I got an email today from no-reply@cryptopia.co.nz to my old email as used at cryptopia, before that exchange folded a few years back.

What it says includes

"Dear Cryptopia Account Holder,

We invite you to begin the Cryptopia Limited (In Liquidation) account holder claims process.

Registering on the Claims Portal is necessary to enable you to lodge your claim.

Failure to participate in this process may mean we will be unable to
return your Cryptocurrency. "

Are these real ?  If so then everyone else with a cryptopia altcoin trading account should get one too, and somebody will post here a report of getting back some of their old altcoins.  If not then I have no reason to disclose anything to the entity who now have the list of user emails.

My full node at home used about 50 Watts.  By comparison to a centrally heated bank branch with several staff who drive to work, quite a big energy saving, and I don't have to go there to stand around in a queue.  The blockchain itself, although it does admitedly use far more energy that we would like it to, could be compared to the entire finance sector plus services plus outsourced services such as workplace anti-fraud and employee retention bonus.  It is centuries of overpaid loyal employees who created trustworthy conventional currency, so how much CO2 had those cost ?

The office light bulb in a major Wall Street finance institution is the wrong CO2e to compare to Bitcoin, and they might have paid some third world charlie to offset their carbon emissions from that light bulb.  The other CO2 caused by all things bought with all of the gross salaries plus bonuses plus construction plus other spending by those institutions all causes concrete to be bought, precious things for someone to be bought, all causing CO2e.  There is a big cost of loyal employees.

Using 2018 figures, as this years' are incomplete, US GDP was about 20.5 $TN (20.5 x10^12 US$).  US CO2 was about 5 GT (5 x10^9 Metric Tons; 16 Tons per capita per annum before imports).  So for every $4100 issued in the US, on average 1 Metric Ton (1000kg) of CO2 blows out in the USA (not counting other CO2 elsewhere needed to make components and imports). 

Now how does the CO2e of all the money creation by conventional $ finance in three decades compare to the CO2e of all the 21M Bitcoins which will ever be made ?  Are there other harms caused by creation of conventional $ ?

In the UK, covid has made market traders cautious about touching dirty banknotes.
Wireless £ transactions at a card reader work in most shops and are convenient.
You cannot have a card to do that without a bank who own it.

Loan-Banking is a separate question to transaction-banking, and I don't do loans.

Who pays for all that technology to do transaction-banking ?  I'm not at all sure and fear that the next financial crisis might have to pay for it.  In the mean time, if you want the pretence that is costless transaction-banking, and you want unfunded borrowing to pay for the hardware which supports that, then use them whilst you can.  If they start to introduce transaction fees and monthly fees then ditch the bank and move to cryptocurrency.

I think not to hyperinflation.  What I'm seeing is that in western capitalism at least, central treasuries now have a fairly good computer simulation of what will happen to shop prices next quarter as a function of how much money they issue.  So they issue enough to keep things steady, and in a society of idle spenders and furloughed shop assistants.  I suggest that sane economics ought to have seen rent and equities and dividends here collapse to prices aligned with median world salary (China was 80k yuan per annum last time I looked; about $1k per month) yet the rent on the meanest flats around here cost that, implying that in the absense of money printing, and for our factories to end up working just as hard as theirs, our rent should need to fall about x3.  By the way, should we be designing the next generation of homes to be nil CO2 and much lower cost than the last?  Furlough payments and prohibition of eviction (even for shop owners who were not selling anything last year) appear to be designed to prevent deflation to rational from happening.  It is even against the law (thanks to the EU human rights clauses) to offer to employ someone around here for 48 hours per week at $1000 per month.  I suggest that govenment free money only filling in excessive rent is why we are not seeing inflation nor deflation, and that is why I'm not running a factory making any of the honest products which I'd figured out how to make efficiently.

So I think that we won't see 1929 Weimer style hyperinflation in the West.  We'll get years of market distortions and contrafactual incentives instead.  And as usual, those tend to prop up the fictional stock market prices, and as usual the brokers will cry foul if ever the pricing should fall towards rational, even if only for a day.

For Bitcoin that would be neither positive nor negative.  21 Million Bitcoins remain worth the same as All The Real Money In the World.  I'm still waiting for the $ shop to notice.

An opinion from someone who did once have a bitcoin full node on a 32 bit rPi quad core with a 64GB usb memory stick plugged in.

