Ah, the infallible free market.
Not gonna happen, not when almost none of the requirements for perfect competition are met.

I agree with you on this one.
Well, miners smart enough to convert their investment in mining bonds and sell them to the highest bidders may still profit. Plenty of suckers around, just look at current mining bond prices.

As for asics endangering or protecting the network from a 51% attack; Im not sure there is an impact either way. Since the variable cost of asics approaches zero, it will likely be similarly easy or hard to mount an attack with asics as it is today.

I think you misunderstand the waiting I mentioned; if everyone has to wait, then that by itself is not a big deal, not too different from waiting for a mini rig today.

The issue is if you have to wait x months while other customers are already getting their asic miners and pushing up difficulty. Then you will have a problem. Particularly if that waiting list is caused by a massive backlog.

But no matter how BFL handles this, with high or low initial per GH prices, long or short waiting lists, unless you get an insight in to BFLs actual and future sales, it will be impossible to calculate a ROI time and if BFL strives for maximum return on its own investment, you will likely not achieve a positive ROI in your lifetime.

Dont use ubuntu 12 if this is a dedicated mining rig. Backporting older drivers may not work, and even if it does, its gonna be way above your head.

My advice: install ubuntu 12.04 on your primary desktop or laptop to get familiar with it. But for the mining rig, have a look at BAMT or even good old linuxcoin.

If for some reason you need a full desktop and HDD install on the mining rig, use an older version of (x)ubuntu like 11.10. It will install older drivers and sdk, which are better for mining.

IM sure they will; but that doesnt change a whole lot, because maximizing revenue for BFL will mean initial high prices followed by endless price drops to keep selling hardware. And even those high initial prices may not deter all that many miners, I bet a lot of people will be lured by the better GH/W rating even if BFL prices them on par with FPGAs per GH. A few months worth of "pre orders" may be all that it takes to get this snow ball rolling and once it does, there is no stopping it.

Now I dont know when those things will hit the market,other than BFLs stated "sooner than you may think",  but a few months later it will basically be game over for gpu and fpga miners - not too mention, bond holders. Oh, and people buying those asics wont be off much better, because unless BFL artificially limits their sales volume, early customers are gonna get caught in the same avalanche as everyone else.  At least the smart ones will sell bonds so that gullible GBLSE investors will be the ones left holding the bag.


Likely a drop on a hot plate. Unless BFL come out with something very disappointing and/or a shared mask solution, you are looking at something with a silicon production cost significantly bellow $1 per GH.  This will make the switch from cpu to gpu look positively benign, and how long did that take?

IOW, someone come up with a good way to short all these mining bonds, and Ill pour all my bitcoins in it.

Yep. THe fact that asics will push up difficulty into the stratosphere, rendering those 5MH even more worthless.
If anyone thinks Im wrong and wants to lend me these bonds for 6 - 12 months, pm me.

In the case of asics, their potential ability to deliver is actually the problem. Unless you know how much they are going to deliver over the time period between ordering and when you think you will have earned back your investment. A 6 month wait for their FPGAs was annoying, but  I think people still dont fully grasp asics have the potential to increase difficulty by an order of magnitude or more and a 6 month wait could prove incredibly expensive.

The date. Clearly money is still flowing in through all the passthrough bonds, I cant see it default very soon even if it is a ponzi. However, I will be betting some coins on the longer term bet, if for no other reason as hedging .

Just for the record, before the invasion and certainly before the iran-iraq war, Iraq had one of the, if not the best educational system in the region. It crumbled after the wars and sanctions, but literacy rate would still have been comparable to the US.
Not that Im sure what education has to do with this. Or even popularity of a regime. Its one thing to hate your regime, but quite another to welcome a foreign invader.  

Anyway, I do agree by the time the US invaded Iraq, crippling sanctions had turned a once prosperous state in to a third world country. That part did work very well, and its being repeated now. The war with Iran is not fought with arms, instead an economic war is being waged.

Why? its already integrated in the northbridge, has its own embedded cpu, but uses the same bios chip as the rest of the system. See the last PDF I linked above.

You honestly think the NSA or CIA wouldnt have asked intel to get access to say, laptop of Al Qaeda suspects or that intel would have said "No" ?
I do think thats a stretch.

