John Doe and his GPUs can not make a profit anymore. Only John Trump and his larger investment can.
Bitcoins were only valid when anyone could make a profit, albeit small, and drive its economy.
Right not, it's elitist. As in, bad.
John Doe has left the building.
poppycock. the average joe will be more interested in mining with a lower entry point via single chip asic miners. Everyone else can buy bitcoin from miners. Miners can and will make money if they manage their investments well. I for instance, shut my gpu farm down 6 weeks ago (not because it was unprofitable) but because I miner sense tingled and told me to resale them rather than switch to an alt coin. That was lucky (as it turned out). But and this is the fun part - most of the smart miners were still working off plans that had a slower increase in hash rate... and a btc price of 10 or 20 bucks. (and the current high prices have let us continue mining long past our expectations). Just because every joe can't 'make his puter make bitcoin' doesn't mean people still won't want bitcoin. So no - I don't care in the least that joey had to turn off his gpu and stops stealing electricity from his parents and can't buy pot on SR. This is business... and having most miners be businessmen is going to be a good thing for bitcoin in general. |
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Hang on tight. Don't lose faith. This is time to buy up more coins while we go through this period of slow down.
I agree - pick your bottom and place orders accordingly. Also, don't panic - We've hit a momentary roadblock as it related to USD cashouts - in a few months we'll all be wishing we'd bought more at 60/btc |
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Because game designers have a profit model that works... and they don't want to risk changing it.
This is why there haven't been any good mmos released since vanguard. (which was an amazing game as originally designed but quickly destroyed by sony's economic fixes after release).
But look - there's absolutely no reason that a game couldn't use bitcoin for it's in game currency. Each account would simply have a keypair (servers would have to have private keys). You could build a very interesting economic model inside a game... with resources and things being created as bitcoin is purchased via the game interface (either through sub fees or buying actual bitcoin from the gamesite using traditional payment methods).
So maybe you spend 0.0001 btc on some consumable item - well that bitcoin is broken up and distributed in game in the form of resources spawning etc. It would have to be extremely rare to find actual coin on a mob... but it really could be constructed in such a way as to make sense.
You could even make it free to play... with the game making funds off scraping a percentage off btc transactions and also of course selling virtual items (bound and/or consumables).
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If you are going to go down the route of controlling the amount of units in circulation you could go nutz with it ....
Hayek talked about an ideal automated regulator that kept the currency value stable with a basket of goods (gold, oil, wheat, milk, meat, what-have-you, etc) just the usual stuff but the mechanisms he proposed could only be done with something like modern digital currencies that we now are experimenting with ...
... the automated algorithm would have as it's goals the currency's stable value but in order to achieve these targets it would automatically buy currency on the market if the value was dropping below target but here's the kicker, imho, if the currency was becoming over-valued then the system would automatically credit all existing accounts on a pro-rata basis to put more currency supply into circulation, i.e., like stock-holder dividends.
Of course, it would need to be something quite sophisticated in the way of a control algorithm to achieve price stability, figuring out necessary time-constants for the system and etc, but not impossible with a modern multi-variate adaptive controllers I don't think (fuzzy logic or neural net may also be options).
The key here is that to encourage/speed adoption there is an incentive to hold large r account holdings so that as demand for the currency were to increase as it's use spread, then currency holders would be rewarded with more numbers in their accounts. It is, in effect, the same thing that bitcoin causes when demand rises and it's value increases (in the local unit of account) but it is monetised in a different way such that the current holders see a constant value of the unit but they get more units ... same net effect, different mechanism. The currency inflates at the necessary rate to keep the value constant against the chosen basket of market goods/services but the inflation is spread out EQUALLY to ALL present currency holders.
NB: I'm pretty sure that Open Transactions can do all this with it's current functionality. And a few added 'lock 'n leave' controller algos that can be unleashed and keys destroyed so that the tamper-proof machine has control.
