Not really.  I don't hold out much hope for a response when I do an 'interesting and thought-provoking' post.  Not on bitcointalk.org at least.  Sometimes I do when I make a particularly egregious troll post though.

If Mr. Dotcom took an interest in Bitcoin I highly doubt that he'd be stupid enough to say anything about it.

Were I anyone with money and wished to take a decent BTC position, I'd outsource the effort to traders who knew what they were doing.  The steady increase in BTC prices tells _me_ that money is flowing into the economy at a rate which is approaching non-trivial.  The smartest way for people with some bucks to get in would be to combine forces behind a single trading specialist who could manage the accumulation over time.  Several relatively big players could really damage one another and it would end up being a net negative for all of them.

If I cannot evaluate things to my satisfaction before I pull out my private key, the private key will remain in it's protected sheath.  Just sayin'.  If I hear back from credible sources that I have a hope of obtaining the control over the device that I want, that may be good enough though.

That's a 'full Linux distro' to me.  (To be fair, I've not played with OpenWRT yet at this point.)

edit: quotes

I'm definitely not trying to argue that appropriate burn-in could not be done without using the primary net.  Just that it is (in my opinion) pointless.  And even counter-productive.

For an 'open source' project, Avalon is disappointingly light on details on the avalon-asic.com site, but as I understand things, the devices have at least the capability of being stand-alone units.  That means they have probably a full linux distro*.  All kinds of real-world testing would be appropriate, and specifically hooking up to various pools, solo mining of some for perhaps, etc, since that is what a customer would wish to do. (Though actually to be fair, most of this kind of stuff only needs to happen for a random sample.  If that.)  But generally speaking, it becomes increasingly difficult to emulate real world conditions when things start to become complex.

(*) This reported design is a giant selling point to me.  If I can shit-can the base image and build my own, I very well may pay Avalon some money for some hardware at some point.

---

While I am at it here on this thread, here's a feature request for subsequent generations of gear.

I would like to see some technology (like TPM or some such) which would allow me to make the barrier to entry for unauthorized use high.  The use-case is that I would want to run units remotely and have them be under the care of non-fully-trusted parties.  By making the units as useless as possible to folks other than myself I would hope to encourage the minders to leave them alone (rather than to steal them.)

Bitcoin itself is still 'experimental'.  I see twanging on the mining effort rates as a good thing.  Any data it adds to the body of knowledge about the behavior of the system is great with me.

I do remember Avalon's statements and thought they were stupid at the time.  It counted as a _negative_ toward their credibility in my mind.

BFL never had any credibility to damage as far as I am concerned.

Be strong ~becoin.  Remember, "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing!"

---  </mirthful sarcasm>

Actually, it probably is the case that it is worthwhile to bring potential scams to the attention of the various justice systems (while we are lucky enough to have them.)  Like ~BitcoinNV with BFL as a target of opportunity when he was persuing the ~pirateat40 scam.  Not that it will result in much, but the authorities probably take a few minutes to key some data into their databases at least, and these will come up as a hit if/when the next person makes a complaint.

lol.  literally.

<derail>


From the point of view of probabilities, it seems almost inconceivable to me that humans represent the pinnacle of life in the entire universe.  We send out intense beacons looking for other 'folks', so it also seems likely that some of the (presumed) others would be doing the same.  One of the bigger mysteries to me is why we've not detected any such beacons yet.

There are a number of hypothesis I can think of to explain this mystery.  One of the more interesting ones is that certain life forms have become advanced enough to be able to manipulate or isolate areas in geographical space from electromagnetic artifacts.  When a civilization is in a primitive state (defined by still being war-like torturing assholes) but is starting to get a handle on certain technologies like (radio-astronomy and number crunching) they are isolated for general 'humanitarian' (sic) reasons.

</derail>

Like I said, if the vendor wanted to they could discount the unit on the basis of any money generated during the burn-in period.  There is a total amount of money theoretically possible to earn during a few days, and it is not a huge amount.  Just does not seem like a big deal to me. 

As for damage to the Bitcoin network generally, what could it possibly do that is not going to be done several days later when customers receive their units anyway...assuming the units work?