DON'T

That was years ago, when the blockchain was less than 50GB and where I live took about two to four days (100 hours) to sort itself out, and then two to six restarts, resynchs, unexplained halts ... whether on my best PC or the scrapheap duel core or an rPi made no difference - probability of ending up with a full node here was never better than 1/4, and expected time before it conked out was never better than a few weeks.

Presently I don't even have a full node running, and I'm usually a try-hard who'll set it up and go through half a dozen resynchs just because I want bitcoin full nodes to still belong to everyone.

On an rPi with latest raspbian, which must have python-3.7-dev and a few other things, a better bet to have your own bitcoins at home is (tentatively) electrum.
That way, you can completely trash your experimental installation and always recover your bitcoins because plenty of full nodes supply pruned blockchain info, to any new Electrum client, so that will recognise your stupid poem which you wrote down on paper somewhere safe.  That is probably more malware-proof and upgrade-proof than copying around wallet.dat files which do not always work on slightly different full node versions.

All is not lost.  There is a fairly low value toycoin called Mazacoin whose blockchain is only a few GB, so is better suited to raspberry pi full nodes than the mainchain Bitcoin.  I had much better luck running a full node for mazacoin on a raspberry pi, a few years back when those ones were traded on more of the altcoin exchanges.  You might find a few other altcoins, but beware of ones whose algorithm was designed to need particular chip architecture which the pi does not have, or whose mission goal is something abhorrent or unlawful.  See for example URO.  I found sha256d coins to be preferable for raspberry pi full nodes.  One can learn much with altcoin(s), at much lower initial investment of money and time in computer hardware.

I wonder what hardware requirements for a full node are this year ?  Four years ago, I noted that bitcoin was not too greedy with memory, definitely needed a 2 core not single cpu, and that it still took all week on the 4 core PC.
Please let us know here if you get to a full node synched up.  I've not tried this years' 64 bit rPi4, as it has continued the tradition of not working with last years' power supply.   

Guys, are we looking at the wrong threat here ?
Given a quantum magic crack, however that works, and a choice between stealing a million bitcoins, or stealing a trillion dollars, which do you think most criminal masterminds would go for ?
The infrastructure for laundering that much money through all sorts of holding companies, overseas mailboxes, financial advisors, and comparable intermediaries is all well established, and when it is time to take the money and run, you can always sell CDO's of junk bonds whatever those get called next time.  So, from "what would the criminal mastermind do with the fabled quantum crack ?", it is surmised that conventional money would probably get raided before bitcoin did.
Therefore the quantum crack would be discovered doing something terrible to somebody else's money, not my bitcoins.

I tried a few things with my 2nd hand S1.
Simplest fix, which will get you 2/3 boards mining, is to
- switch it all off
- disconnect 12V lines from the faulty board
- check that there are no loose live ends in a bad place
- power it up
- mine with the remaining 'good' ASIC boards

Antminer products appear to be safe to run with less than all boards powered.  Think of all that electricity which you are saving by mining at 2/3 speed.
You might also want to look at the "overclocking" method to decrease (rather than increase) clock rates.  There can be times when decreasing the clock rate by about 10% does restore operation of the bad board.

Ninja, thanks for speedy reply.  I'll continue trying things until I find one that works and can see my coin from last September.  Next might be to download and install electrum 3.2.3 on ubuntu 16.04, since that needs python 3.4.  I'm less optimistic about getting python 3.6 and electrum 3.3.2