But what would the system buy your money with? And who would be sending you the payment? This has actually captured my interest now. What we're really talking about is a single party exchange (funded by investors?) that only trade for coupons that equal 1 usd... and only buy and sell bitcoins with it. So every node on the network is run by an investor. This investor is effectively creating coupons at will (backed by actual physical dollars?) So the software could manage the exchange between bitcoins and coupons. It could become the method of choice to move value between the bitcoin exchanges if nothing else. ~ It would require a very high level of trust for people being able to issue the coupons - as they'd have to have cash on hand and be able to deliver it to destroy coupons when people wants to cash out. I'm not sure it's workable - bitcoiners are inherently against a single entity or small group of players controlling the money supply. |
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Okay that one is new to me, but it's addressing a fairly specific problem. I was referring to http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/331, which is older and more general. I know of many pawn/coin/collector shops which actively buy silver quarters/dollars and copper pennies for the purpose of melting them for the metal. common practice for jewelers. If you can find a reputable legit jeweler, and have foreign coin to sell - they'll usually pay a little more for it because it's not illegal to melt them. |
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For those who do not believe in magic:
Buying the miner is buying Bitcoin over time vs. buying the Bitcoin as a lump sum and holding it. Both are bets that the exchange rate will remain good or improve. Both are long bets on Bitcoin. It is possible to know with certainty which growth rates of difficulty will yield a positive return over a fixed time period and which ones will not.
Of course it is not possible to know at what rate the network will eventually grow at. However, you can build a graph of possible returns and look at what the network hash rate must do in order for an investment in mining equipment to generate a positive return. If the hash rate has to do very unlikely things (like shrink for 6 months) for your investment to generate a positive return, then you shouldn't buy the equipment. If you feel strongly about owning BTC, you should buy them from an exchange.
After the time has passed, you can know what the hash rate did. After the time has passed, you can with certainty know if buying Bitcoin over time was a better investment than buying it as a lump sum from an exchange. Beforehand you can know the probabilities of an investment paying off, like the odds at a blackjack table. Afterwards you know if a hand won or lost, but you can know beforehand if you should have bet on it or not.
Finally! I hope your words will be more clear than mine, because I give up  if you kept btc instead and don't sell till btc goes back to $1 then what?? you always sell at the top? perhaps the buyer kept 70% of their btc as a hedge and used 30% for miners... the 30% would represent higher risk/reward. You can only base that decision at the time it was made. Hindsight does not factor into it. If you knew BFL were morons and still risk the btc then it was dumb move even if you got lucky... if you did research and saw that they are solid company then it is good risk what happens afterward is just second guessing. only rate the move at the time it was made. I decided in March that BFL were jackasses so I didn't place a minirig order. I thought Avalon were good, but I didnt have btc for batch #3. Hindsight says I am lucky that I didnt go for avalon batch #3.. but that doesn't mean the move was good. It was lucky. The correct move at that time was to risk on batch #3 from the data available.. but who knew they suck at handling problems and get lazy? It's interesting this idea of correct moves (if it were a poker game I might agree). I think we have to look at motives as well. I for example placed a small BFL order about 2 months before they stopped selling FPGA - got my 5 units and have cleared ~9000 USD from selling coin they've made (in the last 14 months). I didn't hold any bitcoin (which I regret) simply selling it on a set schedule or whenever I thought the price was good. Except for the bitcoin I used to purchase sc upgrades for my fpga units. From my perspective, skipping avalon (and asic miner) were wise choices on my part. At this point, with my FPGA stuff about to be upgraded (just 2 more weeks  ) I've got ROI of 300%. I also have the side effect of spending btc I mined to purchase pairs of nice video cards for my 3 computers, as well as a gpu rig (and that expense isn't in the numbers I've given here) I later sold the rig, and kept 3 7950s to use on the computers. All told it's been a fun hobby over the past year... My total investment was less than 3500 USD. As for your 'luck' in not purchasing avalon batch 3... I chose not to buy avalon because the tech was inferior and I didn't want to support it. I chose not to buy asicminer because the business model would result in a centralization of (imo) too much hash rate in one location if the succeeded (and I think it's bad for bitcoin in general). I think the mistake a lot of people make is looking at investing as some sort of game of chance, with odds and using hindsight to evaluate decisions. If they'd take a more classical view - everything changes. 