I'm sure it will have a long-term effect. Just not what I think of as a positive effect. I have spoken at some length here and elsewhere about my vision for PureMining, which is to serve as a stepping stone towards a commodity market for hashrate which is independent of any issuer's decisions or a particular hardware brand. This is the only way for mining investments to be efficient in the long run. To offer an upgrade plan will be a step back to a guessing game what will each issuer do.

People need to understand the distinction between the two different investment models. Running a company is safe for the issuer because if anything bad happens he doesn't have to compensate for it out of pocket. This is why he can offer at low prices and share the rewards of good events. But the investors are taking the risk of anything bad happening with the issuer, his equipment or whatever. In the deterministic model, the issuer specifies an exact contract and is bound to fulfill it unconditionally. The investors know exactly what they are getting, and the issuer is taking all the risk. This is why there will be a premium for this. It is not reasonable to expect an unconditional fulfillment and significant bonuses. In the case of mining bonds, investors have but one responsibility - to estimate the future of the price/difficulty ratio; and if they erred in their estimation, it is not reasonable to expect compensation for it. I do not want to create a precedent where investors learn to rely on crutches rather than taking responsibility for their investment decisions.

Even if I were to be convinced to offer such an upgrade, on the grounds that it only slightly taints the deterministic model, it would not be fair to do it now after I have already clarified that no such upgrade will be given and people sold bonds based on this statement.

I want people to do business with me in the future based on my reputation as a man of my word, faithfully honoring the commitments I make (and making an effort to clarify in advance what it is that I am offering). Not on my reputation of handing out freebies.

When someone joins a new community, online or otherwise, he observes the behavior of others and mimics it. If he sees everyone else is trolling he is much more likely to do it themselves than if everyone is civil. The choice of joining also depends on the existing atmosphere - a civil community will comparatively attract more civil people. Once the established culture is civil it can be maintained with minimal effort. This is why I don't buy the "this is the interwebz so there's nothing you can do about it" argument.

Of course, given that the current atmosphere on the forum isn't civil, something will have to be done to change it. The OP shouldn't be seen as trying to convince the trolls as it is unlikely to have such an effect. It really is an invitation for an open discussion between moderators and veterans who care about making the change, to see what kind of behavior should not be tolerated and how to act on it; ideally veterans should feel comfortable reporting to mod obvious transgressions, and the mods should have the capacity to deal with them.

Basically, if you agree with the OP and see the kind of behavior it talked about, report it to mod, and if it's a borderline case maybe also post about it in meta to see how others feel about it.

This is legit, there are many business models generating (-7%) ROI per week. I just don't feel this is very competitive with some of the other offers out there.

Relax, post a comment on the Whitelist thread with a link to this one and I'm sure you'll be whitelisted in no-time.

This is ok but it would be tremendously better if unbacked orders would be deactivated rather than cancelled, so they become automatically active when more funds arrive. And the backed part should remain active - e.g., if you put a buy for 100 shares but can only afford 30, you'll have an active order for 30 and unactive order for 70.

Just like on Mt. Gox.

Costume, unless it's a party ordered to specifications.

Right, Largecoin never got to the stage of requesting deposits from preorderers.

You think the "correct" price is "100% going to hardware" where the two are not the same at all (although correlated).

Your point is being muddied by your refusal to clarify if you are attacking mining bonds specifically or mining in general. If you think offering a bond with no profit to the issuer is a losing proposition to investors, it means you think mining is a losing proposition. Judging by history you're wrong - Mining has been very profitable even taking into account hardware and all other costs. Now with the advent of ASIC we may see the first time that people investing in (non-ASIC) hardware may not get their investment returned.

Possibly.

Again, this sentence make no sense. "It's obvious that mining funds can't return an investment when bought at X BTC per MH/s" makes sense and is either true or false depending on the value of X.

Before these opened up you didn't know what price they would be traded at so you had no way to know if they would be overvalued or not.

However a lower bound on their initial traded price is what the issuers are willing to sell them for, which is above what it costs them to back up the obligation. So maybe what you're really trying to say is that mining can't be profitable.

But that also makes no sense because if mining isn't profitable, the difficulty will decrease until it is profitable again (to some people at least). You will always be at an equilibrium where some people think it's profitable and mine and some people think it's not and don't.