Anyway, there is every bit as much reason to burn in the first generation of ASIC chips and PCBs as there is to test a car coming off the assembly line.  Again, I would almost demand that the vendor do this as one of the tasks I am paying them for (or would be if I were a customer.)

As I understand things, the theory goes that they would jack up the difficulty and burn their customers (who are chomping at the bit to do the same thing.)  And/or damage Bitcoin generally by some non-nondescript means.  Neither has ever made much sense to me.

If I were buying early ASIC, I'd specifically request that my units were burnt in for at least a week ON the Bitcoin network.  If they wanted to be good guys they are welcome to split any profits with me, but I wouldn't request it.

The whole 'we will not mine' thing seems like one of those unimportant things which get moderately ignorant people all worked up and which vendors/scammers/re-sellers/whatever just throw up their hands over and state silly (but mostly harmless) policies because of just for PR reasons.

Perhaps you should consider why that may be.  I mean, when FUD comes fairly effortlessly it seems an indicator that there is plenty to be fearful, uncertain, and doubtful about.

I kinda remembered ~cablepair being something of a dick a long time ago before he became mister salt-of-the-earth in running his 'business'.  The benefit of having been around for a while I guess.  Not that it mattered much because I never was even close to buying any ASIC from anyone until I see one working and working well.  Even then, if I buy any 1st generation stuff it'll be because the next gen made it a bargin.

Day is done and I'm relaxing here at home.  Here you be:

 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51512.0

 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81939.0

One person who is probably not full of shit is Vladmir.  He was, iirc, one of the earliest to have voiced some efforts in the ASIC direction.  I have not heard a peep from him on this for some time.

A while ago I theorized that perhaps he became aware of the scammy intent of certain of the ASIC related efforts and that is what made him bail.  One way or another, I would listen to what he might have to say about the various barriers to entry and that sort of thing.

I guess I would say 'so what' if people did multiple pre-orders from the same addy?  For one, the address is public so if the merchant decided to give a shit he might be able to detect doubled-up pre-orders, but why should he care, for one, and more importantly...

The idea would be that the merchant only honors the queue position from the documented address.  If that gets spent it automatically drops out of the queue and the next guy in line gets his chance.

If merchants start using such a mechanism (which I doubt since pre-orders generally are a bit corner-case) it is unlikely that two merchants would have exactly the same notional value for a pre-ordered item, and if they did, they could avoid a collision...unless one of them wanted a collision for some reason I suppose...

---

An interesting artifact would be that being #500 in a queue of 300 ASIC chips (for instance) still gives one a decent chance of getting the item anyway.

An interesting fallout from the above in monetary science terms would be that a fair amount of money could be tied up in queues and not used in circulation.  Most mainstream economists would think this is not such a great thing.  I'm not so sure.  In any event, again, pre-orders are likely to be an unusual thing generally.

But as you allude to in your post, the general idea could probably be used for similar sorts of problems with a bit of scripting and perhaps a tool provided by someone for managing such a thing.

That's it.  ~crazyates has GOT to be some form of troll.  Nobody could possible have not seen that one coming.

That is another completely valid hypothesis.  Only time will tell if either one, or neither, ends up being right.

In the mean time, we (or to speak only for myself, I) just keep stacking up verifiable observations against the remaining hypotheses which are yet to be invalidated.

I thought we agreed to dis-agree?  But since we are here...

If you expect scammers to be irrational, illogical, or stupid, I anticipate that you'll find yourself scammed repeatedly.  There are a lot of adjectives with negative connotations which one may use to describe the typical scammer but these three are not among them.

Several minutes of efforts with the forum search function didn't produce any results.  If/when bitcointalk.org publishes database dumps I'll put more effort into such things.

I've seen nothing solid which invalidates the hypothesis that BFL is 100% scam.  At this point I lean to this hypothesis as the one which explains the most observations, and makes the most sense operationally.

By 'operationally', I mean that core perps knew that they had little hope of pulling off a real device, the logical path would be 100 % con job.  Dumping a bunch of money into some hail-Mary chip fab efforts is just not a rational way to go.