The backing of money by gold is not to give it inherent value, its to limit its supply.
Bitcoin has no need for that. It doesnt have limitless supply like our current fiat currency.

If you were to back bitcoins with gold,  which really is like reinventing E-gold, you reintroduce a lot of the problems that bitcoin actually solves. With bitcoin there is no risk that whats backing it gets stolen, confiscated, isnt there cause its a scam, or loses it value (or increases dramatically in value). The fact its backed by nothing but supply and demand is its greatest strength IMO. The point of a currency is to trade it with goods and services that have the intrinsic value, giving the currency intrinsic value just messes it up.

It also has a thermal conductivity that is 25x lower than water.

You could argue our current economic system is indeed a ponzi scheme thats beginning to unravel. I wouldnt dispute that. But the point is not that its closed. Closed in to that same world economy is also all the real world wealth that the money represents. Real estate, gold, oil, food, whatever. The bitcoin economy so far, is almost completely disconnected from that. As long as real world goods and services are not traded in bitcoins, its value is nothing but speculation, a bubble. If you cant buy a bread with it, it might as well be WoW gold.

yes, but the question is if those bitcoins are being bought for by dollars/euros, or do they come from people who ended up with bitcoins for some other reason, mining or otherwise. IOW, do they help grow the bitcoin economy by attracting real world funds, or is it just "bitcoin recycling", circulating amongst ourselves. I suspect its mostly the latter, and thats true for the majority of the current bitcoin economy.


But they do. How do holding companies make profit? Because they make profit on their investments, their shares. Shares only go up if new people buy in. Since almost everyone on that exchange seems to be invested in everyone else, buys each others ads and give each other dividends, since precious few companies (I use that word lightly) do any real business, the net result is that the "profits" only come from new influx of capital. New capital in to the exchange, not outside capital thats buying goods or services from those companies. Im sure you can see the difference. If no new shares are being sold, I predict there wont be a lot of companies there paying out dividends.


Sure. Thats not the point.  THe point is that, taken as a whole, the exchange and the companies listed on them can only turn out profits/dividends as long as they find new investors. usually that doesnt last .

Thats precisely what it is. I only visited it for the first yesterday as I was curious myself. its just a (very, very basic) website. After you installed tor and torbutton, it opens -rather slowly- in your browser, just like any other website, it just has a weird looking address.


Sure you can link. But you can only access silk road if you have Tor running and your webbrowser is configured for tor (ie, you pressed the TorButton). In that mode you can visit any other website you want, but traffic will be routed over tor, meaning its slow and anonymous. But otherwise its the same internet you browse every day.

Bitcointorrentz has an actual business model. If you believe in it, buy shares in it. I agree (assuming their business works) they attract BTCs from outside the exchange at least. Hey, thats better than some.  I do wonder if they get business from outside the existing bitcoin economy. I kinda doubt its substantial right now, but at least its possible.
 
But buying shares in a company who's revenue comes from dividends from other companies that are its shareholders too, or that buy shares in other holding companies and possibly even the exchange they are listed on, sense does not make. Im sorry, given the utter lack of any real economic activity, as in supplying good or services to the real world, at this point its all rather laughable.

Distilled water will short circuit after a while. Its been tested, I think by Toms Hardware. Ill see if I can find the link later.

I do remember reading about some nanostuff you could mix in water or oil to improve thermal conductivity. It was still in development and testing phase a few years ago, but looked promising and was being specifically designed for use in computers, datacenters and some other key niche markets. Not sure if its reached market yet, let alone what it would cost.

Most ppl arent stating its a scam, but after a week of asking, not a single video or even picture has surfaced. I think its legit to raise some red flags. Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, yet all we're asking is a simple cellphone video or something.

Oh poor you. So the evil  "manipulator" is buying our coins for too much money. Even though you seem convinced BTCs will rise in price. Cant you see how nonsensical that is?

See, thats what I meant. "Hip pocket - brest pocket" operations we call it in dutch. Its a mini bubble or even ponzi. Company A investing in B and company B buying adds in C and C buying shares in A;  increasing each others share value and using that "profit" to pay out early investors.  Sorry guys, thats not how it works. Unless these listed businesses start earning money from outside their closed system, it cant and wont last.

