I like that last line, it sounds so much better than "we are getting ripped off less."

One minor correction, independent sellers on eBay set the price without any guidance or assistance from eBay. On MtGox independent sellers can establish a price, and the current market price is available to all without effort.

Cheers

I'm seriously considering hauling mine along on my next trip hooked up to a 3g modem.

I will for sure with my Jally.

Or 1K/s with Stratum.

It's a nice idea, but it should have been conceived of, communicated, and articulated in the plan up-front. What you refer to may happen as a promotional thing in the future, but at this point everyone is all "shut up and take my money" so why put all that extra effort into some (very) fancy coupons? When you have a business venture growing at a massive rate the last thing you want to do is add any complications that are not absolutely needed.

I'm going to be burning 1-2Gh/W compared to .01Gh/1W with an FPGA single. This is wasteful?

Of course, all other things are not equal, every miner helps add to the security of the network which is why it pays in proportion with the contribution. Contribute less security, get less Bitcoin.

If you want to be green, decide on a wattage that you are willing to donate to bitcoin, and pay for carbon offsets to match that wattage. Every 3, 6 or 12 months buy the gear with the best GH/W rating that fits in your wattage allowance (and get some extra carbon credits for the manufacturing cost offset)

Personally this is too much trouble for me, so I'm replacing a standard light bulb with a florescent or LED bulb for every 10Gh and calling it even.

Like to quote yourself much?

Of course the answer in reality in a physical sense is nothing can be done to stop it, but you should ask instead why would they?

OTOH, if you run BFL and your investors come and take the company you built away because you violated their trust and the trust of your customers, you might regret the decision to voilate that trust.

BFL is not 2 guys sitting in a basement somewhere. There are real business agreements, salaries, leases, and other things ties up in running a business than you seem to acknowledge. There are real world obligations and long term opportunities for these businesses to continue serving a community for quite a white, or get acquired by someone if it starts amounting to more than chump change. Contrary to what some would have you believe, BFL keeps investing and appears to be in this for the long haul. CablePair and ngzhang are similarly trying to grow a stable business. Unlike a scam, these businesses must continue to build trust and keep customers coming back.

In case it had not occurred to you, the ~180TH/s that has been sold so far is a drop in the bucket compared to the market available for ASIC. We should see 1-2 Petahash/s sold over the next 12-18 months. 90% of the ASIC profits for this period are still up for grabs, why bow out now!?

I've been using Stratum on BTCGuild and can back that up. It's pretty sweet.

It actually loads my GPU's more heavily because it's taking a much shorter break between shares and blocks, and it's more bandwidth efficient too.

One thing to point out though, is that the Total is 1Kb/s per session.

So if you are using 10 instances of cgminer (or whatever) with built-in Stratum support it will consume 10Kb/s as each miner has it's difficulty adjusted individually to match the submission rate goal.

There is a Stratum Proxy available that you can put multiple miners behind, collectively adjust difficulty for the miners using the proxy, and constrain the entire pool of miners to 1Kb/s. You just have to  be ready to see low share submission rates on a per-miner basis if you use the proxy because it limits the whole population. The good news is that you still get the same income rate in the long run, even if each miner is doing 1 share per minute (at a massive difficulty multiple so you still make the same amount.)

In spite of your (repeated) unwillingness to accept it, folks tend to have this thing called a "business model." In the case of BFL this business model is to sell hardware to all us crazy people who want to buy it. THIS is what they got investment capital on, not the power of Bitcoin, and their investors will (righteously) be pissed off if they find out BFL was using their own product (bad in the drug trade, bad in business) rather than selling it to their customers.

Mining with the equipment they want to sell would directly devalue said equipment as the potential profit falls and the next generation of hardware would have to be cheaper. Right now BFL can keep raising the (overall product) price with each generation, they don;t want to do anything to prevent that, including mining themselves.

You don't see Husqvana opening up a lumber mill, same principle here.

who hit rewind...

BFL, CablePair, Avalon have all publicly stated they will use testnet in a box.

ASICMINER is the only one I worry about, because it is their intent to mine with them first, and they have stated so all along. It sounds like they might be 2-4 weeks behind BFL though, and Tom is shipping in November/December as well, so the race is on...

