I work at an Estate & Trust law firm, serving high net-worth clients. More than a couple have offshore entities in place. Message me a little more about your situation, I may have some knowledge that could be helpful.

Need someone with experience with the various alt-coin code bases.

Looking for someone who can implement Scrypt-N (Scrypt Jane) and Proof of Stake, with various changes to the parameters of the coin. I can copy and paste and do a few find and replaces - I need more than that though.

Would also want a block explorer and mining pool created.

Please contact me for more information, as well as providing a basic quote for your services. (I understand it will be a rough quote until you've got all the details, but just want a way to gauge if you're asking far too much or far too little).

Thank you!

No, it means that they understand that there will be uproar if they start shipping generation 2 products to people before they've finished their generation 1 backlog

The network effect of eBay, Paypal, Gold, TCP/IP and POTS are all MUCH more significant than what Bitcoin has. The biggest hurdle for Bitcoin adoption is getting vendors to accept Bitcoin. That's the biggest hurdle, asking vendors to accept these coins that they can't see or touch, and which has no backing authority. BUT, if they can do get over that hurdle, the challenge to get them to accept a different type of crypto would likely be negligible. If they trust one blockchain, it won't be terribly difficult for them to have trust in another. They just need to be assured that there is community interest in it, that it's not just a pump and dump hatched by a single person who therefore has nearly all the currency.

As far as the services associated with Bitcoin, bitpay, etc. They've done the tough work already, building the service. Adding support for another blockchain is a trivial task at that point. With Bitpay, you send BTC's, it receives them and posts a sale on MtGox, and forwards the funds on to their clients bank account. To have it look up a price for a different coin is trivial, and its just as trivial to post those coins for sale on an exchange. Bitpay's biggest concern would therefore be that if the altcoin they chose has a deep enough market to absorb sales of whichever coin they accept. That's not trivial, but not difficult either. Just the act of announcing support for another cryptocoin would create a lot of interest in that coin and deepen the market just by virtue of the fact that people would know others will be transacting in it.

To me, Bitcoins first mover advantage is therefore close to nil. Every feature, every service that has been or could be created for bitcoin would take only a couple of hours to implement for any other coin. I feel like Bitcoin is a great proof of concept, a nice version 1.0 product. But all it would take would be for an Amazon, a Newegg, TigerDirect or even several of eBay's bigger vendors to say "we now accept BBQCoin" (to just throw out an example), and that coin gains instant credibility, and likely, a much deeper market than Bitcoin does.

Apple had first mover advantage for refined gui desktop OS'. Heck, it had first mover advantage for desktop pcs as well. Netscape had first mover advantage for commercial web browsers. Ford had first mover advantage for mass produced cars. And apple again had first mover advantage for tablets, full screen smartphones. They all lost out.

Bitcoin has first mover advantage, yes. But aside from the mining industry, not much else has sprung up, and everything else that has could easily be ported to a new blockchain. It's got mindshare, yes, but coupled with that mindshare, I think, are increasingly evident flaws. I won't be at all surprised if ultimately its another crypto currency that wins out. You could claim that the amount invested by miners in their operations will make them stay put, but even that can't be correct. After all,  the useful life of an investment is looking like its 3-4 months. All it takes is a desire to hope off the treadmill.

For every one of you, there's a growing number of people who have received product from bfl and seen that it works as promised at a price point that's lower than their competitors. Rhe good news for people ordering their new product is that, yes so many people have been dissuaded by their prior experience that they won't order, meaning new orders for this product won't face nearly as long of backlogs. Also amusing is when people cry out "don't order this from bfl, it'll never earn back its investment" then advocate another suppliers chips that cost even more per hash, meaning they're even more unlikely to order achieve break even.

