So, if i go to blockchain.info and search for a transaction, upon hitting post, it redirects me to the SSL version of their site. This is where it redirected me, as a matter of a fact:

https://blockchain.info/block-index/393463/0000000000000101a6ec423efffd45e070f3aa628d4ab9fd688abb9eb26555f8

See anything wrong with it? Any attacker or man-in-the-middle will know exactly what you were searching for simply by looking at the URL you arrive at. Just as if you search for a transaction that hit this wallet "11CtTrDnLu2DtbQJPYDUVGf5ZeQ7RB1ao", you arrive at this SSL-enabled page "https://blockchain.info/address/11CtTrDnLu2DtbQJPYDUVGf5ZeQ7RB1ao"

The page is only encrypted to prevent a man in the middle from replacing information on each result page, but it does zero in the name of user privacy. Adding a redirect won't change anything.

r4jQcjmoFDLz28ySX24kXhXbUNdytZJHmr

Yes, the price dip could be temporary. But the difficulty increase isn't, and will only be going up and up and up....Friedcat will continue adding capacity to ASICMiner, and Butterfly Labs sounds like they are actually working through thei backlogs...  Put those miners in peoples hands and lets see where difficulty is in August or September..

For people with big GPU investments (or any GPU investments), the short term course of action would seem like they should keep going for the time being, but when the difficulty flies up even more, they might be forced to take their machines offline, at least until the prices catches up.

Me, I'm crossing my fingers that BFL gets my units tot me in short order. But i simply can't imagine investing in a new Radeon card at this point in time. At least not for mining Bitcoins. The game definetly looks like it's changing.

Another thought I had is, lots of farms take themselves offline, ASICminer might find itself unintentionally in control o 51% of the network. What happens then?

With the jump in difficulty and the recent slump in Bitcoin prices, GPU mining seems like it's just about over with. Wondering what everyone's going to do? Sell their GPU's? Mine an alt coin? Which one? Seems any SHA coin can be overtaken by ASIC's, so will everyone be moving over to Litecoin?

Serious question.

I have a jalapeno pre-ordered since last early fall, and some friends were recently saying we should just go and buy a few Radeons while we waited, but I'm now quite happy that we didn't, especially now that Butterfly apparently is making big progress processing their order queue.

Did you get it yet?

I posted a few days ago that I wanted to buy 0.1 BTC via paypal, happy to buy your 0.05 BTC instead.

I know I'm a new member, but still. Doing a charge back over $5 or $6 is absurd. If you give me a chance, I'd appreciate it!

Not for nothing, but i was always under the impression that their units were shipped and in the wild. At least looking at their website, I saw no indication that they were't.

So it's true then, that ASCIMiner essentially controls ALL of the ASIC mining power at this point?

Just looking to buy 0.1 BTC for $13 via paypal. Alternatively, if anyone is near West Palm Beach FL, I will meet for a face to face transaction at any starbucks you choose.

I know that everyone hates paypal, and I know that I'm new around here, but it's but it's all I can pay with. I opened an Mt. Gox account and I'm still trying to figure out their depositing options, but for now would anyone care to help me?

And to head off comments I've seen on other threads of similar requests:
Seriously, I'm not going to dick around and try to do a charge back over $13. I could understand being hesitant about a first-timer and a multi-bitcoin transaction, but we're not talking hundreds of dollars here.

If anyone is interested, I'll be awake for a few more hours. Thank you.

Would you consider breaking up the list into two parts? First section would be miners that are confirmed in production and shipping. The second section would list all the others, be they slow to produce, suspected vaporware, and so forth? Seems liek 90% of the items on your list aren't shipping, and as more companies make their own "announcements" it'll be increasingly difficult to locate the miners that are actually in existance when eyeballing the list.

Just a suggestion!

You do recall how the Krona did during the crisis, right? Sure, Iceland prosecuted bankers. Big deal. The currency also lost half of its purchasing power versus the US Dollar. Imagine everything priced in dollars (essentially, all imports since those products could be sold for dollars instead) doubling. Almost overnight.

Seems a very strange choice for community that's so obsessed about inflation

ref: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=ISK&view=10Y

People have been predicting this for years. TIPS bonds were bid to negative yields back in 2008 for a time - all the "smart money" thought we'd see massive inflation in a short time.

