tempestb; 1; 2.2148

Sender:  15V96ct1qcy8sVE9GxEpWzwDVwdKf6JnDU
Transaction ID: 4385dca477511f1b64486eff02306fdfa7dbf0a4c695387cb4f698ed7f426756

I like how Avalon takes months to build their miners, but you guys can do the same job in 48 hours. 

BFL isn't a year late, yet anyway.  They took orders starting in June, but said they wouldn't ship until October?  Something like that. 

It really depends on if they are converting the btc they mine right away, or if they are saving them.  If they cash them out right away, that could drop the value of btc pretty rapidly.   On the other hand, if they save them, it could drive the value up because less of the other miners will get as many coins as before.

The 51% situation is a problem, because as they approach it, the difficulty will also spike causing more and more people to quit mining, bringing them to 51% or over.  This means they'll have to shut down some of their equipment to stay underneath it. 

Once someone gets 40%, they have a 50/50 chance of reversing any transaction.  So once they breach 40%, it's a problem in theory anyway.

It's not good for Bitcoin.  But if Bitcoin fails, so too does their entire operation, so they have choices to make when expanding their hashing power.

I would order chips if there was an actual board that they came with, or someone could assemble.  I realize that someone is going to make them, but what is the cost going to be, the number of chips it will support, and various other requirements?  I'm also not sure I trust someone who gets thousands of chips to put on boards to get them done in a timely manner.  It seems like the chips would be cool to get but there are a lot of unknowns at the moment. 

Looking at the Batch 1 thread, it appears at least one person received their overdue unit which was shipped on April 7th.  If I read that correct, it sounds as though they are shipping some units then. 

There are still miner preorders for sale.  I've got bids on some.  They generally remove listings when the person states they don't accept Paypal and only want BC. 

Exactly.  What if Al Qaeda starts sending you money to deposit in your bank account.  Or some other criminal organization.  Money laundering will get you a trip to the big house.  Let alone the IRS will come knocking thinking you're doing off shore trades and not reporting it.

I think it's only crunching that much when it's downloading the transactions.  Once it's caught up, it's not using much resources at all.

Price vs performance.  They are still viable but many people want to sell them now and get ASICs (Or quit mining altogether) while the demand for mining gear is hot.  Once the difficulty takes off, they won't get very much for them unless someone wants to use them for altcoins.

It's all well and good until the wife says she's thrown out your scratch pad of wacky letters and numbers.  Or your Bitcoin loving buddy takes a copy while you're downstairs looking for snacks.

Yeah, that's what I do now or send mined coins directly to BTC-E.  Be nice if they took Dwolla.  I just figured someone was using one of the other funders, but everyone I look at either appears shady or has the same funding issues.

Let me know if you make a million dollars doing this.

Sounds legit!

Did your wallet finish downloading the entire transaction file?  If it didn't, you have to wait for it to complete before the most recent transactions will show up in your wallet.

And yea, your MH is very slow.  NVidia cards are no good for hashing.  A like-Radeon will get about 10 times that speed. 

There are a lot of smart, and some-what smart people in the world.  If there is a device that can produce easy money, they will buy it and run it.  That means the difficulty will rapidly get high enough that the machines are unprofitable. 

When that happens is built around two things.

1.  How quickly ASICs are distributed.  Avalon batch two is imminent.  And BFL is trickling out orders.  ASICminer is also trickling out some hardware.  Soon, when the Avalon chips are in hands, everyone and their Dad will have an ASIC miner of fifty.   At which point, it'll be those people with deep enough pockets to stay ahead of the curve.

2.  The price of bitcoin.  The difficulty can be very high, but if the price of bitcoin is also high, mining remains worthwhile.  The same if it goes the otherway.

It may make more sense to buy coins and sit on them.  If Paypal does start taking Bitcoin, it's going to cause the market to jump up significantly to say the least.  People who are hoarding coins for that kind of an announcement are smarter than spending that money on ASIC hardware that is far away from shipping.

It might be overkill, but I have multiple wallets on different machines.  I move the money around between them so if one gets compromised via malware or other hacking attempt, the damage is minimal.  I try not to store much online unless I'm prepared to use it.  Large sums get placed on wallets on machines that I then take offline so they are never sitting up vulnerable.

That said, if you just be careful and pay attention to what you're doing, you'll be ok.  The biggest thefts seem to happen by scammers more than hackers.  Don't be tricked into anything dumb.  Also, if you ever need to send a large amount to someone, I suggest sending a small amount first to make sure the transaction goes through ok.  Then send the rest.  I've been in situations where people have accidently given me the wrong address and the coins end up lost.  So pay attention, play it smart. 

I know that Visa/Mastercard will not allow you to purchase virtual currency with them.  You can't use them to buy Bitcoins, basically.  That's why there isn't really a legit payment processor that takes CC and turns it into Bitcoin. 

So, my guess is, that Ripple is not calling their XRP a currency because then banks, payment processors, etc will likely reject what they are trying to do.  Not sure just calling it something different will work for them though.  It would be nice if it works out the way the developers intend.  Right now, it's mostly useless to me.

Currently, I use MTGox to buy coins because I have found it easy to transfer money to Dwolla and then move that money into MTGox. 

However, BTC-E doesn't accept Dwolla.  Since I'm in the United States, I'm curious if anyone here has funded BTC-E with USD and which of the available payment processors do you use and what should I watch out for when doing the same, if anything?

You can read the unofficial twitter at www.twitter.com/BFL_News  It links to the articles and happenings and you will find what you are seeking there.  BFL does not have a standard location for news updates, various individuals post blog updates or make posts.  It's unfortunate but that's how it is.  So the twitter feed helps in collecting the various info and putting it there.

As for making money, this all depends on the price of Bitcoin when you get your Jalapeno.  If it's worth $1 you're not going to make any money.  If it's worth $5,000 you will make a lot of money.  Somewhere in the middle is where it'll be and then it just depends on the difficulty and the Bitcoin value.  Don't listen to everyone so focused on the difficulty shooting up.  If the coins are worth more, mining will be worth it regardless of difficulty.  But at the same time, you could have a very low difficulty and the coins may be worth nothing.  You have to pay attention to both factors.

I also think that the estimates on how many units have been sold are greatly exaggerated.  The unofficial preorder list has a couple thousand units (Total) listed.  Even if we assume that list is 4 times smaller than reality, it's still not enough units to ruin hashing with a Jalapeno and making your money+ back.  

Of course, whether you ever get your unit is still up for debate.