Indeed. I still see a problem with adoption as a currency. Currencies need some stability to work. At the moment if I sit down to eat at that restaurant in NY which accepts BTCs, there is a good chance that I would be paying much more by the end of the meal, so there is no encouragement to spend BTCs. As a merchant, I would be nervous of accepting BTCs if that same meal loses me money.

Stability and liquidity will have to be solved for Bitcoin to work. The problem is that I believe miners are also hoarding, and as far as I can tell, mining is reaching a point where it is more difficult to be profitable. With mining rigs going up, difficulty will jump again, hoarding will continue, etc. You could have a noxious spiral soon.

For the sake of some of the good people of this forum, I sure hope I'm wrong  

Y'know the $10k was an illustration that even if he got an INSANE deal on all that gear it's still a huge, huge gamble at this point.

He probably paid retail, there's a fucking newegg box there.

That means he probably actually paid closer to $25-30k, and that's just on the hardware.

He obviously rented office space, too.

Electricity.

Time.

If by "safe" you mean "won't get tripped" then generally the I^n rating should be for continuous use.  I'll assume that you've got at least 14awg on that circuit to be "safe" in the "won't burn my house down" sense of the term. ;-)

Edit: To be on the safe side I'd go with #12 or #10 wire

My point is only that with continually increasing difficulty, the BTC/day drops dramatically in a very short time.

If you spend $800 on a rig instead of $1000, sure you get a better rate.  But you're still only getting 0.1 BTC/day with your $800 or $1000 rig in mid August.  Is that 0.1 BTC/day going to pay itself off?  Not at $17/BTC. 

I would really like to see the price of BTC continue to rise, like it has in the past 6 mo.  If it does, that will help the current adopters to pay off their rigs.

Really though, we seem to be running into a GPU limit.  1.0 Ghash (3 cards) puts out 1.0 BTC/day.  In the next difficulty that rig only puts out .6 BTC/day.  Then, 10 days later, will put out .4 BTC/day.  The amount of media attention and network growth is impressive.  The hardware is not keeping up.  By mid August we're going to have hit a wall in terms of producing BTC simply based on ever-increasing difficulty, and nothing being faster than the 6990.

 I'm also seriously concerned by the fact that the system is set to disproportionately favour early adopters, who have way too much power over the exchange rate. You get a single early adopter dumping large volumes, and the value would plummet.

By the time these magical ASICs are designed, produced and put in use GPU mining will mostly be inefficient anyway unless the price per BTC increases by A LOT. It takes time to produce such a chip.
Buying equipment for mining NOW would be STUPID. It'd be safer, as an investment, to just buy some bitcoins on the market. However, if you're a miner and have some bitcoins, it would be prudent to urge more people to mine and acquire bitcoins for the sake of increasing the size of our economy despite the impact on your mining profitability in bitcoins.

The official client just needs to be updated to support an encrypted wallet.dat file, would that really be so hard?

Also, Google "AaronBarr Anonymous", I'm sure this is a prank

I'm not defending the OP (which seems to be indeed trolling).

However, I have noticed that this is a forum with very thin skin, and critics are instantly tarnished as trolls.

I am joining a forum because I find Bitcoin interesting for various reasons, but I'm very skeptical of the fundamentals behind it.

Good point, although I think it's more likely AaronBarr is playing a prank by putting that address in his sig than anything else.

Ye ye, every new users take their time to register here just cause they feel compelled to point out all the weaknesses.

Its very strange to me that someone would go through the trouble to register just for that without even mentioning 1 or 2 strong points according to them.

gtfo.

Holy crap...I'd get hold of a forum admin ASAP and get some IP information, then contact the cops if you haven't already so they can subpoena the ISP if necessary.

So, this board does not welcome critics?

Not every Bitcoin critic is an FBI agent, a hater, or a troll. I have serious misgivings about the currency and personally I have joined to enter into discussion about the currency's fundamentals.

I would think humidity is an issue inside a fridge/freezer, not to mention the fridge would probably run non stop until it burns up the compressor.  I can't say i've ever tried that tho lol.

Great, please send me all your bitcoins so I can cash them out on mtgox...

I think that is more down to the people's ignorance on the matter of bitcoins. I mean you can't blame them, it took me a while too to figure out why I am getting money for running my GPU at 100%. What you can blame them for is spreading information they are not certain about or have not received confirmation on. Look at the original article with Schumer and the other senator. It said bitcoin is "untraceable" so now all these anti-bitcoin idiots keeping repeating that although its not even close to being true, or is taken out of context.

Just did a search now for bitcoin on ebay and found 82 results.

Edit: One of the sellers doesn't understand what 'micro' means, or is deliberately lying about it's definition:

"I am selling ONE Micro Bitcoin (A Micro Bitcoin is worth 1/100 of a Bitcoin)."

...except that (granting your very extreme example) Alice could choose at any time to end her self-imposed blacklist, and no one is the worse for wear.

You people are really overthinking this.  It doesn't even have anything to do with bitcoin per se.  It is the same as writing down some addresses on a piece of paper that you don't want to trade with.  Completely non-binding.  The only reason to use a computer is that it's far easier.  Arguing against letting the client keep and update a blacklist for you is like arguing against letting the client compute hashes for you rather than getting out a pencil and paper and doing it yourself.