This is interesting



http://ia800904.us.archive.org/35/items/gov.uscourts.txed.146063/gov.uscourts.txed.146063.4.6.pdf

Great project, I wish you all well. I went camping in Uganda for two weeks last January. My cousin has been a missionary/veterinarian there for 22 years. She got married, I went to play music for her wedding (along with two sisters, and some cousins). We were in the Karamoja area (northeast Uganda, not far from Kenya).

Where we were was amazingly primitive. The Karamojong do not really have currency, other than cattle. One of the things that impressed me greatly, was the wide use of cellphones in Uganda (not among the Karamojong, but on the way there). There was widespread use of "Mobile Money", an SMS protocol to facilitate peer to peer money. People that lived in cardboard boxes have old candy bar phones, and there are plenty of street kiosks to sell air time, charging, and give cash for the mobile money.

This is one of the things that got me interested in Bitcoin. Bringing currency and payments to the otherwise unbankable.

Sound like you either do some lending or borrowing.  What is the reason people paying such rate?

Based on what I read so far, trader can only use the borrow money on margin trading. And they can't move the coin out, so arbitrage is out of question.  I never know margin trading can provide such return. What is their liquidation policy on margin trading?

Those interest rates were a strange blip. It didn't last long. But it was there and strange to see.

Their platform and idea are sound. Would hate to see them fail or turn out to be scam at this point.

In the long term, they will probably make more money doing it legitimately than trying to scam people.

Interesting.

This is one of the most insightful comments I have seen on this forum for some time.

As someone interested in economics, I think the establishment of a measure for the adoption level of a digital currency would be useful, and I think 'The Hooker Point' is perfect for it.

If we take an average city of (say) 100,000 inhabitants we can deem it to have reached this point when it is possible within the city's limits to find a locally available defined sexual service directly from a provider (without a 3rd party exchange involved) with a given currency in a (controlled) 24 hour period.

So a country can be defined by how many Hooker Point cities it has, or what proportion of its qualifying cities have reached the Hooker Point (for BTC).

Comparisons can be made over time and against other countries.

Since currencies go back to pre-literate times and prostitution is the oldest profession, it is a measure likely to remain current for the foreseeable future.


Further comment:
1. Market prices fall when more people want to sell than buy, and prices rise for the opposite reason.

2. People's choice as to whether they wish to be a buyer or seller is affected by their needs (entering or leaving a market due to the need to buy or sell what the market trades) or for reasons of sentiment (optimism or pessimism about the market price).

3. Although economics supposedly deals in rational situations in the market place, it is a fact that markets and sentiments are not necessarily rational.  A herd instinct, or copying instinct means that people often buy because people are buying - or sell because people are selling.

4. At present BTC has little practical utility (see 'Hooker Point' above).   Therefore, the market for it is much more heavily influenced by sentiment than other markets.  Since most people do not need to pay their rent or buy food with it, its value is almost entirely based on sentiment.

The only conclusion a rational person can reach in the light of the above is that any price predictions for BTC are very likely to be completely and utterly useless.

Update: (25 June, 2013)

Things have been hectic.  Very hectic.  I am quite aware about the usability issues, and I have been making some progress on the "persistent blockchain" update for Armory, but not at nearly the pace I had hoped.  Other critical priorities have cropped up.  I will explain more about these priorities in a week or two.  I just wanted to assure those of you who still follow this thread that development does continue, despite things looking rather stagnant lately...

On the persistent blockchain front: I have found myself in the awkward position of deciding to just make an identical version of Armory that uses LevelDB, or to actually upgrade huge parts of the codebase as long as I'm tearing it all up and putting it back together, anyway.  It seems that the best solution is the latter -- I've always been a fan of short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.  Even though it's slowing down the resolution of the RAM issues, a lot of what I am doing now will benefit multiple other things I have on my TODO list, including the new wallet stuff that will come shortly after persistent blockchain upgrades.  

What I'm talking about is things like properly handling and indexing multi-sig scripts, P2SH scripts, and compressed public keys.  Additionally, I'm trying to make the whole thing easily extensible to both partial/lite/pruned operation (storing only data necessary for computing balance and creating transactions) and also super-node operation (maintaining a full address-lookup index for immediate balance/UTXO queries for any address).  These are all things that I need to do eventually, anyway.  For instance, I had claimed that the new wallet format was nearing completion before getting sidetracked by this stuff, but I was still going to have to upgrade a bunch of blockchain utilities and re-test it to be compatible with the new wallet functionality.  I might as well kill 7 birds with one stone.

It looks like I've found a coherent way to fit all this together.  And it means that many of these changes can be implemented and tested in one rigorous round of testing, instead of rewriting and re-testing multiple times.  More importantly, after the first persistent blockchain update, it will be much tougher to modify the blockchain utilities, because users will have persistent databases that will need to be rebuilt to accommodate changes.  And that may be quite painful.  If you were wondering why it was beneficial for me to do full scans on every load and not save any blockchain data between loads.... that is why (simple!).

