Just a random googled chip image not HashFast processor.

The shinny metal part is the actual die (produced on wafers at a fab like TMSC, cut into individual dies).
The greenish particle board looking part is the substrate.

The entire thing is what most people call "the chip".  For high powered processors the die and substrate will be covered by a metal lid which acts as a heat spreader.

So whatever the issue with the substrate is, they are needed in the step called "packaging" where completed wafers are cut into dies, attached to substrate to form complete packages ("chips").

Processor/chip = silicon die + substrate + package lid + packaging labor

My plan.

Step 1) Print paper wallet
Step 2) Transfer Bitcoins to paper wallet
Step 3) Put paper wallet in a secure place.
Step 4) IN PROGRESS wait a decade or so.

Optional Step 4a) Periodically check safe place to make sure paper wallet still exists and check blockchain.info to make sure coins haven't moved.

You might be right although I claim Poe's law as my defense.  I have seen too many times people legitimately claiming Bitcoin needs/should work for microtransactions and if it doesn't then it will fail.

Thanks for the clarification you sold me.  The check is in the mail.

Bitcoin is also cheaper than cash.  Most business account charge for cash deposits beyond a token amount.  Usually something like 0.5%.  Larger businesses needing armored car service are looking at costs approaching 1%.  Throw in potential losses for counterfeiting (or detection equipment cost/time) and sure it is cheaper than Credit cards but despite consumer perception cash isn't "free" for the merchant (on anything larger than a hobbyist scale).  Ever wonder why when using a debit card most stores will give you cash back and they don't charge a fee for it (unlike say an ATM)?  Simple they don't charge because it improves their bottom line by ~1% or so for every dollar a customer takes in cashback.

Not true.


I see payments (transactions) but not micro.

Also it depends on the definition of microtransactions.  If you mean sub $1 tx Bitcoin works fine.  If you sub $0.01 tx then Bitcoin will never be viable.  No public ledger system will.   Any system has a per transaction cost and it is somewhat dubious to try and build a global model which works for sub cent transactions.

Current fee is 0.1 mBTC or about 1.5 US cents.  A company selling a $1 digital good generally finds current payment systems to be incompatible.
Credit card: $0.30 + 3%  = $0.33 fee or 33% of gross.
Bitcoin: $0.015 fee or 1.5% of gross.

Yeah looks pretty good for micro transactions. 

So you wrote a useless (and I agree trying to brute force 256 bit random keys is utterly useless) program for fun and want $300 to $600 for it.

Well you have confidence I give you that.

Probably not.  Not every unit is a Jupiter and Order # =/= total paid orders.  In one of the posts KNC indicates the Sept/Oct batch was 1500 units (and at the time roughly 1 week in Oct they had shipped 500 with ~1000 units to go).   If you estimate the distribution of models (Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter) by looking at the public order tracking thread it looks like an average of ~0.4 Th/s per unit.  No idea if that is representative of all sales but it is a good place to start.

So that is ~600 TH/s not 5,500 TH/s for Batch 1.   It has taken KNC ~23 days and they haven't shipped all units, lets guesstimate they ship the last unit by Friday that will be 1500 units in 25 days.  Daily production is more like 60 units per day. They likely were slower initially and had a 4 day halt in the middle so their current production rate is probably double that.  Of course this doesn't mean the network is going up another 600 TH/s next week as most of those units have already been deployed.   

Note this shouldn't be taken as an attack on KNC they have done remarkably well with only a couple issues your numbers just aren't even in the right magnitude.  No doubt that eventually KNC will ship >5 PH/s but they aren't going to do it in batch 1.    Batch 2 is probably larger maybe 2 PH/s but KNC has indicated that won't ship until mid Nov at the earliest.  Rough estimate for total network hashrate based on presale amounts and other guestimates is ~10 PH/s (+/-20%) by end of year.

The amount of TH/s is irrelivent to the number of sellers.   1 sole miner or 1 PH/s the same amount of coins are generated.   The amount generated is negligible.  A small number of fools own the majority of coins hoping it goes higher.

Not really difficult to see why there are hardly any sell orders.  There is also hardly any volume (it takes a buyer and a seller to make a sale).   Average daily volume is <1 BTC.   To pretend there is this mass adoption is kinda silly.  Of course you have hooked your hopes and dreams to this so I don't expect you to believe it but maybe nobody else will follow you down that path.