I received my jalapeño order as promised and was very impressed by it. Ultimately sold it on eBay. But at the time I told myself I'd have no problem ordering from them again if I ever delved into mining. That still stands, if I were to order a miner, without doubt it would be from bfl. Asicminers offerings are far too expensive to be a winning proposition, Avalon seems to have the same shipping difficulties and most of the rest of the crew seems to be offering promises at this point, and nothing else. But I'll stay far away from mining. I see no incentive to participate in this arms race. It's doing nothing for us but forcing continual reinvestment just to stay at the same exact place. Really pointless. What I wish is that we (to include myself) were creative enough to start actual bitcoin business's, and earn revenue elsewhere in the economy. We aren't though. So we're all chasing after one mining and blowing an awful lot of money for nothing.

Lets come up with a coin that's for certain resistant to asics. Then there's no more of this gaming the system. You mine, you earn based on the number of CPUs you can devote to the activity. Maybe that'll force all of us to think of ways outside of mining to actually create an economy that outsiders want to participate in, rather than mining away pining for a mass adoption one day.


Overall, this thread is quite enlightening.

And kind of sad. We want the world to use our money, but we can't come up with any real uses save for trading it for dollars. And when people come and offer new mining equipment, and ask to only receive bitcoin for it, more and more people are crying foul, demanding they accept credit cards to prove they're not scamming. Seems ironic. How can we ask the world to want to use our currency when were not comfortable using it ourselves? True, it's because of a bad apple experience, but the worlds full of bad apples.

Many propose a break for what we have right now, but if anything, it seems to enforce people's needs and desires for things like contract law, reversibility of transactions and/or disputability of charges. It's not BFL. Im actually sypathetic to their plight. It's bitcoin itself that the pillars of the bitcoin economy are having issue with. Bfl's just a single company. And even if they never existed, someone else would be in theirs place, and people wanting to transact with them would be demanding these assurances.

Sorry, multi pronged post. Run on thoughts.

Scrypt is a proof of work algorithm. So, if you use scrypt, you're not using the Cunningham chain that are associated with primecoin. Neither of which is proof of stake (that's a comleely different beast)

Back to the drawing board?

The arms race continues...  All these hashes do nothing to "secure the network", only cause all the miners to spend dollars competing over a rapidly diminishing pie.... CPU-only coin, anybody?

What advantage would a country have in buying into bitcoin vs creating their own clone of bitcoin? They can then fix the initial exchange rate, among other things. Not have to go into the open market to buy heir first batch of coins, etc.

I understand your points fully. But I still don't see how it becomes a winning proposition for anyone who puts their neck on the line. In the real works, there are banks who earn their keep loaning our their customers deposits and there are trust companies earn theirs through trustee fees, and not insubstantial ones at that. Bitcoin lending, at least on a commercial scale, is incredibly risky. Might be less so with much stringer controls, but with controls that strong, there's be no difference in going to a bjtcoin institution versus taking out a dollar denominated loan from an ordinary bank.

You could do it in the form of a trust company but I fail to see a way to value add enough so that people would be willing to pay to keep a balance somewhere. So how does the institution you're proposing suppor itself? How does it adequately compensate its owners or directors for not only sticking their necks out, but also ponying up the bitcoins theyed either post as reserves or post as bond? Let alone paying for audits, because a regulated institution, or one that is expecting that much trust from the public can't just say "we're doing great"they need to establish that as fact.

And really, this is a peer to peer currency. I would say there isn't any reason to leave ones savings in anyone else's hands but your own. I don't understand why people insist on leaving sums at gox or anywhere else. Especially in light of constant losses. People should use exchanges for the purpose they're intended, to exchange bitcoin for cash or vice versa, and when they log out, transfer their balances to a wallet under their control. That alone would stop creating such juicy looking targets.

But I don't understand your idea that "self regulation" would "require" mtgox to use TFA. By its definition, self regulation would mean that they choose what to do. Now, they could require people use some form of TFA going forward, but even that, I'm not a lawyer of course, but I might think that that would open them up to being sued for past losses, where people could claim them negligent for not requiring TFA then even though they should have known it would do a better job at stopping fraud.