Tom has stated he has enough parts for 1000 units, but is closing pre-orders at 900 or tomorrow at Midnight. Right now he's in the 800 range. Of those <100 are 27Gh/s units.

It has also been revealed on his website (new one is going up tomorrow) that each 54Gh/s unit is running 2x6 90nm ASIC clusters, meaning each chip is 4.5Gh/s.

Sounds like a 12,000 part run, so 54TH/s from Tom would be a good worst case bet.

He's also not taking new orders until January, so you don't have to worry about him adding any more hash power until later in January at the earliest, more likely a new run that will take 30-45 days to complete. (Including the backlog from the Chinese New Year shutdown it could be longer)

what are the chances they could rework the bitstream on the Altera to drive an Ethernet or WiFi shield attached to one or both of those minirig-sc ports?

It does seem interesting to have that ARM label there in what seems to be a very logically thought out board otherwise.

I hear this all the time, and i believe it's misleading. The EFF didn't abandon Bitcoin, they ensured that if there was a legal dispute around BitCoin that they would have standing as something other than a co-defendant. It's pretty cut and dried that they did the right thing for us in the long run by ensuring we can call on them if needed.

Once the law is clear, I don't think they will have any problem turning it back on. Until they they are returning funds to the community through the bitcoin faucet.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin

Also, while I think that all the charities mentioned look very deserving, wouldn't it be a good idea donate that 1000BTC to a BitCoin related organization like the BitCoin Foundation? or DevCoin Bounties? Something to help propel the community forward by reinvestment.

Given the context I'm assuming this means 10/22/12-23:59:59PM (~34 hours away) as opposed to 10/22/12-00:00:00AM (~10 hours away)

Yep, it's low EQ you have to watch out for on these boards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

Talk about a crucible... The irony of the untrustworthiness of a large number of folks in a community that aims to bring trusted anonymous transactions is not lost on me.

My thoughts around this were 3-fold:

Public holding account with an (undeclared) fraction of earnings will be followed by many and there will be a disincentive to touch those accounts without someone making a fuss. This might be the only part of this whole idea that is workable.

It may be possible to enact an enforcement mechanism for those caught breaking ranks, perhaps an incomplete transaction that pays out under certain circumstances? This is a bit of a long shot, and might just be a wasted arms race.

It would be nice if there was a similar public way to make the MtGox Position, without that the sell wall IS vulnerable to crashing without knowing who started pulling out first. Maybe unique values per member that are all within a few mBTC of the desired position? (Member 1 is at 20.00001, 2@20.00002, etc.)

everyone matters when it comes to price, it's just a matter of how much.

Post halving 150BTC/hr come into the market, 3600/day. Let's assume 50% is saved, and 50% is exchanged (I know, arguable, but I had to start somewhere)
This means that with the current volume on MtGox (24k today) we are talking about 7.5% of volume in mining revenue. Even if it goes up to 100k in volume (which if you think about it gets more and more expensive as the price goes up) miners still account for 3.6%

So as a daily percentage whole, I agree, it's not huge. However if we all stack up on the same $ amount, over time it could get to be a big impact.

Let's say we get 1000 miners to participate and they make an aggregate of 1000 BTC/day (because math is hard, not because that is an actual number I expect to see) If they all hold onto that BTC and place 10% of it (BTC100 total) on MtGox at the 20$ mark, then each day we add $2k to the 20$ wall. Over the next 30 days we are talking about a position worth 60k, 60 days gets us to 120k.

Once the price gets up to $18 or so we will have to decide how much profit we want to take, vs moving up to a higher sell number. If we use 50/50 again we have a cash-out at $20 of $60k of the position, but the remaining 1500 BTC are relisted at $30 for a position of $45k and $3k/day expansion of the position.

The key is stacking everyone up on the same value so it's conspicuous in the trading tools, in the above scenario and the current order book we could put more coins on $20 each month than are there right now. given a year I bet we could be the single highest step on the wall at all times, and act as a signpost to the market. Certainly not a traffic cop, way too small for that.

I'm seriously considering putting most of my earnings into a program like this just to ensure that I'm not selling too low, once I got to thinking about it it makes sense that as a group we can act like a single big fish. or at least a school that pretends to be a big fish.

