r31B45h9RF9YUBL7KH7fGDE4tyM5s1cT1c

I should really read this board more often.

Wouldn't any NP-complete problem serve just as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete)? I think the hashing target thing we currently use is NP-complete, right? So in theory any other NP-complete problem can be transformed in polynomial time into bitcoin generation.

I believe you can. Each of these pseudo-slot machines are statistically independent and have finite variance; the law of averages applies. It's very different from the chaos situation you have in predicting the weather, which is sort of like trying to play a pinball game twice exactly the same way. You can't play the exact same game of pinball twice, but if you had a million pinball players, you could calculate the average score across players very accurately.  If you had a million slot machines being used 24x7, you could calculate your income very accurately.

In fact, the bitcoin algorithm itself depends on being able to predict the total rate of increase of bitcoins, so it has to be possible.

I think of my machines running bitcoin as slot machines. I put in CPU time and energy costs in at a regular rate, and once in a while I get money back. If I'm to treat bitcoin as part of a business, then I need to be able to calculate my expected return on investment, just as a casino owner needs to be able to calculate how much money she's making off of her slot machines. I know that the bitcoin generation difficulty will stabilize at some point in the future, but at this point it would be useful to me to be able to calculate my ROI quickly and easily.

So, if nobody else is going to do it, I'll probably make a patch for this. Bitcoin donations appreciated, of course, and would help motivate me to make it available quickly.

I'd be interested in seeing something like "expected bitcoins generated/day" next to (or in place of) the khash/s number. I'd rarely need to see the khash/s number since that won't change unless I make changes to the software or hardware, and the bitcoins per day figure is what I really want to know.

I know I can use the calculator at http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php but it's still easier just to see it displayed automatically.

I'd be interested in seeing something like "expected bitcoins generated/day" next to (or in place of) the khash/s number. I'd rarely need to see the khash/s number since that won't change unless I make changes to the software or hardware.