Please don't take this personally but as constructive criticism.  It's obvious you're a coder and not in management yet because you've failed to acknowledge/identify a couple of key problems (should have been the first step)....just helpful advice when you're trying to move up the chain in the future.

In regards to your plan - I've read pages now and still have no solid Idea on how you propose to deal with the following problems:

1.  Implementation - Just because a lot of money goes behind an idea, doesn't mean that its; A - Good for Bitcoin, B - Accepted by a majority, C -A clear priority.   There's a reason the lobby and vote system exists in government and despite anarchist opinion, it's not to promote corruption... its to create an educated and well balanced debate that addresses all sides before a vote is cast on implementation.....how does your plan get to implementation in a fair and organized way?

2.  Government Intervention - How do you plan to protect Bitcoin from this looming threat.  I caution you that - "the we have more computing power than they do so what can they do" argument is painfully flawed.  When were talking about governments the size of the US, China, Russia, etc.... the paltry market cap of Bitcoin could easily be squashed by a multitude of options.   You need to acknowledge that this is a REALITY and then give us a plan that will address it.  Throwing money at developers does not satisfactorily re-enforce Bitcoin.  This war isn't going to be solely waged by computers over the internet in the near future....its going to face real push-back and sanctions from governments if we're not careful and it will affect us all.

This is painfully narrow minded and extremely short sighted.   Bitcoin will only be analogous to file sharing until its market cap and volume is big enough to support arms trades and legitimate physical threats from massive drug trafficking operations .  Right now bitcoin doesn't have the market cap or infrastructure to deal in either of these two government unbalancing trades....but its headed there.   Guess what happens to your unlimited freedom for spending your money when that happens?  Better to head this off in Washington and around the globe ahead of time.

FloridaBear has clearly made way too many assumptions to have any credibility...this is just more button pushing to try and curb the flood of new miners coming to the market.

Lets address the fallacy of his assumptions:

The assumption that Bitcoin will not go up is fundamentally and historically broken.  Infrastructure is getting better, the first convention/limited government is poised to add stability, and the its nowhere near public adoption yet, media coverage is expanding, and most importantly the capital expenditure in equipment and electricity supporting the network is growing exponentially.

He can't possibly be here trying to sell the idea that cryptos are going away, right?  Everything points to the opposite the same as Google, Facebook, apple, etc. etc.  So if Bitcoin is staying then we can easily (and more accurately) make the assumption the other way, that Bitcoin values will increase, and probably exponentially (as it catches on), and then linearly (linear growth will only be the norm when the global market is affected significantly by Bitcoin).   We can reliably look at the last 20 years of significant innovations growth models to arrive at this conclusion.

Granted you're analysis seems to have overlooked all of these core points.  Nonetheless, let me address a few of your other "assumptions".

"Altcoins are a fad" - certainly you'd have a case for unoriginal copies of Bitcoin being "doomed" in the long term

However, to ignore innovations like Litecoin, PPcoin, and other fundamentally different alt coins is ignoring the fundamental nature of new innovations (sometimes the first one to market doesn't always have the best product or the product that will dominate the marketplace).  It also ignores the fact that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. etc...do not control 100% of their respective markets just because they were the first/biggest/etc.   Please at least demonstrate some basic market / economics knowledge before spreading the doom and gloom.  You're assumption's basis is purely opinion and lacks support.

"Altcoin profitability is a wash at best "-

 I think I read that you have a 7970 and if you do it suits you because its the one card that doesn't appreciably outperform its Bitcoin hash #'s when turned to scrypt mining.  However, even your 7970 does better (if we move the standard order of magnitude down mhash to khash) at mining scrypt than straight SHA 256.... GPU's are particularly good at scrypt in fact because of their high frequency memory and now increased mem capacities (thanks to graphics demands in larger screens/resolutions).   Most cards achieve up to 20% more khash on scrypt than on Bitcoin mining (Ex. a 7950 will usually do around 550-580 Mhash at stable temps and reasonable overclocking,  a properly setup 7950 on scrypt will be in the 670's on khash).  Given the conversion rate currently in place most educated scrypt miners are producing 15-30% more equivalent value on Litecoin today with the same hardware.

You've also failed to acknowledge that roughly 30THash worth of GPU's are or were running on the Bitcoin network and have been making their way over to Litecoin.   Guess what happens when all those resources and energy expenditures fortify Litecoin....the value goes up (Just like Bitcoin).

Every single one of your arguments really only holds water if:  All crypto currencies fail....and sorry to say but that's tin foil hat territory now.  Will there be economic shifts, government intervention, market crashes, etc?... Absolutely.   However, this genie isn't going back in the bottle and trying to scare off investments in mining serves zero purpose.  

Every mining rig in operation strengthens the integrity and the valuation of the cryptos.

Market cap for Bitcoin or the leading crypto will most likely reach 1 trillion in the next few decades....if that's the case even your 7970 will have been worth its weight in gold....but by all means go back to surfing porn if that's you're preferred use for your valuable GPU time.

All the data from these two sources, point to pre-production prototypes...not production units, and were still painfully shy of the supposed amount shipped out at this point.

If you have other evidence or thread links to the contrary this would be a great place to post them.

This of course goes back to the credibility of the first post of this thread as well.

but is there actually a credible media source that has confirmed receiving a unit?

Well I actually feel dumber for having skimmed this entire thread.

As evidence of the afore mentioned increase in my stupidity I'm posting here.

I was unable to find any definitive answers whatsoever in here or anywhere else....

Core Question:

Have we confirmed that this is a legit delivery?

or is this just a bad PR stunt to make it seem like they are actually shipping?

The "we've shipped 20 or 30" quote from BFL smells like spin put on a product still languishing in prototype phase.

