Solid deal.

The network won't become more efficient due to more efficient hardware.  While an ASIC may have 100x the efficiency (in terms of work per unit of energy) of a GPU, economic theory says that eventually difficulty will rise by a factor of 100x or more.  The effects of supply and demand.  While miners are 100x more efficient in terms of energy per unit of work they are doing 100x as much work and thus the network will use the same amount of energy.  What caps difficulty is the risk vs reward.  Collectively miners have a point where the risk of deploying new hardware isn't worth the potential reward.  Above that point you will see a net reduction in hashing power and difficulty declines, below that point you will see a net rise in hashing power and difficulty.

What will make the network more efficient (in terms of energy to secure it)
1) More transactions.  While total network energy cost remains the same, more transactions means the cost per transaction declines.
2) Higher energy costs.  Higher energy costs mean miners costs will go up and thus everything else being equal difficulty will decline.
3) Lower "speculation" premium in the exchange rate.  Miners costs are in USD (or other fiat) and thus "difficulty follows price".  Today the price is partially supported by speculation (the belief that the exchange rate will rise rapidly in the near future).  This inflates the global rewards to miners and thus hashing power and thus difficulty.  As Bitcoin becomes more mature the growth rate will slow and the speculative premium will decline.  This makes global miner revenue more in line with actual economic activity.

While there is an technical limit on difficulty, a practical limit exists due to the desire for profitability.  Right now we are witnessing a huge increase in difficulty, because ASICs are so much more efficient then GPUs. We saw the same thing in the move form CPU to GPU.  However eventually difficulty will be capped by profitability.  Would you mine for a guaranteed loss (not the risk of losing capital but an absolute guaranteed loss)?  I would imagine not and most rational people wouldn't either.  How high difficulty goes, depends on how low of a ROI% (margin) miners are willing to accept.  Logically miners are (collectively) unwilling to accept less than 0% annual return so that becomes the upper cap.  

It is difficult to estimate an exact "max" but you can get a ballpark by taking current exchange rate and BTC generation rate to find the global mining revenue.  Now estimate the lifespan of the average ASIC (will it be 1 year before it is economically obsolete? 3 years? 10 years?  Calculate the hardware cost plus lifetime energy cost in USD, convert that to BTC.  Now factor in what return on capital (ROI%) is the minimum you estimate miners will accept.  At this point you can estimate how high difficulty will rise before miners will balk at the idea of deploying more hardware. 


Bitcoin seems very energy intensive because it is for most people the first time they ever participated in any global network.  Bitcoin today is a rounding error on the annual global energy consumption.  Hell youtube probably consumes more energy so people can watch LOL cats and be tricked into thinking clips have boobs.

I would be interested in that to.  Unless there is something wrong with my account (haven't mined in a long time), it looks like minimum payout is 0.02 BTC (360x higher than the default dust threshold) and that min existed before the client change.

It is called price discovery.  Someone believes the price is too low, someone believes it is too high.  The trade occurs where the market will bear it.  If USB stick miners are overpriced the price will drop (IIRC it already has once).  No reason one of the people buying chips in bulk (~$7 ea IIRC) couldn't build competing single chip USB stick miners. If the price is too high then someone will to scoop up that easy profit.

It seems you don't believe or are afraid of free markets.  Nobody "needs" to buy an ASIC miner.  They do so because they believe it is in their best interest.  Now personally I believe a lot of potential miners are for lack of a better word, delusional and thus demand drives prices up.  Eventually reality will hit and it will drive prices down.  If nothing else as profits get harder to eek out I would expect to see a lot of used ASIC gear for sale at 50% to 80% off the purchase price.

Sorry for your troubles by why mention Bitcoin.  Any Bitcoin miner is going to know which GPU are good for mining and anyone gamer just looking for a decent gaming GPU will hardly care.  You could always be discrete "does xxx MH/s" and leave it at that. 

