I see what you mean, but it seems to make little sense.  You seem to be saying that it is only valid to state an opinion and viewpoint which expected to be that of others.

I am a member of the community, have strong opinions about what would be in the interest of Bitcoin and distributed crypto-currencies generally, and have relatively good resources and interest to act on these opinions.  Generally I want what I think is in the best interest of the ecosystem, and I assume that many other participants are of a similar mindset.

You may if you like, for the purposes of this thread, consider my voice as an member of the community stating what _I_ want.

It would be a legitimate complaint that I am not a member of the mining community.  Until now I have felt that it was boring and made less sense from an investment perspective then to simply buy BTC and sit on them.  Mining is just starting to be becoming very interesting to me (which I had not expected to happen for another 18 months or so.)

The bolded is a good point.  I did say 'strongly favor' to allow for some shifting.  It's a giant and expensive pain in the ass to shift reserve assets around and so far it has not been worth it in spite of the gain in confidence that several more years of Bitcoin has produced.  At some point it probably will for me.

It is also worth noting again that my posture about wealth storages is strongly influenced by things which have not yet transpired.  And with a lot of luck, never will in my lifetime.  These would be major upheavals and it is difficult to predict how they would impact the infrastructure upon which Bitcoin relies.

Relatedly, the evolution of Bitcoin itself and the nature of it's reliance on the network infrastructure which rides are currently big question marks.  As are the questions about proliferation (or not) of alternate similar solutions.

Distributed cryto-currencies will always have more complexity and hence more risk than a chunk of metal.  I rely on PM's not to grow but rather to simply act as a storage tank which does not leak to much.  My Bitcoin footprint is still on the highly speculative end of the scale and if it does not grow significantly it will not live up to my hopes.  I expect it to take a lot more tending to however.

Wood is not a factor.

Solar-electric is hardly uncommon though, nor is it a technology which is inaccessible to large swaths of the world's population on a geographical basis.  It is a bit uncommon to have a big enough installation to have it be practical to sell back to the grid leaving large numbers of people with the question mark about what to do with the excess electro-motive potential in times of excess.

Certain areas do have excess energy like Vietnam and small scale hydro.  Crypto-currency mining will never be profitable enough to justify installing generation potential I don't think, but it well could pay net profits over the cost of extra wear and tear on existing setups.

One thing I suspect is not high on the propriety lists of the world populations are for datacenter-sequestered mining operators to get rich mining with state-of-the-art hashing fabs.  Time will tell though.

BTW, it may or may not have occurred to some readers that a large organization could raise more money to be earmarked toward the design and fab low-nm chips by dropping one company picnic than a 'rich community benefactor' could likely achieve.  If/when they enter the game most of those who dream of being 'captains of industry' in the new economy will be swept away like a little bit of dandruff.

bitcointalk.org would also be my first stop for credible information about BFL.  Compared to the to other outlets you enumerated at least.  So it's hard to hold it against ~poobah for dropping by

We're just trying to lend a brother a hand here Poob.  Some have been at it for almost a year now and have probably saved many thankful souls who've been happily and profitably hashing away rather than sitting around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for vaporware as the rest of the economy moves forward.

It's going to be a whole new world if/when those 500,000 110nm Avalons chips hit.  Not to mention whatever 130nm chips Bitfountain might scatter among the masses.  And who knows what other chips have been in the pipeline?  You can either sit around pouting, or cut your losses and join the winners who will be playing fast and hard in the real world.  Your choice.

I live in the Western US.  Hydro-electric is common which brings prices down.  At the end of the day, a lot of people use electricty to heat a lot of things, at least where I live and that's not likely to change.

A neighbor of mine is lucky enough to have a waterfall and has set up a hydro system.  (Got it from Vietnam where they are in common use.)  It's just kind of a hobby system and he just has some baseboard heaters simply for the purpose of doing something with the electricity even though he, like most of us, primarily use firewood for space heat.  (I've got a home both in the country and in town.)

Any solar-electric systems are probably going to have periods of time when they are producing an excess of usable electricity.  I guess it can be sold back to the grid, but I'd personally just as soon mine Bitcoin...and ideally get some water heated up for later use at the same time if possible.

Many people feel that fossil fuels will become less and less desirable going forward.  For various reason.  Until there is a 'hydrogen grid', using electricity to transfer energy around is probably not going anywhere.  And again, if there are places to insert a hashing device into the system 'for free', devices which are designed for that will, hopefully, appear.

I'm not sure where you live, but in the US it is pretty common to use electricity to heat things.  In fact my house is well above outside air temp due to electric heaters as I sit here today.  And my coffee is warm for the same reason.

You are free to disagree of course.  I don't have a crystal ball, so we'll just have to wait and see on this one.

I will say that I just vastly overpaid for a Block Erupter and would do the same for any other devices which had the potential to distribute hashing power widely since I feel that the 'peer2peer' nature of distributed crypto-currency solutions is what gives them their strength.

Bitcoin did not change my thoughts on PM's or wealth or value one iota.  Bitcoin is just another entry in a certain class of vehicles, albeit a fascinating one with some neat features.  I made up my mind quite early in my interest in Bitcoin about where I wanted to set my wealth percentages and has not changed since.  (My posture strongly favors physical PM's and probably always will.)

