You still dont get it. The global hashrate adjusts to fit the cost per MH and the value of bitcoin. There isnt going to be a 2x difference from that, or people would lose money for every hour that they mine. If your point is that some might do that anyway hoping the price would go up later, then please pretty please consider anyone who is not braindamaged will still turn his rig off, and use the money saved on electricity to buy bitcoins to speculate on future price rise.


Its not a "baseline"? Its a function of the price (and cost per MH). Go check the charts, have you not seen how global hashrate exploded together with the price, and how its slowly dropping now along with the price ? Sure, there is some delay, bringing rigs online or getting them sold or making the decision to pull the plug takes some time, but the correlation is nearly perfect. It should be. And always will be.


Miners mine because it makes money. They quit when it doesnt make money. Yes I am assuming on average rational behavior, then its all rather predictable. What you cant predict are the people who can change their minds and suddenly "think its stupid". Those are the speculators, they could dump half their ownings on the market, or double their positions in a whim. Those are driving the price. The miners, they follow.

If you want to argue that miners are also speculators, speculating with the few bitcoins they mine, which they  could sell or keep, then fine. But as such they are first and foremost speculators, the mining aspect is not relevant. Buying coins with dollars or electricity amounts to the same thing.

I dont see why.  It shouldnt make any difference.  The average of the last 80 hours wont be different from the past 24h. So your payment wouldnt change either.
In fact, you will likely get underpaid in any  pool that does not use PPLNS, because those few pools that still havent adopted it, attract all the pool hoppers, and pool hoppers gain a disproportionate amount of the payouts (which means, you lose).

Great idea. Because we all know online petitions work. Particularly to go against the financial sector bankrolling the politicians.

I kinda doubt it would make a difference. The average of the last 10 shifts.. a shift is taking over 8 hours. So its your average contribution over the last 80 hours. Unless by part time you mean you turn the rig on once every two weeks, I dont see the problem.

Wouldnt the timestamps be a dead giveaway?

something like, "Its your money".. or "Its our money"
Seems to go nice with the "wall street our street" slogan

What is your goal exactly? Increase the value of bitcoin, or spread its use as a payment method? Frankly, I dont care about the former. I do care about the latter, and what that takes is not existing bitcoin users spending their bitcoins back and forth, it takes realworld businesses accepting bitcoins. Doesnt matter if they price in dollar and convert to bitcoins. Word of mouth is more effective than investment funds for that.

FWIW, Ive been contacting a few companies and non profits, and at least one is most likely going to implement bitcoin donations (The Real News). Not a big deal by itself (though they do reach an audience of tens of thousands, which isnt bad), but if everyone does similar, get one merchant, one website or one organization to accept bitcoins, that will get this critical mass, and the rest will go automatically. VCs and what not, they will jump on it, whether or not you post threads about it. Thats the idea behind a free market after all. Either that, or it wont happen, in which case bitcoin deserves to die.

I think even that is pushing it too far. I dont see bitcoin as the alternative to fractional reserve banking. I see it as complimentary to it, if that. Lets not kid ourselves or anyone, its an alternative, not a replacement. And its more an alternative to paypal than to the dollar.

You really didnt think this through did you? You're basically selling every BTC you earn (BTW, you pay transaction fees on each and every coin, WTF?).
Assume everyone is like you, if there where 1/10th the number miners, each with 10x more hashing power then you, each earning 10x more BTCs each, what do you think would happen? On average, not a bloody thing.  If those 10x less miners only had the same hashing power as  you, what would happen? Not a bloody thing, besides difficulty becoming 1/10th.
In each case the same amount of bitcoins would be mined, the same amount would be sold everyday on average. The only thing you could argue is miners keeping their BTCs for speculation, but thats not different than buying BTCs for speculation. All thats different is that you pay with electricity rather than dollars.

The amount of miners doesnt affect price. Global hashrate doesnt affect price. Global hashrate however, is a direct result of the price.

@Etlase2
Yes, we had the same discussion, except you didnt even realize the amount of miners or hashrate has no effect on the amount of bitcoins mined. Doh.

Not specific for bitcoin, but SHA256 has other uses. VIA has CPU's with hardware accelerated encryption functions, and I thought recent (or upcoming?) Intel chips did do. They are no match for GPUs but it shows its already done. Also when I google "SHA256 chip" you find among  others, this:
http://www.s2cinc.com/product/pd.asp?id=278

I have no clue how that performs compared to our GPUs, or even if its usable for bitcoin mining, but I would be surprised if there werent chips out there or coming that could be used for bitcoin, even if they are not designed for bitcoin.

When you make that payment, you send a broadcast message to the network. Anyone receiving that broadcast can see your IP as the origin of that payment, simply by logging his firewall traffic.

so they dont like meatballs on their pizza. Their loss .

I tend to agree that "end the banks" may not be the best message here.
But you might want to allude to the fact that you dont want banks to profit from the protests, something eg paypal would cause, or even when donating pizza to  the protesters when paying with.. credit card.

As for donating, im donating bitcoins straight to the general assembly:
http://nycga.cc/donate/

So far this doesnt seem to have generated them a lot, blockexplorer suggests 50BTC to date.

Anyway, if this project goes somewhere and in a direction I like, then sign me up for a few coins too. Think its too early now.

If we dont get a 100x increase in transaction fees by 2013, none of this really matters, as bitcoin will remain an obscure nerd experiment. Note I say transaction fees, not transactions. The current transaction fees are ridiculously low, which is whats you'd want for speculation, which is the vast bulk of current transactions, but if you do actual trade, few would mind spending 10x as much or even more to get fast confirmations.


Because the smart miner will understand that he can get better prices for his hardware if he gets out early.

Do I count 90 GPU's there 

Reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zZ_JfROhOE

Relevant part starts at 10:30 (rest is worth watching too).  You'll see the story of a guy that was hippie selling trinkets on India's beaches, who became a trader in London and went on tv as "expert" while didnt know the first thing about finance. By his own admission he hadnt a clue what P/E ratio's were, he didnt even know what the City was. But because he has a pretty face, he got on TV as expert to explain the market. LOL.

As a result, difficulty is going down too. I just keep mining, no matter the price. The way I see it, either bitcoin takes off in the next years, and Id bang my head against the wall for not mining now, or they dont, and Id have lost, frankly, not much. That the price is low, and the difficulty dropping accordingly makes it a great time to mine. Yes, its speculative, not that different from buying coins, but where is the fun in that . Besides, for me prices would have to drop quite a bit still to make it not operationally profitable even at the current difficulty. Its still cheaper than buying coins.

Different architecture, makes it very unsuitable to bitcoin mining. Its like 5x slower than otherwise comparable ATI cards.

Its not because tor is running that your miner is using it.

Cool I just fed a horse a few million then.