My stats are that I'm earning $17 a day (taking into account currency conversions and MtGox fees) but power costs $5 per day (measured, not just estimated from parts specs).  Not everyone pays a few cents per kilowatt like US/Canadian citizens seem to do.  With a 50% difficulty increase that'll be $12 per day but still burning $5 in power.  Does it make sense to have $1000 of hardware producing less than $5 a day?  (Don't forget taxes must be paid on income).  Bitcoin's USD$ value did not increase at all in the last two difficulty increases, and there is no evidence this trend is about to change.  MtGox's little adventure is unlikely to have a stimulating effect on speculators either.

I have a feeling many bitcoin users are piling in without giving regard to the cost of power (and the cost of cooling where required).  Pretty soon they'll be thinking "free cash!" while spending $1.10 to make $1.

I have a Powercolor 1Gb 6950.  It has a BIOS switch but refused to be unlocked.  Didn't pursue the matter further.  I also have HIS 1Gb 6950s without BIOS switches so I didn't try on those.

This post is a joke.  It's along the lines of 'I don't like it, therefore it should be banned'.  True, many posters don't have a degree in economics or even a keen interest.  Most are pushing their own barrel (sell sell! buy buy!), but how is that different from economic advisers you see and read about in the popular media?  Is economics a riveting subject?  It is to me, so I vote for this section to stay. 

If this forum has the power to discourage people from adopting bitcoin and using it, then it's not the forum's fault.  One forum should not have the power to seriously move an entire market if that market is actually functioning and healthy.

This all sounds like a bank run.  Get your money out while you still can, and leave the poor saps who trust the bank/exchange hanging if they're not quick enough to withdraw.  Of course, every user that withdraws their money just pushes MtGox closer to the edge.

MtGox should in theory have 100% coverage for everyone's accounts, but the only way to tell is with publically disclosed independant auditing.

+1.  The only people who are shocked and upset are those who snagged cents per BTC trades during the deliberate market attack.  They can feign innocence and ignorance all they want.  They were the indirect beneficieries of crime.

Tight security is a pretty important form of prevention.  Mt Gox can rollback transactions as much as they like.  The few members of the general public who follow bitcoin got the message that 'bitcoin got hacked', regardless of the real details.

The world does operate on prevention.  That's why balconies have railings, dangerous areas are often fenced off and industrial machinery has physical and electronic barriers to prevent accidents.

It's not the early adopters I'm worried about.  It's the people who target those accounts and ransack the market at will.  Bitcoin is meant to be a serious effort to create a P2P digital currency.  Businesses are meant to take it seriously as a means of value exchange.  Events such as yesterday's and people defending the manipulated market as 'if it's the will of the market to crash to zero, then so be it' does not inspire confidence.

No assumptions required.  The market went from around $17 to $0.01 within minutes.  Where were the safeguards, or is a 99.95% drop in the market considered normal?  The onus is now on Mt Gox to explain what security was present previously, how and why it was broken now, and what steps will be taken in the future to secure both the site and market.  They need to explain each in detail as security through obscurity or 'trust us' doesn't work.  I look forward to a full report from them once they've had a chance to fix the damage.

Did Mt Gox go down because they haxxored the Gibson?  I bet the hacker used PCI.

The hacker had access to everyone's passwords.  The hacker crashed the market to $0.01/BTC.  Mt Gox allows withdrawls of up to $1k or equivalent in BTC.  Someone moved 500k BTC soon after crashing the market.  Put all those together.

That graph is pretty damning.  Can anyone think of another plausible scenario for transfering 500k bitcoins?  I don't think there is.  The BTCs were probably bulk transfered out to another account and then distributed out to other accounts soon after.  Unlike with a fiat currency system that people love to deride, there is no compensation here.  No chargebacks.  The BTCs are gone and not coming back.  Worse, whoever has them is sitting on a fortune when markets reopen and can crash the market at any moment they wish.  I fear this hack is the end of bitcoin as a potentially viable commodity/currency.  The confidence in the market is gone.  Why Mt Gox didn't have any protection against this is amazing, as it's a completely foreseeable scenario.

There is no overeacting here.  Mt Gox had no automatic safeguards and logic checks to ensure the market could not be compromised.  Gox is no longer a Magic The Gathering trading site.  They are dealing with serious amounts of money with no auditing or regulation.  How was taking a BTC's value down 99.95% within minutes not stopped by the exchange?  I know the rabid libetarians will say it was the will of the market, and if it needs to fall to zero and back again then so be it.  Witness the sheer unbridled greed of some posters on this forum who managed to snag BTCs at 99% off, and now whining that the trades will be rolled back.

We truly don't know the extent of this attack yet.  If it was done properly, the script should have transferred out as many BTCs as possible before the market was shut.  Those cannot be retrieved.

If I had just lost 25k bitcoins, I'd be looking at the Mt Gox hack very carefully.  Who knows how long the hackers had access to Mt Gox's password database?  We can't assume they broke in and instantly crashed the market.

Sleeping.  Just like the Mt Gox people, completely oblivious to current events.

Good luck suing some guy in Tokyo who is only reachable via IRC.  MtGox doesn't even have a postal address to write to.

Those people advocating against a rollback are taking a very strange position.  Imagine for a moment your bank account got hacked and the funds withdrawn.  Would you just shrug and say "Well, that's what the bank and temporary user of my account dictated.  I can't argue with the will of the market!"  Real exchanges (not Magic The Gathering trading sites like Mt Gox) roll back suspicious and erroneous trades on a regular basis.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained by allowing the ridiculous trades like $0.01 per BTC to remain.

This hack was inevitable.  Mt Gox deals with millions of dollars per month and was ripe for the picking.  I bet there's a million dollars stored in accounts on the site right now, and millions more in BTC.  The withdrawl limit saved Mt Gox, this time, but next time they won't be so lucky.

I am unlikely to use Mt Gox ever again after this.  It's the equivalent of the NYSE or FTSE being hacked and all shares sold.  If we're to treat BTC seriously we need serious security and service.  This hacking shows just how flaky bitcoin can be and despite the claims of P2P, security, etc, it's almost totally reliant on a few nodes for trading and bitcoin creation.

You're competing with five groups of people:

1: Those that pay 8c/Kwh and maybe even less.  They will continue to employ $1000 worth of hardware even if it makes $3 per day.
2: Those living in dorms and other places where electricity is not metered per user.  Hey, it's free!
3: Those living with their parents.  Free power!  Until dad comes along and rips them a new one for eating money alive.
4: Those that sneak PCs into work.  Priceless power.... as long as the boss doesn't find out.
5: Those that will mine bitcoin for higher ideals and on principle, even if it loses money.

The only people rolling in cash are those that started mining in 2009 or 2010.  People keep repeating the mantra that increased difficulty will lead to increased BTC/USD exchange rates, but recently we saw that trend broken.  Difficulty is up 100% yet the price remains the same.  Speculators and those very few people actually using bitcoin don't care how much hardware costs, or the price of electricity.  They never had to pay those costs.  If no one ever created another bitcoin from here on in the market would still be very well supplied.

Mining is profitable, right now, but will not be profitable for anyone if people mindlessly pile in with thousands of dollars in additional hardware without taking into account the regular 50% difficulty increases every 10 days or so.

There's also nothing like trying to bring people over to your side of thinking and convince them by calling them names.