Not excusing ebay/PayPal incompetence just point out sometimes it is better to walk around the wall then trying to bash it down with your head.

Once again I am not saying "dont use LTC".  Hell it is possible Bitcoin fails and LTC succeeds (improbable IMHO but possible).  I am just pointing out that if LTC succeeds it will be based on its own merits and not due to the dubious rationalizations in this thread (i.e. not enough Satoshis to go around, there needs to be a "silver", Bitcoin will only be used for large purchases for some unknown reason, SHA is broken, etc).

BTW the free market has said that the overwhelming majority of people agree with me.  Both on the relative value of the money supplies and on practicality.  I have never had in buying or selling goods or services (even $5 steam game) had someone who would not accept BTC but would accept LTC.  Maybe that day will come but it hasn't happened yet.  Lots of places however do accept BTC but don't accept LTC.  I bought a $1,200 domain on namecheap using BTC but they had no option to pay for it using LTC ... at least not yet.  

No that had nothing to do with it.  Silver (and Copper) were used because there is a limit on how small gold coins can be used in any practical manner.

The US gold dollar for example is only 75% of the diameter of a dime and weighs about half as much.  Imagine how easy it would be to lose such a coin.  The smaller a coin is the easier it becomes to counterfeit or reduce.  Scales (especially in 1850) are only so accurate.  A coin 0.1 grams light would be very hard to detect but with the US dollar weighing only 1.6 grams it would mean almost 4% of the value had been shaved off.  Worse the average wage in 1850 was $0.18 so a gold dollar represented about 5.5 days of labor.  That would be like today having a coin smaller than a dime worth ~$700.  Now try to imagine even smaller gold coins and imagine doing so with technology (for purposes of minting, validating, exchanging, transporting) circa 1800s.  How would you pay for a penny worth of nails with gold?  Someone is going to mint a 0.1mm gold coin (that is the diameter of a human hair by the way). 



Coins with more base metal were developed because given the constraints of physical tokens it was easier to use larger tokens of less value.



The amount of global currency in on the order of $4T USD ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_(currency) ).  That would be ~400 trillion pennies ("cents").  Bitcoin has 2,100 trillion Satoshis (21M BTC * 1E8).  If Bitcoin hypothetically replaced all global currencies (a pipe dream but we can consider this an upper limit) that would put the value of 1 BTC at ~$200,000 USD (2012 dollars) and the value of 1 Satoshi at 0.2 US cents (or 5 S = $0.01).

Still, the divisibility of Bitcoin can be increased if necessary with a hard fork.  If there ever came a time that such increased divisibility was necessary it would be a fork that could be made with overwhelming support (it preserves the value of existing holdings in a non-inflationary manner).  It is unlikely more than 2 quadrillion units will ever be necessary though.  Even today there is little need for divisibilty of the dollar to the 2 decimal places.   It rarely affect pricing.  Have you ever decided not to buy something because it was 1 cent more than you were willing to pay.  The cent simply lives on due to inertia.  Many other countries already use currencies with less divisibility without any adverse effect. 

BTW I am not saying Bitcoin will be the only cryptocurrency, it may have long term competitors with significant share or it may be replaced completely by something superior, or we may see specialized cryptocurrencies develop which carve out a niche (i.e. a CC designed around micro transactions, a CC designed around improved anonymity, etc).  Regardless of what the future holds it won't be because Bitcoin needs a "silver" or that there aren't enough coins to go around.

With 520 confirmations the chance of them being reversed due to a reorganization is essentially zero.

Use a third party tool like blockchain.info or blockexplorer.  If the 15 transactions have different transaction IDs then you likely are good.  Most likely there was an issue with the online wallet which caused it to execute the withdraw request multiple times.  It is impossible for the same coin to be spent more than once but the eWallet may have simply "paid" you 15 times.

