FALSE!

They have investors that gave them VC to perform work, they do not get to recognize the revenue (be able to spend it) in the pre-order account for any order until they ship the product for that order. They went into debt, they hope to pay it off after shipping plus a profit. Either way customers are entitled to a product or refund before the investors are allowed to collect in the event of a bankruptcy.

IIRC, IANAL, URADS

Try to troll some more, your attempts are humorous, if futile.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=betamax&l=1

Market Adoption should not be confused with Technological Advancement.

Glad you appreciate the feedback, I understand completely on the mining forecast parameters, I just wanted to check since you used a brand name instead of a generic term for the variable. I have been forecasting about 3x the difficulty at the end of 2013 that you have right now, but that is pretty close given the limited data we have to work from.

I see that the first few fields have been updated to not allow changes, I like the approach of graying them out.

Could you add a rounding function to the report output on the "your rate" field down to 4-5 decimals max? I really don't need this much precision, and it messes up the formatting. (sample: 0.27630000000000005 (0.86%) I have no idea where the 5 at the end came from, my values are .0003 and .276 at this stage.) I also think that making this into 2 fields (TH, %) would be cleaner and allow easier import into Excel, etc.

An "Earn/Day" number would be nice in addition to the balance, I can do the math, but it's nice to have a direct comparison to other calculators.

Difficulty is still capping out at ~2Bn, not sure if you have tackled that yet.

Another item you might want to consider would be a streamlined input panel for the addition of hardware. Adding multi-line table with a calendar picker and drop downs or something would make it more usable for the non-geek bitcoin finance type guy.

I'm PM-ing you my current long term script, but I'd rather not publish the whole thing.

OK, this is interesting.

My biggest question is where the entries for BFL, AVALON, etc are on this, I only see bASIC contributing to the future network.

I've played with it enough to get the hang of what is going on. A few comments would go a long way to help.

There are some weird bugs I've seen when trying to change the "Last Retarget Date" to a value in the future, negative difficulties and stuff. Should this say "previous" or something or add some validation?

There is also a limit of 2 billion (and change) on the difficulty, can we get a bigger data type there?

There is also no help at all if you screw up your script syntax, in fact when I was adding another year of ASIC's for a long forecast and forgot a "+" it gave me a "Server Error" page and I had to hit back and fix the script. (luckily that worked) Maybe you can put an error checking wrapper around the user script that at least does not refuse to submit?

Nice idea, looks like a useful tool as it evolves.

I have a partner who might be interested in providing legitimate consulting and resale of AWS services for BitCoin.

This would be intended as a service that hosts/maintains the VM's for you, with a target of building a pass-through web control panel for Bitcoin customers to self-manage.

I'm personally not interested in any service that does not have the cooperation of Amazon, the risks of having the one account banned because of the actions of a single customer are too high.

The downside to the partner path is that it requires a market ready to buy at least $2000+/month of services from Amazon, plus about $5-10K of startup costs (low side requires a programmer who will work for stock.) The upside is that individual customer accounts pass through to EC2, and I honestly think we could make it work pretty well.

Anyone think we honestly have a market for >$2k/month of AWS?

(I also have contacts with partnerships with Azure, Rackspace, TerraMark, SAVVIS and a few other clouds, but the same types of requirements tend to apply, feel free to PM me if you have some big serious need that I can use to get them to "shut up and take your money")

You need to turn off the Scrypt engine and just use SHA2. TerraCoin is almost exactly like Bitcoin, not Litecoin which is based on a different hashing algorythm that is much more memory intensive and is not well suited to GPU (Well that didn't take long), FPGA, or ASIC.

It's possible you are not a troll, but honestly have missed this detail through all those posts, I try to give folks the benefit of the doubt. This is something that has been common knowledge for months however, especially among those that mine LTC (I do some) so you must forgive the rabid anti-troll squad.

Any other questions?

