This is pretty much a flaw inherent to all proof-of-stake coins. Distribution cannot be from mining because there is no opportunity cost inherent to mining any one particular chain.

This pervasive obsession I'm seeing with Linux adoption not directly increasing some kind of market cap is pedantic about a distinction that is irrelevant to the observation being made.

The scarcity or non-scarcity of software is not the point of the comparison at all.

The point is the nature of the network effects involved in adopting it. The fact that "Bitcoin" exists as a token that has market-based price discovery is incidental to the comparison.

The point of the Linux comparison is that there are viable use cases for mass adoption that do not involve masses of people directly interacting with Bitcoin in any noticable way.

Maybe a more obvious example of this scenario is voice-over-IP telephony. Basically 100% of telephone service is over IP on the backend now. But the public-facing interface is still a phone. Someone who still has regular copper pots service does not have to actually know anything about the nuances of how their phone calls are routed via IP in the background. Bitcoin could turn out the same way where the direct experience of users is through financial instruments and interfaces that resemble what they already do without having to directly interact with the Bitcoin network itself in any significant way.

Wasn't this high-functioning autistic supposed to be going away several pages ago?

This whole ecosystem might in the end turn out more like Linux adoption than say smartphone adoption.

The ultimate ubiquitous use-case for Bitcoin might end up being the underlying infrastructure of mainstream financial transactions, where consumers interact in exactly the same way as before through existing firms that convert over.

Much the same as how Linux never really caught on for desktop use but completely changed the world on the backend.

It's a tradeoff between the granularity of confirmations and the probability of creating orphans. Satoshi actually picked a pretty good sweet spot.

Something like this is impossible to achieve outside of maybe one retargeting because there are several variables moving all at the same time.

Here's some quick-and-dirty to make some estimates:

http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability

That webservices link returns the probability of any given hash being successful based on the current difficulty.

Your hashrate expressed as hashes/s multiplied by 86400 seconds in a day tells you how many tries you get to solve a block every day.

If we call those P and H, based on the expected value theorem your average BTC income per day (not counting tx fees or pool fees, which could be estimated in if desired) --

P * H * 86400 * 25

P * H * 86400 itself basically tells you what fraction of a block on average per day you would win

Taking that original model, call the BTC/USD exchange rate E.

Your dollar revenue will on average equal:

E * P * H * 86400 * 25

Setting this equal to $50 and doing the algebra yields --

H = 1 / (E*P*43200)

For $50 right now that requires about 700 GH/s just ballparking 1 BTC = $600.

This relationship breaks down very quickly unless BTC price and difficulty increase perfectly in tandem.

The fact that Cex is a monopsony GH/s supplier means that the bond has perpetually negative interest rate unless you're operating under fairytale difficulty increase projections.

When Cex dumps GH/s on the market, they are not just dilluting fixed costs, they're also dilluting GH/s price vis-a-vis simple supply-and-demand.

People don't actually make any money on Cex treating it like your model does, the future discounted revenue aspect of Cex cannot ever be profitable anytime soon, the only way to make a return is day-trading GH/s purely speculatively, which is a losing proposition because again the monopsony nature of the market means that exactly 1 participant has 100% perfect analytics and can rent-seek against the order book.

It directly moves the price itself in a way that no model can predict, it's not through a proxy like difficulty.

The ability of Cex themselves to arbitrarily issue new GH/s onto the market dwarfs the predictive value of any analysis whatsoever. These are not futures or derivatives, it's a rigged monopsony market.

What really rubs my spidey sense the wrong way about NXT is that for a bit now there have been what appear to be paid advertising spots on Let's Talk Bitcoin that somewhat deceptively sound a bit like news reports and even tease the next advertisement by advising the audience to get more news tuning into the next Let's Talk Bitcoin broadcast.

I'm going to assume that Active Active represents more like a load balancing multipool setting and Active Standby represents a failover strategy.

You absolutely want to at least have a backup pool setup. The larger pools rarely go down, but they do occasionally.

You don't make more revenue using multiple pools per se, but splitting hashing power between multiple pools can potentially reduce variance in your revs.

The mainstream media monologue has slowly been evolving from prattle about drugs, guns, human trafficking, Satanic ritual infant sacrifice, etc., toward prattle about sophomoric monetary theories (Bitcoin will never be a currency, apparently despite it already functioning as one), Bitcoin 2.0 vaporwave hype (hey guys, we just learned about Bitcoin 5 minutes ago, guess what, there's stuff that's gonna replace it you dumb nerds), and general FUD about things governments supposedly are thinking about doing and/or misrepresenting what they've actually done.

I'd call that progress, because the low-hanging fruit of OMGDRUGSBLACKSAREGOINGTORAPEYOURDAUGHTERS is severely diminished.

He hasn't the foggiest idea what he actually means, it's just a tour de force of FUD and conspiracy theories that you can't actually discuss in any meaningful way without getting verbally abused, and by that time he's already moved onto the next round of madman ramblings.

If only that turned out to be true!

The solution is to expose that it's governments that are manufacturing this negativity, not Bitcoin. Take MtGox for example, the only reason it maintained its market position is because governments are producing a chilling effect. A centralized Bitcoin exchange is a cash cow of epic proportions that everyone and their grandmother would ordinarily be stampeding to enter, but the prospect of having to plea against trumped up charges suddenly poisons the well.

I'm not sure that anybody should take the opinion seriously of an inveterate establishment insider trader who is likely to pass away before any of these questions can be settled.

The website for this product made me think I was having a stroke.

Also there are links selling 2 and 4 terrahash ASIC miners with photographs of what appears to be the case of a gaming PC.

Absolutely terrifying.

Price discovery on Bitcoin is still in its infancy because the chilling effects of milquetoast governments is preventing ordinary people from having convenient access to Bitcoin trading. Insane MSB regulations make startups in this space practically a non-starter in the United States.

It's plausible that things like the Secondmarket Dutch auction system will propel a new rally of pent-up interest and demand. The future is not MSB class startups, it's existing professional firms with all the necessary infrastructure in place deciding to incorporate Bitcoin into their operations / services.

Referring to it as a "line of credit" implies that the underlying value represents a loan, which is not factually accurate in any possible way.