I'll enjoy it.  I pay just under $ .05 per kW now.  Unless BTC goes below $1, I'm profitable.  All the price-pullback does is cut off my competition.  I'd like to thank everyone for decreasing the difficulty and letting me get all the BTC.  Drive the price down, I just make more money...

Tax evasion is a crime, remember Kent Hovind?  If you exchange BTC for a physical good or service, that good or service is a type of capital good.  In the US, if you receive capital goods in excess of $6k in value, annually, you are required to claim them on your taxes.  It's the reason that you pay 30% of the sticker price of a car you win on a game show.  The tax man knows what you buy.  Be smart, claim capital goods that exceed $6k in value, but claim them as goods traded in-kind for a service.  The tax rate is lower.

That's funny, I'm in Texas too.  It has been hotter than hell the last few days.  I'm figuring the next CPS bill will be around $900.

It's possible that the problem was in your fuse box.  I run several dozen computers and I've noticed that if a 30 amp fuse starts to overheat, the heat moves to the neighboring fuse and there are power anomalies in my house, clocks keeping bad time, etc.  If all your miners are cranking out at peak performance, your house may not be able to deal with the heat in the internal wiring.

You don't need to worry about taxes (USA) until you make more than $6k in revenue.  After that, you're required to claim the income.  I'd recommend getting an EIN from the IRS and claiming the percentage of your total power consumption that goes into coin production as a cost-based deduction.  Additionally, you can claim depreciation on your rigs using a 3-year schedule.

  Also, they didn't design it for any specific purpose.  If it's for a business then the comp should serve it's primary function and no other.  It's like miners that try to split a system between gaming and mining, why?  Just build a miner for $600 and build a gaming comp for $1500.  You'll get two computers that are about the same price as the one split-purpose system, but you'll get better results from both.  The Slowstra is just a monstrosity.  It can't be sold commercially, who would buy it?  It isn't useful for gaming, there's no way to use all that power.  It just doesn't make sense.  It's no even useful for research, you could do the same job in several systems for less, and with greater reliability.  Consider, if the Slowstra mobo explodes, the whole system is shot.  If a cluster of computers has a mobo explode, it might lose 5% of it's total operating capacity.  Nope, Slowstra is just stupid and impractical.  Vladaimir's system design makes way more sense.  So much so, I built my cluster of computers based on the same design.

7400 Mh/s  My living room is hotter than the fires of hell.

Why buy a case?  How much are you spending on the hard drive?  Storage is a big problem.  You'll see people buy a cheap spin-up hard drive, but a solid-state one is worth the few extra dollars for a lower power consumption rate.  Skip the 6970, it's not worth the money.  Best bet is 5x 5830s and 5 PCI x16 riser cables.  It's gonna get hot as all hell, what's your cooling solution?  I use a dozen box fans and a crude bit of duct work.  If you go with the Sempron, use Ubuntu.  Windows will bottleneck without a milti-core processor. 

I haven't had any problems at all.  Well, that's not entirely true.  USB read speeds are a lot slower than SATA, so the install takes about an hour.  Here's what I do:  I assemble a new computer, attach a usb cd drive with the Ubuntu install CD, and startup the comp.  I've built 14 computers using this system without a single hitch.  Sounds like you're using a cheap USB thumb drive.  I'm sure I paid too much for mine, but I bought the $35 model.

You gotta go down on the cost of a MOBO.  I'm unwilling to pay more than $120 for a MOBO.  If you're serious about mining then you need to cost a whole system against its expected return.  As an example, I have a standard configuration for a single computer that costs $960 (power supply, ram, CPU, MOBO, HD, and Video Cards) and produces 700 MH/s.  By assembling these things en-mass, I'm able to build a super computer (in my living room) that kicks out MH/s at a rate of (.7MH/s)/$.  That's the cheapest build I could make (that would still function).  Buying a $300 MOBO is crazy.  There are better options.  Check this out: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157207 ,@ $126 you can add three cards and, with risers, you can support six.  This is everything you'd need for a bare-bones rig.

That's because the $20 bill isn't worth $20, it represents $20.  Don't confuse the symbol for the thing with the thing.  People value the symbol at $20, but the physical representation of the thing, when destroyed, is no longer distinguishable as the symbol.

Contracts date back a thousand years, contract law is much newer.  Things can exist without laws.  Laws are a violent means that the ruling class uses to inflict norms on society.  Don't buy the hype, people can behave well without laws.  A contract is just a written agreement between two parties, you don't need cops to shake hands.  I suspect that you're more concerned about torts, contract violations.  Here's a suggestion, the BTC community needs a professional arbitration service.  Call it "For Profit Justice".  When there's a dispute between two contractually bound parties, a neutral arbiter can determine the extent of the violation, decide on a restitution, and rule in favor of one party or the other.  That business can then publish a list of all individuals that have breached a contract and failed to make restitution.  That way, anyone planning to transact with another BTC user can consult the "Dishonest List" to check the credibility of the other party.  Additionally, there can be an arbitration fee.  Then, there will be competing arbitration firms and sound contract enforcement, without state violence.  I know it's hard to see things in free market terms, but I believe we can do it.

You guys are looking at this all wrong.  Yes, the BTC is being used as a crypto-commodity , but the reason is very different then you imagine.  Money must do 2 things, new money needs to do one more.  First, money must be a store of perishable value.  I cannot hold radishes for for two years and still expect them to be valuable.  I can hold money.  The BTC can be easily traded, so it holds value.  Second, money must be a means of exchange.  BTCs are not fully developed as a means of exchange.  At this point, BTCs are only exchanged by a few people and businesses.  The special advantage that the BTC offers is freedom from a central monetary authority, which I think is pretty cool.  The reason that the BTC isn't acting like money, look at the businesses that exist around the BTC right now.  The exchanges are the most well developed.  MtGox may be the most used BTC business that currently exists.  So, of course people are trading BTCs like a commodity.  The number one priority for the BTC community is to bring more BTC businesses online that deal in staple goods.  Here's a free idea for ya.  Someone take the fortune you've made mining, and buy wholesale, non-perishable foods.  Sell those goods in BTCs only, advertising that, if the government knows who bought the food, they can come and take it.  To sell BTC-based businesses to non-BTC using people, the advantage of BTC over a central monetary authority needs to be played up a lot more.

The price of a BTC on any given day is the exchangeable value of a BTC.  That is, it is "worth" it's price.  Asking the for the cost of production will only tell you what the most efficient BTC mining model currently is.  I would add that any cleaver entrepreneur can cut costs and produce a higher BTCs-Produced/Dollar-spent.  The difference between price and value (that is, value as determined by the financial difficulty in creating a BTC) is explainable as the expectation of returns on the part of either the seller or the buyer.  Think of it this way:  If all sales are short and all purchases are long (Why sell if you anticipate the price rising, why buy if you anticipate the price falling) then each transaction for a BTC represents a difference of opinion on what will happen, plus the costs of producing a BTC, plus the industry standard profit margin.  I'm not a big Marx fan.  Economies are not for pushing out goods.  Economies are for satisfying the pull of human desires.  If you're really into an economics approach to the BTC, read a few chapters of "The Wealth of Nations".  It'll help, this isn't the first new currency.