I got AMDOverdriveCtrl to run on Ubuntu, but it doesn't seem to work (mem clocks still won't go below the limits shown in aticonfig).

I would suggest you re-evaluate your return by calculating your revenue as if you sold every bitcoin you mined as soon as you mined it, because that is your true revenue from mining.  Any bitcoins that you keep, the profit you experience from appreciation is from your speculation in bitcoins, not mining (because you could have bought those bitcoins on the open market instead of from a mining operation).  If you're not doing the accounting for your mining business this way, I'd say you're not doing it correctly.  I've been mining since early March and have around 20x the mining power you do.  My hardware is not yet fully covered (though if I account for the resale value of my hardware I am profitable)...I have generated around a 20% profit from mining in that time frame, but my bitcoin speculation (bitcoins I either buy or keep from my mining output) has returned about 450% in that same time frame.

The US tried very hard to suppress PGP.  It was only after it realized that a) there was no putting the genie back in the bottle, and b) the rest of the world was starting to innovate around cryptography that the US finally dropped its restrictions.  Had they continued to try and resist, much of the R&D would have simply left the US (and in fact, I think much did and the damage that the PGP battle did to innovation in the US is still being felt).

This is ignorant and offensive.  First, many of the early adopters were instrumental in actually building the system.  And, now, due to the appreciation of bitcoin, I imagine some are afforded the opportunity to quit their day jobs and work entirely on the bitcoin infrastructure.  Second, someone putting money into bitcoins early on is not someone getting something for nothing.  They had to trade something to acquire those bitcoins.  And I imagine they had to work in some capacity to obtain whatever it was that they traded for bitcoins.  That is wealth that they chose to put into bitcoins that they could have otherwise used to by food or the latest iGadget.  They were taking a risk that they might lose every bit of wealth they invested.

Also, as for 10%, well, for that to be a significant amount, you would have to believe that bitcoins are going to replace most other currencies...I think that is simply unrealistic (at least not anytime soon).  There are already competing alternatives (including existing national currencies) and there will likely be more.

I would encourage you to start a competing currency...if people agree with your sense of fairness, they might invest...especially if you offer a very large potential appreciation to early investors. 

The solution I have in mind avoids putting the bitcoin keys on the card directly.  The only thing on the card is a private key unique to the card that is used to decrypt bitcoin keys.  If the card was stolen, a person would need to have the encrypted bitcoin private keys delivered to the smartcard (ie. from some online service).  The bitcoin private keys would be encrypted with the public key matching a private key stored on the card.  The encrypted keys would not be permanently stored on the card itself...they would only be temporarily transferred to the card for the purpose of generating and signing a transaction and be discarded once that was completed.  The service would maintain a list of cards that could be used to sign bitcoin transactions and it would keep a copy of your private keys encrypted for each of those cards.  If you lost possession of the card, you could momentarily block the transmission of those encrypted keys.  If you did not recover the card, you could destroy the encrypted keys for that card permanently.  It also has the added convenience that one card could be used for signing transactions for multiple wallets with each wallet being able to independently revoke access as needed (without requiring the physical removal of any stored data on the card).

I think physical bitcoins is a silly idea ...but it keeps coming up over and over.  There are already plenty of options for physical money...fiat notes, fiat currencies as well as gold and silver coins.  Smartphones with net access are rapidly becoming ubiquitous, so the need for a physical manifestation of a currency in order to exchange is rapidly diminishing.  And for bitcoins, it's even worse than fiat bills...the opportunity for counterfeiting physical manifestations of bitcoins where network access is unavailable is quite large...and if you have network access, then you really don't have a need for a physical manifestation of bitcoins.  On the contrary, it's far more difficult to counterfeit national currencies or gold or silver.  I would never trust a card with an amount of bitcoins printed on its face without being able to connect to the network and complete the transfer into my wallet.  I would far prefer cash or precious metals in that circumstance.

Now, a problem that might be useful to solve is the scenario where one person involved in a transaction does not carry a connected device.  A smart USB key or a smart card that could be used for decrypting private keys and signing transactions would be useful (taking great care that the unencrypted private keys never leave the card).  A pin code would be required to activate the software on the card.  And, using asymmetric crypto you could probably even do this in such a way that if you ever lost physical possession of the card, you could easily revoke the ability for that card to access your private bitcoin keys (even if someone key-logged your pin code on a terminal of some sort).  One open question would be how to prevent malicious software running on a terminal from surreptitiously telling the card to create other transactions than the one you intend to create.  The only way I can imagine doing that is by creating some kind of well known and highly tamper resistance device designed to do nothing more than let you enter your pin code and confirm spend transactions (I imagine something like a smartphone with a touch screen, but branded and well known to be tamper resistant)..this device could then connect to a variety of other devices (either wired or wirelessly) that do the more complex job of connecting to the bitcoin network, etc.

