Note that you CAN use x1 slots (and they work just as well for mining) but you need to use some kind of adapter/and or mod the hardware.  Not for everyone bit it can give you some more (cheaper) options for MBs.

You use it for things that don't do a lot of I/O.

OP: When you are ready to sell your used SSD, send me a PM.

BTW.

Yes, no different from the way visiting any web site could slow down your computer, for example with a lot of flash ads.

Web site owners who do this (either with a miner or lots of flash ads) better be giving their users a lot of value or people will avoid visiting the site, although it's true that the miner is less obtrusive visually at least.

In short no.

1. The bitcoin JS miner makes very little money compared to ads.  

2. There is no incentive to remove ads just because there is a JavaScript miner on a site.  If the miner ever makes sense (maybe with WebCL), sites will just do both.

There is a distributed mechanism to block future updates but not to distribute them.  If the bitcoin.org domain name is seized and the main developers arrested or sued or otherwise intimidated, it would be a long time before the majority of the network figured out what to update to, if anything.

These problems are solvable most likely but just saying "we can update the client if we need to" in response to an actual vulnerability is not a long term solution.

Good point and as long as the answer to a question is "we can update the client if we need to" then we are not (yet) dealing with a distributed anything.

Worth keeping mind though that everyone involved recognizes this is a work-in-progress.  Criticism on that basis is constructive.  Criticism that fails to recognize the work-in-progress status of the project is a straw man attack.

Different service.  You are offering safekeeping.  I'm offering insurance.  Good to have so many options in these uncertain times.

I'm offering rapture insurance. 

If the world ends May 21, I will pay out 100 BTC for every unit of insurance purchased for 1 BTC.  Offer ends at 07:00 UTC.

1L7TCH2e79bR6sRHbBHGsxJbHtuTCkMqxD

Send me 200 BTC and I'll tell you.

We'll see.  AMD devices do a lot more than just bitcoin hashing, and also FPGAs are manufactured in large quantity as well.

But you may turn out to be right.  Time will tell.  I'm definitely grateful that this open source contribution is being made, even if FPGAs turn out not to be the way to go for bitcoin.

The best answer is that difficulty increases are already priced in.

Not necessarily.  This one won't take over bitcoin mining, that's for sure.  But that's quite different from other people may already have (most likely do) and what this might evolve into.

You answered your own question.  But don't hate.  It's open source being released, others can improve on it.  No telling where it could lead.

try this

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

It's hard to predict what processors (CPU/GPU/xPU) will look like in the future but perhaps something can be done that is based on physics, like the speed of light.  If the speed of calculation is limited by latency between distant nodes, there is no speeding it up.  Issues like pipelining would have to be considered, etc.

You can ignore that error.  The files it is trying to link aren't needed.

Just thinking out loud here.  You say 500Kh/sec (maybe you made up this number?).  The low end "good" GPUs today are about 300Mh/sec.  So you would need 600 of these chips to equal one GPU.  Is that really going to be feasible in terms of h/$ and/or h/W.