As for a deflationairy "collapse" wiping out retirement savings - retirees would actually do pretty well under a deflationary environment, it's the rest of us that would have big time issues.

Yes, that's the unit i have.

Any idea of what the hashing rate will be under scrypt? Trying to figure out if i should just give it back or if there's any point to me (a non-programmer) having one of these?

We can say that, but the risk is there. Certainly it's far greater than cash. And I'd wager to say that even if so far the accepting transactions with 0 confirmations has been low-risk, it won't be for much longer. Bad characters will enter and take advantage. It's happened with every other system, no reason to believe it won't happen here, unfortunately.

Think about it - accepting a confirmation with 0 confirmations amounts to "please give my your product, I'll come back and pay for it in a few minutes". Most street vendors aren't open to that. Most gas stations aren't open to that either. Nor should we expect that they should be open to that. Without any confirmations there's no way to verify if there is any value to the transaction.

They don't take credit cards. So they likely don't have computers set up at their locations? Or they simply enjoy the security of receiving cash in hand. Bitcoin can't replicate that - they need computers at their locations, and they need their customers to stick around for a few minutes to get some confirmations that their spends are accepted by the network.

Inflation free is nice, but I'd bet very little of their earnings get saved. The sell their wares and spend the proceeds buying new inventory and paying their own personal expenses. With that rapid turnover of money, inflation doesn't have time to sink its teeth in. Besides which, the monetary base of Bitcoin is still expanding rapidly. Once all the bitcoins have been mined, you can say its inflation free, but not before. That's a part that often gets brought up that I never understand. Right now there are X bitcoins in existance. In 10 minutes, that number will be X +25. In 10 more minutes, it'll be X +25 more.

Debt-free means nothing. Doesn't matter if you transact in Bitcoins or Dollars, as a US Citizen you're on the hook for the countries debts. And there's nothing to stop someone from amassing Bitcoin denominated debts except that vendors haven't thought to start offering credit yet. Mind you, if Bitcoin acceptance keeps growing then credit will definetly be on the horizon.

Showing a price curve from 2010 to now is dishonest, I would say. There's that old adage that past performance is not idicative of future results, so to sell people on past performance might get people involved that are unaware of the risks but not the people who are more informed. Why start your graph in 2010? Would the results of your advertising be any different if you showed them a graph that starts in mid-April and goes to now? Yeah, thought so. (Bitcoin should be able to stand on its own merits, selling as an ultra-risky investment is not one of them).

I'm sorry, I love many aspects of Bitcoin, but it's just not there yet for non-techies, I don't think. Nor is it there yet for people who transact with the public. Litecoin, with its 2.5 minute confirmations, is much closer in that regard. Doesn't mean that Bitcoin won't be a great store of value, or a great way to transfer wealth around the globe, or a great currency for mail order business to accept, and so on. And but the confirmation time is something that too many people overlook when thinking about offering Bitcoin solutions to people who transact face to face.

The best way to garner their acceptance isn't by trying to sell them on it. It's grassroots. If you show up every week and ask if they accept Bitcoin, and more and more of their customers do the same, they'll eventually start asking "hey, why don't we look into this bitcoin thing?".  Except, if they're not even taking credit cards in this day of Square card readers, they they simply aren't likely to be interested in another electronic payment system.

Sorry to be such a downer.

Supply absolutely has bearing on the overall value.

Take a publicly traded company - even if 75% of the shares are held by founders, those shares are still accounted for when figuring out the metrics of the company. Why? Those shares could be released to the market at any time.

Ex - Company A has 1,000 shares outstanding, 900 of which are owned by the founder who so far hasn't shown any desire to sell. The company earns $1,000 profit. Is the earnings per share $1 or $10? If you say that you can safely ignore the shares that aren't actively being traded, then you'd go for the later amount.

The total market cap of the Bitcoin economy might be $1.5 billion. Or, it could be $.75 billion, if half the coins have been lost. If people start setting the exchange rate as if half those coins have been lost and then they discover that those coins were not, in fact, lost, then the value of all existing Bitcoins at that point would fall by 50%. At least that will be the end result once rational actors have joined the market.