End of the day, people need to understand what bitcoin is. It's a means of transacting that is absolutely irreversible. And they need to be responsible. There is zero reason why people should leave balances in anyone's wallet but their own. Doing so opens then up to too many risks. Or someone could take a stand and sue gox for its negligence. But that would cost a lot, require a trip to Japan, and its uncertain that anyone would even find them negligent rather than the person raising the suit for not taking adequate protections. Who knows, maybe a jury (If they have them in Japan) would find in the plaintiffs favor and gox would take steps towards making sure customers removed their excess balances from their books.

ok, so you want a community, many of whom vehemently hate any form of regulation, to get regulated? What safeguards will anyone get? If a real life credit union burns to the ground with all the money inside, the government can reprint that money to replace what was lost. If a bitcoin credit union burns to the ground and all of its cold storage backup keys were inside, there's no getting anything back.

You're asking for directors, who will therefore take on personal liability, to post Bitcoins to escrow to replace anything that's stolen, maybe? Where is the upside to them? Lots of downside - someone leaves their wallet unlocked. Will people pay for the service of leaving coins on deposit? Can't think why they would.

Besides, what is the use of bitcoin-otc? Wasn't pirateat40 the most trustworthy member there? You'd think his collapse would have at least taken down that site as well. Maybe a new WOT would have been spawned, but that one, not so much.

Ultimately, you're asking people to take on a lot of liability for no real upside. What is the rationale that makes you think that people would want to do that?

WHAT would your yelp like system have done for the reddit guy who had his password stolen from MtGox? I mean, Mtgox is as big as it gets in the bitcoin world. He didn't initiate a transaction with them and they stole it, someone pulled money from his account. Yelp doesn't seem like it'd help there at all....

I went here:
http://www.bitfury.org

that's what's listed.

Ultimately, though, at the end of the day, I'd vote that the whole ASIC arms race has done zero for Bitcoin. Everyone's spending enormous sums of money to fight over a shrinking pie. We all might as well have stayed on CPUs.

There's too many variables.  I would think that anyone mining is doing so under the hope that Bitcoin not only continues existing, but increases in price along the way.

Running through the numbers at Bitcoinx's calculator (http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/)

Yes, if BTC/USD stays around $100, then even at 10x todays difficulty (370 million rather than 37 million), a Jalapeno will generate $55 per month. But difficulty is not that high yet, so they're in much better positions today. For instance, say next difficulty jump is to 55 million. A Jalapeno will earn $420 in a month.

Hashfast has renderings of their products on their website, and a disclaimer that when they get to actual silicon, there could be a huge variance in expected performance and power consumption.  But, yes, you can pre-order

Bitfury? They list a $90,000 miner that does 110 GH/s. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people are lining up for that one... supposing that someone does pony up the money for it though...  if you think the ROI for a $279 Jalapeno is going to be difficulty to achieve, consider that to achieve similar performance to that monstrosity, you would need 20 Jalapenos for $279 appiece. So... $5,580 from BFL versus $90,000 from Bitfury?!?

VMC? Pre-order now. They're talking to a Major Semiconductor Company about actually making their chips, which may or may not perform as they hope.

Yes, they're pushing into the next generation, one of the three is selling something almost at the price level of GPU's, while the other two involve the same leap of faith to be made here as others did for BFL. Maybe their launches will go off without a hitch. Probably, in fact. BFL's low price points, while great for the community (the ones that could get them, at least) meant that they took in TONS of orders. So VMC and Bitfury might have less difficulty fulfilling because they've priced their gear at a level that insures the volume of their sales will be much lower than Butterfly or ASICMiner.

End of the story is that BFL's products still have legs under them. And all the products that are supposed to relegate them to the dustbin seem to be in existance only on paper, if that.