We already have a roughly 100x comfort margin.  It isn't like current adoption is stressing what todays technology can handle (some complaints about the blockchain being too big aside).   Growth probably will exceed Moore's law in the short term but that isn't a problem.  If todays hardware can handle >10 tps on a home computer (residential connection) and more than 100 tps on a cheap hosted server then even short term explosive growth will just eat into the margin.  


I was thinking more on a multi-decade scale and on any timeline pretty much nothing exceeds Moore's law.  As a "makes you think" experiment lets say we are peaking 1 tps today and long term Bitcoin growth will be limited to "only" Moore's law.  That is a doubling of transaction volume every two years which works out to a 32x growth every decade.

2013 - ~1 tps
2023 - ~32 tps
2033 - ~1,000 tps
2043 - ~32,000 tps
3053 - ~1,000,000 tps

To put that into perspective.
PayPal ~= 100 tps (up to 200 tps peak)
VISA ~= 4,000 tps (up to 10,000 tps peak)
All electronic commerce (bank wires, ACH, credit cards, etc) ~= 20,000 tps
All human commerce ?? <300K tps (total guestimate probably significantly less than that)

TL/DR:
Law of large numbers and all that.  The bigger the network gets the slower growth will become.  Unless Bitcoin goes interstellar in the next decade we don't have much to worry about.

Why do you waste energy worrying about edge case scenarios especially the asinine ones which exist only in Vlad's mind?

Bitcoin growth will be "slow" and steady.  As long as long term adoption is roughly equal to Moore's law the relative requirements CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage will remain in check.  If over the next decade the rate of tx increase by 32x it will hardly be noticed as the relative cost of storage will be 1/32nd of todays prices on a per byte basis.

Yup MySpace was at one time the most used and thus always ...

The prior post is correct.  Bitcoin may be "good enough" (ebay) and thus the network effect will be powerful enough to resist technically superior future (none of alt-coins to date) competitors.  On the other hand Cryptocurrency as a concept is larger than just Bitcoin and it may turn out that Bitcoin wasn't "good enough" (MySpace) and its network effect will fold to a VASTLY superior competitor.

There are difficulty estimates on the first page.  Not sure what you are asking?

The "house edge" on solo mining is 0%.   If you know any lotteries with a negative house advantage let me know.

$22 = awesome host

At least the thread was good for a laugh.

In general yes. 

The technicalities are a little complex.

Bitcoin tx can have more than one input.  So for EACH input a simplified version of the tx consisting of that input and all outputs is constructed, that is then hashed and signed using the private key for that input.  The signature and public key for the input is recorded in the final tx. So if a tx has 4 inputs there were will be 4 signatures and 4 public keys.   

Slight correction of the correction.  ECDSA is not an encryption algorithm.   It is a digital signature algorithm.  It is not possible to perform encryption or decryption with ECDSA only digitally singing and verifying signatures.

Private keys are used to sign Bitcoin txs to "prove" the tx was created by someone with access to the private key.
Public keys are used to verify Bitcoin txs are properly signed by the correct private key.

There is NO encryption in the Bitcoin protocol although some clients do employ encryption client side to protect wallet files from unauthorized access.

Cryptography
 - Hashing Functions
 - Digital Signatures
 - Encryption

All encryption involves cryptography, not all cryptography involves encryption.

Supply (or more correctly rate of production) is regulated by difficulty.  1 miner or 100,000 miners roughly the same amount of coins get mined.

I thought the rise from a penny to $1 was the boat coming in.  Shouldn't the rise from $1 to $200 be impossible.  The "investment" had already rose 10,000%.   Thousands of people knew about it.  There was media attention.   It was to use your crude language "after the fact".   It shouldn't have been possible for that second round of adopters to profit 10,000% as well. 

What about the subsequent crash back to $5.  You said $1,000 is possible.   $5 was certainly "after the boat" once again using your redicuoulous logic.  Someone buying in at $5 and selling at $1000 would be looking at 20,000% return.  Shouldn't that also be impossible?

Bitcoin went from $1 to $200.  Thousands of people knew about Bitcoin when it was $1.  There were even mainstream newstories by then.  By your "logic" the rise from $1 to $200 should be impossible. 

The fact that the prior history of Bitcoin disproves your very claim doesn't it at least seem possible that the future unwritten history of Bitcoin will do the same?