Your example illustrates that for a lot of miners, it is the marginal cost of mining that determines how many hash/s they contribute, not the total cost.

In the long term, this is bad news for commercial miners who need to recoup their total investment (marginal + fixed cost) to stay in business.

There will always be someone, somewhere in the world competing against them for whom the marginal cost is zero, and who doesn't care about fixed cost.

The core users of Bitcoin tend to be some flavour of libertarian, so the fact that we don't censor non-violent, consentual activities will not bother them.

The average joe user is never going to get as far as the forum anyhow. He will more likely use a web wallet provider than download the actual client.

The only danger that I see is that some tabloid journalist stumbles upon theses things and sees an opportunity for an outrage piece.

Bitcoin being so popular that it gets attention from tabloid journalists, that would be a nice problem to have.

I buy Bitcoins both for investment and spending.  My investment account currently holds more BTC than my spending account.

Tell someone at a dinner party that you invested EUR 100 in a fully virtual internet currency in beta testing stage, with no backing and no guarantees.  They will probably think you are a gullible fool who throws away his money.  Yet large numbers of people, even very intelligent people, happilly spend EUR 100 a year on lottery tickets. 

Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist regarding new technologies, but somehow the odds of making millions with a Bitcoin investment seem vastly superior to the lottery.

 

I must admit that morally and easthetically, I don't like the idea of "easy money". But I've come to realise that few people in the world ever got rich just by trading their labour for money.  If I don't invest in Bitcoin, somebody else will, and that person is just as undeserving as I am.

You sound like an extremist yourself. A balance extremist.

I believe that balance and moderation is a good strategy in some areas of life, but that absolutism (I prefer to call it consistency) is a preferrable strategy in other ares of life.  

For instance, I am an extreme and absolute in my views on slavery.

If I was alive in 1800 I would have argued that slavery should be abolished altogether.  Many of my contemporaries from the moderation camp would called my views absurd, unrealistic, utopian, dangerous and so on.  They would have argued for "balanced" solutions such as giving slaves more rights or reducing the number of slaves, or trying to find a compromise between slaves and slave owners.  Now in hindsight it turns out they were wrong. The "extreme" solution of abolition was indeed the best for everybody in the long term.

Well, you are probably an absolutist too on this issue, so I take back what I said

Maybe 100 years from now people will look back at us and say "I can't believe this was acceptable back then, even just in moderation!".  Maybe government as we know it is one of those things.



Anarchy doesn't mean no law at all. It means that laws emerge spontaneously rathen than being dictated top-down, at least that's what anarchists believe.

I suspect it will become a power law distribution of wealth.

Not much we can do about it, and bound to happen in a free market.

The presence of some super-rich bitcioners has some advantages too. For instance, one rich entrepreneur who is passionate about making a technology happen (say BitDNS), will get it done a lot faster than a collective of thousands of small investors politicking among themselves.



From the point of view of a vendor who accepts Bitcoin, it makes no difference whether a BTC is worth 0.1 USD or 10 USD. None whatsoever.

The only thing that does make a difference are monthly and quarterly fluctuations in the BTC value because that makes it difficult to cover his costs in USD.  At least as long as the Bitcoin economy is small and most of his costs are not payable in BTC.  He can protect himself against that through currency hedging, which I think will be on the market soon.

Generating is supposed to be hard.

Also, generating is not really the point of Bitcoin. Trading is.

You can join a pooled mining effort, but with a CPU you can currently expect to generate appox. 0.02 - 0.06 BTC per day. That is if you keep your CPU running 24/7 at full power.  A background trickle process will generate a lot less and expect this number to go down in the next few weeks. 

In my opinion, mining is something for enthusiasts/professionals, not for casual/newbie users.

If you are really enthusiastic about mining then be prepared to invest at least a few hundred dollars and several hours of your time. Otherwise it's not really worth it.

These milestones are meaningful from a psychological point of view, and by extention, from a PR point of view.

There are also meaningful for this forum. For several months there has been talk and anticipation about when parity would be reached. Now we can go back and see who made the best predictions. (It turns out that S3052 was spot on)

Clouds and mainframes are not the same thing.

Mainframe means you have a central physical machine serving several user accounts.

Cloud means your computer is virtualised and agnostic of the underlying hardware.

A cloud account could be hosted on a central physical machine (eg. Dropbox) or it could be hosted on a p2p network (eg. Wuala). The latter is very different from the terminal+mainframe model.

There are plenty of young people in NYC who are lucky if they can find ONE job, let alone multiple.

You cannot change the laws of physics.

To reduce latency the data centres would need to be close to peoples' homes which would prevent too much centralisation. There are more are more applications for which low latency is  essential from a user experience point of view. Thin clients are a horrible experience when you try to do anything real-time, interactive with them.  I doubt people will be willing to give up their general purpose computers completely, even if most of their storage moves to data centers.


They will sooner outlaw personal transportation (cars, motorcycles) before they outlaw personal computing equipment.

Occam's razor tells me that Satoshi is just a web persona.

Going on a ski trip this weekend, so I'll skip this Saturday.

I could probably make it next week, any evening except Thursday. I moved to central Zurich now so it should be easy.

It hasn't been thouroughly tested for bugs and DoS attacks. It hasn't been peer reviewed by security experts.

Before that happens it's not suitable as a serious and reliable currency.

Done.

Well, it's a small amount so I've just you sent you the BTC.

Please PM me the invite or send it to the email address in the PM.

You have been on this forum for a few days only, so how do we know we can trust you? Maybe you can you point to an established reputation elsewhere (eg. ebay ratings, bitcoin-otc)?

I will join the auction if in case I am the winner, you send the invite first and I pay second. Also, if you publish your Bitcoin address on this thread beforehand so that I can prove I have paid you.

If you agree to these conditions, my initial bid is 0.5 BTC for one invite.

Sorry for my paranoia, but we have had a few scammers here trying to trick people out of their Bitcoins.

 

Who cares if the gold bars are real or fake?

It's not like have ever been used, or will ever be used, for anything other than sitting in a safe anyhow.

And gold plated lead bars do that job equally well.

They're a bit like the Yap money stone that fell into the ocean, that the natives continued trading anyhow because they all agreed among themselves that it must still be down there.

If Bitcoin is successful and there is adoption by millions of users, a huge increase in value, perhaps 1000-fold, is unavoidable.

Such a strong rally is desirable for a fixed supply currency because it indicates increase in adoption.

Also, the higher the value, the more difficult it becomes for a single actor to move the market.

As for wild, unpredictable fluctuations, this can be solved trivially with currency hedging and futures trading. Some are working on offering these services. Just give it some time. It's still early days.



 

+1 exoware.net

Set up your own windmill for your household needs and generate bitcoin only when there is excess electricity at peak times.

Then you are getting your electricity for free.

every new technology can be used to facilitate crimes. as long as the societal benefits of the technology outweigh the negative effects, there will be no outcry.

for example, I never remember any outcry against mobile phones when they took off, even though they allow terrorists to communicate far more efficiently.