You already trust 8 other nodes that they are sending you the proper block chain, what would be the difference in changing that to trusting 8 nodes that they are handing you your proper account balance and information?  And if you didn't want to rely on that, you could always continue storing the blockchain on your own computer.  It'll get large, sure, but that's the price you pay if you don't want to trust other nodes.

I think the biggest issue to figure out is how the nodes that keep the block chain will be paid for keeping the block chain and answering queries about it.  Obviously, pools have their fees, and will have to maintain the blockchain in order to hand out work to pool miners, but they could potentially just refuse a lite client's request to get information about a given list of addresses.  After all, if most people are reliant upon a few dozen nodes total, then there could be a LOT of data transfer and computational power needed to answer as many requests/second as would inevitably be generated.

We seriously need to start a bitcoin news site, and write articles about things like what you wrote above and "Drug Dealers Sell Drugs For USD".

Yes it is, and thank you for the answer.

Lofty goals...

All you need to mine is guiminer if you're mining with a pool.  Or you can set up your own rpc server at home, and as long as you open the proper ports, it can be opened up to allow for external connections.  And you can just download and unzip guiminer to your flash drive, it doesn't have to be a portable version.

The likelyhood of you generating a block, even with 10 computers at your disposal, is extremely slim.  So good luck with that, and especially with determining the differences between the setups based on how often you generate a block.

I've got bitcoin-php running on one of my machines.  I can generate a new address just fine.  My question is, do I have to keep the new address in the wallet if I don't want it?  Can I generate an address, then check said address to see if I want it, and if I do, THEN store it in the wallet?

ROFL.  Epic win, and nicely done d.james.   

Well, certainly there are other factors to consider, such as opportunity cost.  But this is meant to be as simple as possible, to where you can just find the price/difficulty ratio that is the break even point for your setup specifically, and remember it.

If you want to get all complicated about days and difficulty increases and profitability over time and opportunity costs and depreciation and heck, even pool fees, use the spreadsheet I created.  It includes all of that stuff.  http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=7531.0 .  This is just meant to be a simple metric that gets "pretty close" to the real deal as far as a point-in-time calculation goes.

No, employers would just start handing out wage decreases instead of wage increases.

I think the fact that tradehill opened this morning, and promptly dropped to $6/coin, but has been steadily rising to $15/coin ever since really speaks for itself.  I was expecting a complete dropout of the market this morning after yesterday's debacle, but that is absolutely not what happened.

bji, you do have a point about sending all your bitcoins to a different address after paying a retailer.  How would a block prioritize between two conflicting transactions?  Biggest one wins?  First one to be submitted wins?

I agree with Zagitta's idea of reducing blocks to being found at a rate of 60 per hour, and cutting the reward for each block down to 5 BTC.  Not only would this solve the issue of pools (solo mining and small pool mining suddenly becomes less variable by a factor of 10), but it would allow retailers to verify transactions much more quickly.  The expense would be the overhead of more blocks in the blockchain, but we need to deal with the ever-expanding size of the blockchain files anyway, so I think it is a fine price to pay.

My thinking about a retailer accepting transactions with 0 confirmations relates to checks.  Most retailers still accept them, and really, the risk is entirely on the retailer if the customer doesn't have enough funds in his checking account to cover the transaction.  I view a bitcoin payment in the same manner as a payment made by check.

41908 is the estimated bitcoins generated by 1 mhash/s at 1 difficulty for 1000 hours, according to numbers output by the bitcoin calculator on the web.

Then this number is manipulated by how many mhash/s you can generate for 1 watt of power, and by how much your power costs per kwh (hence the 1000 hours in the aforementioned number).

I don't know, it's rather confusing looking at it myself, but the answer makes sense.  Prove it wrong, please. 

The equation is quite simple...  Mining is profitable, for you, as long as Price/Difficult is more than:

(Your electric cost per kwh) / (41,908 * (Your MH/s per Watt))

For me, that number comes to about 0.000001590757697776
The current Price/Difficulty ratio is 0.000015412202315

So, I am mining at about 9.7 times my cost of electricity... and it would take a price drop down to $1.37 to make me unprofitable at the current difficulty level.

One of my 5830's was running at 90-95c.  The only reason I cared was that it would clock down after it went to 91c, thus losing hashes.  So I reorganized the case cooling a bit (if you want to call what I have "cooling"), and now I see a steady 89c on that card.

The rest of the cards I am running, I can't seem to get that hot.  They all have too good of airflow and not enough overclockability I guess. Even with extra voltage, they're staying below 80c.  Lame - it means I can't run them as hard as they'd like.

Agreed.  ^.^

See now, I thought the same thing.

Until I realized that the sky is still rising...

I'm rejoicing, but not because the difficulty went down...

Changing my password just in case, and will change it again this evening.

Lame.

Oh well, don't have anything in my tradehill account at the moment anyway.

I had the same question/concern not too long ago.

Basically, at some point, we'll see people move from using a normal client to using a chainless client.  The chainless or lite client would connect to one or more nodes to find and verify their account balances, etc.

Most of the code already exists to utilize a lite client.  It's just a matter of implementing the final pieces now.

No.