Very nice collective work! Thanks! 

The official written statement specifying that you do NOT need to be an accredited investor to register you shares has now been published on Havelock's website, in the Updates section of the fund. It reads as follows: "January 15th, 2014 - In the Direction to register non-voting common shares, please disregard the requirement to fill out Appendix A, this was a wording error on the document and will soon be corrected. If any statement applies to you in Appendix A, please check it however you do NOT need to be an accredited investor to register your shares or check any statement in Appendix A."

I've replaced the front and rear plates of my BFL Single SC with special, professionally-machined plates designed by this guy:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277000.0
https://www.bitmit.net/en/item/54944-fan-plate-set-for-bfl-single-scs#

and I've noticed a definite noise reduction.

EasyMiner reports operating temperatures lower by 2-4 °C, which in turn means that the fans don't need to rotate so fast, which is another reason for the noise reduction, and as a bonus, the miner consumes less electricity.

All it took was removing four screws (you need a Torx screwdriver) and replacing the plates.

Yet, despite the gains, the machine remains a little too noisy, so I eventually bought a 5-meter USB cable and I am about to install the miner in the next room.

I'm using the latest version of the Satoshi client (v0.8.0-beta). Would you (or anyone else) be kind enough to briefly explain to me how to create a sending address so that I can send BTCs from it using my Satoshi client wallet?  If I just sent the BTCs to you regardless with my Satoshi client wallet, I should be able to see after the fact which BTC address my Satoshi client used to send the BTCs, right? Then I can report that address here? If I proceed this way, will that sending address be a different address from all the addresses I may have used previously using the same Satoshi client wallet?

Your help would be very much appreciated.

rJ42yMfFajq8pYRNUhpF3iYJbPc2AZ132Y

Another thing that could hurt bitcoin would be a tax on virtual currencies. For obvious reasons, central banks and corrupt governments would certainly favour the idea, and could use their political influence to try pass a new tax law using arguments of illegal activities such as money laundering, drug abuse, under-aged gambling, etc., being facilitated by bitcoin. That wouldn't kill bitcoin, though.

I believe that in the years to come, major governments, such as the US government, will (or perhaps have already) come to the conclusion that trying to make bitcoin illegal would be starting another currency war which they are not sure to win, as bitcoin doesn't really need to be "made legal" to exist, and because it poses many legal challenges that they are not ready to confront, such as the fact that bitcoin isn't legally money, etc.

BUT...

the US government (among others) will probably try to TAX all virtual currencies (and particularly bitcoin), and this new tax could make exchanges operating in the US unprofitable, which would drive them out of the US. Then they could try to use their influence to try to persuade other countries to do the same.

However, I believe that this will ultimately fail, too. But it could do some damage to the BTC exchange rates in the years to come.

Any idea on this?

Hello,

I consider myself to be an active member of the bitcoin community since I attended the London Bitcoin Conference in mid-September 2012, where I made a few friends. I met a number of people there, including Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, Mike Hearn, and many others. I also met Josh Zerlan from Butterfly Labs there, and shortly upon returning from the conference, I pre-ordered a "Single SC" from ButterFly Labs. As you probably know, these have still not been shipped yet, so in the mean time, I started mining using a GPU card, experimenting with GUIminer on Slush's pool and BTC Guild. I also invested in various shares and bonds through GLBSE, and later had to suffer the GLBSE closure, meaning that I had to chase my BTCs with a number of people. I managed to recover most of them, after exchanging a number of emails and PMs with the business owners. I since registered with Cryptostocks, BitFunder and BTC-TC, and invested some small monies in various businesses, mostly for fun and as an experiment.

I have also bought and read a couple of the Bitcoin magazine issues, I have spent quite some time reading various posts on this forum as well as on the Bitcoin StackExchange forum to keep myself updated and to gather more technical knowledge on bitcoin, although I haven't posted many replies yet, mostly because I didn't have a lot of original comments to make, that hadn't already been addressed by others.

Today, I'd like to be white-listed so I may participate in the "Ripple" alternate currency and receive free introductory XRPs as recently offered by OpenCoin (see  Alternate cryptocurrencies > Ripple Giveaway! for details.)

May I be allowed in?

Very nice!

I've just installed the Litecoin-Qt wallet on my PC and opened an online waller with BTC-e.

Please send me 2 LTCs! Here is my receiving address.

LM2VkEaWLAthpvmUhHmAsfaM9q73i3hvv3

I will try mining tomorrow.

Thank you for clearing this up. I believe rules like these are a necessity.

I have spent hours reading various sections of this forum and I found a lot of very useful information here that I couldn't find anywhere else.

I'm also looking at integrating bitcoins in my regular business. I'll let you know about my experiences with this a bit later, as it's still too early