10 month ROI is amazing by investment standards. Using standard batch buying and the concept of drawing your investments down... you can ROI much much faster that simply buying miners and waiting for them to earn themselves out. An example of drawing down a hardware investment is what I did with my GPU rig. I laid out 1800 bucks for the entire system, 5x 7950. I mined with them for about 5 weeks... then I sold 4 of the 5 cards (moved 1 to an existing machine) The left me with ~300 UDS in profit. My timing was good, about a month after I sold them people we suddenly turning of GPUs for bitcoin mining. You could follow the same strategy with any asic gear, evaluate what it's earnings should be over a shorter time period. Buy much more than you're 'going to keep' and then sell some of the hardware over time so you end up ROI'd after a shorter period of time... on the hardware you have left. It's called risk management. |
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You might have considered this already, but unless you have an incredibly high rate of flow through that block, the inflow side is going to be substantially cooler than the outflow (as water snakes through your block, doing its thing & picking up heat). Might want to reconsider using the standard "sandwich" approach -- milling out the metal would take minutes, you already have access to an end mill, and if you're worried about leakage, go with 1/8" alum. plate instead of plastic, i've never had problems with leaking o-rings. What's good for a radiator is pretty lousy for a waterblock  Yes, it's a very basic design. Ideally you want at least triple the surface area inside a waterblock as the area of your hot side. A better design is to break each input tube into a dozen or two dozen much smaller tubes inside... you have the added benefit of much faster rate of flow through the block and also get more heat conductive surfaces... this translates into better heat exchange from the block to the liquid. I never had to cool setups like this, where the heat is dissipated into the circuit board's ground plane (?) & the package dictates board-side cooling (well, VR chips, i guess). This is the best pic of the chip's pron side i could find:  Not sure if there's some sort of plate-through from the solder pad at the center to the ground plane, or if the only copper the chip sees is that center pad itself. If it's the latter. i hope the pc board's skinny, not the best thermal conductor. Have you considered something like this?  I was clicking through pics on Google & this is exactly like something i've made using nothing but Home Depot plumbing hardware & solder. The tubing is simply laid into the routed channels & pressed flat (so it forms a D, flat side facing out ) just like in the direct contact heatpipe heat sinks. Dressed with a file for that extra-fancy ground finish. The manifolds are just plumbing pipe, drilled & endcapped. Fill all the gaps with cheap heatsink grease & it's ready to serve. Works killa' & never leaks. This would actually be much better imo... the more smaller tubes the better (to keep that flow rate high). The other interesting thing about this... if you were to vary the length of the micro pipes by making in non-rectangular with a delivery tube at an angle - you could potentially shape the heat profile of the sink in a beneficial way... if that doesn't really apply to the design... The other method is use something like your pictures but twice as high... with only having active flow through half of it (the part in contact with the board) Effectively giving you the ability to store more heat away from the chips... Or you could even combine these ideas using shorter micro tubes on the chip attached section and much longer ones on the parts high out... (which actually might give you slightly better cooling at the cost of needing a bigger pump. |
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I think the only hope for this is some place like kenya or somolia adopting bitcoin as it's national currency. If that were to happen, whatever government they had would have an interest in global adoption and in keeping the currency sound.
I don't see it happening from any nation with an already functioning fractional reserve system tho (which is really too bad, if Canada had any balls mintchip would have simply been a government issued bitcoin key pair that used some random information and the persons SIN number as seed.
