What I'm trying to say is it's not just feasible, it can be done very easily.


They would gain nothing for now, only because bitcoin is nothing for now.
However, If Bitcoin continues to grow, Bitcoin will be something at some point, something that actually could do some damage to real world economy.


If people lose faith on Bitcoin, It will fall all by itself. = DOOMED
However, If people don't lose faith on Bitcoin, government will kill it at some point. = DOOMED

That's my point that there is no hope.


I don't know nothing about other crypto-currencies. But I can guess some.
Other currencies which give same freedom(discard some or all transaction from the block that he cracked) to miner are all vulnerable and the total destruction might be easy.

If there is no FPGA or ASIC(no faster way to mine), one who want to destroy crypto-currency do not need to build a special machine because regular supercomputer can do the job.
Top notch supercomputers usually have 10~100k of CPUs+GPUs or 200+k of CPUs. So, If someone managed to rent multiple top-notch supercomputers (which is easily possible for some government),
He will have more than a million CPU and a few hundreds of thousands of GPU. There is no way to match these kind of processing power.

For example, before ASIC hit the network, total network hashrate remain 10-15TH/s range. It can be achieved with 16~25k of 7970.
In other words, If other currency's managed to attract same number of miner as bitcoin, their combined hashrate cannot stand a chance in the battle with a group of supercomputers.

i don't have a habit of feeding trolls, that's all i'm saying.

Thank you for your correction. But it was never a main issue. The calculation was made to determine whether current supercomputer can beat the network or not.
And this doesn't matter because massive ASIC invasion is true problem.

BTW, Changing the numbers with integer performance is easy.
To get a hashrate of 1GH/s, you will need 5000 GIPS (for nvidia kepler gpu).
In order to get 55TH/s speed, 275 PIPS would be required.

Cray titan(no.1 supercomputer) has 18,688 Opteron 6274 and 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20x(approx 2 TIPS).
It will get 37,376 TIPS from K20x and this is not even close to current hashrate of network.
(i didn't count for cpu because cpu speed doesn't really matter i think)

Same conclusion.

Untrue. I know there is a dailymail article which made a similar claim, But there is a flaw in the article and your statement is not the same as dailymail's.

First of all, It's true that there are 6 billion mobile subscription in the world. But it does not necessarily indicate that 6 billion people held each subscription.
In case of United States, There are 321.7M wireless subscriber as of JUN 12. And guess what? There are only 313,914,040(est) people in the US as of 2012.
And It's not a rare event. In Hong Kong, There are over 13 million wireless subscriber(2011) but the population of Hong Kong barely exceeded 7m(2011).
Therefore, The number of actual phone holder must be quite lower than 6 billion. It could be lower than 4.5 billion which is the number of people who have an access to flush toilet.

And most of 6 billion phones are not even smartphone. A cumulative smartphone sales figure won't pass the 2 billion bar in this year. In other words, there are at best 1-1.5 billion people who have a smartphone and internet connection service provided by network operator. Plus, there are some people who has a phone but not a computer especially in underdeveloped countries, but computer owners usually have a phone nowadays.

Therefore, a number of flush toilet user must be 2-3 times higher than a number of internet users.



Read the link.



It's not widely accepted. Can you make a claim that most of the people who doesn't have an access to electricity have those kind of bicycle-powered charger?
Of course you cannot. Therefore, there are still electricity related issues out there.



Think about cell tower. It's very common that people don't have an access to electricity because their closest electricity line is at least 20 miles away. And in this case, There will be no power to activate the cell tower they need. Powering it up by solar panel? Hello? Their governments don't have money to spend on electricity line.

PSU quality is not about brand. It's about specific models.

Since there is no "we only sell good rock-solid product" brand on the market,
most of product from "good brand" are cheap, low-end, or worse, expensive and high rated output with bad performance characteristics.

I don't know anything about the compatibility issues with avalon asic, so i cannot say anything about it.
However, this is a list of top notch 800W+ output PSU you can find on the market today.

Seasonic P-860 SS-860XP2 (in-house)
Seasonic P-1000 SS-1000XP (in-house)
Corsair AX860 (Seasonic OEM)
Corsair AX860i (Flextronics OEM)
Corsair AX1200i (Flextronics OEM)

And belows are slightly worse PSU compared to above.

