I'd imagine there are quite a few more government offices where they have talked behind closed doors about how they could fund their favored sides in Narco wars and insurrections with bitcoin. For all of the idealogical wrangling about what the Fed and bankers think, I bet the three letter agencies probably either love or want to love this shit.

Not to mention the legislators and officials who would like another way to "fundraise" under less scrutiny.

I don't suggest this often, but maybe try mining litecoin and trading those for BTC. The NVIDIA-AMD gap is a bit closer there, because scrypt won't penalize you as much for having less cores but more sophisticated cores. You probably still wouldn't profit, but you could acquire some coin.

It's not really a joke, but it is different. I'm looking to host a celebration of bitcoin sometime next year by opening an event where people can come together and build a single ASIC loop while enjoying beer and BBQ.

What you are looking to do, build an ASIC business without any capital. That might be a joke. If you had the capital and a quote from a foundry to produce at least one wafer's worth of chips on a 90nm (preferably 65nm) or smaller process. Are you planning to write up your own SHA-2 core or are you just going to license a standard IP core (the latter is probably recommended).

There are questions you already need to have answered if you want people to buy in at per sale while you are trying to raise in total capital, a figure that while it might be feasible is probably going to be a bit light for the task at hand.

Maybe you should see if Kumala would be willing to put TRC on Vircurex. I use them for my Devcoin and Namecoin trading. When their BTC balance was wiped by RoR he covered losses out of his pocket. Trading activity can be a bit sporadic, but massive amounts of BTC/LTC trades have happened there. They already carry PPCoin, and who really cares about FRC anymore. I'd not open a FRC exchange because the 80% to the foundation is a trading hazard.

I doubt anyone is moving exchanges over 2%...

wtfvanity has a more realistic account of what a malicious and well healed actor could do to Bitcoin.

Pretty much this. They know and care to a point. That point is they will acknowledge mining in their marketing and probably not drastically alter their chip architecture to be like Nvidia and suddenly suck at mining, because that would be too much R&D. Will they release dedicated mining cards that are less capable on the graphics side, no.

Not really. Processing transactions and mining blocks are pretty much the same thing, or at least you can't process transactions without mining blocks.

Every pool handles fees differently. Some pools keep the fees and split the entire block reward as a way support the pool others split the fees and reward but take out a higher percentage of the pot (subsidy+tx fees) to support the pool.

You could destroy them by sending them to a black hole address with an unknown private key. They'd stay destroyed for all practical purposes for at least a century or two.

Just wait till MultiBit gets deterministic wallets or you play with Armory and its paper backups.

MultiBit's what I use for most things and it is the client I introduce my fellow liberal arts graduate friends to when they want to get into betting with bitcoin. Mostly because it is because we are silly 20-somethings who like to bet on sports and Pope-ing.

I'll admit that a move back to the $10/BTC range is not unlikely, but a tapering to zero just probably isn't happening. A lot of the value that supports it to the $10 dollar range is dead simple gray-market online gambling from the United States as well as other uses that current payment systems are inadequate for.

There's also quite a bit of a learning curve to the software, but honestly if you managed to back up and restore your wallet, then for most people you've gone through what would be the worst of it. The next hurdle is keeping malware off your computer.

You also might was well post a BTC address in your signature and see what happens. It's hard to get excited about something when you have to measure what you have down to the third decimal place. I didn't really start caring about it till I had amounts I could reasonably count in whole numbers (except for when I mined about 150 in 2009 and was like fuck this shit).

Update!

Right now I am thinking of a tentative date for the weekend of April 4-6th, 2014 for the "Different kind of ASIC Celebration of the Coin."

Like all ASIC endeavours anticipate a delay, 2014 was chosen largely for the purpose of incorporating a delay. The next few weeks I'm going to look into what kind of hardware it would take to actually do this. My first post in this thread was the result of just some drunken posting, but the idea has been growing on me. Especially the BBQ part.

I'm also looking to start an ASIC mining initiative, though mine is a bit different. The details for a different kind of ASIC are here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140476.0

There is little money to be made with the ASIC I am suggesting, but it should be a fun time.

Not really, they'd just destroy the ones they get.

The bigger problem is that market inertia is going to prevent much volume from going to this new exchange. Bitcoin to USD exchanges are a fairly saturated market (BTC to USD money changers are a different topic), and because it has been around so long without getting hacked or running away with all of the bitcoins Mt Gox is currently king of the market.

A new exchange that payed doubled the Gox price for bitcoins would almost immediately be flagged as a scam. Even if someone or some people big on the WOT start vouching and shilling for it, they are probably going to hear cries that they are scammers too.

A few people might take the jump though, and this exchange might build some trust after enough people sell on there then buy back on Mt Gox. The problem is that if some people started putting effort into this, it would start a feedback loop and the Gox price would start climbing fast. At some point though the new double price exchange is probably going to fold, because trying to destroy bitcoins at $200, $500, or $1000 won't be pocket change. Note this scenario only works if they get anyone to trust them with bitcoins in the first place.

There are a good number of people though who have at least some portion of their coins that they aren't cashing out of at any price.

There was a bit of a dustup a while back about someone selling hacked newsbin accounts.

As long as you don't sell hacked accounts or anything that would get reversed after you sell it, things should go well for you.

I'm reading your tagline and wondering when you bought arXiv

In the long run netting 0.03 BTC per day from a small mining investment like a Jalapeno, probably isn't a bad investment. It will add up to something over time, and people run much more expensive GPUs for less. Investing in the security of the network and getting some ROI is a good reason to get something like a Jalapeno, but at this point it shouldn't be long before they are ready to start shipping so waiting for that milestone is probably worth it to avoid paying for vaporware. Preordering now would probably stick you near the back of the cue anyway, so waiting until they cut through that a bit and can give you a more solid shipping date would be a prudent move.

Future mining profitability charts at this point are making a lot of assumptions, because they have to. Investing in a more powerful mining apparatus might help a bit in that 0.03 looks so small, then again $150 is awfully small as well for a money minting machine. The important things you need to weigh are your definitions of recouping the investment and a reasonable frame of time.

Tenure is a hell of a drug.

Generally that's almost always the case.

Very important point here.

I'd suggest reading the scam accusations boards.It will give you an idea of some things to watch out for. Gambling tends to be interesting to as it tends to host some of the most reliable businesses.

I'll also throw this out there for if you already have some bitcoins BitBet

If you need coins though and are willing to spend some time earning a few instead of buying Rugatu is one of the better sites to get "free" coins.

There are still people who buy ThinkPads for the aesthetics.