It's just cute when going back to $6 is called a rally. More like a slight recovery that will last until the optimists run out of money again.

Of course, to some degree, but every time buyers or sellers do a large instant trade the price will go back to what it used to be almost instantly. Knowing this it seems pretty stupid not to spread them out a bit. They may be trying to trigger a rally or sell off, but if so it doesn't seem to work very well compared to how much money they waste trying to push the price.

You are of course free to think whatever you like, but this and your negative attitude to greed is the same as saying that market economy is a bad idea. You would basically rather get less hashing power than give money to those greedy capitalists mining for profit.

It would be more helpful if you bought the coins instead. Then miners with cheaper electricity could add more hashing power than you can for the same amount.

I guess it depends a lot on the size of the population. In Norway there are hundreds of snow and ice related words, although a lot of them are only used by some dialects. There's a list of most of them here, but unfortunately most of them aren't translated into English: http://folk.ntnu.no/ivarse/snjoord.html

Except for tiny amounts escaping as radiation through windows or as sound and vibrations, energy put into LEDs and fans ends up as heat as well.

Getting a good laugh is never a waste of time.

There is no point in adding more bits. There can only be a certain amount of transactions in a block, and that forces miners to either charge a fee for all transfers or filter out the ones that are very small because of spam attacks. Either way there is no point in trying to transfer very small amounts.

That creates way too much overhead. Optimists will just stop mining and hope for better times, and pessimists will sell the rig and never think about bitcoins again.

What part of the word "pool" do you not understand? I'm not talking about beating the total hash rate of the network, but about enough miners colluding to maximize profits. For every miner that joins, the hash rate of the honest part will get smaller and easier to beat. I didn't get the technical part quite right, but ArtForz has already explained how it could be done.

BES doesn't really work for this. You can reduce the CPU usage, but it will also slow down the GPU hashing rate significantly.

2.1 never gives 100% cpu, but unfortunately that doesn't support AMD 6xxx GPUs.

Generally hoarding will probably make the price peak higher, but more volatile. Spending it will make more bitcoins available for buyers and sellers, so it will probably make the price lower but more stable. That will make it more viable as a "real" currency in the long term, which is good. Unfortunately it will also make it more certain that it will be very valuable in the future, which will make it more attractive to hoard it. It's still much better than hoarding if you want to make bitcoins live on, though.

It seems likely that there is less chance that people will stop mining in the high difficulty periods and start in the low periods if the changes comes frequently. If the difficulty starts fluctuating like it does with namecoins the cycle will be self reinforcing. A noticable drop in difficulty will make people add more than the current amount of mining power. When the difficulty change comes it will increase to more than the current amount, making it even less profitable than it is now. That makes the next difficulty drop even larger, and the next increase larger than the first. With many days between the changes instead of hours it is much easier to adapt to this cycle of turning miners on and off.

Perhaps it's because my Windows machine has an Intel CPU? Anyone with Intel able to avoid 100% CPU usage with more than one AMD 69xx GPU?

Wow. Thanks for doing such an excellent job at proving my point about cognitive dissonance. Do you really think you can convince me that gold is stable by asking me to ignore the most volatile years?

I did of course know you would say that, which is why I used silver. Your only recourse to fix the cognitive dissonance was to pretend it was off topic.

The currencies are much more stable compared to pretty much everything you can buy than gold. You can of course pretend it's the gold that's stable and everything else that's varying in value, but then stability becomes meaningless.

When you reach this line your brain has probably already gone through the "NOOO!" fase and fixed the cognitive dissonance for you again. It's quite fascinating.

If you can't hold more than one thought at a time I understand why you think this is difficult.

Are you saying that they actually can print more silver?

The value of something is not locked just because it's hard to make more of it. If it was the proportional value of gold vs silver would always be the same.

I have searched the forum and Google, but I not find a discussion of this particular variation.

Say one pool starts paying 150% reward to attract more than 50% of the miners. At the next difficulty change block it mines until it solves it, and sets difficulty to 25%. Then it can mine on this chain and solve 4x as many blocks as everybody else, and still have the most difficult block chain. Is there any way to stop this, other than hoping that miners don't join?