Of course, the more likely scenario is that we continue to use cards very similar to what is used today, the only difference being that they are connected to accounts backed with bitcoins instead of fiat currency.  It would be up to the issuer to design a scheme that keeps access to your account secure (something like what I describe above could just as well be used for accessing an account).  Imagine mtgox offering a debit card that, when used, would draw on your balance of national currency and once exhausted, would then automatically initiate market sell orders to raise the needed national currency for a transaction.  If you do not have enough bitcoins or there are not enough open bids to generate the needed currency, the transaction would be denied.

I like XBC.  But I also wouldn't mind just staying with BTC and just changing the decimal place.  I would even say do it now while the use of BTC is relatively small.  It could even generate a bit of press saying bitcoins became so valuable the needed to split. 

Nice spreadsheet...yours is projecting forward, whereas mine is looking at actual returns.  The key point I was trying to make was that mining profitability should always be calculated based on selling 100% of everything you generate.  If you include holding some of those bitcoins for some period of time, it's bogus when evaluating mining profitability.  That's because you could just forgo the mining and buy the bitcoins you would have mined each day.

As for the price moves in the future, who knows.  It's easy to imagine catalysts that will continue to propel the price higher...it's also easy to imagine events that could severely impair the price.

I wanted to better track the profitability of my mining and bitcoin investment operations, so I started to think a bit about how best to do that.  I decided that I needed to clearly separate the mining business from speculation in the appreciation of bitcoins.  The approach I took was to calculate the revenue to the mining operation as if I sold every bitcoin generated as it was generated (I did it on a daily basis).  So, if my miners generate 1 bitcoin on a particular day and the closing price that day was $5, I would book $5 of revenue for the mining operation.  That revenue comes from the bitcoin investment operation buying bitcoins from the mining operation at the market price each day (after all, if I weren't generating bitcoins, the investment operation could have bought them on the open market for that price).

Separating things like this has been quite illuminating...if I include the estimated resale value of my hardware in the assets of the mining operation, I'm right around a 21% return (over ~3 mon).  If I don't include the resale value, I'm still not yet profitable.  The investment operation however has returned about 413% over that same period of time!  But, it gets better...

I then took a look at what kind of return I would have had if I'd invested all of the money I put into mining equipment in bitcoins.  The dollar cost average of bitcoins that I've purchased (including those purchased from my mining operation) over the past 3 months is $2.11.  Using that price (which is more realistic than if I'd picked the price when I started in Feb (which was less than $1)), if I'd forgone mining and just invested all of that capital into bitcoins directly, my return would be identical in percentage terms, but I would have a 3.3x greater absolute profit.

I feel like this is a good way to analyze a mining operation vs price speculation.  If you hold the bitcoins you generate, then any gains you realize from that point forward have nothing to do with mining (because as I mentioned above, you could have simply bought those coins on the open market).  There is less risk in mining (due to hardware resale), but to date, far smaller returns.  I wonder if most people aren't doing this kind of analysis and are conflating their returns from mining with their returns from price speculation (which may lead to sub-optimal poor decisions regarding mining vs buying).

One of the things that 20% of bitcoins could be used for is to help dampen the price swings.  You wouldn't want to try and control the long term trajectory of bitcoin prices (the 20% would rapidly become 0% if you tried that), but you could smooth out a lot of the volatility.  You could make it trying and hug the 30 day moving average for example (while also adjusting for significant events that cause a radical and permanent departure from the moving average).

In any case, the points you are contemplating are a legitimate concern and something everyone should consider IMO.  That is a large percentage of bitcoins and is a significant concentration of power (within the bitcoin economy and if things go well for bitcoin, a large amount of power in an absolute sense).  And I think large concentrations of power are a thing that many here seek to avoid by using bitcoins.  So, people should certainly factor this into their assessment of the value of bitcoins (just as you are doing).

Yes, I had actually implemented them myself before I saw booo's patch (I really should be paying closer attention to the issues on github).  However, I did notice this statement about testnet from the wiki:

    "A different value of ADDRESSVERSION field ensures no testnet BitCoin addresses will work on the production network. (0x6F rather than 0x00)"

I didn't find anywhere in booo's changes where this was accounted for (maybe I missed it).

