I think folks wanting refunds on chips shouln't get 100% of their BTC back if they were intended to go into assemblies.

Some of us, even with chips in late batches quickly paid for assemblies in good faith to help SB get the board/assembly work off the ground. These people shouldn't be punished. The losses should be absorbed by everyone who intended to buy assemblies, so folks who paid for chips but sat on their assembly order, and who are now requesting chip refunds, should receive a partial refund of their chip purchase. Doesn't seem fair that those who did the least to help the project would get off with the least loss.

I guess you're using email addresses to match chip purchases to board/assembly purchases. Just to make sure, my humble single K16 assembly is paid on Order #100000077. Do we still owe you shipping for the chips themselves?

I was a bit caught off guard by your June 30th deadline, even for batch 5 chips? I guess it makes sense to pay for all the boards and components at once and get a volume discount. And the queue probably doesn't matter much but since all the assemblies are expected to be out the door within a few days of getting each batch of chips, but the sooner the better!

Even as a newbie, I like it. Hell, it could be 50 posts and 5 weeks. I think the quality of the content is a reason so many lurk and don't even need to post to ask questions.

Though, if the point is to prevent spambots, couldn't a bot get around this?

ASICs made to mine Bitcoins can't mine Litecoins, but ASICs for Litecoins may be developed if it appears profitable for someone to do so.

An ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) is any chip made to do a specific task. There's one in your mouse that processes and compares the images of your desk to track your movement. One thing the scrypt-based alt-coin tries to do is require more memory for computation, which is more expensive to scale up compared to the bitcoin algorithm, which doesn't require much memory and can scale with ASICs more cost effectively. So, Litecoin ASICs have a higher bar to reach than Bitcoin when it comes to whether or not it makes sense to make an ASIC for mining.

Same here. When did you start mining bitcoins?

You can estimate a near-best case situation: Bitcoin completely replaces the US Dollar outside the US. Inside the US, they'll probably try to prevent that from happening. There are obviously many other currencies used outside the US, but the dollar gets used a lot. About 800 billion dollars worth. Say that all goes to the 21 million total Bitcoins to ever be minted. 800B divided by 21M = about $38,000 per bitcoin.

That's not going to happen. $260 was, I think, largely due to currency speculation. But as Bitcoins become more and more spendable, which they are, it's quite possible that they could be int he $500-$1000 range within 5 years. That's my guess, anyway.