I think that answers my question in that you are waiting for live tests but USB alone may be all that's required for normal hashing use. I don't personally care at all if it's hot, that seems like a disadvantage if anything.

Please do share whatever you know though, any updates you can provide (even if there's a level of uncertainty) is great.

Just to be clear. If we want the plate hot, that's the only reason to use the external power source? If we just want it to hash really fast we can just plug it in with ONE USB2 cord?

You'll definitely want to use some sort of pool. I'd personally argue for P2Pool, whatever you mine is mined directly to your own wallet. After 120 confirmations (network rule) they're there sitting in your wallet when you want them; no downtime, no waiting, no minimum payout, etc. If you're up for setting up your own node that's one way, or there's a list of public P2Pool nodes here and a list of public LTC P2Pool nodes here

The protocol made perfect sense for the main chain (5s wait time on a 10m block is just fine) but it was expected that running through the entire chunk of work and returning one "best" nonce for the whole block would be more efficient, but the assumptions break a little bit for the really short timespan between blocks on the P2Pool chain.

That's one of the things we were talking about up higher, because even the jalapenos can finish a block relatively quickly the stale rate should be low even if it has the same behavior.

Theoretically, if the Bitforce Single's bitstream was changed it could report back sooner, and I think BFL was looking into that briefly, but focus has definitely been shifted off of the old singles by now anyway.

Oops, should have said jalapeno, although there's a chance that it's using multiple getwork requests (like multi-threading) which would multiply the time by the number of concurrent instances. The SC singles are probably multiple chips and probably run multiple requests at a time if I had to guess.

In theory the jalapenos solve a whole getwork in under 1.25 seconds, where the BitForce Single took almost 5 seconds to complete; which is what lead to getting really high stale rates (~40%+). The new one should have under/around 10-15% stale rate based the scan time.

Edit: should have read jalapeno instead of single

So this bot basically waits for a wide gap and tries to be the winning bid on both sides of the spread?

Even if not, I'd much rather submit to important chains first (usually the ones with the highest difficulty). So you should never be stuck on an alt-chain if the program is made well.

"Solutions" are sent to alt-chains more often however since they usually have much lower difficulty.

It would require them to redefine what "perfectly good" meant to them. To drive transaction prices up that high would probably be seen as attack (since it would exclude most transactions). But right now there are other fairly arbitrary rules setup that current miners do enforce, size limits, certain limits to prevent bitdust attacks, etc. Even the standard client's insistence on including transaction fees for small or immature coinbases can be seen as a set of arbitrary rules.

I do think that the real line gets drawn when they start rejecting blocks from other miners though as you said. Refusing to include transactions they don't like (while permitting them to enter the blockchain through other miners) would be perfectly valid even now.

The chain has established itself as a good proof-of-work system, which is the largest reason to stick with it that I can see right off hand. However it may run more like P2Pool in that storing old blocks (other than headers) may be slightly useless, or at least contrary to the goal of eliminating extra data. Setting up the alt-chain with either "none" or "some" updates may be the way to go to preserve simplicity however compared to normal chains. For one of the datastructure guys, would there be an advantage in marking updates as "a few" vs "many" in terms of packing the data? Maybe something else worth looking into for someone who knows how the current setup would work.

As a much more random aside, any idea what the alt-chain coins could be used for? and if transfer would be worthwhile. If transfer doesn't matter just give 1 coin per block and let people sign with their keys how many they've accumulated helping to secure the chain for lite nodes. 

Everything would work as is, but this chain wouldn't work quite the same I don't think. Since this alt-chain essentially needs to have the same number of blocks as the primary bitcoin chain. If the alt-chain catches up there's no incentive, or value, in mining anything else on it, which otherwise "wastes" the workers that are participating on the chain.

My main point is that linking the block count to the main chain one-to-one changes things somewhat. Or is this not as big of an issue as I'm thinking it is?

Edit: Fixed typos made while using my phone.

There's definitely some truth to that, although some actions would possibly be ruled a criminal if they are obviously trying to break things. Trying to pull off a double spend or denying transactions to specific entities might be criminal interference, but simply owning the majority share of power definitely isn't illegal. Even enforcing mildly arbitrary rules like 0.02BTC+ 2% transaction fees (removing the advantage of low transaction fees) might be perfectly legal. Under such a plan blocks with transactions not including "proper" fees wouldn't be included in their chain, and if they have enough power then they get to say so.

Unethical is definitely still there though, but not publishing their rules might make it murkier.

Since the alt-chain can only update as often as the main chain, would using a different difficulty mechanism make sense? Of course adherer or not merged mining is used matters.

For example: Instead of saying that the first hash below difficulty wins, is there any way to say that the absolute lowest hash wins? The biggest issue I can see without an obvious answer is how to keep the chain from backpedaling if someone releases a better block N-1 while everyone else is working on block N , but it might just be a variant on the 51% attack.

TL;DR - would a different difficulty mechanism be warranted?

The posted "attack" plan says that no one should see anything until Friday, and that's part of the point, that everything from Midnight until then won't be included in the new fork. I'd say it's also the beauty of it for Express, FUD, FUD everywhere. No one can confirm the attack until then and everything is just a giant clusterfuck until we see the proof.

Also, at this point Express has also threatened both to fork the chain and to drive up difficulty, which both have different attack vectors.

For anyone who didn't see it already, Coblee has released a patch to make the fork worthless (by ensuring the current fork stays)

If you're mining blocks anyway, why wait until 1BTC has been accumulated, why not just send it out smaller amounts weekly or monthly? Or are payments being managed manually for now?

Edit: Some lower floor would probably still make sense, but it seems like it could be much lower than current (0.01 maybe?)

Here's to another week watching for pirate to throw interest to bitfoo before it gets doled out to everyone else.

By the way @bitfoo, any update over the past week as to what's going to happen with the fund in about two weeks?

Also, if the fund closes, I'm assuming there will there be a coupon payment on the 30th still as normal?

My impression has always been that you'll pay your bonds out at whatever rate you're able to get so I'm just hoping you'll be able to get at or above the older 7%.

I am curious if you've heard whether or not the security deposit will receive interest or not as this could change the effective interest rate everyone receives. Any word on this yet?

This has definitely been a highly requested feature from what I can tell, and I'm interested in it myself as well. Here's hoping!

That may be part of the solution, but the other problem is that a 4GH/s device can run through an entire getwork (4 billion hashes) in one second (A SC Jalapeno at current specs goes through a whole getwork in ~1.15 seconds). So even very small miners will need to request more work. Higher difficulty shares just lower the number of found shares. The really fast machines like the 1TH/s device powers through 250 getworks per second, so more resources will be required to support these in the future.

Actually, come to think of it, higher shares would just increase variability.

That does make some sense too, and using that theory allows us to transition to bitcoin from regular fiat without breaking the existing system entirely, we just have to move from one to the other at our own pace.