If you want insurance against a BFL SC 'scam', buy with Paypal and use a properly insured credit card with that account.

*shrugs*

Assuming folks mine BTC for profit, the BFL ASIC is a necessary investment if folks want to stay competetive in the BTC mining market. I suspect that most folks that want to buy a BFL ASIC already have or have ordered the BFL FPGA products (Single or Rig) and those will be exchanged for the BFL ASIC when they become available plus half the price of the ASIC. They can still mine during the time they wait on the new product, sure they paid a bloody big chunk of cash up front, but I assume that as this is an investment, they are prepared to lose that money. That's what business is all about, taking risks and making money. Not taking the risk most probably will cost more money (that is an educated guess because we can't see the future and only hindsight is 20/20).

Let's say that BFL doesn't come close to the state hashing numbers, as long as performance is at least twice what it is now, no money is really lost. Maybe a bit more to compensate for the additional difficulty to compensate for the added extra hashing power. I doubt power consumption would be twice as high, because that would probably generate more heat then can be dissipated. Heck, if a $30k Rig could only do 100GHash/s, that is still four times more then a $15k Rig could do. Sure the advantage over the folks not using the new BFL products would be less great, but the financial advantage is still very much there.

If it was a scam, it could be made far more attractive for folks to invest in, more 'believable' numbers could be used, lower prices so more folks would be willing to risk it, etc. This reminds me very much of the time when the rumors of the iPad 3 and it's very high resolution display, there were many naysayers that it couldn't be done, stating very reasonable 'facts'. The problem was/is that technology isn't an analog increase, it's a digital one, with jumps in performance instead of a gradual increase. Even in the processor industry you don't buy a 100MHz proc and then a 101MHz proc. It went from 100MHz to 120MHz. From DVD to Blueray the maximum amount of data a single sided disk could contain increased 15 times (8.5GB to 128GB), sure those are not mainstream disks, but is a $30k Rig?

Honestly, if you don't trust BFL, your pretty screwd as a big miner (best price vs. MHash/s vs. KW/h). And if you don't trust BFL, that's your right and your welcome to your opinion, because after all, it is an opinion, nothing more. Folks that do believe are also welcome to their opinion. Personally I'll wait and see, not only do I have mixed feelings about the future of the BTC value and the difficulty of mining it, I'm also not currently in the position to mine for profit in any meaningful way (due to not enough budget for a BFL Rig and cooling issues, not to mention very high local power costs).

What I mean by Id holder is the person that made the accounts with the Id, so that doesn't have to be the person who is on the Id.

A non-existing person would be tricky, they ask for the Id in order to comply with certain banking laws and regulations, it would seem apparent that they would actually have to check whether the Id/person actually exists. If not, they have to report it and folks would get the police/interpol on their behind for id theft/fraud.

Why risk it that someone else knows what you did with the 'stolen' Id? There's already a black market for stolen Ids, get one, use it to create the account, no third party to do nasty things with that account.

Now, I don't aprove of those thing AT ALL, but I find them interesting from a fictional perspective (actually make a smart/accurate bad guy for scifi or near-future story/rpg).

Yup, but also illegal due to identity theft laws in most western countries. Very probably against the EULA from the relevant exchange, so they can block your account if they find out. And ripe for scams due to the Id holder just contacting the exchange and claiming that you hacked the account after you transferred money/BTC into it. Why bother with it when you can just open multiple unverified accounts?

Well, someone tried to manipulate bitcoin-24.com just now by indeed trying to crash the BTC.

On the other hand, does he really need to? 65.000 BTC was traded over a period of 2 days crashing the price of BTC from $15 to $8, and is now back at $10. If he sold at the right time (initiating the crash) and sold at the right time and is now slowly buying back enough BTC he doesn't need to hope for anything.

Why take the risk of using another (unstable) crypto currency? Chances are that you can sell your GPUs and buy less power hungry FPGA/ASIC solutions (like the japaleno). Unless your using really old videocards selling those should cover the cost of the new hardware, while you'll save on power consumption for future mining. The only issue with FPGA/ASIC solutions is that outside of the Bitcoin mining business it has very few applications, so selling it could be an issue if the Bitcoin collapses. On the other hand, value actually increases when you sell them in an active Bitcoin economy due to the current waiting time of 2+ months...

It's simple Market manipulation, as to why...

Options:
#1 Crash price to buy back a significant larger amount at a far lower price.
#2 Crash price to devalue BTC of competition. Companies like BFL probably have a large amount of BTC in their wallets, personnel, bills, and raw materials are purchased in $ and not BTC. So if this is done long/often enough it might 'kill' such a company. The same goes for the bigger miners, they need to keep paying their rack hosting costs, power usage, their own bills, etc.
#3 Someone with to much money on hand might be bored and thinks that manipulating the BTC value is fun. If you think that is nuts, realize this. time = money, thus money = time, there are legions of folks that 'waste' their time trolling webforums... ;-)

I suspect that the price of a Bitcoin is pretty much separate from the block rewards. The difficulty is only related to it in the way that if mining becomes unprofitable due to the Bitcoin vs. $ Price vs. power costs, smart folks will stop mining and there is less processing power in the network and the difficulty will go down. But my experience is that an awful lot of folks aren't all that smart and will continue to mine even when it's not profitable. You also have the folks that will have to continue mining for a said period because the have a contract anyway (colocation, racks, office, etc.).

Currently a very limited amount of BTC trading can influence the worth of the BTC drastically. A week ago, the trading volume of 65.000 Bitcoins over a period of two days resulted in virtually cutting the 'worth' of the BTC in half (on mtgox). Certain 'news' can really gut the worth of the BTC (such as a hack on robbery of an exchange). So I think that the worth of the BTC actually drives the amount of miners and thus the difficulty, then the other way around...

*waves*

I'm Cergorach, someone interested in Bitcoin.

*grumbles something about the bloody newbie requirements*