There really isn't any advantage.  They all are of dubious value.

They don't really "hurt" Bitcoin anymore than someone making dirt coins reduces the value of gold.  You can't prevent others from producing alternatives so live and let live.

It is nothing to worry about.  Today performing a brute force attack on a 256 bit key is simply impossible.  It won't become possible without breakthroughs in physics that give us access to energy on a scale the human race has never seen before.  Just counting from 0 to 2^256 would require more energy than our star has left (yes the entire lifetime output of our sun).  

The only theoretic scenario where addresses could be attacked is that on a very long timeline (potentially decades or centuries) the cryptographic algorithms which make up Bitcoin could be compromised allowing a faster than brute force attack.  Generally these types of attacks take years if not decades to develop from an academic paper to something which can be done in the real world.  That would give active users plenty of time to move funds to "new" (as of yet not invented) address types based on stronger cryptography.  Long before any such attack could be made the only coins left in vulnerable addresses would be the ones that couldn't be moved because the private keys have been long since lost.

Gabi wasn't trying to be rude.  Blunt is more likely we see lots of similar posts pretty much on a daily basis.

ASICs will utterly destroy the economics of FPGA.  This isn't like Intel making a new CPU which is 2x as powerful and uses 30% less electricity then current CPU it would be like Intel releasing a processor which is 5000% as powerful and uses 90% less electricity.

If you really want to mess around with FPGA you can look to buy a development board and licenses for software necessary to create and flash bitstreams.  Understand that it is going to cost you hundreds of dollars (thousands for higher end FPGA) and you have absolutely no chance of making anything which will be profitable.   Most Bitcoin mining boards use the Spartan 6 series FPGA (Xilinx XC6SLX150) not because it is particularly powerful but because it is pretty much the cheapest FPGA on a LUTS/$ scale.

Honestly FPGA is a complete dead end.  If you want to do something interesting using electronics skills look to build a "hardware wallet" which can keep private keys secure from a compromised general purpose computer.  Not only is that far more interesting but it has the potential to generate revenue.

On a long enough timeline it is highly probable that the cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin (SHA-256, RIPEMD-160, ECDSA) will become compromised to the point that a brute force search is possible so in your analogy eventually people will build space craft to go look for stuff.

Most merchants won't they simply role the discount rate into the sale price but I am glad it is now legal for merchants to do so. It is insane that until how it was a prohibited practice.

Or not.  

I think the scammy, greasy used car salesman that is Bruce Wagner is probably the worst possible publicity for Bitcoin.  For example Bruce's claim that there are a million users simply can't be proven and all the stats indicate he is off by a least one order of magnitude.

And also PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can reporters earn their paychecks and stop making blatantly obvious claims like "Bitcoin has been hacked".  It would be like saying because a 7-11 got robbed the US dollar has been "hacked".

Nope. 


Sell them to someone else for a greater profit.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Sorry but it is the truth.  Have fun.

Did you make a backup of your wallet and have it emailed to you? 
Did you make an alias for looking up the identifier? 

If the answer is no then your coins are likely lost.  There is no mechanism to prove the wallet is yours so (hopefully) blockchain.info will not release that information.

There is no evidence that it is intentional.  Bitcoin is an experiment it is more likely software errors resulted in taking a reduced reward.  I haven't heard of anyone intentionally mining blocks for no reward.

It seems you have your mind made up so maybe you should just build a rig but the honest answer is never.

There are plenty of idle mining rigs out there.  Rigs run hard so they have little resale value and due to electrical costs are unprofitable at the current (price/difficulty ratio).  That ratio tends to be pretty stable so if price rises some marginal rigs will come online raising difficulty, if price falls then some barely profitable rigs will turn off lowering difficulty.   While price may rise a lot it unlikely that will make it suddenly attractive for new rigs.

An example of this ratio:


You will note that for more than a year despite massive swings in price and difficulty miners have earned (gross) roughly $2 to $4 per GH/s per day. The reality is that the capital cost will takes months (probably 6-9 or more) to recover at this earning rates.  Even if ASICs are delayed say 3 months you would still lose a significant portion of the investment gamble.  

To build a new rig now is essentially just gambling.  I mean if you want to gamble then gamble but you probably will have more fun playing satoshi dice.

This has been asked a couple hundred times I recommend searching the forum and doing a lot of reading before putting down any cash.

The simple version is difficulty will adjust to hashpower. If you can buy a box which is 150x more powerful than the largest of the mining farms so can anyone else.  Redo your math at difficulty 20x higher than current.  Now try 20x higher than current rising to 50x higher than current over the next year.

Wait you would pay money for something that was pointless.  You said the conference was completely pointless as one could get everything there from forums.  So if it was $50 you would pay for it knowing it was pointless?

As for the Foundation using foundation funds to pay for part of the conference?  Most foundations don't do that.  Not everyone joining or donating may be interested in a conference.  The Linux foundation has something like 100,000 paid members and conferences they sponsor still have a cost.  Nothing the foundation has done is out of the ordinary. 