SuperFlower Golden King 850W SF-850P14PE (in-house)
SuperFlower Golden King 1000W SF-1000P14PE (in-house)
Fractal Design Newton R3 800W FD-PSU-NT3B-800W (ATNG OEM)
Fractal Design Newton R3 1000W FD-PSU-NT3B-1000W (ATNG OEM)

Anything other than listed is typically worse including Enermax Platimax/MAXREVO, Antec HCP, Corsair CX, CoolerMaster SPH, SuperFlower Golden Green, Zalman Platinum, FSP Aurum Pro and so on though they are not in the same ground. actually, a few of them has matching characteristics with above listed. In this case, they're not listed because they're 80 plus gold PSU.

Anyway, Avalon's original PSU is 2 BTC worth. It means original PSU cannot be good one considering exchange rate of pre-order period. Their originally equipped PSU must be worse than Enermax Platimax/MAXREVO, Antec HCP, Corsair CX, CoolerMaster SPH, SuperFlower Golden Green, Zalman Platinum, FSP Aurum Pro.

Avalon homepage stated that the power consumption is "~ 600w @ 120v AC". Therefore, the data probably came from wall power meter like kill-a-watt. and less than 600W wall draw with cheap power probably means 450watt-ish real power consumption, so 4 module one's actual power consumption would be around 600watt, at best 700w. In other words, Good 600-650W PSU probably won't blow up with 4 module Avalon since high quality PSU typically can handle 110-120% load for a considerably long time.

However, long term exposure of near 100% or above 100% load is definitely not a good thing for PSU even if it's a good one, so I would recommend 800W+ good PSU. And maximum efficiency typically achived within 40-60% load range of PSU, Corsair AX1200i looks fine if there is no size issue(AX1200i is slightly longer than typical ATX PSU).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168176.0
Most fiat currencies issuers have at least 5 more ways to destroy bitcoin completely.
If they want to destroy it, Bitcoin will be done. Bitcoin is alive because they don't care for now and that's because bitcoin is nothing for now.

I heard miner who solved the block can decide to arbitrarily discard some or all transaction from the block. Is that right?
If so, I think someone with great resources can destroy whole bitcoin system anytime if they want it to be happened and there are some people who could actually do that.

Let's check some number first.
7970 GHz has 4300 FP32 GFLOPS and 1080 FP64 GFLOPS and the hashrate of GPU is 0.65GH/s. (which means 1 FP32 GFLOPS = 0.00015GH/s or 1 FP64 GFLOPS = 0.00060GH/s)
2600K has 50 GFLOPS and the hashrate of CPU is 0.02GH/s (which means 1 GFLOPS = 0.0004GH/s)

Judging by above data, 1 GFLOPS can roughly translated into 0.0004GH/s.
Todays network hashrate is 55,000GH/s, therefore 137,500,000 GFLOPS = 137,500 TFLOPS = 137 PFLOPS would be needed to achieve 55TH/s hashrate.
And US Government only has 17.59 + 16.32 + 8.162 + 1.257 + 1.11 + 1.054 + 1.042 (and so on) PFLOPS supercomputers.
So, Now we know that even the US government cannot beat the network's hashrate with current supercomputer especially considering the fact that we are on the verge of ASIC explosion.

However, If someone with great resources try to build their own version of ASIC, It could be very easy to beat the hashrate of entire network by wide margin.
I heard avalon use 110nm lithography, so if someone use 22nm lithography to build their own ASIC, ten fold increase of speed is easy.
If someone develop much better architecture and use 22nm lithography to fabricate much bigger chip, 50x speed bump would not be far fetched idea.

If so, the "improved" chip's hashrate will be 3,150GH/s. 1 million chip means 3,150PH/s which is 63,000 times greater than today's hashrate of entire network.
In other word, he now holds 99.998417% of network hashrate, so he can deny at least 99.998417% of transaction.
If that happen, bitcoin miners and users has two option. Option A, Try to beat him by increasing their hashrate. Option B, Accept the reality and leave.
I think 63,000 times difference cannot be overcome easily, so the most of miner will leave and bitcoin system will be destructed forever.

