It's calculus - you get a nice derived function that you can increment difficulty in and get a lovely graph showing you at what difficulty which hash rates become unprofitable.

My ti-84 is still useful =P

Hm - seems like you'd need to setup some second factor auth otherwise you run the risk of having the card stolen and being unable to prevent anyone from using it.

You understand QE started killing japans economy ~20 years ago... but you claim the dollar isn't losing value... Look at any forex pair since 2008, you'll see the trends.

Yes, and that's exactly what's likely to happen - assuming that 100 th/s comes on line all at once, we'd see at least 1 quick difficulty adjustment - (where 2 weeks of coins get created in a few hours). And it could very well crash the markets. Then again, that crash is only likely to persist for a few days - maybe a week - before those coins all get sold and the normal support kicks back in.

I also think that if people on SR are selling pegged to USD then we'll likely see support build back quickly, since they'd simply charge more btc to meet costs and that would rapidly consume the supply.

Well let us know how that goes.

I still like the idea of a encrypting the private key and storing it on the card - then the reader can do the biometric scan, pass that the jvm on the card - along with the amount and desitination address, and the card can pass back a signed transaction - after decrypting the private key.

I guess the important question would be - could the reader be made to snag the entire contents of the card - if so then this wouldn't be secure either. In that case, we need a dongle that the user owns, to make sure that the POS machine can't read out the card - and once we're getting into designing hardware, might as well go fully custom and just use flash.

This doesn't protect you at all.

The problem with chargebacks is when someone uses a stolen creditcard to pay for purchased via paypal. It all looks good until a week or two later when paypay refunds the transactions (After the creditcard is reported stolen) and you've already mailed your paper wallet.

removed the image.

Smartcards are an interesting idea. Is there any way to prevent someone from being able to extract the private key once it's loaded on the card?

The concern being someone steals a card, drops it into a reader and has full access to whatever's stored on it, including the private key.

Maybe the POS device uses some sort of biometric reading to feed another private key to the card to dectypt the one stored on the card?

That way, the card card could still sign in - but wouldn't have only an encrypted copy of the private key on it...

so without the POS machine, the smart card and the owner's proof of life - nobody would be able to do anything with it.

as for the OP:

I find it unlikely that I'd use a service asking me to enter information (even if it is just a btc address) before being able to see the rates.

Please add a tab 'Rates' that lists all the percentages and fees etc.

I'm hoping he did... they are most certainly basic rather than acidic

It isn't exponential growth at all. It's the standard growth rate that all miners use if they want to increase profits over time. 20% of everything earned going back into more hardware. *shrug*
imo it's linear growth.

My optimism is backed up by having actually done the math. You should try it - it's very reassuring.
The only real variable we can't account for is total hash on the network, but not know what it will be - doesn't stop you from running numbers at different rates (adjust difficulty in your maths).

right now there are some pools getting ready for stratum (which is basically a better way than getwork).

There are also a some pools where you can adjust the difficulty manually.

the zero commissions is reasonable depending on how much hardware you've already ordered. SC rig, yah 1.5th/s is plenty for solo mining you're talking 1.1% of the network hash rate at somewhere between 5x and 10 difficulty.

sc Single - no you won't be going solo.

I agree with your numbers, we'll see 5x immediately then a quick climb to 10x (as first wavers cash out and reinvest - yes expect a couple days of the btc/usd being compeltely tanked). and a quick step to 10x... then a slower acceleration to 20x or 30x over the next year or so.

I should point out that FPGAs will still be profitable enough at 10x - and will start dropping off when the network hits 15x.
At 40x - an sc single will still make about double what a single is making right now... nobody should be shocked by this... ROI will still be between 5 and 6 months.

I've always wondered what would happen if replaced lye with potash... (that is potassium hydroxide)...

Probably, but what would be the point, it's obviously a  troll/throwaway account.

A cutesy pink wallet for droid?

It's called marketing - Either someone does it or those less capable of proper use of a computer (both genders included here) won't ever adopt.

Lets hope it isn't a solid piece.

BFL seems to have failed at the whole 'airflow design' thing... again... Top mounted fans that blow up or down are bad. you want are horizontal to the board, not vertical. But hey, at least there will be a waterblock option which more than makes up for bad airflow.

If you look at it as an investment (or as growing an income stream). Then mining makes sense.

For example spending 1300 on an sc single which at 40x difficulty will bring ~0.5 btc per day. Say the support for price of btc is above 10 USD. so a ballpark estimate is ~200 USD a month. That puts ROI at 6 months. that's ~200% per year. That's a crazy good investment when compared to something stocks/bonds.

The important thing is to jump in with enough of a purchase to get close to your income stream goal. For about 5000 you could have 1000/month.

The other thing not to forget is that as more hashing power comes online the income will decline, to stay ahead of the game, you'll need to re-invest some percentage of your income from mining into buying new hardware.

I've only just really gotten to the point where reinvestment was sustainable for me. My plan post asic is: 20% reinvest, 20% savings as btc, 20% savings in other more traditional investments/diversifaction (think kids college fund), 20% for operating costs and other upgrades (solar panels, better cooling, computer parts etc) and 20% as income (lets be honest, my wife's going to spend it and call it a 'lifestyle upgrade').

The thing about mining is a profession is - it's constantly reducing what it makes - at some point when the block rewards becoming uselessly small there should (at least we all hope) be enough transactions to keep mining viable... once we hit that point in the process the profitability will finally reduce to match cost of mining... but by then i'm planning to be mining for near zero cost - what with my existing solar/hydro setups and the additional ones I'll be buying along the way.

Not long in the sense of 'time taken' but if it's limited to 4x per adjustment that means 3 adjustments to get to between 40x and 50x.

During that time, the folks with asics will take the majority of the coin generated... that's what 6048 blocks? that's 302400 btc going mostly to the people with the new asics. or aprox. 3.6 million USD. If that happens in a day, we're going to see massive de-valuing at all exchanges and a steady climb back to pre-asic rates.

Suppose it is aprox 200 th/s after asics. running your 60gh/s single will bring in aproximate 1000 USD - which meets ROI on upgrades =P

Not at all - I'm sure anyone would take almost anything given for free.

What we're asserting is that "the Occupy Movement" (your caps not mine) isn't a movement, isn't in any way constructive and has no hope of achieving anything other than what they've already done (which is simply to provide comic relief, humiliate themselves and annoy anyone who isn't a moron.