I did finally receive my order...had to make a special trip back to Florida to get it from the post office which thankfully hadn't sent it back yet.  Probably cost five times the value of the order just in Diesel fuel.

The order was quite well packed; each coin in its own little plastic sleeve, the whole lot in a zipper bag wrapped in a customs declaration (??) wrapped in bubble wrap and packing tape, then stuck in a padded mailer.  I doubt that running it over with my 40 ton truck would've harmed the contents.  So on that count at least I was somewhat impressed.  The coins themselves were exactly as advertised, brilliant uncirculated condition.  They're gorgeous.

What pisses me off to no end is the insane wait time and piss poor communication.  I demand results, not excuses.  Yes, mine was a very small order; only seven silver Eagles.  But when the charge for shipping works out to over US$30, and it's shipped plain old first class from California to Florida, and they take almost three weeks to do it...yeah I'm slightly torqued about it.

Never again.

The fact that you have excellent stock levels of silver eagles totally explains why it took two weeks to send me seven of them.

Well they finally shipped my order on July 29th...from Encinitas CA.  With a signature required.  To my house in Florida.

This is really super extra awesome since as I've mentioned I'm a long-haul truck driver, currently sitting in Dallas TX, and will not be home again until probably the end of August.  I really hope they hold the package at the post office because otherwise it'll be sent right back where it came from.  I'll most likely have to pay to have it shipped yet again, and given the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised to have to repeat this cycle a couple times.

Sounds more like it's the attorney who registered all those corporations. Or some tax fraud and/or money laundering.....

Did a little digging, coinabul is run out of a house in Cheyenne WY.  http://goo.gl/maps/g6psL  Gotta wonder about the 321 area code...wait, sat phones all have that area code.

Pretty sure this is a scam.  Ship just enough orders to have a semblance of credibility, pocket the rest.  Or delay orders long enough to turn a major profit when prices shift.

Either way, I for one will never use their service again.  Good news is, given my line of work it won't be long until I'm in Cheyenne myself.

I put in an order the evening of July 15th and paid in full before the confirmation email even hit my gmail. Nine days later and my order (for which I paid btc0.25 for next day shipping!) still isn't here. Emails go unanswered.

I am a long haul truck driver and will be leaving for a month or more on Friday or Saturday. If I don't have my order by then, I may as well kiss it goodbye as it'll be sitting in my mailbox or on my porch while I'm gone.

Seven ounces of silver.  Yeah, I'm a little pissed.

So how much does the MT4 server setup cost, and what else is required to start a BTC exchange (aside from a metric butt-ton of cash)?

That's probably what I'm up against...according to top, most of the cpu time is waiting for io, which tends to indicate swappage.  I've only got 4Gb of ram so if the blockchain is 6Gb....yeah that'll do it.

Thanks for the quick reply, looking forward to the update!

Given how powerful even the cheapest netbooks are these days, I don't see why you couldn't put a full-fledged Linux distro like Suse or any of the Ubuntus on it.  My old roommate had a little EEE (maybe 2-3 years ago) and it ran Ubuntu like nobody's business.  Honestly the ancient history laptop I'm on now is probably less powerful than a new netbook, and I do Blender animations on it.

Then again, I'm about to spring for a System76 Bonobo.....

Probably cheaper and easier to get a $30 HP inkjet printer from Wal-Mart or some such place.  HPs are really well supported under Ubuntu, pretty much just plug it in and print.

I've been wondering basically the same thing...if an Android phone can use what amounts to a webcam as a QR scanner, and Android is basically a mobile-optimized Linux distro, why the heck can't I use my Kubuntu laptop's webcam as a QR scanner and have it pass data to any arbitrary app, such as Armory?

Anyone know if ZXIng's scanner is open source?  Might be a simple port, come to think of it.

How long does it normally take to process the blockchain on startup? With my (admittedly rather ancient) Athlon x2-64 laptop, it can take upwards of half an hour every.freakin.time I start Armory to scan through the chain, and during that time my CPU usage is pegged on one core.

Is there any way I can reduce this?  Maybe put the blockchain files on a ramdrive or something fancy like that?  Are there plans to reduce this time somehow, or is this really a bug on my end somewhere?

I'm reeeeeally kicking myself for not buying $4000 worth back when it was US$5 per BTC.  Stupid stupid stupid.  I'd have a Corvette worth of BTC if I'd done that.

Ah, well.

Four modules and a PSU selling for BTC115.000 or US$7920 as I write this.  Dammit man!  I'd only set aside US$4000 for this...now I'm priced right out of the market.

Regarding aTg's question: I for one will NEVER buy a BFL unit, I don't care if it's one angstrom technology and mines 120 bazillion petahashes per microsecond while drawing 0.1watt from my cell phone charger, and spits teddy bears out its ass while it's doing it, for the low low price of US$1.99.  Not gonna happen.  The way they've constantly pushed back their ship dates, on a series of products, is totally unacceptable to me and I just can't see myself supporting them no matter how great their product may turn out to be.

Having said all that, there's not a really huge difference between 65nm and 110nm chips.  Really it boils down to power consumption (about double) and die size (about quadruple the area).  Power consumption does matter, but in the near term at least the power draw will be more or less insignificant compared to the mining profits to be had.  Chip die size matters not one iota, since the package has to be a certain minimum size anyways: does it really matter if the die inside that 10mm square plastic chip is 5mm square or 3?

I'm lumping all my available cash into my bitcoin wallet, primed and ready to pull the trigger the moment I get that magic email from Avalon.

That clear is gorgeous, have you access to a dual-nozzle unit with which you could fill in the negative parts of the QR with black?

I might have to splurge and get one myself, and start doing these on demand.  BTC0.20 sound about a fair price?

I love what blockchain.info is doing, it seems like a really great service.  I'd like to make my own, at least generally along those lines, probably just for my own gits and shiggles.  Entirely PHP, entirely FOSS, simple and clean.

How on Earth do I go about getting and parsing the blockchain without using a wallet?  Preferably all in PHP?  Any ideas?  Once retrieved and turned into discrete transactions, I'd like to stuff the whole thing into a sql database, and after that point it's really pretty simple to manhandle the data however it wants to be.  But getting to the point of the entire transaction history in a db...I'm stumped.

Help?

+100!

One step further though (or perhaps back, depending how you look at it) how about a rather generic SHA256 ASIC?  Put two of them nut-to-butt and there's 90% of your miner; put one into a cryptophone or whatever else uses hashing.  This would increase your market by a massive factor, and in doing so decrease your per-unit design cost and thereby price.

How small could one make a simple SHA256 chip?  If they can fit three complete unrolled engines on a single S6LX150, one can be crammed into a damn tiny bit of silicon real estate.

As a Chinese manufacturer, you'd also be uniquely placed to market PCBs, assembled boards, and even assembled BFL-style units at really competitive prices.  Initially though, at least to recoup the initial investment, I'd vote for a single generic SHA256 engine on a chip as the best answer.

Sub!

Gorgeous idea, looking forward to some CAD renderings.

Out of curiosity, I've been mulling the idea of perhaps a hundred LX150s run by an ARM9 and stuck into a 1U pizza box chassis.  Pretty sure even an anemic ARM can handle a hundred 9600bps serial ports and an Ethernet connection to the outside world, and perhaps configuration via serial port for security...ideas?

Woohoo!  Many thanks!