of math, using mostly metaphors and analogies that I knew even he could understand.

After reading my final report which surprisingly proved the entire concept would never work he simply lumped me in with all those other evil narrow minded people who believe in the first two laws of thermodynamics who are always out to get him and never talked to me again.  After all doesn’t a revelation from God trump man’s understand and laws?

To this day he still believes in his world saving vision from God and is still attracting and fleecing new investors with his machine which is still “almost there” but just needs a few more tweaks and a few more dollars to get it to work.  Read more at http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Dennis_Lee/ especially interesting are all the positive comments at the bottom of the page!

Now that is a great picture!  I have always wanted to have exactly this picture.  It immediatly shows why gasoline is used in cars (over lower energy density options).  Where did you get this diagram?

I have been thinking about this a bit and have a couple of suggestions for "version 2.0" of this product:

* On the metal blanks ditch the denomination.  Instead of "1 bitcoin" say "bitcoins".  Keep the rest the same.
* On the holographic side replace the printed short public key with the QR of the public key.  This is so it can be easily scanned to determine the stored value by a smart phone application.
* Inside keep the private key the same.

I can imagine a holographic sticker with a clear "window" and under the window you simply put a small square of material with the QR on one side and the short private key on the other.  Very simple, easy to mass produce, easy to assemble:

* Produce large sheets of material with 100s of the public QR embossed on one side and the corresponding short private key embossed on the other side.
* Cut into tiny squares in one step, producing 100s of squares for each sheet.
* Stick the squares on the sticky side of the holographic sticker with the QR facing out
* Attach the stickers to the blanks
* They could be sold with no BTC in the account, just the blank "coin", or they could be preloaded as is being done now.

Now, here is one use case I have already run across:  My elderly parents want to be able to have me buy them bitcoins over time.  They just want some in their portfolio, along with some gold, silver, etc. "just in case they go up".  They consider them like a penny stock.  They do not want to get involved with putting the client on their computer, getting a dwolla account, getting an exchange account, etc.  They just want me to set up an account for them, they send me cash, I buy them BTC.

This is perfect!  I buy them one of these physical coins, I remember the public key, I send it to them, they put it in their safe until they want to cash it in.  Whenever they want to buy some more BTC they send me a check, I sell them some of mine or buy some for them on the open market and then transfer the BTC to their "coin" in their safe.

They are very excited about this whole idea where they were very put off by my previous explanations of how I could get them the client.  They were very concerned about someone stealing them off their computer, stealing their computer, losing their computer or their computer crashing, etc.

The idea of having the coin in the safe is very appealing to them.

This is great stuff (I am an electrical engineer).  My favorite quote so far:  "The Lutec Electricity Amplifier (LEA) More than triples the electricity it receives!!!"

I also love the pictures of all the patents at http://www.lutec.com.au/patents.htm

It just goes to show that they will rubber stamp patent anything without any review at all!

Interesting idea and you just showed me that these are way cooler than I first thought!!  In theory I can make one of these coins worth as much as I want to, right?  I just can't make it worth less.  This proves that these coins are, in fact, one way WALLETS - not just coins.  All I have to do is:

Lookup the entire public key in the block chain.
Send more to that key.
Let's say I send 99 coins to the address.  Wala!  A 100 BTC coin.
I can then give the coin to someone and tell them it is really a 100 BTC coin.
They can verify my claim in the chain.

When they "crack it open" then can transfer all 100 BTC to their account (or wherever).

Also another very useful application is that you can give the coin to someone and then transfer more to it over time AFTER they have it, like give one to a nephew and then transfer more on each birthday - or whatever!

You can meet someone face to face once, give them a coin and from then on you can make payments to them and you know the payments are going to the intended destination, the bitcoin address you gave them!

It looks like these are a very cool way to store (and transfer) any amount of value "off line" - just like the paper wallet idea!

This is one of the coolest bitcoin related items I have seen.  Can't wait to get mine.  I plan to put them in my safe for now since I do not want to damage them and then possibly give them as gifts to those "hard to shop for" coworkers and friends on my shoping list.  How many I give away and to whom will depend greatly on how much they are worth come Christmas   They eventually may end up as a novelty but they may end up worth a whole lot some day - who knows.  Great idea!