If the foundation puts of a good conference it will be worth it even at $300.  If they put on a bad one (and to date everyone conference has been just embarrassing) it won't be worth it even at $0.  How good will this one be? I guess we will find out, I am willing to give them the opportunity (if schedule will allow it). 

Then simple solution ... don't go.  You have no intention of joining the foundation and no intention on going to a bitcoin conference.  If it serves no purpose then the price doesn't really matter does it.  It would be just as pointless at $10,000 or $10.  So don't go.  Other people will. 

What exactly was your issue again?

Simple version is no.  Using the free tier you won't earn even a penny a week (USD).  Technically you are right it is free but it really isn't worth it.  If your lucky you will get maybe a penny each month.  I would recommend spending 30 minutes in a parking lot looking for change on the ground it likely has a higher return on your time.  When ASICs hit you will be lucky to make a penny per year.

Using anything other than the free tier you will simply turn a large amount of USD into a smaller amount of BTC.

Nobody is being messed with.  It is the Bitcoin equivalent of intentionally lighting a stack of cash that belongs to you on fire.

For some reason the Bitcoin network doesn't require a miner to take the fees.  A block is valid if the coinbase is less than or equal to the max computed block reward (subsidy plus sum of block outputs minus sum of block inputs).  A miner giving themselves too much reward will produce an invalid block but a miner giving themselves too little reward (or none at all) will still result in a valid block.

You missed the point.  THERE ARE LARGE FIXED COSTS TO HOSTING A CONFERENCE.  The Bitcoin conference is likely going to be smaller than the 11th annual Embedded Linux conference.  Check back in 10 years likely the per person costs will be lower.  Conferences are expensive to host.  At $300 per person even with 1000 attendees the Foundation is unlikely to make more than a token profit.

Exactly.  The actual price doesn't matter.  It is the sentiment of the investor.

Example of a weak hand.  Someone too scared to buy into BTC and watched it rise from $10 to $15.  The entire time was convinced it would crash to <$10 so they didn't want to buy.  Finally due to the spike from $15 to $19 they buy in (capitulation buy).  They don't really want to buy in at this price point but their short term plan has failed and they feel "forced" to buy in now or risk missing out on even more price appreciation.  This hypothetical investor now has too much invested at too high of a price (relative to their own internal valuation).  This investor is just looking for a quick spike to >$20 to sell for a profit.  They are very likely to dump on any significant price movement upward which caps their gains however the larger risk is they are too long relative to their internal valuation and thus are very likely to panic sell if the price moves against them.  Their impulse purchase, entry point, objective, and internal valuation all conspire to create a scenario where their upside potential is small and the downside risk is large.

Example of a strong hand.  Someone dollar cost averaged with multiple strategic buys between $10 and $15 over the course of several months.  The investor believes long term the valuation should be north of $50 and thus $1 to $2 price moves are really irrelevant.  While this investor may have a large nominal amount invested they don't "need" the funds and are psychologically prepared to suffer a unrealized loss for months of even years.  They anticipate significant corrections and have undeployed capital ready to "buy on dips".  The investor also accepts there is a non zero chance that the Bitcoin experiment will fail and this speculative investment will be completely worthless.  This hypothetical investor has a strong hand.  They are more likely to be buying on dips and selling some (but not all) on unrealistic spikes to continually improve their basis.  

Over time coins (and thus wealth) are more likely to move from weak hands to strong hands then strong hands to weak hands. While an individual investor with a weak hand can get lucky "just happened to buy at the right time" in the long run on average they will transfer their wealth to those with stronger hands.

The detractors in this thread are sad and simply show how small they are.  $300 for a conference cna be an amazing deal if it is well organized with good speakers.  Free conference absolutely worthless (because there will still be airfare, hotel, etc) if it is poorly planned and thus a waste of time.  How good will the foundation's first conference be?  I don't know but the value is based on execution not a $300 entry fee.   As IT events go, $300 for a conference is actually pretty low.  Bitcoin is still small and conferences generally have high fixed costs.  Maybe next year (or the following year) they can have multiple options and the fee will come down as it is amortized over more attendees and sponsors.  I wouldn't be surprised that even at $300 per person the foundation loses money.  However the PR, and press may be worth it in the long run and you got to start somewhere A solid conference in a real venue that doesn't make international press think Bitcoin is a couple of nerds hopelessly out of touch costs a lot more than most people realize.

Still when you compare it to say the embedded linux conference (11th year) the prices don't really seem out of line.

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference/register

To be a full node you need the full blockchain.  Every block, every transaction back to the genesis block.  The trust model requires you to be able to treat EVERYTHING you receive from the network as untrusted (and potentially invalid) and independently validate everything yourself.

However you don't have to be a full node.  You can run a "lite node" client or use a web wallet (blockchain.info).

What is an impossible output?  Also I think your 80 year is off by a few orders of magnitude.