Having a different opinion from you doesn't mean being stupid. Being correct after the fact is evidence that your analysis was justified, but it is not conclusive proof of it.

In general, saying "I told you saw" is less useful than putting your money where your mouth is, by shorting the asset if you think it's overvalued or buying it if you think it's undervalued.

I guess it's as good a section as any.

The traded price of a mining bond isn't fixed, it is determined by the market. If someone offers you a 1 MH/s bond for 1 BTC you shouldn't take it because it will generate much less over its lifetime. If they offer it for 0.01 BTC you should take it because it will generate much more. If it is currently traded for X BTC it means there are people thinking it is worth at least X BTC. They could be wrong and if you think it's worth less don't buy it.

This applies for every imaginable security, commodity or business venture. Nobody knows for certain how much profit will be made from it and hindsight is 20/20. The profitability of mining bonds correlates with the profitability of mining hardware and just like some people buy hardware hoping to profit, some people buy mining bonds. Whoever has the best ability to estimate what's coming profits on average as a reward for steering humanity's resources to the best venue.

If your question is really "why did people think mining bonds are worth X?" then, well, you should ask them.

Don't forget that a major contributing factor to the recent drop in bond prices is the ASIC announcement.

Exactly. The premise is that with high likelihood, a recursively self-improving superhuman artificial general intelligence leading to a singularity will eventually happen anyway. Unless a special effort is made, that AGI will be unfriendly to humans. SIAI it making a special effort to make sure that it will be friendly.

That statement is about what SIAI is trying to prevent, not what it is trying to create.

I believe they'd settle for no AGI of any kind, but as said that's not really an option.

Eliezer Yudkowsky (the brains behind SIAI) has mentioned in the past that his vision of a singularity is very different from Kurzweil's.

Not all users use the standard client or any local client, or would care much about anything but critical security fixes.

"Important" announcement should be measured by how much impact it has on Bitcoin, where "Bitcoin" is the Bitcoin economy, the software is just a means to an end. Things like the Bitcoinica or Pirate stories have as much impact as new client versions.

A new glorified way to sell bitcoins conveniently, on the other hand, should be last on the list of candidates for a mention.

Hopefully sometime in the future, the Bitcoin economy will be "the economy", the Bitcoin scams will be "scams", and development on the Bitcoin software will be "developing financial software". But right now these are all encompassed by the "Bitcoin" umbrella, and this is a forum dedicated to Bitcoin.

Yes, the bond is deterministic and will remain 1 MH/s, and its value will be significantly lower when ASIC devices with BFL's reported cost-effectiveness become available.

Yes, you could do that. You need to be very careful though not only with the order of inputs and outputs, but also with the order of transactions in a block since the satoshi can end up as a tx fee.

Essentially this is equivalent to how I suggested to look at it.

I like the idea of probabilistic PoS. I think the motivating problem is exaggerated but this could have other advantages too.

I don't think satoshis are tracked the way you think they do. If there's a 50 BTC coinbase which is split to two addresses you can't say "this satoshi went to output A and this satoshi went to output B". Not a major problem though, if you agree on a randomness seed (deterministically from the blockchain) you can simply trace the chain forward, in each step choosing a random output weighted by number of coins.

In other news, Matthew's next business venture is selling nonapples.

I don't think so. I'm giving Inaba the freedom to choose where to direct the hashrate, and I wouldn't really mind if he did, but my understanding is that he doesn't currently use GPUMAX.

Your mistake is that you think green means coins were bought and red means coins were sold.

In fact green just means the price at the end of the period was higher than at the start. So for all we know during the hour of 8-9 am (or whenever that is) Aug 16, maybe 38K coins were sold (bids executed) and 2K coins were bought (asks executed) and it would still be green if it's higher at the end of the hour (and by the graph it's only slightly higher). Of course since the price was almost unchanged it's most probable to assume roughly the same number of buys and sells.

And anyway "buy" and "sell" is a bit fuzzy since for every trade there's a buyer and a seller and the bots keep changing their bids and asks all the time.

I'm not sure I'm following your logic. Whatever the Kronos incident was, it predated the BDT IPO in which Alberto raised about 10K BTC. So he would have more than 4K BTC anyway.