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You may read the claims here: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=20130166455.PGNR.&OS=DN/20130166455&RS=DN/20130166455If the images don't load, those may be gotten from the Public PAIR site. The application covers the technology we use to create and secure Bitbills. It does not cover "bit checks" that you print from your computer. It does not cover putting private keys on a flash drive and putting that in a safe. It does not cover NFC-type smartphone wallets. This is misinformation that I believe has been unintentionally spread by people who have not read the application. Assuming this is not their intent then I would guess the problem is that they feel they "need lawyers" (something it seems is in the blood of most USA citizens) who will advise you only in the way that they think they will be able to make the maximum amount of fees from court cases (so the more court cases the better in the mind of a lawyer - thus the advice to make the patent as wide reaching as possible).
Any serious company in this industry that feels like they do not need lawyers is going to have a bad time. You sir, are a real piece of work. Amazingly naive to think that one of us wouldn't notice and step in to block your attempt. Also to imagine that it wouldn't affect your future business prospects in all things bitcoin related.  And hey Cacascius, if you need help with legal fees to deal with this mess just drop us a donation address and we'll get right on that. |
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No on the regulation. Markets do best when self regulated
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scam?
Based on the list of people they're sending demos to... yes, I wouldn't worry about... 4 of those 5 will be loud and vocal about it when they don't deliver. |
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You might have considered this already, but unless you have an incredibly high rate of flow through that block, the inflow side is going to be substantially cooler than the outflow (as water snakes through your block, doing its thing & picking up heat). Might want to reconsider using the standard "sandwich" approach -- milling out the metal would take minutes, you already have access to an end mill, and if you're worried about leakage, go with 1/8" alum. plate instead of plastic, i've never had problems with leaking o-rings. What's good for a radiator is pretty lousy for a waterblock Yes, it's a very basic design. Ideally you want at least triple the surface area inside a waterblock as the area of your hot side. A better design is to break each input tube into a dozen or two dozen much smaller tubes inside... you have the added benefit of much faster rate of flow through the block and also get more heat conductive surfaces... this translates into better heat exchange from the block to the liquid. |
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congrats! Now be happy with your easy ROI and pat yourself on the back for having the foresight to change your order into that =P I'm still kicking myself for doing my upgrades to singles instead of 8packs of jallys. I just keep telling myself... 2 more weeks... 2 more weeks... |
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The greedier ASICMINER gets, the less profit they make on each coin, that's because their energy costs rise as fast as they add gear. At some point they wont be able to pay a dividend as all their revenue will be going into running the bloated ASIC farm, for roughly the same number of coins each week. Then there is a good chance they will have to close up shop, leaving a lot of worthless shares, but also that means 1,000TH/s+ suddenly disappears from the BTC net hash rate, and confirmation times blow out until ridiculous, effecting everyone.
Best possible scenario imho. I've got nothing against any ASIC manufacturer... but the concentration of hashpower in a nation where property rights are... marginal at best worries me... Then again, China is kicking the rest of the worlds ass on the whole 'following free market economics' thing. So I guess I'm not as worried as I would be if ASICMINER were located in the USA or EU. I can just imagine that headline now... DHS seizes asicminer warehouse and kills bitcoin. |
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I got one of those myself --- looks like this guys forum account is compromised... I can't imagine why someone would goto the trouble... it's not like there's a manual payout on the site anyway =P
Yah - not sure what the game here is - but I have a feeling this is an exit strategy of some sort.
Guess we'll have to wait and see.
It also has links to a site bitcoin-talk (.org) looks like another phishing attempt. Very interesting.
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BFL ASICs ROI gets shaky with a $60 bitcoin at 1,500,000,000 difficulty ... but I guess there's Europeans with 50c per kilowatt/hour power bills.
