It would be stupid to build new GPU rigs now.  Difficulty will likely rise 20x to 30x or higher once ASICs are shipping in volume (I have no idea if that will be next month or next qtr but it will happen eventually).  Worse it won't stop there, on a long enough timeline (probably going into 2014+) eventually BFL and Avalon will sell so many ASICs that they will saturate the market.  Take a BFL product and pretend difficulty is say 38x higher than now.  Doesn't look like such a good deal for NEW CUSTOMER at that point.  So sales will dry up.  What is the solution?  Simple cut the price.  When sales flatline both companies will cut price, more a ton more units, and difficulty to jump to a new high.  The market will be saturated again so, cut, jump, saturate.   A couple cycles of that and it is time it move to smaller more efficient chips and start the process all over again.  Looking out years into the future it is entirely possible difficulty will be 100x to 200x higher than now and who knows it could even be higher than that.

There is no guarantee your rig will be able to pay for the electricity it uses.  You could end up in a situation where it costs $10 in electricity to produce $1 worth of Bitcoins, even if you pretend the hardware you are using is free.

None.  Bitcoin mining uses a negligible amount of GPU memory.

Probably.  Did WWW grow that fast.  It "launched" in 1990.  50 million users by 1994?  I guess it is plausible although I don't recall it being that popular.

What you talking about that 420 coins per person (420 mBTC that is).

If that happens I think I will make a platinum 1 BTC coin.  "Wow you got a WHOLE Bitcoin".
Or maybe to be future proof it should say 1,000,0000 microBitcoins.

It is like 2011 all over again with everybody thinking they found the "critical deathblow" to Bitcoin.  Why is it rational discussion and USD price are inversely correlated?

To OP simple version is:
There aren't more than a handful of people with hundreds of thousands of BTC, and they have a vested interest in not destroying their own wealth.  Even if they act irrationally they can only do so once.

Personally I think the number of imaginary multi hundred thousands BTC early adopters is probably close to zero but let say he/she exists and for some asinine reason decides to tank the market.  Ok.  A drop from $32 to $2 didn't kill Bitcoin.  A drop from $50 to $1 won't either. The value is in what Bitcoin can DO not it's current price.

Still even if such adopter exists one would have to suspend disbelief that he/she would act so irrationally.  He mined them over the course of a year for fun.  Then suddenly they were worth a $1.  $311K for something fun.  Yet Joe Early doesn't sell.  He watches the price climb to $32 making him a millionaire ten times over but doesn't sell.  Why?  Maybe he believe BTC is worth a lot more.  The price crashes and he doesn't sell on the way down.   He doesn't sell at the bottom despite seeing the paper value evaporate.   Over the next two years the price slowly rises and he COULD have sold a thousand or so coins a week without affecting the price and pocketed millions of dollars if that was his goal.  However 4 years later he hasn't done any of that.  Why?  Really the only plausible scenario is that he is a diehard true believer, "A bitcoin will change the world as we know it" type.

So Joe Early is now Joe the Apostle.  Yet for some reason he decides to cripple adoption (at least in the short term) by crashing the market.  Hurting his own net worth, hurting his credibility, and hurting the thing he is a diehard believer in.   Does that even sound close to plausible?

Still time will solve even this non-problem.  I remember the same "doomsday scenarios" except at one time it was tens of thousands of BTC, then a hundred thousand BTC.  Now it is a beyond silly hundreds of thousands of BTC, someday it will be "well if someone accumulated over a million BTC they could crash the market below $100".

Don't give up your day job because your understanding of "criminal proceeds" is flawed.

Game. set. match.

To the (often uninformed) people say Bitcoin has no "intrinsic value" ... what would you value an open transparent network with barriers or restrictions that allows anyone to send $80,000 anywhere in the world for less than 2 cents?  $100M?  $1B? $10B?  The network IS the "intrinsic value".

Simple answer is no.

Their 4 years to 50M for internet is a dubious claim.  The first two nodes in the ARPANET which eventually would become the internet was in 1969.  I am pretty sure they didn't mean there were 50 million users in 1973.  Likely they are using some artificial "start of the commercial" internet and counting 4 years from there.

