[/quote]

Price stabililty is more important than price rise for the general public.

[/quote]

I'm with you on that one - people are more comfortable using a currency if they have a good gut feel about what it's worth. Bitcoin is such a moving target from one month to the next at the moment - you can go on holiday and by the time you come back it's value has changed 50%. I also don't think a coin where one unit is worth several hundred dollars is doing itself any favours either. Suddenly you're talking about needing to get your heads around transactions of 0.05 or, 0.005 (where those sums actually have a real value) and it just looks so different to what you find in the fiat world. If this was the stock market, they'd just do a share split to keep the numbers down - can't do that with Bitcoin. Will it put me off? No but I do think it will slow down mass adoption.

That was really interesting. Good stuff.
God knows when mine will ship....

Ask not what Bitcoin can do for you – ask what you can do for Bitcoin

Alright, alright.
I'm just saying don't get seduced by precision over accuracy.
The calculator gives these wonderfully precise and believable numbers, but they're just a calculated guess and they won't be accurate.
Whatever it comes up with now, -$546, +$1200, whatever, the reality will be different.

Oh just look at block erupters, people are still paying far too much for those!
People are putting such faith in the Genesis Block calculator. It's like the guys who drive their cars into the middle of a field because "The sat nav says that was where the road went." It's just the coarsest prediction of the future based on the recent past. There are so many moving targets here to potentially throw it off course. A bitcoin price crash, a bitcoin price spike. But we don't worry about that because the page doesn't give us the option to enter a price volatility variable. What about a surprise change in difficulty? These all make the difference between a column of blue numbers and a column of red ones. We just don't know what's going to happen and neither does the Genesis Block calculator. For sure I think profitability is going to be a close run thing. It could go either way and a few days on delivery will make all the difference. But even if luck goes against me and I end up under water, I don't think I'm going to lose more than a few percent of the cost price and flogging the miner at the end will get me back pretty close to even.

It's a ride, it's a risk, I'm in it for the engagement and the throw of the dice.

Definitions of ROI aside, when it comes to the question of getting your money back, don't forget that the miners themselves have some intrinsic value too.
Yes, the Genesis block predictions are gloomy, but even on the Nov 1 start date you get pretty close to break even. If after 6 months you say "This hasn't delivered for me" then stick your miner on eBay. As we've seen, someone will always buy it and probably pay too much too. That may well be enough to make all the difference between turning a profit and not. You get away with the shirt still on your back and at worst, you've turned a pile of banknotes into bitcoins without wasting money on third party commission

Jim, you're a genius.
Windows keystrokes... why didn't I think of that.

 I've been using apple's cmd+c and cmd+v and nothing has been happening.

Switch to ctrl+c and ctrl+v and it worked fine.

Must be key mappings, but hey, this fixes it so I can live with that.


It was OS X 10.7.5 and multibit 0.5.13 by the way

Hi
This is a pain. The only cutting and pasting I can go is to take a wallet id, use the copy button and then paste to an application outside of multibit.
I can't paste to or from any windows within multibit. I'm running OSX, I do the paste thing and nothing happens.
This makes signing anything pretty much impossible. I can't take a wallet ID from the wallet window, I have to retype the string in by hand.
Then once the signature is generated, I have to laboriously retype it all by hand into an email or whatever, including retyping the original message of course. All very awkward and prone to errors as cut and paste just doesn't do anything.

I've done the obvious - reinstalled, restarted computer etc. but it's just not happening for me so wanted to ask if you out there had any ideas.

Cheers

Pls put me down for one share: noodle73 #1 @1BTC

2 @ 4.35 BTC

Thanks both, very useful. I think these are probably the most onerous board rules I've come across! But necessary to weed out the time wasters and would-be scammers I suppose.
I just wish I could get all the time I spent lurking as a guest to count, now that I actually DO want to post something. Ah well, clock starts now and thanks for taking the time to point us in the right direction.

Noodle