for the record, you can be a legit company (startup or not) without necessarily requiring a real office, virtual offices work well for hundreds of thousands of businesses, and not every virtual office-based office is automatically a scam, which is especially true for many hosting companies that are acting as resellers.

That being said, like was said, colo-costs will be a significant factor given the Thash/sec rate advertised by cloudhashing.com, which would support the assumption that  they should have supporting information to back up their claims (e.g. contracts, billing, invoices etc) that can be checked by potential customers, to ensure that their money is actually being used for these purposes. So far, the whole thing seems to lack in transparency unfortunately. If such information could be provided, based on 3rd party companies that are actually real, customers could make up their own minds.

absolutely right, one could also simply set a variable pointing to the source tree during configuration, so that the binary can refer to the location of the source tree to find kernels. In the meantime, even just showing an error message saying that the kernels cannot be found would suffice, i.e. "cgminer must be installed or built/run from within the source tree" (even just editing README.md would do)

just a some feedback: the current autotools build system doesn't seem to handle out-of-tree builds when running the binary without installation, i.e. it doesn't find the CL kernels in the source tree because it is referring to the CWD - it would probably be a good idea to use cmake instead of autotools, because it handles such dependencies without issues and is also cross-platform ?

this is page 15 of the the thread, meanwhile pitchforks have been turned in for flame throwers since page 11 already.

(never bring a pitchfork to a good ol' flame thrower BBQ)

even more concerning is the fact that they are now teaming up with other "vendors" who have been accused of being scammers, due to not delivering a single unit within months...

once you have to start thinking about low/zero electricity costs for a USB-based mining device in order to make it mine profitably, it's a fairly safe thing to say that you shouldn't be touching the whole thing in the first place. A typical computer has 4-8 usb ports, USB providing 5 volts and about 0.9-1.2 Ampere, which in turn means that we are talking about 5-7 watts per device, the BFL/Jalapeno is said to mine at 5Ghash/30 watts, i.e. 1 Ghash/6 watts. So do your own maths.

at >= $100 USD bitFunder's 5 BTC is also pretty excessive for people wanting to start something new...

DNA sequencing

you could be making money by coming up with an Indie movie named "BitCoin - The Heist"...

It's more like 30+ % increase in difficulty per month minimum... it's just that the mining reward is decreased at 4-year intervals.
Don't make hardware decisions until you understand the dynamics at work here, in case of doubt, go to: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

• raise difficulty by 45-60% to account for 4-5 weeks shipping
• reduce conversion rate by 25%
• reduce hash rate by 10%
• increase elecricity rate by 20%
• increase power consumption by 20%
• increase pofitability decline by 15%

=> check if you're still breaking even under these cirumstances (and WHEN) - adjust your numbers accordingly

PS: You are doing something wrong if you're buying erupters, you should be SELLING them !  

+1

From a government/authorities standpoint there are worse things that could happen crypto-currency wise, bitcoin is only just the very first manifestation of an established and working cryptocurrency with a sizable following and capitalization, but most people are fully aware of its shortcomings and weaknesses - and in fact working on improved implementations that could have a much bigger impact on globalization and adoption by black markets. With bitcoin, there's at least a public bitchoin to trace and validate transactions in a p2p network.

at least, we've got a statement now - you can now do the maths: 24hrs hashing per unit vs. 700 resulting bitcoins 

right, if you were to order 10,000 ASIC units from a company, it would make a huge difference to the end-customer if these were "live-tested" for 6-8 weeks or if they were just running on testnet and directly shipped.

That's the nice thing about bitcoin which also makes the community so prone to scamming: you don't need to make legally-binding promises to your customers, instead you can hope for your customers to make their own little calculations based on your "ballpark projections". And the awesome thing is that they're all accepting btc as payment, so that even if there was a trial and authorities would be trying to look under the hood, all the money would be pretty "safe" - unlike bank accounts that can be frozen.

There really is tons of money to be made through scamming with very little risk involved, the whole bitcoin/ASIC wave must be a con artist's wet dream come true, and you don't even risk violating banking guidelines or money-laundering laws, all because bitcoin is so new and still unregulated. You could pull something like this off, without any real dangers involved

care to elaborate why ?

Agreed, but the unfortunate truth is that a handful of black markets adopting bitcoin will have a more significant/positive (stabilizing) effect for the btc economy than a handful of established companies, unless they're really major players like ebay, amazon, paypal or google/apple. In terms of profits, SR is said to return >= ~20M per year, that's fairly significant and means there'll be a constant supply of people wanting to trade via btc.

Sorry for being the one to break it to you, but that's simply not how humanity, and life in general, work.

And concerning "Satoshi's" motives, it is easy to speculate what he had in mind - but keep in mind that he's almost certainly the one sitting on ~BTC 5-6M since the early days of bitcoin as being the role-model of an early-adopter and bitcoin miner, which would currently translate into ~$600M US. So please stop telling us BS about how noble his motives were and how he was going to improve humanity  

http://www.sikharchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/satoshi_nakamoto.jpeg

Without greed, this would be a damn lonely place, we wouldn't just be losing all the scammers, but also pretty much anybody else who's hoping to make a fortune by being an early-adopter...

Never say never, you can only accomplish the unthinkable if you consider it possible in the first place.
Among hundreds of scammers, there are some pretty clever people around here , and there are some pretty sophisticated ideas floating around, too.

However, people looking at speeding up btc-mining by discovering shortcuts (not necessarily in SHA256, but rather in the way it is used by bitcoin, and the way difficulty is modified in a p2p fashion), should have a pretty strong background in math, cryptology, computer science and engineering.

There are really only very few threads to be found here where you can find people discussing these things who obviously do have such a background, which is only really obvious to people with a similarly strong background. Some of the more interesting threads include:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55888.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120473.0

Bottom line being, you need to know how to translate crypto-maths into code and vice versa, not just at the HLL level (C/C++, OpenCL or VHDL), but also at the instruction level,i.e. assembly/RTL instructions and parallel hardware, i.e. GPUs, FPGA and structured/standard cell ASICs. All these skills are hard to find in a single person.

Again, I am not saying that SHA256 can be realistically broken by a single person, but rather that you can indeed make certain assumptions about the way SHA256 is used by bitcoin for mining purposes, and for controling difficulty through mining output, by just requiring more bits to be 0 - which conceptually /could/ translate into less potential work for the miners, like mentioned earlier.