It would work fine if the mining was licensed (with public key crypto) by the Tesla manufacturer. Such distributed database could then outlive the Tesla manufacturer itself and be invulnerable to legal attacks in various localities jurisdictions.

Issuing licenses for mining has been discussed on this forum many, many times. For Bitcoin it is unacceptable because of its anarchist origins. But for any non-anarchist endeavor it is a viable choice. Each Tesla car could do a little mining while being charged, with the certificate of ownership stored somewhere in its management computer.

I'm not very familiar with Tesla cars, but I presume that they already have some sort of public key infrastructure installed in them to verify signatures on their software upgrades.

With total absence of a reliable technical information about the chips it is hard to make predictions. About the only source available are the "preliminary data sheets". But even with those one could make educated guesses.

1) If the future chips still contain BIST circuitry/instructions that means that they still weren't able to internalize their own experience that dedicated test circuitry is nearly a complete waste of silicon resources and that the chips have to be continuously calibrated while running, not just tested at the start.

Other things that may indicate that they were finally capable of doing a true full custom/analog design:

2) BIST is still present, but no longer gives binary result PASS/FAIL, but some vector of values

3) PLL programming information will have additional parameters besides "frequency", either duty cycle (instead of the default 50%) or explicit phase shifts (for multi-phase clocking)

4) package information showing more than one "core" voltage, eg. positive Vdd and negative Vss (in addition to ground GND)

(3) and (4) would mean that they are capable of exploiting imperfections in the "C" of "CMOS".

Edit: Anyway, there is a Jewish proverb (approximately): Don't ask the tailor if the suit he's making is going to fit you.

Sounds like your "router" is actually a "NAT gateway/router". Get a better one doing a proper maintenance of the NAT state which will close all the stale NAT entries and send proper ICMP responses (edit: or TCP RST) to your machine.

What do you mean by "automatically kicks in"?

I've seen many multihomed machines with incorrectly set up routing tables that continue to send packets via if1 with the source address of if0. With correctly set up routing the ICMP no-route replies take care of closing stale if0 sockets.

In the normal financial circles this would work as follows:

1) group buy collects the funds in a bank A's account
2) bank A issues a letter of credit
3) bitcrane takes the letter of credit an obtains a loan against it from bank B
4) using loaned funds bitcrane manufactures the miners and ships the miners
5) upon proof of shipment bank A releases the credited funds to bitcrane
6) bitcrane repays the loan to bank B

In other words:

a) bank A is supervising the availability of the funds
b) bank B is supervising the timeliness of manufacturing and shipment

But this is Bitcoin, there's nothing normal about it. In particular many Bitcoiners are actively against banks and conventional finance.

$ host bitcointalk.org
bitcointalk.org has address 109.201.133.195
bitcointalk.org mail is handled by 10 bitcointalk.org.
$ host bitcoin.org
bitcoin.org has address 208.64.123.130
bitcoin.org mail is handled by 10 mx.zohomail.com.
bitcoin.org mail is handled by 20 mx2.zohomail.com.
$ host bitcoin.net
bitcoin.net has address 109.201.133.195

This forum has much less computer literate people than it would appear. There's also way more functionally semi-literate people here that would seem to be required for the text-based communication medium.

Love? No. But I do recognize that Bitcoin has originated somewhere near the people with the anarchist worldview. Out of all anarcho-something groups I think anarcho-syndicalism is the most promising way forward while staying near the roots.

Super-naive corporatism.

It isn't about "votes".

If you want Bitcoin to resemble corporation (or a cooperative) you need to find a way to reproduce the cash flow of the corporation (or a cooperative), e.g. miners pay the salary of the developers.

Your writeup was really naive, you wouldn't get a passing grade in any decent school.

What about the following modification:

a1) fold a modified p2ppool protocol into the mainline protocol
a2) require that transactions mined into the mainline blockchain have to be seen in the majority of p2ppool blocks
a3) p2ppool then has an additional function of proof-of-propagation: at least 50% of miners have seen the tx
a4) we can then individually adjust the fees and incentives individually for:
a4.1) permanent storage of transactions (in the mainline blockchain)
a4.2) propagation of transactions (in the p2ppool blockchain, which is ephemeral)

Right now the problem is that miners receive all fees due, both for permanent storage and for network propagation.

Another idea in the similar vein:

b1) make mining a moral equivalent of a second-price auction: the mining fees of block X accrue to the miner of block X+1
b2) possibly even replace 1 above with a higher, constant natural number N.
Late edit:
b3) reduce the coinbase maturity requirement by N
Later edit:
b4) since nowadays the fees are very low compared to subsidy, (b3) would imply a temporary gap of global mining income. Subsidy of block X accrues to the miner of X, fees of block X accrue to the miner of block X+N.
End of edits.