At the end of the day, people who ordered butterfly's products early and receive them in the next few months will do fine. But people who ordered later in the process (April, May, June, July 2013), at current prices, likely never would have broken even, simply because of all the orders ahead of them would already be online.

Sorry for the ramble.

one things sure if the price makes any movements up or down, everyones projections go out the window.

Even at higher difficulties these make sense. Your ROI isn't 2 weeks, just because you don't achieve 100% ROI in 2 weeks doesn't mean they're worthless. That's as silly as people on here offering $800 for an in hand jalapeño in early July. Yes, difficulty will get up there to the point that ROI is measured in months rather than weeks, and eventually non-existent, but were still a ways away from that. I think.

Ordering 12 @ .32, plus 0.06 for priority shipping and 0.06 for insurance. Will send 3.92 BTC upon my receipt of them, which should be soon.

I've been sitting with this message open for almost 30 minutes now. Won't name sites, but I transferred from an exchange back to my personal wallet at 12:01 PM EST and it's now 12:28 PM EST and I've yet to get a single confirm. Blockchain.info says it's still an hour til it gets confirmed (position 612 in queue).

I would support a hard fork so we could get some faster block times/confirmations     Til then just know that it's on it's way!

Yeah. And at .39 for 330 MH, it comes in twice as expensive as Bfl's. I got a jalapeño. Sold it immediately because eBay was posting some amazing prices for them. Lots if others do the same, though the going prices are falling because there's more and more coming online. IMO people who bought those at 2btc proved PT Barnum right.

They seem slow in coming out, but we have zero clue how many orders they got. It could be 10's of thousands going by the range of order numbers people have posted. Though that number contains a lot of orders that people stepped through the system and then Didn't pay for, but it also contaibs lots if orders for more than one product, so its still a huge number likely. Even 10k orders of a single product each is going to take a while to fulfill in house. Not to mention assembling, etc.

There are some pretty big up front costs involved. It's not like you scrape up pocket change and have custom chips made up. So they could either have gone the route they went (develop chips and sell devices to end users) or go the ASICminer route, raise capital from a small group of investors, develop those same chips and hold your hashing power tight to your chest.

I'm glad that BFL took the route they took. Otherwise we'd have a completely different looking ecosystem, twin towers of AM and BFL, with the rest of the world trying to keep up using GPUs. Well, we'd have all of 1500 Avalon machines to fight over, or be afforded such great deals as friedcats 2BTC 330 MH device. Which, even after its latest price it, is still twice as much per hash as butterfly's offerings. Yes, you can get it sooner. But every day BFL wittles away at that.

Not working at either of those co's, I'd vote that that's false. The biggest reason they're ignoring it is theyre not familiar with it. A) They'ed hate to invest a ton of money into a project and find out that interst in BTC evaporated, leaving them with a ton of product with no other conceivable use. B) It really is just a drop in the bucket for Intel. AMD, though might be more inclined. They were beneficiaries of the Bitcoin craze, and probably sold tons more GPU's than they otherwise would have, and are now seeing those sales dry up. Not only that, they're seeing a huge second hand market developing which'll lower demand for their cards. So they might sit up and take notice.

But the legalities are of no concern. They'ed simply be selling sha hashing chips, what the customer does with them is their business. They're not dealing in the currency or anything else where there'd even be a question of about legality. The last issue would be whether they think they can be price competitive with everyone else out there. Remember, AMD has been hemoragging money. Their shareholders will make heads roll if they spend fifty million on a new chip line, only to see nothing happen and the losses deepen.

Lots of dynamics at play. Nothing that I can imagine that intersects with Bitcoins legality.

It's a loss leader. Obviously I can't cover costs. And not only that, I spent serious BBQ Coins having that fantastic aD created. But once I've put you out of business, I can chargewhatever I want. 1 LTC. 100 PPC. heck even 24,000,001 BTC's. And people will pay it because they'll have no one else to supply them with nothings!
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