BTW, even if intel said no, some hackers managed to crack older versions of VPro.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-vPro-Hacked-101286.shtml


A good read here:
http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/bh09usa/Ring%20-3%20Rootkits.pdf

There is also like a milion bed and breakfasts in London. Typically costs 50 euro or so, and you are sure to get an actual bed(+room) and, whod have guessed,  breakfast .
http://www.bedandbreakfasts.co.uk/uk-london.asp

If thats a reply to my post, just read the documentation, its completely public and in fact marketed heavily by intel for its legitimate use. Look here:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/architecture-guide-intel-active-management-technology/

Its basically the mother of all root kits.

which doesnt explain why you wouldnt even have done the most basic cost benefit analysis before IPO-ing your so called $1M company.

In that sense, Im surprised you havent considered the most obvious solution for housing, cooling and electricity; put your rigs where no one can steal them, where solar energy is far more efficient than even in the Mojave desert and where cooling is a non issue: low Earth orbit.
Space-x is aiming for $1100/kg, if you want to be ambitious, do it right .

This is a storm in a glass of water.

If you are worried about hardware backdoors, just imagine if your PC or laptop had a real hardware backdoor that would allow an attacker to connect remotely over LAN, Wifi or 3G to access your harddrive, your RAM, your display, your keyboard, your microphone, your camera. It would render any and all of your attempts to protect your privacy null and void, including any encryption. Something immune to software protection or detection, completely OS independent, in fact, even independent of the main cpu and therefore impossible to detect. Something that works out of band, even when your PC is powered off. Something that you cant disable, even if you think you can, because it can remotely be enabled again. All it would take is someone having the key to this backdoor

Sounds far fetched? Yet if you have an intel laptop or PC with AMT/vpro; thats precisely what you got.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology

And it would be a stretch to believe some 3 letter agencies wouldnt have the keys.

Whats with block 183419 "minted by external" ?

I bricked my LG optimus trying to upgrade it to android 4, so I looked for a cheapish replacement and found this:
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/803232/211505324-557211424/Titan-X310e-Android-4-0-ICS-4-3-inch-Phone-MTK6575-1GHz-CPU-512MB-RAM-4GB.html

I actually ordered it on ebay for GBP 154,99.

Its a chinese no name phone, fake HTC I guess, under the hood its the same phone as the zopo ZP100;  specs look pretty damn decent and plenty good for me (1GH single core Cortex A9, high res screen, dual sim, dual camera etc), and Ive seen a few user reviews that all say its actually a fantastic phone except for rather poor GPS reception. I can live with that given the price is only a fraction of an otherwise more or less comparable galaxy S2. Its actually cheaper than most second hand Galaxy S1s Ive seen.

Here is a youtube clip of the phone in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hax0HkHxpYA&feature=related

Thought Id let you know in case someone is looking for a mid range 4.3" android phone and doesnt want to spend more on it than on a second hand car .

Look closely at the HS; its mostly closed from the side. The design is to let air flow through from top to bottom, not sideways. And of course the system design makes that impossible.

Once more, a  text book example of how not to engineer system cooling. I imagine cooling isnt a big problem with those asics, but if you are going to spend money on large copper heatpipe coolers, you may as well design the system so they can actually function.

Even that wont help; you are suggesting they keep the price high to prevent difficulty from going up too fast, but a high per GH price also linearly increases the payback period, so the period BFL would have to limit sales to keep difficulty more or less stable. Thats not gonna happen,; BFL cant keep selling machines at the same price if difficulty goes up and BTC value does not.  BFL will have to lower their price or sell not nearly enough to make up for their investment. More so if they worry about a competitor, which they probably should. 

So those people who buy them early at maximum per MH price are likely shafted just like the ones that will come after them, particularly if there are many of them, which I think there will be; at almost any price point I suspect there will be a race to get those machines early from people who just dont realize whats about to happen.

The only thing BFL can do is limit sales; not even by raising the price, but simply limit the number of GH they sell even if there is a big demand for their product. And when you think that through, it means having money printing machines on the shelves that you dont monetize. In short, BFL will have the choice between screwing themselves or screwing miners.