On the other hand if you only see these 15 transaction in your client on and not on a third party tool (blockchain.info or blockexplorer) it is highly likely you don't have these coins they never existed and it is some parsing error by your client.  Another way to check this would be to transfer all the coins to a new address.  If that transaction confirms then defacto other nodes are saying the prior transactions (all 15 of them) are valid.

Without providing any specific transactions that is the best I can do.  Without any more information I mean leaning towards the former possibility (error/bug on site resulted in multiple valid withdrawals).

Yup it is just as likely as Barricks Gold (worlds largest gold ore miner) doing something to undermine the confidence in gold bullion. 

Well ASICMiner is a "company" (maybe not in the legal sense of the word but in practical application) a large portion of the coins mined are returned to shareholders in the form of dividends.  If those shareholders independently choose to sell coins how is it any different than someone with their own (owned) hardware choosing to sell coins?

As the number of coins climb and the block subsidy declines the influence of new coins on price will also decline.

Today there are ~11.4 million BTC and daily only 3600 or 0.03% of total are being produced.  The number of coins traded daily on the major exchanges (~50,000 BTC) already significantly dwarfs these new coins (even if 100% of them are sold as soon as they are mined).  By the time of the next subsidy cut there will be ~15.8 million BTC and the daily generation rate will have declined to 1,800 or ~0.01% of total. 

Nobody said ASICs are disruptive but if it wasn't ASICMiner it would be someone else and without ASICs increasingly the odds would be on the "someone else" being a hostile actor. 

This.  If Bitcoin never gets any bigger then it doesn't really matter what ASICMiner share is but if/when Bitcoin rises significantly in valuation the global mining revenue will bring in new players with deeper pockets.  Global mining revenue is ~$130M annually today.  That is the pie that ASIC developers are fighting over.  It doesn't matter if a company is building hardware for internal use, or selling that hardware to the public the potential revenue (either by directly mined BTC or from hardware sales) come from that same pool of $130M/yr of potential revenue.

Now like I said if Bitcoin doesn't get larger then all this is just a tempest in a teacup.  Does it really matter who is the king of the anthill?  Without continual growth and improvement, Bitcoin will be an experiment that limps along and eventually is replaced by something superior. Under that scenario it doesn't matter if ASICMiner goes bankrupt or runs 100% of the network.  

However lets say (over some period of time, months, years, decades) global mining revenue increases by an order of magnitude.  Suddenly ASIC developers are fighting over $1B potential revenue.  That is going to bring in companies with deeper pockets.  Today the potential revenue is (relatively) low and the risk is high but the longer Bitcoin continues without dying, the more regulatory issues get ironed out, and the higher the valuation the more it shifts the risk vs reward to one where larger players are interested. 

Forget AMD/Intel there are dozens of companies which make specialized ASICs for all types of industries who already have the expertise, staff, and industry contracts to roll out SHA256 ASIC and do so in a streamlined efficient manner (think shrinkwrapped build quality, ease of use, support, and distribution you would expect from say a home router).  However a slice of $100M at very high risk is simply not something they are interested in yet.  $1B+ potential revenue at a lower risk well that is a different story.

Edited for clarity.

I used BTC to buy a $5 steam game.  It worked just as well as major purchases.  Why would I want/need a second currency just to handle smaller purchases?

There is some truth to this however a partial break of SHA256 doesn't materially affect mining.  If people can mine 100x more efficiently then difficulty will simply rise 100x.  On the other hand a complete break of SHA256 (such that collisions can be found trivially easy) presents a danger to the security of addresses and LTC has chosen to use the same address structure as Bitcoin making it equally vulnerable.  The good news is the likelihood of that is very low, and the likelihood of it happening quickly before changes can be made is even less likely.

Of all of the cryptographic primitives used in any cryptocurrency it is the public key cryptography which history has shown is the most vulnerable.  It is vulnerable not just to future Quantum Cryptography but also to improved cryptoanalysis.  Take RSA for example.  It is now possible to break 768 bit RSA keys making 1024 bit keys vulnerable to attack within the next decade.  Most systems using RSA have moved to 2048 or 3764 bit keys to provide improved resistance to advancement in cryptoanalysis.

