At 7PM EST on Feb 16 the fastest Primecoin miner in existence will be publicly released. Sporting performance up to 35% faster than primecoin-hp11 the new client is available only for the RapidPrime pool. Linux and Windows clients will be available at launch.

You can join the pool at rapidprime.com or read more about it in the primecoin reddit.

Wow that really sucks. Why do people trust others with their wallet? Why not just hold the coins yourself?

I expect the price to hit around 450 before dropping back down to 120ish

It really could go either way. Something catastrophic could happen. such as someone cracking the hash and BTC will be worthless.

On the other hand, most people believe the hash is quite safe and the price could just rise and rise.

I wonder if this is fixable or if its going to be a permanent problem.

I would think it would be hard for an asic miner to become unprofitable since the price of bitcoin will rise with the difficulty. However it does seem like just holding bitcoins could be more profitable.