I would also point out that while Facebook grew rapidly the concept of social media took roughly a decade from the first sites to facebook hitting millions of users.  I have long believed Bitcoin will be no different.

It just occurred to me that the 4,000 BTC daily limit on MtGox is now worth almost $200K due to the skyrocketing value.  
If you have a high withdraw limit you may want to consider lowering it to limit losses in the event of an account breach.

If you are an exchange operator and don't give users the ability to put a daily limit on BTC withdrawals please consider it.

Coinbase is the one with the deep VC pockets not us*, so I don't think we will be buying competitors any time soon.  I will refrain from making a judgement on coinbase.  Their order cancellations may be due to the risk of accepting ACH.  I am happy to say our procedures don't put is in a posistion where we need to arbitrarily cancel orders.  We have had the price move against us ... a LOT and still honored the deal.  

I hope Coinbase can make their order process more transparent.  Something i said in a conference call with a different competitor seems to fit.


It is going to take many companies each improving the user experience to grow that pie.




* We are 100% self funded and if possible we would like to do our first outside equity offering without involving VC funding.  

No.  This seems to come up a lot when we open to new members. 

Accepted funding options:
Bank Wire
Cash Deposit

No other options are accepted.  We no longer use Bank Of America for any services.

Citation needed.

Microsoft Bob?

Nope.  Bitcoin mining is incredibly low bandwidth.  If they made a serial card GPU it would work fine.  Plenty of miners have used GPU in PCIex1 slots with no loss in hashpower.

The OP didn't want to work for wealth, he wanted it handed (redistributed) to him simply for existing.  
Work for money you got some crazy ideas son.

Dedicating mining processors are (slowly) hiting the market.  They are significantly more efficient at mining and will drive difficulty up by 20x (and probably more).  Expect your mining revenue per MH/s to decline by 95% or more.  Buying new GPUs today for mining is a good way of piling lots of cash up and lighting it on fire.

As for your general questions.  The 21M coins won't be mined until the year 2140.  As the amount of the block subsidy declines (block subsidy is halved every 210,000 block ~4 years) it is expected fees will increase to provide the revenue to secure the network.  Fee have already increased from ~0% to ~2% of total miner revenue.  

There is a far simpler reason why confiscating coins not used "soon enough" will never happen.  Users would have to agree to the theft.  That isn't going to happen.  Getting any breaking change to the protocol is tough.  Even non controversial changes take a lot of time, effort, testing, and lobbying.  Getting something like a "you use or your lose" policy implemented is essentially impossible.

This idea comes up like clockwork at least once a month but the end result is it doesn't matter how "good" this idea is it will never happen.

From a ethical standpoint changing the rules AFTER people have invested in bitcoin is simply dishonest.  It is a bait and switch.

If you feel so strongly that this is the deathblow to bitcoin the fork the project implement remining rules into the protocol and launch "eternalcoin" or whatever you want to call it.  If Bitcoin is truly flawed then in time the market will dump bitcoin in favor of eternalcoin.  Personally I have no problems with a coin which does this from the begining (or implements demurage like freicoin) but to change the rules after the fact is just plain theft.  Period.

https://fastcash4bitcoins.com

Can get a bankwire for up to $7,000 today and have cold hard cash (well 1s and 0s) in your bank account in a matter of hours.

There are a half dozen major exchanges, private brokers, companies like coinbase, etc.

MtGox =/= Bitcoin

Even if you are 100% sure BTC is "too high" just remember

OP isn't that fraud?  Taking a personal loan or using a credit card is one thing but how exactly are you planning on getting a student loan for "not being a student".  Also buying an investment on credit because it can't go down is a good way to royally screw up your finances.

Also if you are in the US understand the COMPLETE stupidity of what you are doing.  Student loans are the ONLY form of debt that you can never get away from.  No statutes of limitation, no credit reporting length, no ability to discharge in bankruptcy.  Car loan, mortgage, home equity loan, signature loan, business loan you get (with different levels of difficulty) get away from them but not student loans.   They are for life and the banks will use the collection arm of the IRS to seize every tax return from now till the day you die in order to satisfy your debt.