11 January 2019
~~~~~~~~~~
Does Electrum 2.6.4 work for anybody ?  I've got ubuntu 14.04 on some of my desktops and ubuntu 16.04 on some others.  18.04 won't install on anything here, perhaps if it has been maldesigned to dislike anything other than the newest hardware.  Typing 'electrum' in ubuntu software centre found an installer for electrum (with no indication of which version), so I did that, and some time later started it from its icon.  Turns out that Ubuntu 16.04 installed Electrum 2.6.4 which is how I found this old thread.  Does that even work this year?, or will I be waiting forever with the wallet 'Synchronising' ?  If it has not moved in an hour then I'm uninstalling it. 

By the way, the latest python3 electrum versions did not install on ubuntu 14.04 linux from 2014, and it took a day of circular loops of installing various dependency packages and dependencies of dependencies and following helpfully misexplained instructions to find that out.

I was considering buying a shiny new 12V 1600W power supply to replace an old one with a second hand miner but I'm seeing conflicting figures.

Mains electricity Voltage here at 50Hz was 244 Volts rms typical last time I checked and formally could go up to 253 Volts in this region.
Bitmain advertise their APW3 power supplies for 220 Volts and up to a maximum of 240 Volts.  As in "it might break" if it functions as advertised.

I read elsewhere online that they are good with British mains and rated up to 264 Volts.  I do not make sensible purchasing decisions on a single source of internet gossip.  What works in the UK ?

I just got a useless reply from Bitmain support "Please send us the Order ID and a picture of the SN tag. "

To divide bitcoins an (almost) infinite number of times would require their representation as a floating point number.
If you don't know how that differs from an integer, then ask a maths teacher to point you to a book explaining real numbers.
Although computer chips from different manufacturers ought to get the same answer when subtracting one small floating point number from another, such as 0.0002 - 0.00000001, they sometimes don't quite match, due usually to different ways of rounding between a computer representation and a human readable decimal representation.  Try looking up the "Pentium Bug".

Setting a fixed 10^-8 minimum fraction allows such to be represented with integers for which all 64 bit arithmatic logic processors will get exactly the right answer.  For example 2000 satoshi - 1 satoshi = 1999 satoshi.  The purpose of bitcoin is to have worldwide money with which all the computers in the world can exactly agree that valid transactions are valid, and that fraudulent ones are not.  This can only be guaranteed by representation of bitcoin not with real numbers but with integer counting of satoshi.  It was presumably decided very early on not to count "bit cents" worth 0.01 bitcoins and use those as a minimum unit because it was not small enough for envisaged use cases such as kW-seconds electric car recharging bills.   Also real money with metal coins already struggles to make small enough metal pieces for half-penny coins, so there was no reason to copy what physical currency did.

Ask me about pegged coloured coin sidechains and sharding if you want more (possibly minority opinion) ideas for spending very tiny bitcoin quantities, possibly smaller than nanobitcoins, without clogging up the main international blockchain.

The use to a pov begger of a Bitcoin is the same as the use of a 438.9 ounce gold ingot; it is somebody else's item of value to covet and tell stories about.

According to rumour, it was remarked by a London begger in early 1994 that the total stolen by Ronnie Briggs et al in The Great Train Robbery was less than the total taken by the newspapers and film about it.  The 1969 Micheal Cain film "The Italian Job" took even more.  Therefore making up a fictional robbery story should be more gainful (to someone) than going ahead and doing a robbery for real, and best of all won't get you sent to prison for it.  Next followed the entire pre-draft story "Oceans 12" of a PG rated fictional ideal robbery which must contain no nasty violence of kinds which could cause death or permanent injury (screen knockouts being about the worst), must contain no porn (though strippers could be mentioned and present, just don't show them doing that); their use in distraction of stupid men is allowable where it advances the robbery and shows nothing detrimental to those women.  Blatent distraction of security while the CCTV suspect recognition was tampered with was specified in a way which made it comicly obvious to the audience, on big screens behind the back of the head of security.  That "Oceans 12" predraft-screenplay was put forward as a contingency plan to spend loads of money in Vegas if some other scrounges and plans had made an embarrassingly fat pile of dosh which could not be moved back to London without upsetting the Federal Reserve.  Reportly, the begger was quite amused that the story got made, implying that the pile was quite fat enough to do that.

Now, can anyone make up a PG rated story for 2021 or later (preferably anticipating a few interesting advances in technology, security, and society) implementing a legendary scale cyberheist, and make the whole scam so totally cool that people buy tickets to go and see it ?

Surely bitcoin is neutral with respect to poverty and inequality, not redistributive nor charitable ?.  As with $, holders of bitcoin might choose to be philanthropic with it, but so far usually have not.

With bitcoin being as inedible as money, it certainly won't directly feed the unfed.

Where I see it helping though, is from the prohibitions in blockchain of certain corrupt institutions spending all the money in the world and then awarding themselves some more to spend.  If and only if bitcoin becomes the preferred pricing means for crude oil, soya beans, wheat, and the majority of third world export commodities, to the extent that a stable bitcoin price exists for those, then the exporting hardworking countries will be protected from the flood of unjustified bailout money which presently supports corruption and impoverishment in the commodity producing countries and enrichment of unproductive managers above them.

Stamping out corruption and unearned richness is not quite the same as ending poverty, but surely a step in the fair direction ?