So, by my calculation, ~$30 million would buy you the ability to compromise bitcoin (with a few more million spent monthly to stay ahead of other miners).  That's a scary small number to me.  Mining does not drive the price of bitcoin up...demand for bitcoins drives up the prices.  I'm just suggesting that some people take some of the profits that they've made from the appreciation in the price of bitcoin and put it into mining.  I myself have just about maxed out what I can support without bringing in new wiring, new air conditioning or renting a warehouse.  I'm at ~4 Gh/s currently.  Mining has been less profitable than investing in bitcoins recently, so I'm just encouraging people to take a more long term view and consider applying some of the new wealth flowing into the economy to making the network more resilient.

Enlightened banks actually have a lot to gain by using bitcoin.  Consider how bitcoin can solve a lot of issues with fraud and identity theft.  This is an enormous cost to the industry.  Also consider how bitcoin could be used as an international institutional settlement mechanism.  No doubt the current mechanisms are immensely costly, cracking at the seams and full of security vulnerabilities.  The banks that recognize this and act on it, will have a tremendous competitive advantage.  On the other hand, banks that try to stop bitcoin (something I think will only prove futile in the fullness of time), will only end up squandering scarce resources and may even lead to their own demise.

The old address is still good.  Your wallet holds the keys for many addresses.  The client likes to create new addresses for you such that it's less likely for bad actors to piece together your transaction history.

I don't think mtgox is scamming anyone...I've been using mtgox for a while and while I've had issues here and there, they've always been resolved.  I think they are just struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of support they must be dealing with.  My suggestion is to be patient and keep following up until you get your issue resolved.

On average you can expect a payout (a block rewarding you with 50 bitcoins) in about:
140 years, 25 weeks, 4 days, 3 hours, 30 minutes, and 17 seconds

(seriously)

And that's only if the difficulty didn't rise in that amount of time...oh, and blocks will not be paying out any reward by that time...oh, and you probably won't live that long

If you want to get into mining...acquire some top end AMD graphics cards (Radeon HD5970 or 6990 currently).  They will very likely pay for themselves in a few months (look for some posts on how to correctly do the accounting for a mining business to get a true assessment of mining vs just buying bitcoins).  Mining has been less profitable than just investing in bitcoins recently, but there's no guarantee that will continue...and we need more miners!!!

I don't think any of these will fit 4 double width GPUs ...you need space between each for the cooling fan on each card to be effective, which means each card will need 3 slots...so to fit 4 such cards, you'd need 12 slots in total (never mind the problem of finding a mobo that has 4 16x PCIe slots spaced accordingly).  I've looked for solutions and I just don't think there are any if your objective is to get more than 2 double width GPU cards into a rack mount case without doing any mods.  My suggestion is load up with dual GPU, 4U servers and spend your time trying to figure out how to power them and keep them cool (hot/cold isle if you can) rather than modding cases.  Close off the case and forcing cool air into the front (buy a portable A/C unit) and vent hot air out the back and out of the room is the best way to go.  I'd also advise 5970's over 6990's.  You'll get more efficient hashing with the 5970 and 6990's exhaust hot air out of both ends!!!  (what were they thinking!!!)

One of the popular recent themes around mining is that it hasn't been as profitable when compared with just investing in bitcoin directly.  And this is true.  But I have the following suggestion:

- take some of your gains from bitcoin appreciation and reinvest into mining

Why?  Because the network needs to get a lot stronger in my opinion and we need more miners.  Mining helps strengthen the network.  It's also taking some gains and putting them into a less risky way of investing in bitcoin.

(I tried to keep this message short so that it would actually be read by people)

I would like a p2p system for announcing and matching quotes...I want the exchange to be between bitcoin and ripplepay like debt in various currencies rather than the actual currencies.  It's possible you would need a separate block chain to track the ripple debt transactions and somehow make the exchange between ripple debt and bitcoin be atomic and irreversible.  Settlement of ripple-debt can take place between individuals and their adjacent nodes in the ripple trust network.  Super-nodes in the ripple network that swap a cash deposit for credit can develop to help facilitate connections through the trust network.

Wouldn't that be ironic...that a crackdown on bitcoin by governments actually stimulated bartering in bitcoin.

I did a quick calculation of the approximate cost it would take to buy enough off the shelf hardware to match the current hash speed of the network (5451.42 Gh/s according to bitcoinwatch).  Based on the cost of my mining rigs, I would estimate it to cost around $9 million.  Accounting for a healthy margin to get you well over 50% and the infrastructure it would take to support that hardware, I'd say for an initial outlay of $30 million you could have enough hardware to outpace the rest of the miners on the network.  Now, that is like 15,000 high end AMD cards...I'm not sure whether they would be able to meet a demand like that...but, for a motivated and well funded entity that had an interest in destabilizing bitcoin, this doesn't seem like a huge number (of course, by the time such a system could be built out, they might very well have to double down again on that outlay to keep up).  Is my math off?  Should this be a cause for concern?