OK, so given these values, I can be certain that the memory will not grow beyond 137MB in 4 years (and I know the max it could grow in 1 year as well) this is plenty of lead time to create and implement an ASIC with a lot of RAM nearby. I think if your goal is to avoid ASIC competition to CPU and GPU mining, you are not going to find it down this path. I started out mostly playing devil's advocate on this one, but I'm pretty convinced that this is not really going to work out.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but this coin does not appear to have an inherent advantage over LiteCoin.

Thanks Aido!

good grief, how much precision do we need?

Hmmm, I had not thought about part of that. The hardware that supports the network is going to have to be flexible to a level we don't see today in order to deal with the memory growth. This means that in theory there will never be a point where you can buy hardware a know how long it will work for, unless we are using real time as an input. In fact we are talking about miners being literally useless if the memory requirement gets too high, right? Not just slow, but unable to execute the functions?

Great, that introduces a potential new attack. If you can manufacture systems with significantly more RAM than your competition then you could manipulate the difficulty to render their systems ACTUALLY useless if the memory difficulty got too high. Battle of the supercomputers.

Am I interpreting this right?
Memory requirement based on time == growth of requirement without relation to network realities
memory requirement based on difficulty == Potential attack vector

Limiting the percentage of change over time/blocks just slows down the attack, but still requires other miners to acquire systems with more RAM to continue to compete once the full correction is felt. It does not solve the root issue, just blunts the volatility.

I see 2 big problems here.

• If it's Murphy's law you are working against you are doomed to failure. Murphy always wins and in this case I believe it would mean that ASICs will come out that run your coin BEFORE the software implementation is done.
• Your memory requirements growing over absolute time will eventually outpace Moore's law leading to an increasingly impractical cost of participation that eventually require more RAM than possible.

The first one is a funny typo, but the second is a big issue.

At SOME point we are going to see Moore's law slow down and maybe even plateau as we reach atomic densities.  This protocol will just get more and more memory intensive until just scanning the blockchain takes millions of dollars worth of hardware, let alone mining. BitCoin solves this issue by NOT using time as an absolute factor, but instead Hashrate/difficulty. This means if Moores law stops working tomorrow or in 2050 the network will self-stabilize difficulty and available computing power.

2 conclusions I'm drawing from this:

• We need to prevent excessive computation from being required to validate the blockchain or operate as a client. The more asymmetric we can make the ratio of verification:generation the better the efficiency for clients compared to the mining effort
• Don't tie ANYTHING to an absolute growth direction except the number objects. Assume that any adjustments that are made might need to be reversed in order to keep the network operating.

Suggestions:

Maybe your difficulty adjustment should be a composite metric that includes harder targets AND more RAM instead of having them tied to 2 different events?

As far as increasing the ratio between computation and verification would it be possible to sign each block twice? Sign it once with a simple algo, and then sign block, simple signature, and nonce with the complex algo and retain both hashes. Mining could require full verification of the previous complex hashes, but that just needs to be for recent blocks.

Those are my thoughts so far, hope they help.

If that impacts the overall hashrate by more than 10% I'd be amazed. Many more chips will be going into the other models, which means that the slower speed of the Jally should be discounted to 25%, 12.5% or less on a per unit basis.

let me just make a point, I don't think that Jally's are going to be as popular as singles (or even little singles) but let's assume half of what they sell if Jally's and they sell 1000 of each them and Singles.

Jally: 1000*4.5 = 4.5TH
Single: 1000*8*7.5 = 60TH
Total: 9000 Chips for 64.5TH
Average per chip: 7.16GH/s
Impact of shipping half Jally: 4.5% total hashrate reduction.

It does not matter because it's a small margin and it's something that will be breaking in our favor, but unpredictably. There are so many errors larger than 5% in guessing this stuff that you are better off just assuming the worst.

Why bother?

Just assume they are shipping ~15,000 chips over the first 6-8 weeks and finishing the 20K batch within another month or so (close to worst case, all 20K ship by 3/1.) It does not matter if they are in Jally's or Mini-rigs at the macro level, just multiply by 7.5 for worst case.

