Researcher/designer for GPU cluster design and operation for $50/hr .... can you reference that?  Contract or salary, if salaried add in extras to the package.

Use the PCIe power-bypass ribbon extension to avoid frying your mobo ...

1 satoshi  =  1e-9 BTC (since it/he doesn't really exist)

0.001 BTC = 1e-3 BTC  = = 1 millibitcoin  =  1 million satoshi  = 1 mill


I propose "1 mill"


we can have two camps one going to the left of the decimal, the other to the right and things can be thoroughly confused (and conflict with abbreviated millilitres and milligrams) but they will both agree on the mill.

Agreed.

Okay, so you have a range of outcome scenarios and estimated a likelihood (probablity) of each of those occurring (with a pessimistic/conservative bias). Sounds like a good starting point and a worthwhile exercise. What about you put up the range of values of probabilities and we'll have something to discuss ... (yes I'm bored) ... to your benefit we may collectively come up with a better estimate on the likelihood probabilities than you on your own ....

... we'll can call it the "pizza guy analysis", after the guy who delivered 2 pizzas for 10,000 BTC (maybe he did a similar thought process).

Care to elucidate us on what those "fundamentals" may be?

Besides, "I just pulled this figure out of my backside and it seems about right."? (as fundamental as that is doesn't make it believable. Anybody who believes they have a fundamental way to value bitcoins is in la-la land. There are just impossibly many variables involved.

You've got nothing to fear, if you've got nothing to hide ..... ?

The problem is, it's a sucky statist attitude .... no ID, no ticky, we may as well live in communist China, Soviet Socialist Russia or Nazi Germany.

 ... there's the rub. You got Big Brother's money and then you got bitcoin. .... BB's money costs too much.

Just give the prospective client splash page access only to his Instawallet and an address to send the coins to ....

https://www.instawallet.org

dystopian grand theft auto where bitcoins are the underworld currency of choice?

I think you can extend the averaging period so that the variance is averaged out and it reflects more closely to what you see on your machine. But what you see on your machine is an instantaneous reading anyway and does not take into account time to submit shares, stales, etc.

Small note here. Relating hashing power and transaction costs in BTC, i.e., MHash per BTC and MBytes per BTC might be introducing unnecessary confusion.

These costs, hash power and transactions, are actually more closely fixed in other currency units (for now) and with rapidly changing valuations e.g., BTC/U$, fixing those computational costs in BTC is always going to create moving targets for the 'relevant' size of fees.

most likely because you are an unlucky bastard miner ... for now.

... the demand for digital money that is easy, near zero cost, to transfer, limited in issuance and pseudo-anonymous is difficult to estimate.

However, let's just say that there are more than 100,000 people on the planet of 7 billion that might like to use this .... run the numbers, the current exponential growth could go on for a long, long time ... us here now could be considered the "early adopters" after another 18 months of exponential growth ... it's difficult to get your head around the potential size of the shift in wealth/money perceptions that is possible, for anybody.

Life of its own now, enjoy the ride.

Hey, if your were going into a war. Adult males, with high degree of technical training, aged between 25-34, i.e. good amount of work experience, is where I would draw be drawing my military reserves from ... these are the backbone of modern economy, they are who brings home the real bacon, they produce the stuff society actually needs ... right now it is monetary information technology.

Banksters, accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, public relations and all the other sundry parasitical and bullshit-artists can go blow for all I care. Technology has a way of catching up with, and purging such inefficiencies eventually.

To the victor, go the spoils.

Oh yeah, we get to write our own history too.

These are interesting mind exercises ... I do them all the time to keep the grey matter clicking.

But think of the wider ramifications. Imagine all those people currently sitting on hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of wealth, Buffet, Gates, Ellison, bankster CEO's, the Paris Hiltons, old money families, Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg, etc ... there are quite a few but not innumerable, for guestimates sake lets say around 200,000 people who control 90% of global wealth or something like that.

Now, imagine if bitcoin become the new denomination of wealth. Suddenly we have world turned upside down where the new holders of big wealth are cyperpunks, linux hardware nerds, extreme gamer college students and various other programming geeks, libertarian anarchists and etc who got in early. Even a few tens of bitcoins could represent a massive holding under the new system.

And that other former ruling elites are suddenly grasping at straws trying to get into bitcoin at any cost as they see their power evaporating away in the collapse of the old discredited monetary system.

Wow, 115 GHash/s ... and having a great run today. Weekends on BTCMine just seem to go better.

Bitcoin is behaving not like a stock, but somewhat more like a bond. In fact, it is behaving exactly like a newly introduced form of cash (which it supposedly can be used as).

In a word, it is monetising.

This means that the premium the market is placing upon its value, above its production costs (mining costs), has become a function of how the market can use that commodity (bitcoin) to perform the usual functions of money. Medium of exchange, store of value, etc.

It cannot be a bubble until it pops. If bitcoin remains good as money after the initial monetisation phase there is no reason to suppose that it will no longer perform the functions of money and lose that premium that is giving its seemingly unbelievable gains in value.

You need to understand the dynamics of monetisation before you understand the dynamics of the market for bitcoin.

There are very few case studies for this occurrence in the monetary history. It is an entirely new form of free-market private (i.e. non government) money being introduced through an ingenius invention. We are in uncharted territory.

Monetisation.

A universal currency, particularly one that is easy to transfer between nations, will do much to level the playing field of economic disparity. Much of it has been maintained by vested interests who manage national currencies. Just think you easily see how much it really costs to glue those Nike shoes together in any country in the world.

Comparative advantage will kick in with an unimaginable viciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

It also raises interesting questions about where on earth all the bitcoin reserves will pile up over time, like the current situation with T-bonds in China.

bitcoin2.0

What bothers me is that bitcoin maybe the defining catalyst for the state to have its "crossing the Rubicon moment", shed any pretense of legitimacy and go completely feral.

After that, she's all on, as far as I'm concerned, with us or against times. And a bunch of computer enthusiasts are on the front-line of much nastiness, how sad would that be?