I think you added a few too many zeros. http://www.coinish.com/calc/#BFL 50GH/s @ $2499 (straight from their product page) will never generate a return @ 80,000,000 difficulty, $94/BTC and 1.2788% growth rate. ASICMiner is looking at this same curve. Very soon it will not make sense for ASICMiner to deploy their own hardware. ACTUALLY: At 640,000,000 difficulty a BFL SC SINGLE will still be making ~ 1.32 btc per month. You're numbers are just plain wrong and ASICMINER about twice as power hungry as bfl gear (and 2/3 as avalon). ~ If you had a SC SINGLE in hand right now - you'd roi in under 2 weeks. @ 80,000,000 difficulty it's still under 3 weeks. |
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I respect your posts and replies, firefop. They have merit.
I understand the enforcing aspect, but they have the rules written down nonetheless to cover their asses.
That's exactly it... no transit company would consider letting us install the device without UL because of the potential civil liability if one exploded and took out a bus full of passengers. Ultimately I blame the litigation system in the USA for this mentality. I really don't have an issue with the rules (especially since they're opt-in rather than mandated)... But then I agree that I wouldn't expect a bfl unit to burst into flames either. So maybe I actually agree with you that they should have gotten certification. |
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BFL ASICs ROI gets shaky with a $60 bitcoin at 1,500,000,000 difficulty ... but I guess there's Europeans with 50c per kilowatt/hour power bills.
To any actual buyers, seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY complaining about AM's first round hardware pricing, I'd say it was probably a cheap lesson in impulse control, vs ending up on a murder charge or something. If you were oblivious at the time, some 90% of the bitcoin world were standing back, pointing, and laughing at you. It isn't the high price of their hardware I'm worried about. It is what they are doing with their reinvestment that is really scary combined with an issuance of "shares". Paladin has it exactly correct. Just take a deep breath and think about this for a moment guys. Manufacturing, products that aren't turned on... if a China decided to kill bitcoin all that ASICMINER hardware is right there waiting to be seized and used against us. The only ethical thing for friedcat to do is sell off all the existing asicminer hardware so it's at least distributed... and sell out each batch completely before making more of it. I imagine that shareholders would be annoyed but would gladly take their share of the profits. |
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The way I understand it is that they plan on bringing 800-1000TH online in the event that their market share (of global hash rate) falls significantly.
They planned to keep at least 10-20% of the network and add/remove hash rate as the total hash rate fluctuates. I can't see that they'll just bring online 1000TH and shoot straight to 90%+ of the network, as that might kill trust in Bitcoin (and thus the whole point of Asicminer's existence). If the network shoots up to 1000TH+, then I would expect them to start seriously flipping the power switches on new machines to keep up, but I doubt they'll bring online that much unless they need to.
Well that makes me feel a bit better I guess. Sorry I'm new around here and I don't know their intentions or the integrity of friedcat. It currently feels like they are in it for themselves. But if they are talking about it from the angle of securing the network then I guess that is cool. What I see right now is all I can go on...and that currently is USB sticks & blades that are WAY overpriced that are being sold to suckers while they have the luxury of mining for themselves what they develop. Just save a little for the rest of us ASICMINER. Otherwise we can't continue to keep buying your cheap Chinese stuff...lol The West and the East needs to work together to destroy the fiat central banking overlords. China is showing a growth path that will do a bit too much dominating for my liking. I agree with you. Bitcoin will fail if they grow the network too large too quickly. I hope KNC has an upgrade path program when their 2nd generation ASIC's come online...sorta like what BFL did for their FPGA customers. But if all I am doing is using all my BTC to keep up with each new generation because ASICMINER is pigging it all then it doesn't make much sense to stay in the game. I can't speak for the veracity if friedcat's claims... What I can say is this. ASICMINER is the middle of the road for current gen asics. They better be milking the cow beyond just "building more units" because they're going to have to downsize the process to keep up long term. If They don't... then they'll rolled up by the middle of next year at the latest (or whenever knc ships which should imo be around the same time). Even if I'm completely wrong... and they don't understand this... and keep just making more... eventually the side costs will kill them... They also have the disadvantage of having shareholders... so some of the profit is probably going there. I have doubts about their ability to keep up if a much smaller process comes out... |
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So far I like this product. Very nice offering and needed as well.
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