I'm also open to suggestions on how to structure this, it might make more sense to have 2-5 positions that we take as a group with differing values instead of the 1 big value so that we can "win" by having the wave come all the way into our positions, but not have to start over each time it does happen.

Why would we not TRY to be more profitable? We should just give up and let the market get our BTC for the least possible value? Bah, crazy talk.

I aim to make the market pay a premium for my coins, and every additional miner who does the same can amplify the effect. If you want to sell cheap, go for it.

This is one of those Big-Hands/Little-Hands things, I'm trying to think bigger, not smaller.

Sweet! Selling at 19.25 rather than 12, success!

That's the cool thing, if there are enough folks selling at a set price, others will ride along above and below the line as well. If we can attract them to our line, we can move some of them off market rate, and the price goes up.

The thing is, I don't think you need a majority, just a large number.

All we really need is a bunch of like-minded folks, and we can build a wall on MTGox. This wall will lure in the speculators and bots, causing the price to rise.

Of course some (a lot) of folks won't hold to the rules, but we all know that the big potential money in BTC is holding it, so we are really just asking folks to help us while they help themselves.

If we even get a commitment from 25% of miners that they will withhold 50% of their BTC from the market until X price, some will hold onto 80%, some 30%, but on average we could be looking at reducing the daily BTC supply by 12.5%

So maybe less OPEC as the model and more "A Loose Consortium of Like-Minded Miners"

I also just realized that we CAN have some community policing of an operation like this, participants can publicly state the address they are using for holding and we can watch for spending.

Keep the comments coming, even the negative (but constructive) ones. I want to figure out all the ways this can fail before trying it. I'm going to start updating the OP to include an example set of rules.

I don't think so, I'm thinking of a mining specific organization. BCF is more about promoting adoption as a currency,

I'm talking about getting all (or a large number) of miners to agree "not to sell below $20" or something like that.

In a similar situation to the Oil and Gas industry we find ourselves competing for a shared and dwindling resource. OPEC was started to allow those producing the product to exert market control, and while the exact mechanism is not available due to the predictable overall outflow of BTC, there might be some opportunities to help guide the price of shares or BTC through cooperation.

The 2 ways I've thought of so far are:

• Voluntary participation in a group "Sell Wall" @ 10% or higher premium over market, coordination of sell wall changes through forum to help raise price
• Public mining restriction forecasts (not sure if this will really solve the German Tank problem, little hope in holding down share production)

Obviously the repercussions for violating these agreements would be unenforceable without community participation, but if we do "catch" someone selling low options are limited, but if we can get everyone selling their shares for a premium rather than par we should be able to ensure fiat profitability in mining far longer than we can operating independently.

Have you guys thought of other ways to leverage supply?

Is there an easy line between a volunteer effort to build a sell wall, and a cartel? Are we facing significant legal issues if we try to coordinate something like this as a group?

Just a thought, looking for feedback.

Thanks,

Scrybe

edit: above this line is the OP, below is a set of rules and observations that have been thought of so far
Sample Ruleset for Members

• Membership is strictly voluntary, Members can leave at any time by withdrawing from your holding account.
• Leadership will consist of a board to be elected, (including chair, vice-chair, secretary, treasurer, and 3 directors at large?) and will operate within published bylaws
• Members agree to hold at least 10% of their net mining profits in BTC on one or more exchanges with active sell orders at the Member price
• Member Price is updated on Member website at time of block difficulty change, all members are expected to updated their sell prices within 24 hours
• Member Price may be set by formula or vote, TBD by Members
• Members agree to hold a total of at least 50% of their net mining profits in BTC in some form (including BTC denominated investments)
• Members agree to hold some portion of held BTC (>1% preferred) in a public holding account. (bragging rights?)
• Members can join by sending dues (TBD, minimum to run the site and such) to Group Address from their holding account (monthly? quarterly? annually?)
• Member website monitors holding addresses to measure success, and confirm continuing membership by lack of spending on holding account
• Members agree to offer discounts on goods and services they offer to the public at a minor discount (2-10% recommended, depending on type, this only applies to fees on exchange type transactions)
• Board will attempt to acquire additional discounts or freebies from community businesses in recognition for miners efforts (i.e. get MtGox to offer members a free fee bump to the next level down, since they are committing to holding a large amount of BTC on the MtGox servers)

Keep the thoughts and suggestions coming!
AMMMOW