BFL = Big Frickin' Lies.

BTC's are a global currency, it is as much "yours" as air molecules.

Having an issue with BFL = trolling...

Actually Forbes is doing a great service for Bitcoins; many of its articles are very positive on Bitcoins, even that blog about living on Bitcoins for a week.

Don't worry, in time, Mr. Forbes will change his tune. You CAN teach a dinosaur a new trick, you just need time.

Develop their own virtual currency? I agree that is likely, but whatever currency the Chinese come up with may only be popular within China, missing that extra bit of global spice that Bitcoin brings.

The sentiment today in China seems to be that Chinese people want to reach out and experience new cultures. They are curious about the world outside of China. If Bitcoin really continues to take off internationally, what better way to potentially experience culture than to use a currency that has no borders?

Yes I agree that these gadgets are not meant to replace the big boys (i.e. ASICs).

But I'm just suggest how better pricing could satisfy both the curious person who wants a couple of these to play around with (for fun), AND the more business-oriented person who wants to a dozen because he/she can't afford the risk in paying/waiting for an Avalon or another comparable $$$$ unit that can't be scaled back (I don't consider the BFL 4.5GH-5GH'er an actual product at this moment).

Paypal might be able to lower its spending on human resources by using the Bitcoin infrastructure and dissolving/shrinking some of its existing departments.

I don't think so. It's very difficult to get into mining today, GPU's are on their last legs, ASIC's are hard to find, and if ASIC's ever becomes readily available, profits from using them will be minimal as the difficulty adjust rapidly.

Like you said, the salary per month for the average Chinese is quite low. If they don't have money to throw away, how are they going to buy the mining gear?

Those who have money to spare (not necessarily tech savvy people) will just buy up some BTC's and play around with them instead of dealing with mining at all. You might have some large hands putting down a lot of money to buy some mining power but relatively few people be in the mining game nonetheless.

I would not buy any BFL product unless its delivery date was guaranteed. In fact, I would pay more out of my own pocket to mine coins through other means, just because I don't like the way BFL handles things and their shady background.

After crunching some numbers, these Erupter sticks are still vastly overpriced.

Let's suppose we order an Avalon B3 @ the listed price of 73BTC's. Let's assume that it gets an average of 60GH/S (60,000MH/S). For one Avalon it would cost about $8,000 USD.

To get 60GH/s out of these mining sticks (300MH/s each), you'd need 200 of these sticks.

If each stick costs $240 USD (assume that 1BTC = $120 USD), you're looking at a price tag of $48,000 USD to have the same hashing power as Avalon.

That's way too expensive. You have to spend 6x the price of an Avalon to get the same hashing power.

If each stick was 1/6 of its current price of 2BTC ($40 USD instead of $240 USD), then the price would be much more competitive.

Should to price come down to near $40 USD/stick, and should these sticks be produced in massive quantity within a reasonable timeframe, I could forsee these sticks being competitive against Avalon.

In fact, if the price per stick was lowered, investing in a bunch of stick miners would be advantageous for someone who is not looking to invest anywhere near Avalon's asking price. Instead of spending 8k, why not test the waters and spend $1,000 to get 6GH?

Avalon doesn't offer this option to scale things down according to one's budget. I believe these sticks would fill the gap for many people out there who don't want to sit for months on an ASIC preorder and don't want to deal with GPU mining at this point. They just need to bring the price down.

Your theory might be true. The central government doesn't really care if BTC rises and, as a result, people start favoring decentralized currencies over government backed fiat; the government already knows that there is already a large portion of their population wise to the problems of central banking. So the philosophy behind Bitcoins is not really a pressing issue for the Chinese government; the people will eventually know about BTC's anyhow.

With that premise out of the way, why wouldn't the Chinese gov. give the go-ahead for the average joe with a bunch of pocket change to play with some BTC's? At the very least, it might mean that a huge portion of BTC users in the future will be from China and neighboring countries (SE Asia, Russia, even Australia/NZ). This would tip things in favor of the East and threaten traditional Western paradigm.

And if things were to go down that path, Western powers might fire in kind by being friendly to BTC's, ensuring that Asia doesn't have a monopoly on virtual currencies. In the end, the people that are holding BTC's today might stand to benefit from all these shifts in power in the coming virtual currency wars.

I agree. Just because it was aired on a big news channel doesn't mean that the government approves of it or is somehow backing it. They can change their tune any time they want, as soon as they feel BTC's as dangerous to their interests.

I think over a period of time, those investors will understand more and more about the fundamental and potential of Bitcoin.

The people in Asia seem naturally ready for Bitcoins because they tend to be more humble; they're studious, have good fundamental understanding in mathematics and hard sciences, very comfortable with the technical aspects of computers and technology, and are willing to try out new things, rather than flat out dismiss them. If this was not the case, you wouldn't have a half hour documentary on Bitcoins (nothing in the Western mainstream media went that in depth in Bitcoins, with that much length)

On that note, just on the basis of pure numbers makes it more likely than not that the next big adoption of Bitcoins will be in China. You have a 30 minute long neutral-to-positive documentary aired to an audience larger than probably the entire population of the US. That's a long period of exposure to a huge number of audience. The content itself covered a lot of areas in the Bitcoin realm, touching on the financial aspect, the mining aspect, the youth culture aspect of BTC's... it's more than just some 2 minute blurb about an ATM (ala Berwick on Fox) or some scandalous hit piece (Silk Road, Gox hacks, etc).

NZ is not intellectual "ready" for Bitcoins (in its current form)... which is probably the case with many countries. Bankers are good with numbers, but not necessarily with computers. So I agree that NZ is going to be behind the game should Bitcoin gain massive traction.

I'm not so much hyped up about any potential price increases (and with that, crashes).

The main thing we should be looking at how this new influx of users can help to create new services, exchanges, and merchants that Bitcoin needs right now.

Imagine if by tomorrow, millions of people in China suddenly hold a respectable amount of Bitcoins for investment, for novelty, for beliefs, and for whatever else. It'd be difficult to expect services and merchants to not pop up right along with it.

I have trouble understanding all this; what's the rationale behind this new patch? What would be the problem of continuing things as they are now?

And if users end up not liking the changes, can they revert back? Can the next client after 0.82 reverse these changes without dividing Bitcoin?

MalwareBytes says there's "PUP" files in the OP's exe.

I think later on in the program they mentioned it fell down to a low of 50 in April. Plus that blurb at the end seems very cautionary. However almost everything up until the final 1 to 2 minutes was very fair to Bitcoins and even pro-Bitcoins at some point (which made up the massive bulk of the show).

I doubt the Chinese government will have any hard enforcement on Bitcoins. They will publicly have a soft discontentment against Bitcoins but it won't result in anything substantial, especially if cryptocurrency can upset Western powers.

And I disagree about restricted access. It is still not too difficult for many people I've spoken to to gain access outside of China's great firewall.

I think people in China, and perhaps people in Asia, are more accepting of risks. They're also very tech savvy, and are ready to learn when something new and adventurous appear on the scene. That alone makes them very ripe for the adoption and innovation of matters in the Bitcoin. So I agree, given the often "it's a scam! It's not physical! I don't want to learn!'" type of attitude you'll find the States, it's only a matter of time before China's usage of BTC's outgrows America's.