A large company requires a lot of revenue to continue operation.  Operating using tens or thousands of watts a day will require constant dumping to meet the overhead.  A company also has to weight the amount they know they'll get in fiat today versus losing even more money tomorrow.  I think the end result with ASICs will be lots of downward pressure, because everyone will want to recoup their investment as quickly as possible and because if the price of Bitcoin collapses the resale value of their hardware also collapses.  Hence, best to sell BTC while it's worth something then dump the devices as quickly as possible if the price of BTC appears to be falling.  We're already seeing this pretty widespread and ASICs have barely been introduced.

Before there were tens of thousands of smaller scale GPU miners who could easily resell their cards for 80% of their value in 4 months and make more than that 20%.  Even more, there was less pressure to sell the BTC in general above your operating cost and the cost of the card because they were random internet dollars that didn't cost a lot to procure (one of my friends just discovered 3.5 BTC the other day he forgot he even mined a year ago).  Now with profit and resale value of your device up in the air and the amounts being invested by companies in the millions, I think it's likely we'll see a collapse in BTC value.

Also notice that newer ASICs are already offering a 5-10 fold efficiency improvement over the first gen BFL/Avalon chips (eg Bitfury, which is 0.4 W per GH/s).

There is no guarantee that the price will go back up, and most of the time you need to try to recoup losses now instead of a year from now if you have a ravenous bunch of investors to cater to.

Yes, exactly.  This is when I look forward to mining, moreso than right now.  I mined throughout 2012 and sold only 25% of it then, 2013 was great.

I'm sleepy, hope this is coherent.

Are you integrating GIMPS into a block chain? There would be a couple of problems with that I could foresee, namely that it takes an average of two years to find a new prime and that all new primes usually need to be independently verified (eg in 2003 when a new "prime" was found that ended up being factorable).

There are no real implementation details, so I'm curious.  In the Mersenne prime format you could easily stick them somewhere in the block header.

Edit: Apparently Gavin made a fork already of the same name
https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin

Doesn't look like he did much with it, though.

The reported efficiency numbers from the Russian subforum posts are almost unreal, it appears at low voltages he's hitting 0.40 W per GH/s.

I'm pretty surprised that it's been going about as I predicted.  I made a bunch of money this year on LTC and BTC, which is good.

Around the end of last year I predicted that the price of BTC would hit some new high above $100.  I sold the majority of my BTC when the bubble hit and have no regrets.  I also predicted that as ASICs hit, mining profit would tumble and we'd see a new low around that of the previous bubble's high ($30).  As before, the tumble to $30 or so will be slow and agonizing.

I would caution against the buying of large quantities of ASICs right now as the price may go so low that you'll be able to pick them up for next to nothing at the end of this year.  I bought 5 USB Block Erupters for shits and giggles, but I wouldn't go farther than that from any company -- unless you really want to worry about mining with your shiny new $120 GH/s ASIC that pulls 600 W from the wall and nets you barely nothing in the event the price collapses but the difficulty remains high.  Further, the effect on resale value of the devices will be catastrophic, so you may encounter horrible losses even if you try to resell it after.  If this happens, then it's probably a good idea to buy ASICs and sit on them until the network and price sorts itself out.

That's just my two fiat buck cents on where the market is going.

I hope the price tumbles to $30 per BTC and the margin of profit falls to almost nothing.  That way I can continue mining with my 5 ASIC sticks that only cost $1 a month to run and get more BTC, while the companies who invested a bajillion dollars into it make barely anything and have to shut their power hungry massive ASIC warehouses down.

In fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't, given the way things went after the first BTC bubble...

Yes, the miner should be a modified cgminer with GUIMiner support.

The "coloured coin" implementation I envisioned isn't really about emphasizing smaller divisions of coins directly, but rather about facilitating exchanges between Netcoin and other currencies.  Coloured coins themselves have no intrinsic NTC values but can be exchanged for NTC using the chain itself as the escrow.  An intermediary could always make a "milli-netcoin" currency and send one NTC in exchange for 1000 milli-netcoins.

The downside with coloured coins is that with widespread adoption, cost in terms of fees may become prohibitive for lots of these transactions to go through.  Still, where the coloured coin maintains a large value or can be transferred en masse (think overnight currency exchange among banks), the feature will still probably prove useful.

GPU mining will be available at launch.

I'm considering having an implemention of NTRU along side ECDSA and letting users select which one to use.  The end user will then decide whether or not enduring 10x the amount of fees is worth the hassle, but it would enable an easy way to transfer coins from ECDSA addresses to (much longer) NTRU addresses.

