Most likely pricing would be around where the other series have been, but that's currently being discussed and we won't know until we get all the numbers in.  Silver spot has been reasonably cheap lately so if it stays where it is, that will help.

As for the air-tites, sure we can look at options for direct fit.

Some more info after some discussion.

- Yes, we're interested in doing a special issue coin, solid gold is on the table but we're playing with design options
- We're considering a run of around 25 coins - fewer and the premiums would be killer, more would be difficult due to the cost of the batch run and we'd probably have to get pre-order guarantees if we were to go above 25
- We can't use existing dies from previous runs because gold is more dense than silver, and the coin dimensions would be smaller, so we have to either re-make dies with a previous design, come up with new artwork, or mix in another metal to alloy with to achieve the same dimensions to be able to re-use previous dies.  I mention this because it will obviously affect the pricing based on how much work/money needs to be put into the solution
- The coin would be most likely 1oz.  As mentioned by others, with gold anything smaller will not fit everything needed.  It won't be larger, as even at 1oz it's a smaller market due to the cost
- We have not discussed the holos, numbering, engraving/stamping or anything like that yet.  I think there will be some sort of marking to make it a special issue series, just not sure what yet.

Pricing is very hard to speculate right now until we figure out more of the technical parts.  If we have enough interest that we know we'd sell out, premiums could be adjusted accordingly, but we're so far away from that right now it's not worth any larger discussion.

This will not take away from our desire to issue a "normal" Series 4 coin in the traditional silver & silver/gold gilt like the past.  Stay tuned for more information on that.

Please keep the ideas and questions coming!

Been crazy with life, and thanks, good to be back, it's been too long.  BTW, I still have something of yours, I haven't forgotten. 

I can confirm, we are planning a series 4 Silver Wallet, and the initial target is mid-to-late summer.  Now I guess I gotta get off my lazy butt and draw up the guidelines for this design competition, huh...

Jumped in during the Series 3 cycle, one of the previous partners wanted to explore other opportunities, so I acquired his shares.  I figured I was spending so darn much buying the things, I should probably just get involved

Actually, we were just discussing our plans for the future the past week or two.  Perfect timing for this thread to resurface

As of right now, there are plans for a Series 4 Silver wallet to be done (or D4, if you want to keep with current "design 4" for wording), which will probably be standard silver & silver/gold gilt like the last couple series.  We're currently figuring out logistics and would hope to be able to deliver something sometime around summer, if all goes well.

Since our art skills are limited to stick-figures, we are planning a fan-art contest for the design, with prizes for the winner and runner(s)-up (aside from being able to say you were the design artist for a Silver Wallets series, we will also give some real, actual rewards).

We have been talking about a number of things to do to bring some new ideas to the upcoming and future series, one of them indeed being a gold round.  It's all about working capital and demand, so most likely S4/D4 won't have a gold round, but depending on how we do with this next series, all things are possible.  I know for ourselves we all agree we would love to do it.

I'll be putting together more information over the next couple weeks and we'll get things rolling.

Not a huge almond lover.  Do you guys have any plans to maybe do other types of honey-roasted nuts, specifically either peanuts or possibly cashews?

Yes, because there's absolutely no cost involved in the minting process, no cost for the dies, no cost for the holograms, no cost for the artist design work, no cost for the insurance and shipping from the mint, and oh yeah, because silver spot price is exactly the same today as it was when these were minted.

Awesome lack of understanding of the minting process and being a douche.  Bro.

You don't want to spend the money on it?  Your prerogative.  Let others choose for themselves.

Thanks for the free bump tho 

Thanks.  I'll be out all morning but back mid-afternoon-ish.  Talk to you then. 

I'm in for 5.   Too lazy to pm you...

I'd go as high as 0.7BTC, also in the us.

1.7

$10k?  Where are you looking...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147360&cm_re=256g_ssd-_-20-147-360-_-Product

An SSD will hands down beat out any mechanical hard drive from the performance angle.  Durability might be an issue long-term as they do have a limited amount of writes capable, but they're cheap enough.

And yeah, a UPS is key, I have all my electronics on them at home - computers, TV's, stereo, etc.  It does more than just battery, it normalizes your power and keeps surges and dips from harming them.

Congrats!  Wonder if it may have been one of my miners.  I show a block find reported by one of them, and you've been renting them pretty solid recently.

I'm not really sure how easy this would be to manipulate.

From the proposal:
- Limit increase or decrease may not exceed 2x in any one step.
- Miners vote by encoding ‘BV’+BlockSizeRequestValue into coinbase scriptSig, e.g. “/BV8000000/” to vote for 8M. Votes are evaluated by dropping bottom 20% and top 20%, and then the most common floor (minimum) is chosen.

From what I understand it's the pools, not the miners themselves, which will be doing the voting upon block submissions.  The highest pool right now I think only has about 25% of the total hashrate (f2pool at ~70PH, right?)

You would need to own 80% of the hashrate to vote for a change.  Right now I know of no one who could bring online another 300PH of mining power, I think it's fairly impossible to do something like that.

And, even if you could, you could raise or lower it no more than 2x the current rate, once every 83 days.  Starting at 1MB today, you could conceivably get it to 16MB block sizing by the beginning of August 2016.  I hardly call that any area for concern which couldn't be rooted out well before then.

