People, having such anti-TOR, and not to mention stupid policies on a forum frequented by cypherpunks and libertarians is quite surprising.

Upon opening the page, I was greeted by a message stated I'm banned for spamming. At first I was a bit shocked, but then hit "new identity", and the message disappeared, apparently I'm not banned anymore.

Dear administrators.

Banning a TOR exit is not only useless in the fight against spammers (note, if I WAS a spammer, I'd still only have to click "new identity"), it's an affront to all that is dear to the Internet freedom fight that bitcoin too is part of. You are making TOR into a public enemy, and not in a very useful way.
If you want to ban TOR, please be honest about it and ban all TOR exit nodes.

Otherwise, I'd suggest you mandate registrations from non-TOR computers (you can use online lists of TOR exit nodes to ban them), but allow all IPs to log in to existing accounts.

I have a thing I want to sell. There's a guy who wants to buy it. We'll settle in bitcoin.

What happens? Well, the situation is similar to two criminals doing an exchange, each with a gun pointed at the other. It's a modified prisoner's dilemma. If one shoots the other, he gets both the money and the drugs.

If I ship before I get the bitcoins, the buyer can just walk away with the merchandise, and never pay me. Since bitcoin transactions are untrackable, there is no way for me to legally prove that I haven't been paid.

If he pays first, I can walk away with the bitcoins, and never ship. He has absolutely no way of proving that he ever paid me.

The only solution would be using a payment processor, but that takes away the very essence of why bitcoin was created in the first place, as it brings "banks" back into the business...

Hey...
I'm wondering if it's time for transaction fees. Has anyone tried accepting blocks with a fee only? Could transaction fees save the hashing network from becoming increasingly centralized?

When I hear stuff like "mining is no longer profitable", that essentially translates into "no sane person would do hash processing". We all know what that would mean, were it true. RIP Bitcoin.

If newly generated coins can no longer pay for even the electicity a rig eats, I wonder if fees could.

BlackArrow's Minion chips seem to be the cheapest in terms of hash/sec/USD on the market by a factor of almost ten... Then again, as they will only become available in February, I wonder if that hashing speed will amount to anything by then.

The way I'm thinking is, we're seeing an enermous deployment of hashing power all over the world. In February, all the new minions, and several other newly minted chips will come online, doubtless creating an avalanche of hash/secs in the bitcoin network... If bitcoin prices rise further, it will only encourage more people to start hashing, so I doubt price can offset difficulty over the medium to long term.

So... do you guys think they will be obsolete by the time they are shipped, or is there a potential for profit in them?