And i don't think 1 million ASIC's price will be unthinkablely expensive. I don't know nothing about ASIC, but if the die size of ASIC is 400mm^2, you can get 137 of them from one 300mm wafer.
You need minimum 7300 wafer to get one million working chip, and typical 300mm wafer cost $5k-ish, so it's $36.5M.
$36.5M is not little money to average joe, but US DoD's direct spending on Iraq War was at least $757,800M and $36.5M would mean practically nothing for them.

So, Once bitcoin become break certain critical point that could harm the real world economics, "bitcoin is enemy" kinda definition can be made by government.
and since sweep process is relatively easier than real war(find some ASIC gurus, make a $40M worth fabrication deal with intel), destruction will be inevitable.

Long story short, bitcoin will never gain wide market-acceptance because once they do, whole bitcoin system will be wiped into history.
Am i correct or not?

Every other crypto-currency's recent price spike are entirely caused by bitcoin.
Bitcoin has drawn huge attention recently, hence more attention to other bitcoin-ish currency.

And there is no reason that the world need more than one crypto-currency and that's the Bitcoin.
In fact, there is very good chance that none of crypto-currency including Bitcoin won't be a widely accepted forever.

If they clearly stated below facts in agreement,

1. Main currency is USD or other real currencies.
2. They offer BTC acceptance as a side option. In other words, It's just an exchange service between BTC and USD.
3. Therefore, BTC payment do not construct a direct payment.
4. If you paid in BTC, amount of BTC you need to pay is determined by the exchange rate of the time of payment
5. Likewise, If you ask a refund in BTC, amount of refund in BTC will be determined by the exchange rate of the time of refund.

I think it's done deal unless they use unrealistic exchange rate.

Let's say you bought a very fast computer with your one kilograms gold bar.

CASE1. Merchant originally accept 1kg gold for 1 computer deal.
CASE2. Merchant originally accept USD for 1 computer and they have an additional service which is "Take some gold and exchange it to USD"

In Case 1, If you give them 1kg gold for a computer, you will get 1kg gold refund.
In Case 2, If you give them 1kg gold for a computer, you will get USD refund.
And if you wish to receive your refund as gold, exchange rate at the time of refund will be applied to determine how much gold you will get.

because they don't know nothing about exact time of arrival of their ASIC and if they don't know about that, they cannot determine whether they can get full return of investment or not in reasonable time.
ROI per any given period will decrease every new ASICs hit the network, so if they get their ASIC after massive BFL's 10k ASIC chips hit the network, they will get 1~2 BTC/day not 5BTC/d like today.

and mining rate is not the only factor. USD/BTC rate can be fall drastically. even if you can maintain average 2 BTC/d rate for the next whole year, your 730 BTC can be worth much less than $20k.
730 BTC worth more than $90k today, but if exchange rate falls to $10/BTC again, it will be $7.3k. and $10/BTC is not even close to the basement. no one knows where the basement is for sure. could be $0.1/BTC.

Therefore, $20k price tag is perfectly reasonable for those who are in the waiting line, and not a bad deal even for a current holder of ASIC.
$20,000 price tag is actually 75BTC + premium. if you consider the premium is 50%, $20k for ASIC deal is actually selling 112.5BTC at the rate of $178/BTC.
If someone believe market will experience at least ten fold crash very soon, selling out BTC mining machine at the rate of $178/BTC is good deal.

It's pretty sure that you won't get your ASIC before massive amount of other ASICs hit the network.

Wild fluctuation of price is inevitable. Bitcoin ecosystem is still very small market compared to real currency, and they are drawing too much attention nowadays.

Check out Volkswagen's stock fluctuation between SEP 08 - NOV 08. (code - VOW:GR)

VW's market capital is 70B Euro today which is 63 times larger than bitcoin's market cap and one VW stock is slightly more expensive than 1.0 bitcoin.

Still they had a huge fluctuation between SEP 08 - NOV 08 when people started to trade 5~15 millions of VW shares for daily basis.

Bitcoin's daily trading volume is 150-350k which is larger than daily trading volume of VW, the 70B worth company.

Agreed, 100%.