Or ensure the sender paid a fee.   I have never seen a paying tx not confirm.   Well maybe some spam dust garbage.  


For the OP.  It all depends on your risk tolerance.  I sold cellphone prepaid code and for repeat customers sent it with no confirm.  Of a couple hundred sales never had a double spend.   A lot depends on what you are selling and to who and for what reason.  Take humble bundle, it is a donation.  If people wanted to steal it they could simply torrent the game.  Very likely humble bundle could accept 0-confirm with no (or negligible) lost funds.  On the other hand if you are selling a high volume low magin product and can't afford any fraud not even <1% you probably should be waiting for at least one confirm.   High value tx especially the type which are highly fungible (poker deposit, exchange deposits, on blockchain gambling, etc) are much higher targets and really need confirms (often multiple).

Maybe he got hit by a bus.  People do die everyday and no I am not talking about CIA black op mission just the normal end of life that happens to everyone eventually.

An letter isn't a parcel.  The lowest class of mail for an letter which has tracking is Priority Mail.  Ironically if your letter had been >3/4" thick it would be too thick to be a letter and would be considered a parcel.

The simpler answer is tyring to figure out USPS is a good way to get a headache.  They love asinine rules.

Getting involved and already cranking out millions of wafers a year are two different things.  In time everything (even cheap garbage like USB controllers) will be 20nm but it is going to be a while.  The first mass production customers will be customers that value power usage over cost.   For example a cellphone CPU might be $15.  Paying $22 or $30 (on a $400 device) and getting 30% lower power consumption is worth it.

Nobody is going to buy an 20nm ASIC which costs 50% to 100% more than a 28nm ASIC.  It generally takes 3 years before a process nodes acheives cost parity with the prior node.   Those expecting 20nm tomorrow are in for a lllllllllllllllllllloooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg ggggggg wait.

Note the image is from NVidia conference.  NVidia who does runs in the hundreds of thousands of wafers (millions of units) hasn't commited to 20nm/22nm in 2014 because of cost concerns.  It is highly likely both AMD & NVidia will extend 28nm for yet another product cycle to bridge the gap to at least 2015.



http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless

There will be no 20nm miner by any vendor for quite a while.   20nm being available =/= 20nm cheaper than 28nm.   20nm will probably be available in volume next year (at 50% to 150% higher prices).  It generally takes 2-3 years before a new process node becomes cheaper than the prior one.  Maybe in late 2016 but 2017 seems more likely.

Miners using the coin protocol to create a blockchain over time.  All blockchains start from the genesis block (block #0).  All alt-coins have a different genesis block to prevent clients from becoming confused and mixing blocks across chains so "a new blockchain" simply means a new genesis block.   All cryptocurrencies "create a new blockchain". It is an absolutely pointless statement.  Every alt coin every made and every will be made "create a new blockchain" even your utterly worthless NUG.

You haven't proven that ASIC Miners withold coins at a higher rate than GPU miners did.  I mined with GPU for 18 months and sold less than 10% of my coins to cover electrical costs.  Still while daily volume may be lower than total supply it is much larger than the rate of NEW production.  New ASIC miners don't "own" the complete supply they only "own" the newly created coins which is a tiny portion of the market now.  It was different in 2010 when the daily production was sometimes more than daily exchange volume but those days are gone.

No.  Correlation is not causation.  Why would Avalon miners not sell coins at a higher rate than GPU miners?  The number of miners is irrelevant the amount of production remains the same.  If anything the continually rising hashrate means that production is about 30% higher than the target.  Still the amount of coins relative to daily trading volume is a small fraction (and shrinking).   

No.  If it was then GPU miners would simply keep mining and sell their coins for $800 per BTC.   Miners have almost no pricing power.   If difficulty gets too high relative to price then some miners will quit and difficulty will go back down.

Why would you think they had the "machines" right from the start?

You do understand the NRE, tapeout and first batch of wafers for any 28nm project is something on the order of $5M+.  They didn't tapeout until a after accepting preorders.   Fabrication time for wafers is based on the foundry schedule and often 60+ days. 