How about we create a very simple system wide program with the sole purpose of keep the price of these new coins stable.  For fun we could call it the "Feral Reserve Program".  If the value of the new coins is dropping because there are too many of them in circulation then this hypothetical program would sell some sort of AAA rated bond or debt instrument like US treasuries – oops those are not AAA anymore - in order to reduce the number of coins in circulation.  And when there are not enough coins in circulation the program would buy back the debt instruments in order to increase the number of coins in circulation.  Hmmm, this is all starting to sound vaguely familiar…

The FPGA is interesting.  The ASIC numbers, including cost, would be even more interesting.

I gathered from elsewhere that the average number of hashes needed to get one block is given by the difficulty times 2^32.  If this is correct then:

The average number of hashes per block right now is 1,564,057 * 2^32 = 6,717,573,664,079,872 = 6,717,573,664 Megahashes/Block

Using your number of 2.3 Megahashes/Joule yields 6,717,573,664 / 2.3 = 2,920,684,201 Joules/Block

Finally 2,920,684,201 Joules/Block is 811 KWh/Block

Using your number of 0.15 $/KWh yields $121.65 per block or $2.43 per Bitcoin.

I have checked and rechecked these numbers and given the assumptions I believe they are correct.  

Of course the 2.3 Megahashes/Joule is only the energy used by the video card and does not take other power consumption and cooling costs into consideration. 

So the actual cost is more, this is just the lower bound.

I asked the admin and he responded that the conversion used on the http://bitcoinwatch.com/ page is from this very thread!  The site uses the formula from above (after correction for the typo).

The page simply uses the following assumptions/estimates:

    1 INTOP = 2 FLOP
    1 hash = 6.35K INTOP
    1 hash = 12.7K FLOP

So the hashrate in TeraFLOP/s is simply 12.7 times the hashrate in Gigahashes/s.

For example as I wrote this:  11,558.55 Gigahashs/s * 12.7 TeraFLOP/Gigahash = 146,794 TeraFLOP/s = 146 PetaFLOP/s

I am wondering about the number of TeraFLOP/s reported on the http://bitcoinwatch.com/ page.  For example the number I see right now is 145906.

If this number is really in TeraFLOP/s then it is claiming 146 PetaFLOP/s!

That can't be right.  What do you think?  This number is larger than all the supercomuters and all other distributed computing projects put together.

I have an email into the page admin and will let you know how they respond.

Sometimes it is very useful to find a definition of something that actually explains what it is, how it works and what it does.  I thought a lot about this and found that all current definitions of "money" are lacking.  Bitcoins, namecoins, gold, silver, tobacco leaves, wampum, dollars, Euros, etc. are all commodities.

Fiat currency:  dollars, Euros, and so on are a special kind of commodity where the amount of them in circulation is constantly monitored and controlled by a central bank.  The job of the central bank is to keep the supply and demand for their currency in balance – in other words to control inflation of their currency.

So what is money?  Putting aside all historical, emotional and politically motivated definitions of money I have come up with my own personal working definition:

     Money is the state of an unfinished transaction.

In other words if I do some work for you and you give me a meal then we have traded two things and the transaction is done.  But if I work for you and you promise to give me a meal in the future then we have an unfinished transaction.  This state creates money.  We can simply write down on a piece of paper “Joe owes Burt one meal” to keep track of this or we can use the state approved method of keeping track of unfinished transactions and you can give me an agreed to amount of dollars.
 
No, I do not mind telling every new person I meet my personal definition of money as it sometimes leads to new insights into the economy, bitcoins, dollars, and a myriad of other subjects.
 

Also, slush is currently under attack.  See http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1976.3280

Yes, slush is under attack.  See http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1976.3280

Yes slush is under attack.  See http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1976.3280

I expect they did not sell all the BTC at $0.01, they just sold such a large amount that they went through every buyer (including me) all the way down to $0.01.  Every single buy order from the current price at that time all the way down to the bottom was filled before the sell order was complete.  Therefore they would have made a lot more than $1000 on the first BTC they sold...

Just a post to increase my number and find out what it is - what a waste.

This brings up a question I have been wondering about for a while.  Since the system is targeting an average of 6 blocks per hour and we have seen about double that for a while wouldn't is stand to reason that the difficulty will eventually have to be such as to bring the production down below 6 per hour in order to maintain an average 6?  Is this part of the algrorithm?