I wouldnt be amused finding out the coin expired years ago, as suggested in the post I replied to

There is already such a project that does more or less that. BUt honestly, how many people are going to redeem 0.1 BTC?
And then what, they have 0.1 BTC in their wallet, only took them a day to download the blockchain and/or 20 minutes to setup a mt gox account,  12 attempts to get the numbers right. What can they do with it? Nothing. I just dont see it.

0.1 BTC might have some purpose if you speculate on long term appreciation. It might one day become worth enough to bother, but making them expire in x weeks, you might as well save yourself the trouble.

AFAIK, thats not how it works there. As on most websites you dont have a balance, you trade directly with the buyers/sellers.
I also cant imagine ordering some munchies or alpaca socks or even space cake and typing in codes of one coin after the other.
4x 1BTC coins and 12 BTC cents lol, we are going to need that small change after all

Anyway, the logical way is importing them in the official client. That would be awesome. Mt Gox is not a solution IMO, not for 1 BTC coins at least. No one if going to sell 1 BTC on MT Gox. I would also like to think these coins have more enduring value than possibly Mt Gox, so some generic way, no matter how complicated for now, would be nice. Just so people see it can be done, even if Casascius and Mt Gox are no longer there, that their bitcoin value doesnt depend on it.

Also, as I requested before, some generic information would be very useful. Id really like to point my recipients to one single page that explains how the coin works, how to redeem it, what bitcoin, where they can spend them etc. Now I have to tell them, go here to redeem the value, there to see what a bitcoin is, oh and over there to find out how the Casascius coin works. A single (brief) page with all that key information would be great. Just put yourself in the shoes of someone who received such a coin and has no idea what it is. Christmas dinners dont last long enough to explain all that :p.

+10

I uploaded it to google docs, hopefully you can access that:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l7nHZr4OeXZZwt9xbbDovmIv4q9RtM3X6tFsRWv4q5w/edit

Then Ill let you provide the correct arithmetic

Much depends on how many "big" miners there are vs small ones. I suspect most of the big ones will either be profitable or shut down, since any losses would also be far bigger for them; but Im even more certain there are many more miners  who mine with one or two cards, but operate at a loss, stealing electricity, have their parents/employer/landlord pay for it, speculate on future gains, or are just being plain irrational (or terrible at math, like that other dude who could double bitcoins).

The question is, how is hashrate divided between those groups? That I do not know. I would have guesssed something like half the hashrate is provided by casual miners with 2 or less GPUs, but looking at bitminters statistics for the last block (yeah, finally!), that might be mistaken, as the majority of hashrate seems to be provided by at least 3 GPUs.
Not sure if deepbit would give a similar picture though.

I seriously doubt flash exposes OpenCL interfaces to flash apps.


Flash player itself uses GPU acceleration for some things, like videodecoding (youtube hd). Thats not the same as allowing flash apps to access those resources.

BTW, what you probably notice is not flash hogging anything, but the AMD drivers clocking your GPU down to 400 MHz in UVD mode when you have hardware accelerated flash enabled and while you watch youtube. If you dont want that, just right click on youtube movie, and disable hardware acceleration. Your cpu will do just fine and your hashrate will barely be impacted by watching youtube or any other flash app.

I think thats a given; mining at a loss or "free" electricity. BTC has lost over 90% of its value since the peak, hash rate and difficulty havent even halved.
It be surprised if more than 10% of that hash power was profitable at actual electricity rates.

BTW, this company (if it even is one) claims to be working on an asic for bitcoin:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/users/275/ken-simpson

Granted, I wouldnt hold my breath as any 15 year old could have made a more convincing website, but at least they arent taking preorders, so who knows . The CEO seems to be this guy:
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/ksimpson

Also founder and CEO of this company:
http://www.mailchannels.com/company/index.html

It may not be wallmart, but doesnt strike me as something run by a 15 year old punk or a nigerian scammer either.

We will have to see if anything pans out of it, but, like I said, Id think twice before plunging a boatload of money on FPGAs.

Its worse than that. Keep in mind bitcoin generation will have halved twice in that time span.

I dont expect to make money on my gpu mining. If I do, it will only be because of appreciation of bitcoin. Thats why Im not interested in expanding, what I do is mostly for fun and some speculation.

As for why buy FPGA's? I certainly wouldnt. Or maybe one for fun. But I dont believe they would pay for themselves before sasics arrive, since I suspect that might be really soon. What I can tell its really not extremely expensive, NRE is on the orders of 10s of $1000s. Like I said, if its not BFL, someone else will.

Would I jump on that? No, because I dont have enough faith in bitcoin's longterm sustainability. If I had, yes, I would buy that, and take the risk I get crushed by asics one day and pray I will have paid off those s-asics by then.

BTW, I wouldnt worry too much about moore's law. State of the art processes are prohibitively expensive, and increasingly so. If you havent earned back your money before the next process or two becomes affordable, you probably never will make money on it anyway.

Wouldnt bet on it. Its expensive, but probably not out of reach to do small runs through MOSIS or CMP sharing masksets particularly using older processes like 90 or 130nm.


Have a look, from Altera's website:



Considering for bitcoin you barely need any IO or RAM, the efficiency increase would likely be much more than double. Looks more like ~5x to me. Depending on leakage perhaps more.


At 130nm....
If bitcoin becomes an actual currency, you could spend a fair amount developing a money printing machine.

It doesnt matter. Its easy enough to achieve short time price spikes or drops (particularly after you spiked it) if you throw enough money at it, but no amount of money is going to keep the price down. The only thing  that can keep the price down is lack of demand. You cant buy lack of demand .

Before you splash that kind of money on expensive and (relatively) power hungry FPGAs, do consider that if bitcoin is here to stay, sooner or later someone will do a (edit) easypath/hardcopy port, or even a  full custom asic. If its not BFL, someone else will, and it will make your off the shelve fpga's look almost as silly as  someone who bought racks full of xeons for bitcoin mining a year ago.

To get a feel for what full custom asics could achieve, have a look here:
http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/sha3/chip/sha3-asic-datasheet.pdf

If my math isnt off, that test chip gets either 150 or 300 MH/W on an old 130nm process (1.51 Gbps SHA256 for 5mW). On 90nm you might expect double that, on 65nm you might get 4x that. 40 and 28nm, well, do the math, but those are probably too expensive for years to come.

Likely because they have a significant NRE and a small per chip cost. If they use something like Easypath or hardcopy, their per chip prices could be up to 80% lower than off the shelve FPGAs, but they would have to aim for many thousands of boards to recover the NRA.

Why oh why would anyone spend these kinds of resources on some unbelievably elaborate scam that involves selling fully functional $1500 FPGA boards for $599 when they could actually make legitimate profits selling them for $1500?

Guys, seriously. Im all for being careful about possible scams, but is this www.ufos-aliens.co.uk ?

Probably, but they will use the tools they know best and that have worked so well for them in the past; you know, the tools we elect. Thats the obvious way to undermine bitcoin.

You cant drive price down without driving it up first. The idea is ludicrous "lets buy a million bitcoin so we can sell them later and crash the exchange rate ". Yeah that works 

Please tell me you are not really that gullible.

Have you tried a pool on port 80? not sure if deepbit allows that, but bitminter (see my sig) does.
And you dont want to mine on deepbit anyway.