exactly. Volume of BTC traded for USD <<< Volume of BTC passed around between wallets

When the coin bonus for verifying blocks is gone, fees will most likely rise as the few miners left would need to have some incentive to keep running the quad-5970 boards. I don't know how high fees will go in the future, but it may not even pay the electrical bill.

I hope more locations begin accepting bitcoins in order to provide the market with something other than speculators.

Nothing important; just look at the poll results for a tl;dr version of this thread.

Seems to be pretty expensive with little gain: the 5970's don't throttle if you can get good airflow on them.

Yup, be sure to get one of these. If not, make sure to get a PSU that will have the connector's for however many cards you are using (listed under PCI connectors)

$75 million USD by next year? With 2 5970's?
You're assuming that people are going to pump billions of dollars into btc.

Bitcoin Alert

This is a free, open-source Android application meant to monitor the price of BTC on Mt. Gox, in the form of a widget and price graph. I created it at the very beginning of the month and have found it useful, so time to share!

Features

Current:

• Displays price data from Mt. Gox (bid,ask,volume,low,high,last trade)
• Price graph of last 48 hours (landscape and portrait)
• Manual refresh

Planned by Feb 27th:

• Receive alerts (phone notification, vibrate, or email) when BTC value goes above or below a certain percent of recent average
• Ability to customize number of items on axes of price graph
• Ability to change which items are displayed on widget
• Change price graph scale by pinching or zooming touch

Planned by March 6th:

• Place bids and asks on Mt. Gox
• View Mt.Gox account info

Images

Widget
https://i.imgur.com/RNdXO.jpg

Price over last 48 hours (heh, you can easily see the price drop today)
https://i.imgur.com/JjACK.jpg


Download

Search "Bitcoin Alert" on the Android Market.

I also know that some people here can't access the market due to country restrictions, so also feel free to download the .apk from http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-alert/downloads/list

Source code: http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-alert/

Misc

Since this is free and open source, bitcoin donations are welcome: 1CnrmXBb5eTyTGcG7gr8EUL317YXnnzp9q

If anyone wants to help out with coding, please do so! Send me a PM!

Issues

If the market dosen't like your country, download the .apk file directly from the link I posted above.

If it dosen't work on your phone or looks bugged, please post and we'll try to figure it out.

Thanks!!

While an overall bitcoin chart would be useless since people do transfer money between their own wallets quiet often, a trade-specific chart such as https://mtgox.com/trade/history may do you some good.

There's still a significant amount of solo miners with 5970 and/or 5870 clusters.

Though it is true that the "get paid no matter what" pool that recently popped up will draw some people in due to giving out coins solely based on expected block generation rate.

Whups, looks like it will be that high.

The average generation time will certainly be less than the better part of a week.

An %40ish increase in difficulty is certainly significant, but %40 is much less than %200

Edit: Miscalculated

Buying cards right now is still profitable, although the predicted 40% increase in difficulty will surely put a dent in the profit margins.

Depending on how many cards you are running it will change, but lets say for two 5970's it will equal about $50 in electricity per month around where I am. It could be $100 in other parts, make sure you do the calculation.

It seems there is a problem with the definition of "illegal": some people here disagree that certain types of light drugs should be illegal.

A possible solution is to ban items which negatively affect more people than just the user: things such as spam, CP, ddos'ing services all majorly impact someone outside of the buyer-seller relationship.

The economy seems to have held pretty steady week compared to the rapid increase two weeks ago.

Darkpools could certainly be a factor:


The price on Mt.Gox rose up to 1.08 yesterday, so there is still some volume moving around that pool, but it does explain some trends.

If that's the case, what other algorithms are you thinking of. ECDSA seems decent at what it does, that's too bad about distro restrictions though.

Wow, this seems kind of sudden. Then again, Jobs does like to cover up his health issues like any public figure would.

Could be a false source though