Here is a simplified analogy with dice which should highlight the problems with you proposed attacks.  I drop all the complexities concerning fees, the market rate, hardware, difficulty changes, orphans/stales, or different pool reward structures (I use the simple and popular "pay-per-share" method here)

(Real) Mining:
You have a 20-sided-die (a d20).  You roll the die on a table.  If you roll a 1 you win a dollar.  If you roll anything else you win nothing.  You keep rolling the die and claim as many dollars as you can.

Pool mining:
You and two friends sit at the table with a pool operator (boss).  The boss gives you each a d20 and you all start rolling your dice.  Whenever one of you rolls a 4 or less, you show the boss and he gives you 25 cents.  If someone rolls a 1, the boss wins a dollar (the boss is mining as above).

When you are rolling your die for the boss you are doing work but you are not making any progress towards rolling a 1.  A roll of 2, 3, or 4, is worth precisely nothing as far as real mining is concerned: the boss takes these rolls as an indication of how hard you are working for him.

Extra detail:
The boss has a blue wallet.  You have a red wallet and your friends have green and yellow wallets respectively.  The boss gives you all blue d20s to roll.  When you roll a 1 the boss wins the dollar because of the colour.  If you want to win the dollar for yourself you must roll a red d20 but then the boss won't give you 25 cents for rolling a 4 or less.

I expect those that like binary for the bits&bytes parallel would use the satoshi as their base unit for it's indivisability; bits cannot be truly subdivided.  After all 1 bitcoin is nothing more that 100 million satoshi, an amount selected to give users a more intuitively appealing base unit.  Indeed, amounts stored in the blockchain are stored as integers with 1 being 0.00000001 BTC = 1 satoshi.

The current rate is 1.384 USD / MiSAT, or 0.7225 MiSAT / USD if you prefer.
(where MiSAT ("mebisat") is mebi-satoshi = 1024^2 satoshi)

From [now] to [now + 1 year] my best guess is:

Low: $35
High: $175

That I was.  Alas, my novice attempt contrasts sharply with the 4chan-quality troll posts above.

I think we will reach 1 mBTC = 1 USD and that we'll reach it for the first time in 2015.  I expect we'll be trading at between 50 and 80 USD/BTC at the end of the year.  This is all based on a long-term, support line I perceive in long-term log("market cap") charts such as:
https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=1&address=

Sorry for the earlier troll post: I saw fun and wanted to partake.

Incidentally, I consider 1 BTC = sqrt(1000) USD = 31.6 USD (3.s.f) to be the mid-point between BTC-USD parity and mBTC-USD parity.

These days I give all my prices in mBTC (giving the BTC equivalent in parentheses for those unfamiliar with the notation).

1 mBTC = 1 milibitcoin = .0001 bitcoins

Note there are three 0s, the metric system goes in threes.  I can't believe how dumb most people are at this!

1 mBTC is about $0.13 now.  I'll change to mBTC when were half way, when ($1000 - $1)/2 = $499.

rdBvkTpHYwrdKveWY2ppZHUzvJTejwBcY

I've tried to use mBTC as the basic unit since around July 2012.  I prefer working with whole numbers to fractions, even if those numbers are in the thousands.

To members of the community, I certainly recommend changing now, especially since the US dollar is closer in relative value to the mBTC than the BTC (true roughly since the exchange rate eclipsed the 2011 high).  At the current rate of 70 USD/BTC, I say preference for BTC over mBTC indicates pig-headed inertia or market bearishness that would make proudhon blush.

I personally like writing 'mil' as an informal suffix (just as it is for millilitres; likening Bitcoin to a liquid highlights its divisibility).  However, I would not recommend anything other than mBTC and uBTC for official/introductory purposes.

I have a significant student loan with an interest rate of 1.5%.  However, the fiat this debt is tied to is losing purchasing power at far greater than 1.5% per year and seems likely to continue doing so.  In short, my debt is shrinking with time in real terms.

Also, my bitcoins are appreciating (year by year) and that seems very unlikely to change anytime soon.

So why should I clear my fiat debt with Bitcoin credit?

Also, what qualifies as an early adopter these days?  Is there some date/rate cut-off or something more vague?  Given that such a definition is very much by community consensus it may make for an interesting poll (I'd say "informative poll" were this not an oxymoron).

80 mil sent.


I'm pleasantly surprised by the open-minded response.  I have little experience with programming so cannot say how hard this would be to do.  Right now, it seems that the page refreshes temporarily so I think smooth rotation would take more work than its worth.  The angle of the second hand would be:
where 1 represents a full turn (I made a silly mistake in my previous description, 7/8 should be 30 mins).  I guess the most difficult part would be with getting sane values for time_since_last_block (which should always be non-negative) and average_time_per_block (although 10 min is a good enough approximation).