A friend of mine just provided me with an LX9 FPGA Board. No cost to myself. Is this thing worth mining with? I read in one place that a Spartan 6 could be expected to generate 100 MH/s, but read somewhere else than that's for a beefier board, and that an LX9 might only generate 3 or 5 MH per second?

Anyone have a clue about this?

Two points:

"lost" coins are indeed an issue, because it's impossible to have decent price discovery without knowing how many coins are actually in circulation, or available to be circulated.

We know how many coins have been mined and we know the total value of those coins, but we don't know the status of them. Therefore, we can only guess what the market cap of issued Bitcoins are. Quick: what is the total value of all Bitcoins available to be spent? We simply have no way of knowing.

If someone bought up 90% of the outstanding Bitcoins and destroyed their private key, the theory would be that the remaining BTC's would then be worth 10 times as much. But there is no way to demonstrably prove that those coins were actually destroyed, and really, no way to even suspect that they were unless someone announced it.

Second - off blockchain transactions. Seems like a complete non-starter. If someone's going to try to exchange their paper wallet for my goods or services, the FIRST thing I'm going to do is import that wallet into my own wallet. It'd be silly to simply accept the paper "bill", verify that the public key its displaying has the balance that was described and have that signal the end of the transaction - afterall, the person who traded the paper wallet could redeem its value long after we parted ways, and I might be none the wiser until i try to exchange the wallet with someone else who then alerts me that there are no coins remaining in it.

Interesting... I thought the Bitcoin community was rabidly antigovernment?

But anyways, it's sounded like they've been giving refunds to anyone who's asked, haven't they? And those rules are for inventory that you have in stock - if you sell out due to great demand and can't arrange for more inventory within 30 days, you'd have to stop taking orders until you were reasonably sure that you could fulfill those orders in a timely (read, 30 day) manner.

BFL likely falls outside this - everyone ordering their products (myself included) were aware that they were pre-ordering a product that was not under production yet. Though their guidance about possible ship dates has pretty much sucked, they weren't misleading in that they were clear that they had no product to speak of at the time orders were placed. Our bad.

Now, if they weren't giving refunds, there'd be a real issue, but most of us are sitting tight to see if they do actually ship. Mainly because they're the ONLY ASIC game in town for people who want to run the machines out of their homes rather than just buying ASIC Miner shares.

an investment that can lose 2/3 to 3/4 of its value in a couple of trading days, I'm sorry, but that's a high risk investment. An investment with such limited liquidity that even in the event of a panic, woud still take a few days to liquidate any substantial amount, that's a high risk investment. And an investment that's got such a short track record that how it correlates with other asset classes is, again, high risk.

Note that just because an investment is of the high risk category, that doesn't mean that it's inappropriate for anyone to invest in, it simply means that one should expect more volatility from it than from "lower risk" investments.

Utilities (electriciy, nat gas, internet).

Or other things that don't need to be conducted face to face.

Gasoline, no good. Someone could have filled up and driven off before the first confirmation fails to come through. Bars and restaurants? Besides training staff on what to do, trying to transact in bitcoin during a late night happy hour would just not be a good situation.

There is a shop in the ground floor of my building that has a "we accept bitcoin" poster on display. When i actually inquired about doing so, the guy that was working confessed that was the owners idea, but he had shown none of the staff what to do - they just get the random person asking if they accept bitcoin and haven't got the first idea what it is.

So that's the second part - if your'e going to accept bitcoin, accept bitcoin. Show your staff what to do. ANd then, once they realize what it is, institute controls of some sort. Of course, if the business you conduct buys its materials and pays its employees and other bills in dollars, then you should use a service like Bitpay. The last thing you'll want to have happen is to conduct a ton of sales during the day in Bitcoin, and then before you have the chance to pay bills, be victim to a crash like we saw in April. True, hopefully that will be a rare event, but we the economy is too young to really know what lies in store. What we do know is that even on an intra day basis, a retailer would have been hurting severely if they sold $5,000 worth of goods for $6,000 worth of bitcoin only to find out that those bitcoin were only worth $3000 when they tried to cash them in in order to buy more goods.

I thought you were upset about the tirade against minimum wage. Oops!