On AMDs website the HD 6750 specs indicate that it has 720 stream processors. In your calcualtions, you are indicating only 144 stream processors, but later you are multiplying 144 by 5 when calculating the theoretical alu ops per sec.

Could you elaborate a little on the the difference in terminology?

How about imposing a fee for too many cancellations per day based on the ratio of filled orders / canceled orders for the account?

For example, an account is allowed 5 free cancelations per day for each filled order. Anything above that will be charged.

I used prq.se a few years ago but stopped because I felt their customer service was less than responsive. Only one guy seemed to be manning help desk (Gottfried) and he seemed to be always overworked. Their hosting was bulletproof but making changes seemed to take a long time. Are they better now? I know they moved data centers.

Yes, whatever you do don't use the same userid/password that you use for your pools, no matter how strong the password is!

The pools are under constant attack, and if you connect to many pools could you really trust each and everyone of the operators? There are only a few places where you can cash out your Bitcoins and it doesn't take much for someone who obtains your pool login to try to see if it also works on Mt Gox or Trade Hill.

I would like to know! I have converted more than an insignificant portion of my USD to AUD and South African Rand and I am only getting approximately 3.5% for both. Which currency would give me 7%?

No offence, but I felt like I wasted 45 minutes of my life reading your paper. Regarding the above statement, that would never be true because even in the most successful scenario Bitcoin would never represent the entire world's wealth. There will always be fiat currencies, precioius metals and other forms of pseudo currencies.

Whatever happened to the concept of layering your security? If using a VM provides adds some level of isolation between potential malware and the Bitcoin wallet then it would certainly be beneficial to use it as part of an overall solution. You shouldn't discard it just because it is not 100% "impenetrable" (Are you looking for a Maginot Line-type solution?). Other steps can and should be taken to protect the host, other VM's, the local network, etc. You may argue that this is just obscurity, but in the real world throwing an additional roadblock is usually all that it takes to prevent the success of a potential attack.

A high frequency trader that does Mt. Gox <-> Trade Hill arbitrage would be more beneficial to the Bitcoin community.

Well keep mining for the moment because with over 22.5 Ghash/s you should be generating $560 / day worth of Bitcoins based on current difficulty and exchange rate. The used hardware would not depreciate significantly over the next few weeks whereas continuing to mine would recoup a large portion of your investment. In 3 weeks you can stop mining and sell your stuff on eBay and might still make a nice profit.

Of course, assuming you are not just full of bullshit ...

You need to look at both Mhash/$ and Mhash/J. Once your rig has paid for itself your running cost is primarily determined by the price of electricity and Mhash/J  (assuming you are not paying additional datacenter colocation costs).

I did run the numbers for my own setup and assuming the conservative $10/BTC  exchange rate I have at least 2 difficulty increases to go through before I need to worry about rechecking the numbers. Electricity is expensive where I live ($0.20 kW/h) and I pay $18 a day to generate  5 Ghash/s. Note that my rig has already paid for itself so this is my only cost (excluding capital depcreciation).

I am not completey convinced that it would be too late for new miners to start today, though I can see the end for me possibly a few months away. Still, I would probably keep "donating" 500 Mhash/s to support the network as long as it remains viable.

Yes, but you can open multiple mtgox accounts and multiple LR accounts.

Dwolla is tied to your SSN/EIN so you can only open 1 account and that could become a bottleneck if you are a big timer (not a problem that I have).

To someone who does not know when it would be appropriate to display a chart using the logarithmic scale, the answer would probably be "Yes". I bet the panickers were looking at the linear chart, which would have been inappropriate because the price has muliplied several times in the past 2 months.

I'd be pissed if I "went away" for 10.5 years and came back to find my buried Bitcoins worthless.

What if I were to lease a server in Sweden (or some neutral country that has not outlawd Bitcoin) and physically ran my Bitcoin client there controlling it remotely from the US? Assuming that I never send or receive Bitcoins to or from the US, would I still be breaking US laws then?

Once you connect the second power supply to a card that is connected to the PCI-e bus of the motherboard the 2 PSU's are on the same ground level. However, it is better to directly ground the PSU's together because the ground pins of the PCI-e bus are only rated for so much current.

And someone who sells for $750 is smarter? Not necessarily.

Bad idea ....

But if you really want to do it try running an SSH server at home, not on port 22 but on port 443. There is a very good chance that the firewall would just assume that it is outgoing SSL traffic (HTTPS) and allow it. Since SSH and SSL are both encrypted, it is not easy for the firewall to tell them apart. You can then run SSH clients on the machines and forward port 8332.

There are an infinite number of ways you can scale out of your position in BTC. You just need to be honest with yourself and pick a risk profile that you are comfortable with.

I remember 5830's were priced at over $200 a year ago and did not really provide good value. You either went for the 5770 or the 5850. The last batches going for $100 is just that.

A more valid complaint would be "Why are 6990's so difficult to get? ", since we are talking about current technology here.

I'm sure some US banks are already reporting repeated ACH deposits from Dwolla into customers' bank accounts as Suspicious Activity Reports. Technically SARs only need to be filed for transactions over $5K and I believe that withdrawals from Mt. Gox are typically smaller than that. However, I have heard of at least one bank filing SARs for smaller amounts that occur repeatedly, just to cover their asses.

I'm willing to bet that there are a few pimply-faced kids who have never earned a cent in their entire lives who've made a killing in mining Bitcoins. Some of them might have made more than $100K in Dwolla ACH transfers into their bank accounts and spent it all without thinking of the tax consequences. They'd be in for a rude surprise if the IRS decides to audit them and demand their share.