I am the wife of Chalidore who commented further up.  I filed a police report with my local police and they suggested I file at complaint.ic3.gov
I don't know exactly what good it will do, but my family tells me that if I properly document the loss it will be relevant to my taxes next year.  It seems like it's worth doing if anyone else wants to.  I think it would be the first step in any kind of process that would possibly potentially get our litecoins back, although I think that possibility is pretty slight.  But you know, if whoever is behind this gets caught in their next scam and all their money is confiscated, at least we would be able to have documentation that we are out due to their actions.  Maybe that would be helpful?  That is my thought about the situation. 

Basically, with the price trending down, and with the assumption that it will slowly decline for a few months at least,
do you guys think that difficulty may let up at all?

I am not a new miner, but my tech guy recently moved on and now I am in a position of having to learn a lot about actually physically running my gear
and also about the new regulations

I feel like I basically just have a ton of homework, and I wonder how I should go about it/prioritize when it is unsure whether I will be getting screwed on both price and difficulty for a while, or whether there would be a kindof respite from the rapidly increasing difficulty as the price goes down and other miners maybe let up a bit or move on.

I have 2 BFL ASICs coming (supposedly) and I can't decide if my greater strategy should be more gear or to wait, and maybe buy and hold some more.  On a greater scale, it seems like if things let up, it will be good for a lot of newer bitcoiners to sort out exactly what they are doing and build infrastructure that will sustain bitcoin and add value in case of another surge in interest.  Do you think this is true, or do you think that the loss of momentum in the price is going to discourage that kind of activity?


On another topic, do you think it would be reasonable for me to look for a mentor when it comes to all the 'homework'?  I am pretty intimidated, especially since I don't really have a tech background.  Did most of you start from scratch, learning as you go?  Is there any established route for understanding the occult secrets of mining?  Any advice? 

Hmm.  We could exchange some goods and services.
We could invite some bitcoiners to meet us in a dark ally and then whack them on the head til they give us their passwords.
We could form a gang, become the coolest people around and then start charging others to hang out with us.
We could become bitcoin experts, start an exchange and charge .7% fees on all trades.
We could lobby our respective states or countries to start issuing bottle and can recycling refunds in bitcoin.
We could all take sexy pictures and demand bitcoin from those who want to see more sexy pictures.
We could set up mining operations in secret underground caverns tapped illegally into our respective cities power grids.
We could borrow money to buy some bitcoin and then gamble at Bitzino to increase our holdings before paying back the original loan.
We could find valuable discarded items and sell them on Bitmit.

4.24Ghash (varies between 4 and 4.5)
2 FPGAs
and 13 GPUs including 5770s, 5870s and 5850s and 5530s.

I was actually wondering if there is a way to tell from the blockchain what the average miner runs, and basically how the curve looks.  My husband thinks we are super bigtime miners, but I don't think I am convinced.

Hello to OP. 

And as for newbieland, I think it is character building.  Whether or not you are a big shot, everyone has to go through the same (not very onerous) process.  It seems in the spirit of bitcoin somehow. 

I feel pretty confident in my theoretical and practical Bitcoin knowledge, but I have never been too confidant on the actual cryptography or technical aspects.  I realize that these are not beginner topics, but can anyone point me in a direction to increase my knowledge?  Either online or off, or even within the forum?  I guess I have slightly above average understanding of math and computers, but that is probably not saying much.

I am pretty sure that Satoshi was either from the future like PP mentioned or is L from Death Note.

I think it is a gamble worth taking.  Mining is a competition and the chance that BFL ASICS are legit is a better bet than many. 
I also think that they have not behaved as though they were a scam.  They have had a lot of opportunities to tell people all kinds of BS to get more orders if they weren't intending on filling them.  For that matter they raised their prices.  Doubling down like that is a pretty bold move if they aren't planning to back it up.  At this point with samples being sent out and whatnot, I am pretty confidant.

Nice to meet you all.  I am new here too.  I was GPU mining, but now I am waiting on ASICs and trying to figure out how to get paid for my bitcoin knowledge,

I feel like the solution is an intermediary body that assesses the supply and demand in the economy and sets a digital exchange rate in bitcoins for regular transactions.  Until recently, inflation and deflation were much trickier in my opinion because you had to price things in dollars (or other currencies), not in X good or service worth of $.  Dollars (for instance) are based on all kinds of elements of supply and demand and manipulation and regulation.  The price of dollars fluctuates wildly.  But they are considered to be the baseline of how we figure the price of other things?  

The classic question is... what else?  Money can be traded freely with all other goods and services, so it is meant to kind of average out to some sort of equilibrium on it's own.  That is capitalism.  The invisible hand controls the economy so that nobody else has to.

However.  The invisible hand does a kind of terrible job a lot of the time.  But that doesn't mean that people could do a better job, and indeed they can't.  But computers... Computers have never had the opportunity to try.  Now I am not saying that we should abandon the market system.  But maybe instead of the Federal reserve (in America) trying to figure out what is best for the country and how the 1 or 2 things they can actually do will change the state of affairs, we could adopt a unit of currency that is more flexible and that can accurately and quickly adjust to things that happen.  Because bitcoin is digital and open source and divisible into tiny pieces, it is reasonable to apply other digital techniques to them that just simply wouldn't be possible or practical to use with dollars.  So in one way, we could have a bitcoin backed economy in the way we currently have a debt backed economy.  But just like people don't pay their bills in treasury bonds, there is no reason to figure the current value of goods and services in bitcoins themselves.  Rather we could have a standard unit of bitcoin that changed constantly based on the supply, demand, and value of goods and services in the economy.  Just like the value of dollars changes constantly based on the supply and demand for treasury bonds, and the US economy as a whole.

Basically.   Instead of spending-  a bitcoin-  We could spend a bitdollar worth of bitcoin.  A bitdollar IS X bitcoins where X is the price that reflects the current monetary situation.

I can't wait for the first robot Fed Chairman.

I am a lady bitcoin miner.

I put 10k$ into a GPU farm in 2011. 
Now I want to make bitcoins my career so I need to network.
But you bet I am not going with a gender specific username.  People fear what they don't understand, and judging by this thread, some bitcoiners aren't exactly experts on women. 

I like Namecoin and other financially pointless alts for the purpose of developing other uses for bitcoin.  There could be a million applications beyond currency and the fact that some computer power has gone into namecoin and like, devcoin, means that they could be used to set up and experiment with.  For that matter, if someone wanted to use crypto-currency as for instance part of a game or other online service,it is not unreasonable that they could adopt one of these rather than starting their own.  But as money.  I like bitcoin only.

I wouldn't buy a lot of new GPUs because 1.  Free electricity can't last forever, 2. Soon it will be so slow going as to be pointless with the difficulty increase. 3.  Even if your electricity is free, the capacity available in most buildings is going to keep you from expanding your operation eventually and again with the difficulty increase you might not even make back your initial cost for GPUs.  If you can get cheap used GPUs and mine the crap out of them for a while and resell them, that would not be a bad plan.