BTW that problem isnt unique to glbse; its something the entire bitcoin economy seems to suffer from. If it cant reach out to the real world economy out there, its all pointless, or rather, worthless.

You cant be serious? Drawing a 2D tacho needle would require basically zero GPU resources and perhaps a tiny % of CPU resources unless you update it 10.000x per second (and even then). You sure you are not doing something wrong here, or is that a side effect of the toolkit you are using?


If you run youtube, on windows at least, UVD is used, or whatever the hardware video decoder is called. That results the GPU clock being slowed to 400 MHz (on my machine). That is causing the slowdown. I can watch youtube on linux and it has no real impact on hashrate.

That was the half joking part of it. That said, it would be pretty damn hard to prove the person posting on this forum is the same one trading on silk road. Anyone could make that claim. I dont know US or canadian law, but I dont even think it would be enough for a search warrant here. Also, if he follows silk road rules, he will not have a list of customers.

No idea about vuse, just use the official client:
https://www.torproject.org/

Feel free to download one of the bundles which comes with its own firefox browser for tor, or download tor, vidalia (GUI interface for Tor) and the torbutton extension and use your existing firefox and toggle with that button between regular and tor browsing. You can find it all on that site.

Agreed, but dont forget you can use a different miner on the same pool. If the bitminter app artificially inflates its reported hashrate, the pool operator would lose money to people using different miners that report accurate numbers. Or am I confused?

If you are inferring he could lie about the numbers of shares per block (something I think you can verify, but feel free to correct me on that?), then you could make the same argument for any pool.

I was only half joking.
Can you think of many other ways to make that much bitcoins and a reason to insist on converting it in cash?
And hey, if he is selling pot on silk road, I wouldnt hold that against him for a trade. If anything, on the contrary, it makes him more trustworthy as a trade partner than if he earned his coins scamming,hacking or stealing, which are about the only other possibilities I could see to explain his request.

You dont install any "silk road" software. All you need is tor (/vidalia/torbutton). These apps are all opensource and in that sense, perfectly safe.

There are waterblocks that cover ram and vrms too? Nice!
But Im too chicken to use watercooling, so Ive been searching all over for "plates" that cover VRMs and/or ram heatsinks that have fins to use the airflow provided by my accelero cooler, I just cant find anything. Well, I saw precisely one, but it was for an older nvidia card IIRC. I find that odd. Surely not everyone using aftermarket coolers wants to rely on glued alu sinks that always fall off?

Anyway, I think Ill pick up a thermaltake VRM V4 or V5 to take care off the VRMs and cut my stock baseplate in half so it still covers the ram modules.

I dont get this whole "manipulator" thing. 10.000BTC is 0.14% of all BTCs out there. If there was a real significant demand for bitcoins from new users, that wall would torn down overnight, and the "manipulator" would lose a fortune selling his BTCs so low.  The fact that wall is there just shows there is no such large influx of fresh capital, and if anything, we should all be grateful that wall prevents small time speculation from sending bitcoins value all over the place.

That depends on your electricity costs, your time horizon and perhaps mostly, your faith in BCs future.

Unless you suffer from terribly high electricity costs, mining is operationally profitable and at current rates, you would probably break even on hardware investment in a year or so. That by itself is actually not bad compared to most investments. How long until you break even on solar panels or a hybrid car? And yeah, risks of those are much lower obviously, but you are typically looking at 10 years or so to break even.

Well, they do have protection that throttles their temp to around 130C; I noticed that when a GPU-Z/Afterburner bug caused my voltage to spike toa  whopping 1.65v. Which I only noticed after 30 minutes of roasting my card (ouch).  I suppose AMD set that limit at a point they are designed to handle, and they did handle 130C and 1.65v for 30 mins so I honestly dont know if 100C at regular voltage is a problem or not.

FWIW, the GPU's throttle at 100C, yet most people seem happy running them just 15C below that.

Anyway, Im mostly curious what VRM temperatures you guys that run your cards at 800-900-1000 MHz actually have. If they are not way higher than mine, then Im doing something wrong