Well, first things first, could you please PM me your source for $10 bitoins?  

Regarding micro-payments, in the long run, I don't thing bitcoin will be well suited for use directly in micropayments...some bitcoin backed account service will likely be needed for that eventually.  There are scaling limits that will eventually make the cost of transactions on the block chain too expensive for micro-payments.  I think in the long term, bitcoin block chain transactions may be used more for peoples' long term savings or large purchases as well as inter-institution settlement transactions than it will be used for your everyday purchases (but that's probably years off, and in the meantime, transactions on the block chain will be quite useful for merchants).

If you're talking about an actual default (as opposed to printing of money), it would have a deflationary affect on the US dollar.  The value of bonds would fall likely causing knock on defaults by various other entities.  There would the a scramble to raise cash as a debt deflation kicked in.  So, the value of the dollar goes up.  To the extent people held BTC and needed to sell it to pay off dollar based debts, the value of BTC would drop...however, the value of BTC could remain largely unaffected (but still cost a lot less in dollar terms due to the dollar deflation).

On the other hand, if you are talking about a default via printing press (a default in the sense that the US just devalues the currency rather than making changes in fiscal policy to balance its budget or actually defaulting), then the value of the dollar falls.  To the extent people opt to buy bitcoins as a result, the value of bitcoins would rise.  However, the value of BTC could remain largely unaffected (but still cost a lot more in dollar terms due to the dollar inflation).

The printing press seems to be the path of least resistance (compared with a default on US bonds, cutting various entitlement programs, cutting war spending, or raising taxes).  Only time will tell.

Yes, you could do that, or you could run a miner and make a lot more profit.

Short answer: your balance goes down, you get poorer and everyone else (that holds bitcoins) gets richer

The client tries to protect you against putting in an invalid address (there is a checksum in the address that will protect against simple copy/paste errors).  But if you send money to some address for which no one holds the keys to spend, the bitcoins go to bitcoin heaven.  The supply of bitcoins shrinks, and hence, assuming constant demand, all other bitcoins in existence increase slightly in value.  

Compare this the US dollar...if you lose a US dollar, assuming demand remains constant, the value of the dollar goes up (deflation)...to combat deflation, the FED can print more money and put it into circulation, keeping the value of dollars constant.  But, that's a nice way of spinning it.  Another way of saying it is that that for every dollar someone loses, that's another dollar the FED can "print" (I say print, but it's really a digital book entry) without triggering inflation.  And since newly printed FED dollars flow through the primary dealers, it's those primary dealers that most directly benefit when you lose a dollar.

jgarzik did a great job with the interview.

I think difficulty is at least somewhat of an indicator of demand for bitcoins (because miners do not sell everything they mine).  However, there are plenty of other factors affecting difficulty (ie. graphics card supply as mentioned) that would confound such a simple analysis as "difficulty going down is an indication of demand for bitcoin is going down."  I would also suspect that infrastructure available to people for mining could also be constraining growth (I live on the hairy edge of tripped circuit breakers myself).  It's summer on the northern hemisphere (where most miners are located), so cooling becomes a bigger problem.  And, it's entirely possible that people could conclude that they are better off investing in bitcoins directly or that investing in bitcoin related business is more profitable than mining, but their interest in bitcoin is unaffected.  

All of this means that while I think difficulty partially reflects bitcoin demand, making predictions about the future value of bitcoins based on mining difficulty is problematic.  It's more likely that the temporary leveling off in price at around $8-$9 caused a slight moderation in difficulty growth with a bit of time lag...I wouldn't be surprised if this recent run up to $18 triggers another wave of difficulty growth (assuming people can obtain graphics cards).  

Oh no!  Don't tell me people are hoarding graphics cards now...that'll send the graphics card economy into a deflationary death spiral straight to hell. 

I talk about bitcoin a lot in my circle of friends...I do it not because I want to convince them to use bitcoins (although that would be great), but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable propaganda against bitcoin that the banksters and their politicians will spread.  This was only a matter of time and everyone should have expected it, but people armed with the truth won't be so convinced by such propaganda.  I suggest people do likewise with their friends...the more people that know someone that is using bitcoins for honest and legal trade, the less likely it is that bitcoin will suffer at the hands of politicians (of course, in the long run, I believe bitcoin survives regardless...it's just 5 or 10 years of hassle I'd like to avoid so that we can get on with inventing the future).

Just to clarify...the poll is specifically about their US based bank account(s).  They have other banks accounts from what I understand.  Also, I do believe their servers are located in TX at the moment.  I think you are correct that such a problem would quickly get routed around (there are already other fully operational exchanges and mtgox itself is pretty international and I'm sure could adapt if something like this occurs).

Yeah, because a virtual currency backed by a single company worked so well for egold, digicash, flooz, beenz, cybercash, cybermoola, packetpass, and probably a few others I can't recall.  We already have a virtual currency backed by a single company, they're called dollars.