Nice!  I'm interested to know if you can manage to get all 6 running from one mobo.  If you can close off the case (with slots for the PCIe wiring) and arrange the extra PSUs a bit better (so everything is blowing hot air in the same direction), you could pretty easily get all air flowing from front to rear and make a little home made setup to vent all the hot air away.  Did you do anything special such that all those cards aren't drawing power from the PCIe bus?

You should run the numbers...get one of those Kill-A-Watt devices...measure the normal power draw and the draw when mining.  Then calculate your overall hash rate and the amount of coins you would generate.  Using the exchange rate and the price of the additional electricity usage, you should be able to calculate whether it will cost you more in electricity than the value of the bitcoins you'll generate.  If your objective is to acquire bitcoins and the electricity costs more than the value of what you generate, then just buy the bitcoins.  OTOH, if you come out ahead, then generate them and re-evaluate that equation as the exchange rate and difficulty fluctuate.

You could have just described this as an over-under bet at a difficulty of 430,000 with black8 taking the under and CydeWeys taking the over.

Adding to this, an important property of secure hashes is that it's very difficult (nearly impossible) to derive the data that produced the hash from the hash (or to find other data that produces the same hash...a collision).  In this simple example it is trivial to find sets of numbers that sum to 14.  Also, due to the high improbability of finding a collision, one can use a hash to verify content (i.e. if you ask someone for the data corresponding with hash "14", and they delivered 1337, you can be confident that 1337 is in fact the correct data...of course, with this trivial example, you can't because collisions are plentiful...so you can't really be sure in this example that 1337 is the correct data or if it's really 95 or 1733 or something else that would sum up to 14).

This is not correct.  You have to remember that the chain with the highest difficulty is the one that the network accepts.  If you control >50% of the mining power, you do not have to build on anyone else blocks, you only have to build on top of the ones you produce.  Over time, your chain pull away from the chain that the rest of the network is producing and your chain will be *the* bitcoin chain.  This attack would afford you the opportunity to double spend, or block transactions that spend out of certain accounts, or block transactions altogether...and probably many other kinds of mischief.

Here's how I look at it.  Difficulty (or mining activity) follows price (that's been well discussed many times in the past).  But difficulty does give you a sense of how many people are interested in (demand) bitcoins.  A lot of miners are mining with the objective to accumulate bitcoins and not simply sell them and take profit.  Such people represent a portion of overall demand for bitcoins.  So as difficulty rises, you could conclude that the interest (and hence demand) for bitcoins is rising.  If everyone mining was selling everything they mined, then difficulty would not be a good indicator of demand for bitcoins.

No, I'm just not in a good habit of checking there.  

I also see one open on the download getting stuck (https://github.com/bitcoinjs/node-bitcoin-p2p/issues/13).  I'm new to node.js, so I haven't been too certain which issues might be due to my noobness, and which are legitimate bugs.

I can probably get to the bottom of most of these bugs myself, however the one impacting the use of the test net (where it reports a gibberish error coming back from the creation of the block locator) is probably going to be more difficult (I'm guessing it's an issue in your fork of mongoose...and perhaps in the native code).  Let me know if you have any ideas or tips where to look for a fix for that one.  I'd really like to be able to use testnet (I know you don't think too highly of it, but losing even a few real bitcoins isn't appealing).

Btw, I've found the cloud9 IDE and node-inspector (for debugging) to be nice tools.  I wonder if anyone else has any good tools the know of that I should be using.

I get this quite frequently (during block download in particular):

   Error: Socket is not writable

The p2p client dies (well, in this case I'm running the exit node, but it's dying in writing a message to a connection in the p2p code).  Do others get this?  I haven't investigated it much, but I'm guessing it's normal network interruptions and that a bit of exception handling to catch and recover (or just discard that connection) is needed and would fix the issue.

Also, after downloading a 50 or 60 thousand blocks, the block download seems to stall out.  Is that due to some throttling by peers or something?  Or is this a bug?

When running node-bitcoin-exit, I'm getting a lot of this kinds of errors:
22 May 20:47:38 - error: Error while creating block locator: �3�����M�.�ڣ]   ����2x

I've not yet managed to successfully debug what's happening, but wonder if it's affecting others.  I've got things setup to run on the testnet, so I wonder if that might have something to do with it.