Both proposals above aim to incentivize and enforce propagation of the transactions on the network and discourage self-mining of non-public transactions and self-dealing on the mining fee market.

Could somebody please fix this meme? The text should be "Pre-order ASIC Prices Are Too Damn High!". Jimmy McMillan is too much of a gentleman to be dropping f-bombs.

Again, what is the point of minimum fee if the transaction isn't propagated? Miner-spammer includes the fee payable to himself. What's the point of that exercise?

How would you enforce those non-free transactions? If the transaction spammer is the miner then he can include any fee whatsoever because he pays himself. The only cost for him is that the coins are frozen for about 100 decaminutes.

Are you thinking of making the validity of the block dependent on how well the transactions in it were propagated over the network? I don't think this is going to work without a complete overhaul of the protocol.

I don't really disagree with the above. I just wanted to add that stylistically the code does resemble the work of a corporate consultant who was very experienced in padding billable hours and job security/contract security by writing idiosyncratic code.

In other words: it could be a "funded and managed project" where the staff was primarily interesting in maintaing the effective control over the code.

This is fairly common misconception that the only way to pay for the space in a mined Bitcoin block is with fees denominated in bitcoins. But this is not true when a miner is integrated with an exchange, because an exchange can shave commissions on both sides of the transactions.

Imagine for a moment that Bitfury branches out into Consolidated Furies and spawns Hryvnafury, Roublefury, Eurofury, DollarFury, etc.; all of them being exchanges. It can then easily outcompete pure Bitcoin miners because it can directly funnel fiat commissions into electric utility bills without having to go twice through the fiat<->coin exchange.

Edit: In fact opportunities for integration are not limited to mining + coin exchange. Imagine for example Marijuanafury which does two things demanding lots of electricity: Bitcoin mining and indoor marijuana growing. If only somebody could come up with new optical ASIC technology that is pumped with energy via photons at the same wavelength that stimulate photosynthesis...

Yep, you are good to go and as safe as the US ICBM operators. Although if I remember correctly the ICBM operators are required to sit on their chairs (with rails instead of rollers) and wear seat-belts (chairbelts?) when swapping floppies.

Important edit for the beginners:

1) Do not allow any of the computers to boot off of the floppy or CD-ROM. Always remember to immediately remove the floppy or CD-RW used to exchange the data between the computers, lest you forget and reboot the machine accidentally.

2) Do not install any additional drivers that might have came with the PCI board or the laptop expansion bay. The added device should be recognized by the OS itself. If the device isn't auto-recognized then it also isn't really safe. There were well-know vendors who inadvertently distributed viruses/trojans/bad OS patches on their pressed driver CD-ROMs.

I apologize for not putting this disclaimer when writing the original message.

You seem to be confused. Floppies have no firmware neither in the drive nor in the controller. It is all hard-wired logic sequencers. Moreover normal floppies never used IDE/ATA interface or anything similar, those were for hard drives. Fortunately the connectors won't fit, so there's no possibility of damage. Lots of even fairly modern motherboards will support floppy connected via the LPC as a last-resort recovery from a locked-out administrator access to the IPMI, AMT or similar pre-boot low-level interfaces. It is frequently not even described in the regular documentation.

There are some extremely rare IDE-attached floppy-like drives like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_UHD144
but those aren't real floppies and do have firmware. Although they are so rare, that one can probably assume that nobody would bother to hack them.

Internal or external. It doesn't matter, lots of laptops had it as an option for "universal drive bay" or "expansion docking bay". On desktop motherboards it is nowadays available through the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Pin_Count bus instead of the historical "IBM PC-compatible" cable.

Floppy firmware

The problem is paucity of computers that still have the floppy drive interfaces. Physical drives and disks are quite easy to get on the secondary market.

Obviously, using an USB-attached floppy drive will put you back in square one.

Paintings can also be endlessly replicated, all you need is some frame, cloth, paints, brushes, etc.

Peter Paul Rubens was even involved in replicating his own paintings. Yet after his death his paintings mostly appreciate in value.

After the last bitcoin gets mined in a hundred years or so, the available bitcoins will only gain in value, even if just to be shown in museums as an example of an ancient cryptocurrency.

There is some value in simply being first in doing something in a certain, very specific way, of doing something and in being first to popularize that particular way of doing that. When compared to Rubens' paintings Bitcoin has an advantage of being self-authenticating and cheaper to transport.

I had to read your reply twice before I understood your key argument.
Perhaps you'll find the original H.L.Mencken complete quote polite enough:

In other words, what I see here is another shtylman/Bitfloor or davout&Boussac/Instawallet situation brewing: substandard and/or questionable implementation; then a "hack" and loss of customer's funds. Or maybe just another "accidental double payment" like the ones that happened to GLBSE and ASICMINER.

I tried, but my work here is done. Now the emptor will have to caveat.

Edit: I'll save the btc4ever's signature block for the future reference.