Obviously Bitcoin has vastly outperformed PM's at the time of this writing.  I am, of course, delighted, and I'll be even more delighted if that remains the case which is very possible.  But I'm not going to think I'll roll snake-eyes, then do so, then take a victory lap about it.  I anticipated a number of possible scenarios for my BTC holding in two years form the time I set them.  We are sitting at one of them.  Things could be both much much better than we see today, or they could be zero'd due to a system failure or other causes.

My speculation in Bitcoin actually has to do more with the impacts of things which have not happened yet...to me because I live in the US and not in Cyprus...  I'll be a lot more interested in what the landscape looks like after such an event rather than during this dead-space period we are in now.

It's associated with Wirth's law.  With permutations such as "Gate's law":

  "The speed of software halves every 18 months."

Now, to be fair, that does not really apply to custom hashing chips.  But the whole goal is to support Bitcoin (or that is the way most people look at it) and Bitcoin as a system displays such behavior in a big way due to the persistent nature of the baggage it needs to pack around.

Water boils at 100 centigrade at sea level pressures.  It's not commonly used to cool chips for fairly obvious reasons associated with how most chips are used, but it has one of the highest specific heats around and is super common for cooling many other things because it is really good in that capacity.  I doubt that it would be technically all that challenging to develop or produce a packaging form factor which employed water cooling if gathering the waste heat was an actual goal.

For something like a water pot one would need to be producing only as much thermal waste as is needed to account for insulation loss.  Most devices would be built with traditional heating elements to augment thermal production at higher demand times.

Something like a rice cooker would probably not be cost effective until truly commodity elements were around since one would be at idle to much.  But an American style tank hot water heater, or a swimming pool heater and so on would be really well geared for such a thing.

As for communications, that technology is already quite commodity and wifi systems are getting pretty ubiquius in homes these days.  At least in developed countries.

It just was not clear what the ship was composed of.  And many people may not even notice the background due to how the human brain processes info.

The 'updated lineup' graphic with the 500cm high Jalapeno, and shifted/duplicated other offerings was a work of true genius.  Really hard to compete with that one.  I still laugh about that just thinking of it.

"Lotta power issues with these chip, but you know what?  We're just going to put it together and get it out there to you guys."

"Ya, doing this process, getting this all set up, you know, four per day, five per day, and ah expect to be hitting into the 50's you know in the next couple weeks, ah. ..."

I know this thing is a joke, but it has actually turned out to be amazingly accurate.  BFL should hire this guy to give their company some credibility and to give their 'customers' a decent understanding of what to expect.

  edit: quick fix.

If I wished to give something back to the community, it would not be 'low-nm' mining chips.

I think it would be both cool and effective to have individuals who need heat for one think or another (like a hot water pot or rice cooker) be able to mine and have this class form the backbone of distributed crypto-currency hashing (for those distributed crypto-currencies which use massive hashing as a backing.)

What I would see happening in this case is that people doing mining are not really even thinking much about power.  It is either otherwise wasted, or so small and expense in their personal economics that it is written off.  Large commercial mining operations need to compete against in an areana where they are at a dis-advantage on a major expense.

In that case, it makes more sense to focus on chip packaging designs than on the core fab technology.

Fuckin' TED talks.  Almost universally fascinating.  I have no idea how this talk bore any relationship to this conversation, but it was new to me and very interesting.  I'm usually skeptical of such amazing results.  This guy's thinking is 'orthagonal' but actually should not be.  Ecosystems are so amazingly complex and tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution are such a good tuning fork that it would make sense to look to pre-history to find solutions which work.

Don't forget the giant pile of 'pre-order' funds.

Such a thing is vastly to nuanced for a fair fraction of this board.  Trust me.

Gee...ya think?
LMAO!

Why?  It would be a totally waste of time and money.  You cannot shame a scammer.  Just the opposite in fact.  They take pride in a job well done, and BFL has done an amazing job.  Victims are seen as nothing more than idiots to be milked.  The only thing which gets their attention is threats to their operation(s), and you saw how Josh flipped out when BitcoinNV mentioned BFL to the DA during the pirateat40 goings-on.

I'm in it for the laughs and lulz at this point.  The graphics about BFL and general comic relief on these threads is very enjoyable.  I must say that this latest graphic with the ship is a bit of a fail though.

BTW, I happened across a priceless youtube vid of Josh explaining the delays tonight.  It's a couple of weeks old at this time, but I didn't see it on any of these threads.  But then I am only a part-time follower of them.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eF6FSdur8k

For such a buy or one like it, I'd like to see some option to just have them sent straight to you to operate as a pool along the same lines as your earlier idea(s).  With a reduction in the cost of overhead of shipping ans what-not of course.

I personally won't be buying any more of these types of until the price comes down.  Probably significantly.  Also, I intend to put a lot of focus on supporting efforts which are as open (and open-source) as possible.  But anyway that is feedback that you might consider.

Lots of people don't like scams and scammers.  For my part, I think it hurts the ecosystem and my stake in it.

I also think it is a lot of fun to see the various comic material that people generate.  I come back to these threads for that more than anything, then sometimes cannot resist making some comment or another.

Thx for the update.  Seem fair and will hurt no-one.  Particularly if you try to ship in rough order of those who put their money on the table.

I would vote that when you get a chance to make the deal with ~friedcat, you just take the existing pot and lock things.  Those who were asleep at the wheel...or just flakey...will just have to suck on it.