I'm sorry to say, but I'm not wrong.  I run large infrastructure for a living, and I know very well the difference between what is stated capability, and what will actually be achievable.  I can assure you that the number they state (56k) is a theoretical limit based upon extrapolation of numbers from baseline stress testing done in a staging environment.  If you research how they did their stress testing, it was not on their own equipment, but done in a third-party facility with a replicated environment that is not a full-on replica.  It's also all low-latency local networking within a datacenter facility, not higher latency interconnected fiber which is subject to routing and other issues when you are communicating between datacenters.

So, yes, it's a theoretical limit.  It may be a fairly accurate limit (chances are it's not), but it's still theoretical as their network has never pushed that many transactions in real life.  They've only ever hit 1/4 of that in a real live peak situation.

Ok, so thankfully that was explained in the first couple paragraphs, otherwise there's no way I'm reading a full 22-page thread right now.  I'll stand corrected on the actual speed.
I spent a whole 5 minutes on mine as well, but at least I'm not being an uppity snot about it.   

I stand by my word "surpass".  If you actually read the context of the sentence I mention their real daily transaction volume, not what their network is capable of.  If we exceed their number of average daily transactions, then we have surpassed their actual daily volume.  Our 7Tps theoretical limit is the same as their 56k Tps theoretical limit, although in practice they are not coming anywhere near that high number, nor are we coming close to ours.

Furthermore, since Visa's is a closed network it is not comparable to the Bitcoin network.  They need to have that high of a total capable Tps because each processing server they have is critical to that number.  If they lose a datacenter, their theoretical limit drops accordingly.  If a node or 100 nodes fall off the Bitcoin network, our Tps does not suffer.

The theoretical max of a 1MB blocksize is 7 Tps (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets).  The network is currently doing 3, but blocks are not currently maxed out (https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size).

Therefore, if we base the calculations on the theoretical max of 7Tps / 1MB, then 32MB = 224Tps in theory.  This puts us at a theoretical max of 19,353,600 transactions per day.  Let's just call it 19 mil.

If Visa is doing on average 150 million per day (http://usa.visa.com/merchants/industry-solutions/retail-visa-acceptance.jsp), then 150/19 = 7.895.  Multiply that out and you get 252.6MB as your theoretical blocksize to match/surpass Visa.

First off, its the pools that vote, not the miners directly.  Which, if you aren't aware of already, the majority is currently in China and they're fine with going to 8MB today even with the crappy Infrastructure.

Second, there is a hard cap - 32MB - which has adjustable increments within it to handle active market pressure.  Which is a very reasonable cap, getting us to roughly 20 million transactions per day.  It will allow Bitcoin to surpass PayPal, and handle 1/8th the Visa transactions.

A vote for XT would do more towards fueling your fears than this proposal does.

This is exactly what BIP100 gives them.  By the mining pool voting with the blocks it produces, the majority can pick what the blocksize limit is.  If the majority of Chinese pools don't want to go above 8MB, then they keep their voting at 8MB or under, and it's the top 80% of votes that judge the blocksize.

BIP100 is the perfect compromise for the current situation.  

First, it introduces a dynamic ability to adjust the size up to a 32MB maximum, which will be able to scale the network for at least the majorly forseeable future - that's potentially 224 Tps.  You have to remember that Satoshi's original limit was 33MB, which this falls inline with.  

Second, it keeps the blocksize down to a manageable size, which will prolong the lifetime of a full node on the network.  An 8GB blocksize limit with XT?  And you still clamor for decentralization, whining about the number of nodes declining?  That large of a blocksize will accelerate the centralization of nodes, as only those who have top-tier datacenter hosting will be able to run a full node due to the bandwith limits.  Hard drive sizes matter not, but with an 8GB block it would take over 6500 seconds to pass that block info on a 100Mbit network connection.  It would take over 650 seconds (longer than the 10-minute block threshold) on a Gigabit network connection.  That is completely unrealistic.

In order to surpass Visa (150 million transactions per day), we would only need a 256MB block size.  That's a far cry from needing an 8GB blocksize.
In order to surpass PayPal (10 million transactions per day), we would only need a 16MB block size.  That's a far cry from needing an 8GB blocksize.

Nodes need miners, and miners need nodes.  Each of them play a critical part in the network - without the nodes to protect the network, it fails, and without the miners to mine transactions to be protected, there's also no network.

In order to keep the miners going there needs to be enough transaction volume and fees to sustain them once the block rewards can't.  This proposal allows the market to dictate the blocksize, so that there's enough pressure in the blocks to have higher fees, but also enough block size to allow for those cheaper transactions to go through.  The proposal allows for expansion when there's enough transaction volume to warrant it, and contraction when it doesn't, so that miners will be able to maintain incentive to keep the network alive.

This being the case, I'd recommend adding Jeff's BIP100 proposal to your poll...   (http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdf)

So far I think this is the most sound proposal for block size increase I've seen.  Allows Core to dynamically expand - and more importantly, contract - allowing pools/miners to vote for adjusting the blocksize limits based on what they see with market pressure and existing backlog, as well as their own infrastructure capacities.  Pretty smart.  And, free of all other baggage.