That's all I have for now.  I'm excited that when I'm finally done with this, Armory will be miles ahead of where it was before.  So many problems will go away.  Until then... you'll all have to suffer while I take my time doing it right

Bei 3 Shirts bleibst Du auch so nicht unterm Freibetrag.
3 Shirts sind korrekt. Drecks Copy-Paste im hektischen Office-Alltag.

Ente --> 2*0,19*1,19 = 0,452202 BTC

I have an idea. Let's turn the tables on FINCen.

Since they have such a difficult time elaborating, let's help them. Besides, it's inevitable, so let's accelerate the process. The TBF could sit down side-by-side with them drafting what needs to be drafted, allowing FINCen to take it to any direction they desire. Once completed, we'll know exactly what we have to do on our part.

@Sebastian: Hast du eine Ahnung, ob es eine Gruppenbestellung bei Burnin aus Braunschweig gibt? Müsste weniger Aufwand machen und weniger kosten, oder?

werde wohl auch meine Chips zu Burnin schicken, wollte sie erst selber löten, bin dann aber doch zu faul dazu

-collecting numbers in this post here-

1) Junction to chippackage 0.001K/W
2) Solder layer between chippackage and board 0.01K/w
3) Board with 25 vias 3.8K/W
4) Thermal paste between board and aluminum 2.5K/W

Watercooling:
5a) X mm aluminum
6a) Aluminum to water
--> I'll simplify this to "T_alu = T_water"
7a) Radiator with/without fan to air 0.25K/W


Aircooling:
5b) Heatsink with/without fan to air 0.5K/W


2w per chip
5x5mm for 2) and 3)
somewhat larger area for 5a) 6a) and 5b)



This tutorial was posted earlier, it has almost all answers already:
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/2004/08/thermal-vias-a-packaging-engineers-best-friend/

1) Silicon to chippackage: 0.001K/W

2) As shown on the thermal imaging here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.msg2043405;topicseen#msg2043405
I calculate with a delta of 7K between chip and board (62°C and 55°C respectively).
This assumes the soldering and boardsetup is comparable between Avalon and Klondike.
--> Nah, 3.5K/W is waay too high. The tutorial says 0.008K/W, 0.01K/W seems more realistic here. We don't use the length of the board for heat transportation, but the thickness!

3) 5x5mm area with 5x5 grid of vias, each 0.3mm diameter.
Bottom layer is 1 oz. copper
electronics-cooling says 3.8K/W with a 5x5 grid of vias (at 2mm spacing though, ignored)

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_grease says 0.5K/W @ 12.6cm², which calculates to 2.5K/W for our 5x5mm area.

5b) I randomly found a value of 0.3K/W for a CPU-cooler with a fan. Let's calculate with 0.5K/W for our non-sophisticated DIY solution.

7a) Found 0.21..0.35K/W for a 12cm radiator. The larger the radiator, the wore heat gettin' rid of. I'll use 0.25K/W here, although this value is pretty random - can be reduced at will with more/larger radiator.

..I'll calculate a bit with those values later.


Ente

About silicon-to-heatsink: I collected some numbers here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.msg2295823;topicseen#msg2295823
My conclusion is we'll be in the 10 to 15 degree ballpark, difference between junction and coolingmedium.

Yes, normally we want some turbulence in the water, for quick mixing of the fresh, cold water with the heatsink and warmer water.
In our setup, where we ultimately cool the water with room-temp air, I am sure there will be no thermal gradient over the whole setup at all! I.e. the water going into the heatsink and the water coming out will be the same temperature, in equilibrium. And with such low power over such a high area - I am sure such a minimalistic waterblock is enough. Having a potent enough radiator, with a strong enough fan, is a totally different story though ;-)

So. Who can tell me anything about running a bit of water over flat aluminum, which is heated with <50w per 100cm²?

Ente

Not to be too harsh like Loshia was on me.... (sarcasm)

But do we now need a water block thread? Consider we pushed out the case discussions, heat sink discussion why is this discussion still going strong here? Just asking not accusing.

So the water is running through the inside of the "box"? The largest problem with any setup like this is making sure that there is conduction between the chips and aluminum to the water. There will be no convective cooling in this setup (such as blowing air over the chip without any heat-sink). I also wouldn't consider setting something like this up along with a radiator and fan as "easy" unless you already have this stuff around. But I would have to see a design to make sure I understand what you are talking about.

Edit: OK, I've seen a design similar to what you are talking about. So, these current designs are placing heatsinks/aluminum housing on the underside of the board... how is heat being conducted from the thermal pad on the chip, through the board, and to the heatsink/aluminum? If it is just silicon then there may be a conduction/heat-transfer issue. It seems that this QFN design isn't really made for external heat dissipation.