.....and my other conclusion:

BFL really needs to hire an actual PR firm and take away Josh's access to the forum.....

Josh: I'm actually dumfounded by your rants...surely you don't suppose you're bolstering support with these petty back-and-forth jabs.   I'm sure you're fringe target client is a zit-faced over indulgent teenage brat but I'd venture to say your target client is far older, mature, affluent, and totally turned off by this kind of rhetoric.  You've lost my future business and you've made the future PR person's job a nightmare.   For your own good send somebody polite, courteous, and amenable to the conference this month and then go find a gym to work out your issues while they do their best not to choke on the foot you've jammed in BFL's mouth.

I'm in for 32...just waiting on confirmation 2.752 btc

txid: 8c0c52ce67b89d6a2923a748c1466a8468c8519ee9584073ade6809ede450035


Email and related info on its way

will double this order if there's room in batch 2

Need somebody to get on here and filter the legal terms of this suit.

Can't be that easy to sue across international borders in domestic court.

A 75 million dollar lawsuit is going to do nothing other than add more instability to Bitcoin....I seriously hope this stuff is addressed at this month's conference.  This is a childish play on the part of both parties and is not in the spirit of building Bitcoin.

...and regarding MtGox

MtGox is clearly failing at their duties to protect the integrity of Bitcoin.  Last month's crash and the ensuing decline in consumer confidence falls squarely at their feet.  Yet we take it because this underfunded venture has a track record of creating (limited)fiat liquidity.  The whole market reeks of manipulation yet MtGox claims that they are large enough and well funded enough to deal with these problems.  I'm in total agreement that its high time another exchange arises to create competition.

Gotta know my friend.... your hashpower is insane for a gpu net.  Let us in on the basics?  156,000 k is....obscene.

My shares are all submitting but hopefully its just the website/interface that's broken.

peewee ; 50 ; 4.3 ; 13FdjGU6P6q6ypqWVQ2fJpF93ikTKTH2yS

No issues leaving the voltage at 1.250 on several of these cards for me

Getting 640khash with 1100/1350 at 70c constant

Get 595 Mhash when I switch them to BTC 1150/1100 67c constant

Seems to be fixed now.

First let me apologize for my relatively new participation in this thread on on this forum...it actually feels embarrassing to post on this thread with such a low post count and such a new presence.  I'll explain right off that I am not an expert in cryptographic hash functions and my coding is so dated  that the source for bitcoin reads like greek to me.

I do however have a great deal of business experience with some military training on computer security.  I spent hours searching the boards to find a thread just like this one and hopefully I'm posting this in the right place. 

 I knew that there had to be a discussion already about addressing the weaknesses of bitcoin...specifically the compromise of the 51% weakness in bitcoin.  Many have assumed that this was only relevant to a smaller network but you guys have touched on the bigger issue here.

Unfortunately, the nature of bitcoin at large difficulties is manifesting in exactly what we're seeing - a migration to large pools.   This is exposing a very very large weakness in the system that can bring bitcoin down.    A large scale DDOS attack that is well coordinated can easily bring down enough of the network by targeting the large pools that one could replace the blockchain with an alternative model while the majority of the system was offline.   Sadly this doesn't even require a great deal of resources and the exposure gets more and more pronounced as this phenomenon perpetuates.

I know the anarchists that love bitcoin for its lack of government will balk at this but a system (even if its a concurrent system run by the major pool operators to validate the blockchain) of officiating needs to be put in place asap (can be read limited government).  Presumably the concurrent checking system offers the most benefit but it removes some of the power and transparency from the entire network. 

I would propose that this forum forward the idea of a bitcoin coalition that is comprised of developers, pool operaters, exchanges, and elected participants to meet at least once a year and to be accountable for changes to bitcoin for the betterment of bitcoin.   Even a summit once a year and an agreed upon system of checks and balances to ensure the integrity of the blockchain would go a long ways to to ensuring that we all have something real in a decade.

Destabilizing bitcoin because we want to be stubborn about not putting in a system of checkpoints or checking measures will inevitably lead to failure..like it or not Bitcoin is no longer just a social experiment...there are livelihoods, retirements, and hard earned money riding on the motley crew of individuals that operate on this forum and support the infrastructure of bitcoin... I think we should take responsibility for that.

Please let me know your thoughts, PM me or tell me I'm what a government whore I am publicly but I'd like to see this brought into the light if I'm on target.

You need to set up a local proxy server on your machine....its available for download at wemineltc.com under Getting started

Reaper is get work only it cannot mine via stratum so your reaper miners will be redirected to localhost or in this case 127.0.0.1 which is where you're proxy will run on your computer.

Point any additional workers to the same by altering the address to 192.16.1.x/127.0.0.1

mining proxy will have the following flags on activation -pa scrypt -o eu.wemineltc.com -p 3333 (or 80 if you use us.wemineltc.com)

I have a large array of 7950's as well and my settings are basically the same...I've found benefits of being a little higher with gpu engine clocks when temps allow 1125...my concurrency is exactly this as well as worksize and intensity.  500 would be about right with such conservative gpu settings as was posted earlier.

More importantly

Please somebody address the payout issue...I'm still below half of my expected payout after 10 blocks...this is well beyond my ramp up time in the past and its stabilized low.  I wonder is your code splitting with the added servers now and not calculating payout correctly? 

+1, can we just go to user selected difficulty?

Vardiff seems to be active still on the US server....difficulty jumped to 15xx and then stopped responding.  Presumably because I wasnt solving any blocks at that level but it escalated very quickly from 128 to 336 to 15xx in a 3 lines of polling.  Switched back to eu...no issues there.

Had to redirect but will be back when you guys come online again...please let us know.

Port 3333 down 5 mins ago no luck on 80 either.