What is more interesting to me is the actual execution, will they achieve faster shipping, or will it take until 6/1 to sell out of the initial 20K batch?

I'm also trying to factor in a 20% boost in performance for all those chips someafter release when overclocking becomes common or BFL releases faster clockspeed firmware. (500Mhz to 600Mhz) A second boost of 33% (800Mhz)  is likely as well, but I'm betting something will give before we hit 1Ghz for most customers.

Yep, it would have to be watercooled, and come with a pad of some sort to go under it in case it leaks. With wings or something.

Gosh it's exciting to watch excitable people be excited!

Hey, that looks suspiciously like the key in the registry...
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Prefs\org\open\payment\alliance\isis\atp]

Thanks, I didn't know how that translated.

Recommendation/request:

Instead of having parameters that are set at command line for the trading, arbitrage, and simulation settings, could we handle them in the registry so we only have 1 place to manage settings? It might also be nice to be able to turn different modes on/off during a longer run by updating the registry without relaunching the program.

Thoughts?

Use 32 bit windows 7 if you want, it will work fine with 1GB RAM. In fact for 2 or 3GB you should also prefer 32 bit windows 7 over x64. This is because the memory structures are larger and you will waste about 40% of your RAM with half empty quadwords. 64 bit should only be used if you are planning on putting 4GB or more of RAM in a desktop for best results.

It Tom gets hit by a bus, or ninja assassins take out Team Avalon, then it is game over. If BFL_Josh dies, we get to make jokes and then bug the company for our stuff. (No offense Josh, you would be missed by some at least!)

BIG difference. Even with outsourcing the risks around doing business with individuals and tiny groups is higher than when dealing with larger groups. Larger groups are more likely to continue in the face of adversity, which is one of the reasons for the rise of the corporation over the last 500 years. This is actually the case where the "corporate person-hood" thing we are dealing with is needed, that corporate person is obligated to you, no matter who owns/operates the corporation. (Free speech through unlimited campaign donations on the other hand seems to be a misapplication of the Bill of Rights)

+1

You paid them for something, and they acknowledged payment. It does not matter if the purchase was made with gold or Rare Purple Lego's (assuming both parties agree on the exchange rate), they are obligated to deliver or return you the same value in exchange. This does mean that the spot-rate will be used if you insist in payment in Rare Purple Lego's, so you won't get the same number, but they will be worth the same value when you get them.

Consumer protection (generally, not CC specific unless CC was used, etc.) applies, this is similar to why coupons have a "no cash value" clause.

What part of ANY was confusing here? They have stated this multiple times even if they have not answered the exact post you are looking for.

Like it or not, this is not a community project, it is a for-profit enterprise. As part of that equation you keep certain information to yourself to avoid giving the competition information that they can use to get an advantage on you. In the case of BFL many of the things that have been asked for get into that proprietary realm.

They have answered, they have INVESTORS that covered the initial costs, their investors don't get paid back if BFL fails. Legally that money is not theirs until they ship the product. If they went bust without shipping anything all the investors will be on the hook to refund all of us from a legal perspective.

If you have ever operated a business on a line of credit or flooring agreement you are already very familiar with these rules, because exceeding your cashflow can allow a company to go under because it is TO SUCCESSFUL for it's resources.

Once you get past a basic small business, it becomes a lot more about the reliable and predictable flow of money through the organization (paying rent, salaries, buying new materials, etc) than just making a profit in a single tactical action. BFL has shown by their actions that they are interested in the long game (at least a year or 2, likely more) and are playing by business rules, this obviously is not a scam in a garage so we need to apply the relevant standard.

bASIC and Avalon are a lot more like the hobbist type project with one or 2 critical folks doing everything, but I think BFL has graduated from that category into a real business. This is AWESOME news in my book, we need more businesses using Bitcoin and operating like businesses rather than cowboys, hopefully BFL will be an anchor for others. This is because (beyond a small scale) established business don't want to work with an individual, they want to work with another established business that they can rely on.