A future alt coin which uses a different public key cryptographic system would provide a better hedge/insurance then one which uses a different mining algorithm.

As much as this is an overzelous prosecution with a political element and thus absolutely disgusting the guy and his lawyer should be required to attend mandatory civics training so they can stop making stupid 1st amendment claims which don't apply.

The first amendment doesn't apply to another persons private property.  For example I can't barge into your house and scream on the top of my lungs about how your wife is a whore and then claim my first amendment rights are being violated when you either silence me, remove me, or contact agents of the state (i.e. Police) to accomplish the same.

This should never have even gotten before a judge.  Admit wrongdoing (and stupidity), plead down to a lesser charge (likely a misdemeanor) and pay a fine.  In the future follow the advice your mom hopefully gave you as a kid "if it doesn't belong to you ask permission first".

No because all governments tend towards despotism. Another Declaration would simply be resetting the clock 200 or so years before the same inevitable conclusion.

What the human race needs is a post-state society.  It is my hope that emerging technologies (material sciences, decentralized networks, distributed energy production, etc) will enable the emergence of post state societies.  If not then the 21st century will likely be a repeat of the 20th century, where more citizens were murdered by their own governments then criminals or foreign states.

That is some awesome investing insight you have.  Throw money into a project for emotional reasons.  What possibly could go wrong?  I don't know if AMC is a bad deal, good deal, or scam but your rational for investing is seriously the stupidest I have ever seen.

BFL and Avalon would be selling Scrypt ASICs.  Avalon shipping in 1 3 months and BFL in 1 3 years.

The issue is there is no standardized IOPS to FLOPS conversion ratio.  Any such ratio is merely speculation.  The ratio between integer and floating point performance varies dramatically even when just looking at CPUs from a single manufacturer.

Then no cryptocurrency will ever be successful.  The idea that 100% of users will be miners is a dubious pipe dream.  Did 100% of gold owners miner their own gold from their own mine, using their own mining equipment.  The number of miners in nominal terms may increase but the miners as a % of user base will continue to decline.  There is never going to be a cryptocurrency with 20,000,000 miners for example.  It just isn't going to happen.  Time, resources, skill, risk appetite, and finite reward will constrain the number of miners.

If cryptocurrencies can't grow beyond a base of miners well then the whole experiment (not just Bitcoin but all derivatives as well) never had a chance of success anymore than if the only people using Personal Computers were people with the equipment and skill to build one by hand.

Because LTC doesn't do "exactly" what BTC does.  Does every store, exchange, merchant, and user which has, uses, or accepts BTC also have, use, or accept LTC?  Does LTC has the same security against a 51% attack (exactly the same security)?

If not then LTC utility is not the same as BTC.  It may have utility but it isn't an identical replacement.  The concept is called fungibility.  Gold for example is a good commodity money and diamonds are not because all pure gold is identical however diamonds (or other precious stones) vary in value significantly based on size, shape, color, etc.   All Bitcoins are identical.  There aren't good Bitcoins or bad Bitcoins.  There are Bitcoins which are slow to confirm and Bitcoins that are fast to confirm.  All Bitcoins are equally vulnerable to unconfirmed double spend or 51% attack. 

While BTC & LTC may have similar properties they aren't fungible.  The value of LTC money supply may indirectly affect BTC exchange rate but BTC will retain its own valuation much like Silver and Gold retain unique valuations.  Gold and Silver are both precious metals, have similar properties and have similar uses.  Gold however is valued about 50x as high.  Under your logic this shouldn't have happened.  The price of gold should fall and silver should rise to reach an equilibrium with silver at say $300 per ounce for all precious metals (Gold, Silver, Platinum, or Paladium your choice).