I just quoted the source to avoid any lame rebutals but I don't think you a moron you just trusted the OP and he made crap up and you got stung.

a) if you went to the post office they wouldn't allow you to track first class stamp
b) if you used the website you can add tracking to first class letter
c) if you use software like stamps.com there is no option to add tracking to frirst class letter
d) nowhere anywhere on USPS website does it say you can add tracking to first class letter.

The truth is you probably never would have tried sticking a random tracking label on a first class letter expecting it to be free had the OP not mislead you.

If it is obvious then you already have your answer on why the time value of money for BTC is lower than USD.

Remind me to never do business with you in the future.

I guess you didn't read anything but the first line that is exactly what I was saying.


No.  Time value has absolutely nothing to do with speed of the currency.   I feel stupid for wasting my time.

blub I know HF has released their protocol doc and IIRC Avalon has as well.  I got to run so I can't find a link right now but they are out there.

The ASICs are "simple".  The high level "mining" is done on the general purpose host and the ASICs as really SHA-2 hashing engines.  It varies from design to design but generally speaking the ASIC is sent get a "blob" of binary data (block header) and a target.  The ASIC takes the header, adds the nonce, hashes it checks if it is less than the target and keeps incrementing the nonce until it finds a solution which it returns. 

The one issue with high output PRNG is that the SHA-2 processors throw away all the hashes which don't meet the target.   Even if the target is set a difficulty 1 that means that only 1 in 2^32 hashes will be below the target and returned.   So take HF 400 GH/s processor.   Even with a target for difficulty 1 it only returns ~ 4 solutions per second at higher difficulty it is even less.  This is done to reduce he need for high bandwidth connectivity between the host and the processors.

I don't believe any ASIC processor can be instructed to return solutions which are less than diff 1.  In theory it could be done but I doubt any designer assumed anyone would want to as in Bitcoin the min difficulty is hardcoded at 1 regardless of network hashrate.

I would guess most customers can't get a refund or at a minimum vendors make if very difficult.  Those ordering early even with credit cards are likely beyond the chargeback window.  Even KNC which had the most liberal refund policy went no refunds because orders were "in production" the last of the oct orders didn't ship until 3 weeks after they went "in production".

Still even if every miner got a refund the chips have in most cases already been purchased by the foundry.  It would be bad news for vendors because they likely would need to lower prices to sell the same chips again but either they would or they would mine themselves.

If the numbers are right and >10 PH/s of chips have already been ordered from foundries then it is only a matter of time before those chips are hashing (by someone, somewhere).

The point is that mining is perfectly parallel.  It makes little sense selling a 6 TH/s unit for dedicated power connections and a 2 TH/s unit for "the home guy".  Just make a ton of 2 TH/s units and the small miners buys 1 or 2 and the big miners buys 100.  Higher economies of scale, less supply chain complexity, and higher margins.

The only reason for multiple units is when a customer can't afford the unit price but as the price per GH/s falls that becomes less of an issue.

Time value isn't related to the speed of transactions it is the difference in value between a currency unit today and a currency unit in the future.

If I gave you a choice:
a) I will pay you $100 today
b) I will pay you $100 in 365 days.


Which would you pick?  Obviously "a" right.  Nobody would pick b, that would be a time-value of zero.  Present dollars aren't valued any more than dollars in the future so nobody would opt to delay payment for no "compensation" the compensation for time is the time value of money.

So imagine the same scenario I owe you $100 but I will let you set the 365 day repayment "price".  I will pay you $100 today OR I will pay you X dollar in 365 days.  For you personally there probably is a value (say $120) where the two are considered equal.    

For example if you believe $100 repaid today = $120 repaid in 365 days then you would favor the extended repayment if I offered a value higher than $120 and favor the immediate repayment if I offered a value lower than $120.


The difference (X-100) is the time value of money. The time value money is going to vary from person and situation however in economics we are interested in the aggregate or average.    I think you can now figure out why the time value of BTC is lower.

Vlad please learn how to read.   The quoted post says nothing about the foundation.   Please also learn HOW Bitcoin works.   The foundation can do whatever they want and existing nodes will see those changes as invalid.

It was 0.18 less than 3 weeks ago (look at title and date of OP) so it shows how much "investors" have already lost.