Anyway, consider this a friendly suggestion and notes for the future should you find the time and interest to give this a go.

And thanks Ente for the support

Nice work.  May I send a tip?

I must admit I've never liked the second hand.  Each cycle of the hour and minute hands mark a Bitcoin event but a cycle of the second hand only represents an approximation to 24 hours.

I would have a cycle of the second hand represent the addition of a single block.  Of course, the classic notion of angle symbolising "progress" toward an event would have to be weakened.  I submit the most natural mechanic would be to measure time since the last block, with 10 minutes represented by a half turn, 20 mins by 3/4, 40 mins by 7/8, et cetera.  The second hand could then move smoothly.  Another consequence is that the position of the second hand at a random time would be uniform, just as with a normal clock.  Bonus points for having a more accurate expected block frequency than 10 minutes.

I'm certain the idea of cycles of the second hand representing block creations has been raised before.  I can't think of a more elegant way of graphically representing the exotic nature of block-chain activity in a clock than with a smooth and gradually slowing second hand.

Finished, phew!

Adding to DannyHamilton's datapoint:

Processing equiptment: One 32-bit, single core, 900 MHz CPU (bitcoin-qt limited to 50% to avoid overheating, my CPU fan is broken).
Re-indexing time: 55 hours

This should be no real problem for even somewhat dated desktops and laptops but I'd advise those attempting the upgrade on ancient/exotic hardware to prepare themselves.  I've been writing down transactions I wanted to make while waiting for my client to sync.

Anyway, I now have one almost-24-7 node in Asia with a reasonable connection (at least 10 Mb/s upload).  Hope it helps!

Ok.  I'll just leave it running overnight and see where it gets to.  I may be late to the party but a 24/7 node based in Asia should be worth something.

I backed up my wallet, shutdown my node (without detaching the database), installed the pre-built Linux binary, and fired it up.

Unlike previous upgrades, the node automatically started "Reindexing blocks on disk".  I assume this is to be expected.  Will my node be helpful to others before the scan is complete?  It looks like the scan will take a long time to complete.

My thanks to everyone that made this new release possible.

Ah good.  I was prepared to grill you for details on the 1080 MHz setup, but with no desktop generating noise and distraction like a 3-year-old on holiday, it's a plausible rate for a good card given the overvolt.

As for the desktop card: running two differently demanding tasks stably, 24/7, with a serious overclock is already a considerable achievement.  Doing this with a mild undervolt?... .  She's a gem; long may she live.

For the record.  My rate of 461.1 MH/s was also set with air cooling.  I went as far as replacing the standard fans with some decent custom ones but no liquid was involved.

king_pin:  Hash rate aside, 1080 MHz at only 1.174V is impressive! (damned impressive if I'm correctly gathering that this card is simultaneously driving the desktop).  How stable is that?  The big advantage I had over many other miners was having no GUI (my screenshots are just ssh sessions in terminals on another machine) and I bet my good card would have struggled to do that if at all.

Honestly, I was uncomfortable taking my card beyond 1.15 V but decided to try it briefly for the purposes of setting records and learning more about my cards.  I eventually set my card to 0.9875V, 890 MHz core, 300 MHz RAM, which was giving me 373.1 MH/s, and got more involved with pools (about a month before Namecoin merged mining came out).  I preferred this as it was much kinder to my cards and was more profitable (with my second card set a little slower my rig drew 300W at the wall, so 2.43 MH/J).  I never had a crash with these settings.

I guess there have been some improvements over the last few months, based on king_pin breaking gellimac's old 434.4 MH/s record with relative ease.

I'm curious:

• How far can you take your card king_pin?
• Has anyone beaten my personal best of 461.1 MH/s?
• What's the current record?

Wow!  I'm tempted back to the mining hardware forum for the first time in 6 months by the news of the first ASIC system and find someone has revived one of the threads I was most active in.

I have nothing relevant to add to the content of this thread anymore (I sold all my mining hardware late last year and bought at ton of BTC with the proceeds) but wish you all luck with record breaking attempts.

I'd love to help but the site appears to be broken.  I can't get past the index page.  I'll try again in a few days.

Does anyone have a reasonable estimation for how many sites accept Bitcoin but which are not on the list?  I've known about goshrine.com for a while but recently have been running into other examples such as f-droid.org, brainworkshop.sourceforge.net, and thepythongamebook.com.

Is there a separate list for sites using Bitcoin for donations?