Progressive updates to the wiki are coming soon, and hopefully that will clarify things for everyone and make it a little easier to understand.

Not really.  Naked, actual, unlidded ASICs look like this.  Beautiful, no?

Thank you for the lengthy dissertation of why, mathematically, the number of computations and memory transactions performed doing one sCrypt hash and one SHA256 hash are exactly the same and have comparably easy implementations on application specific integrated circuits.

No, with N=1024, r=1, p=1, you end up with a 128 KB scratch pad.  You can reduce this logarithmically by a factor of two by using the lookup_gap method of only the fly scratchpad reconstruction, but you also increase the computational effort exponentially by factors of two -- hence why scrypt is said to have time-memory trade-off (TMTO).

I trust Colin Percival's math on this one, and if you read the paper there are no obvious attack vectors beyond the already discovered TMTO.  By using a smaller value of N you should not compromise the security of the ROMix/sCrypt algorithms, at least not in theory.  Security geniuses like Solar Designer have been hammering away at sCrypt for a while and haven't discovered much else that can really be done with it.

TMTO does show that ASICs will have some advantage in power consumption and speed, but good luck achieving a 50 fold increase in speed while reducing power consumption 100 fold like we've seen with Bitcoin.

Litecoin will be here to stay for this reason alone, and there are no shortage of people willing to send thousands of dollars to the devs to keep the network operational and running smoothly.

Or they unplug them one at a time and ship out like the Avalons did, without perturbing total difficulty increase much...

Okay; 15x the hash power for these other devices, which are a bit cheaper per GH/s.  For these devices to lose money mining (versus electricity), we need the overall network hash rate to increase beyond 100 fold what it currently is now.  At that point, everyone is likely losing money unless someone comes out with a way more energy efficient process.  There shouldn't be any point in the next couple years where I'm losing much money mining with these.  Maybe I'll make $250 fiat bucks back, or $100, or $1000.  Doesn't really matter to me; I'm supporting the BTC network by a decentralized means.

No one can tell what the price of BTC will be in the future, and also what the network hash rate will be in the future.  The price may fall to the point where it's not profitable for large ASIC mining companies to continue their operations mining or manufacturing products (similar to what happened after the 2011 crash), the difficulty could collapse, everyone could start throwing their devices out windows because they are worthless.  I can continue mining and losing a few bucks per month with my little USB sticks at pretty much no risk to me (a cheeseburger a month in power -- who cares?).  Then we may see the price go up in the long term.  One of the best times to be mining BTC before was when it was seldom very profitable by GPU in 2012, because the difficulty kept falling and everyone still mining kept getting more and more BTC; over time the BTC proved very valuable.

This is my high risk investment.  I know I'll make at least a little back, I have no worries about the loss of $500, and I'll be securing the network in the meantime.

The difficulty has to increase by two orders of magnitude for these to become totally worthless in terms of power usage versus mining income.  I plan to run them for the next couple of years.  I'm not really worried.  If they lose money, so be it, at least they're not costing me anything to run and they are securing the Bitcoin network.

The per watt efficiency is similar to other manufacturers out there, so as long as they are mining profitably, probably I will be too.

In the meantime you're welcome to disseminate your money to operations who will ship in "September" or "October" or whenever, who will probably use your funds to buy ASICs, destroy the network difficulty with them before shipping them out, and then send a slightly profitable brick to your doorstop (as we're seeing with Avalon and BFL, and as I'm sure we'll see with the Klondike etc manufacturers).

I'm going to buy them and exchange the BTC for Litecoins, which currently cost waaaay more power to generate in comparison.  So I really don't feel bad.  I will keep them running until they can no longer profit.

tacotime; 5; 5.65397647; 0875e568fa4ebce89847d35613f03541b2ffc789aa1edec22df7bf89f8db2261

I'm cool with $45 for express.

How many BTC is that total for 5 plus shipping?  I'll send it to the address.

Yes, that's fine.  I don't want to pay $100 for it, though.  USPS first class international should cost about $20, if that.

The search space for private keys via ECDSA is reduced from 2^128 to 2^64 using Shor's algorithm if I recall correctly, so not really.

In for 5, but only if you will ship to Canada via USPS.  FedEx will change me brokerage fees and I don't want to pay them.

If any Americans want to reship via USPS and can show that you're in good status on this board, please PM me.