I don't have the devices to test, but perhaps you'd be able to attach another device after renaming one of the existing ones? Does it matter which order you plug them in in?

I'll just cover this excerpt:

1) I have no idea what this "obligation of sovereigns" has to do with bitcoin. Sounds pretty weird and not something I want anything to do with if I can help it.

Don't listen to people in this thread. When Casascius released his first version of his coins, he had a typo, and people who contribute nothing to the advancement of Bitcoin were really harsh. Screw the freeloaders. Give it a go.  See what happens.

Too generic.  ASICminer is paying dividends and doing what they said they would do.  Avalon has delivered to the tune of 1/2 of the total network hashrate.  Helveticacoin isn't asking for prepay and will be very interesting when they hit the market.  

BFL is the only company advertising what they can't demonstrate.

Certainly seems that bitcoin gains from disorder and there is plenty of fuel.

"lack of market contagion"

I all seriousness, I wonder how far out from now quantum technology is. If it's in 20 years, hypothetically, what does that mean to bitcoin?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/technology/testing-a-new-class-of-speedy-computer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130218-diamond-idea-for-quantum-computer

Neal Stephenson was inspired to write The Baroque Cycle when, while working on Cryptonomicon, he encountered a statement by George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines that suggests Leibniz was "arguably the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines."He also had heard considerable discussion of the Leibniz – Newton feud and Newton's work at the treasury during the last 30 years of his life. He found "this information striking when [he] was already working on a book about money and a book about computers." Further research into the period excited Stephenson and he embarked on writing the historical piece that became The Baroque Cycle.

I guess this goes back to the question of do you use bitcoin as your checking account or your savings account? If you want to use bitcoin to replace credit cards, debit cards, checks, cash payments, etc, then yes it is important to get merchants to accept bitcoins.

On the other hand, if you treat bitcoins more like a savings account, then no, it does not matter if anybody ever accepts bitcoins in their shops. If you want to buy something, simply take your money out of savings, convert to whatever local currency happens to be in fashion and purchase your goods. In this use case, we should help build up the bitcoin exchange network so there is a quick and easy way to go in and out of bitcoins where ever you are. Bitcoin ATMs would be good for this.

That reduced quote was what I was interested to see if the trend could be reversed... a design that was so efficient and widely available it was still possible to mine for the masses (as all you could do is multiply at the same efficiencies).

I was unaware they were simply parallel operations rather than solving them quicker. Still, it would be interesting to see if you can solve that operation quicker, rather than in parallel.

The way Bitcoin mining hardware works is to put a bunch of SHA hash units on a single chip so the miner can do parallel work. SHA hashes are designed to be computed quickly and with minimal resources, so they're naturally quite easy to run in parallel. So in other words the design of a Bitcoin ASIC miner isn't necessarily as expensive as other kinds of chips that you could make. The main problem I see is that the hardware is low-volume and thus expensive to make. Hardware is very much a volume business and Bitcoin hardware is extremely specific. Nobody else is going to want a chip that brute forces SHA-2.

Even if hardware costs for ASIC machines dropped, the hardware is still very much special-purpose. With CPU mining everybody with a computer could have a chance of mining some bitcoins. When GPU miners were released this got specialized down to computer with a decent graphics card. This later specialized down into having to have a computer with a very specific AMD card, then a computer with multiples of those, then having multiple computers altogether. Now, the average Bitcoin mining hardware resembles no computer one would actually build or want to use. So already mining has specialized to the point where it's a profession rather than a task everybody on the network carries out.

The problem isn't just the cost of obtaining ASIC hardware, it's the fact that it has to be obtained at all. Mining is a very computationally expensive operation with no other benefits than either going to a mining pool or solo-mining. Unless you have one of these mythical ASICs, or a very specific purpose-built GPU mining rig, you aren't going to make anything resembling a substantial amount of money. But you will be spending lots of electricity to do practically nothing.
So in all practicality, the more specialized the mining gets, the less people can actually start mining, which is contrary to Bitcoin's design.
Even if the ASICs get really cheap, Bitcoin will adjust difficulty to compensate, in a sense, and you'll have to buy a lot of them again.

-kmeisthax

what events took place that led up to  this bs.