OK, first, you *can not* mine 10 or so bitcoins. There were no mining pools at first, and that is the only way people mine fewer coins.. And that's not really even correct.. Mining pools mine 25 bitcoins these days, and then share them with their members.. What we're talking about is directly mining coins here, which got mine 50 coins at a time for the first four years or so.

Also, IIRC, most of these coins are held by just a few addresses, not spread among 100,000. The entire population of the bitcoin community was probably less than a few thousand people during the first year.. During the first months it was more like 20 or 30.... maybe less..

I think you mean until he caches them into United States fun bucks..

...you wrote the IDE yourself :)

I believe that Xen is probably the most used VM/hypervisor on the planet..

Amazon and EC2 have deployed a pretty fair number of them with a lot of success (like all of their VM's).

I was at a Chuckecheese with the kids for one of their friends birthday parties when one of the machines freaked out...

It was a photobooth that took your picture, and then made a sketch like version of your picture and printed it out for you..

When the employee came to reset it, I got to see either Redhat or Cent boot up.. Somewhere I've got a picture..

Even it's ability to chirp loudly when a drive fails?

I think you've used some pretty lame raid controllers.

How about it's ability to not waste CPU?

ZFS is good... great even, but (irony intentional) absolute statements are always wrong!

I've used them together. Seems to work just fine.. Just don't let ZFS know that there's more than 1 drive. You can't have them both trying to manage the redundant storage.

ZFS has some great features besides it's redundant storage. You can get them from other filesystems too though I suppose, but I like snapshots built into the filesystem. It *is* overkill to have the filesystem doing checksums and the raid card detecting errors as well, but that's why this is the paranoia setup... Not really looking for the performance king..

ZFS certainly isn't necessary though, if you've got hardware raid.

If you really want hassle free and safe, it would be expensive, but this is what I would do:

ZFS for the main storage - Either using double parity via ZFS or on a raid 6 via hardware raid.

Second location - Same setup, but maybe with a little more space

Use rsync between them using the --backup switch so that any changes get put into a different folder.

What you get:

Pretty disaster tolerant
Easy to maintain/manage
A clear list of any files that may have been changed for *any* reason (Cryptolocker anyone?)
Upgradable - just change drives
Expense - You can build it for about $1800 per machine or $3600 total if you go full-on hardware raid. That would give you about 4TB storage after parity (4 2TB drives - $800, Raid Card - $500, basic server with room in the case - $500)

What you don't get: Lost baby pictures/videos. I've been there, and I'd pay a lot more than this to get them back at this point, and my wife would pay a lot more than I would..

Your current setup is going to be time consuming, and you're going to lose things here and there anyway.. If you just try to do the same thing but make it a little better, you're still going to have the same situation, just not as bad. In this setup you have to have like 5 catastrophic failures to lose anything, sometimes even more..

No no.. thank *you*.... Save the bitcoins for me...

It's a little flaky, but no more than systems you pay a lot of money for..

Of course, it really depends on how well it meets your requirements..

...but if you can get someone who's really good, and can also play nice with others, then I think it's well worth it. That's a pretty rare combo though.. Sometimes just because "others" sometimes won't play nice with people that are better than them because they're threatened..

If you ever have a problem of difficulty 8, and you've got a programmer of skill 7, don't even bother trying.. You're just gonna get a mess..

This has changed (slowly) over time.. You actually *can* dump a million USD in bitcoin without throwing the market all over hell now.. You *should* string it out over a couple of hours (or put up a wall and let the market do it for you) so that you get a reasonable price, but the market will take the direct hit as well at this point..

This very minute, if you were to sell of 10,000 BTC (a bit more than 1 million USD) in with an order that would sell immediately, you would push the price of BTC down by 5 cents. With their price in the $130 dollar range, that's actually not much of a fluctuation.

You haven't looked very hard (or at all) then.. I would think the average slashdot user would be able to find something they'd like to buy on www.bitcoinstore.com. I know it's hard because the name is so misleading, but they sell things that you can purchase with bitcoin. Oh, and the nice part is, they're actually often times cheaper than their USD equivalents because they save so much money by using bitcoin (no charge backs, and *tiny* fees compared to comparable USD systems (visa/paypal/mastercard)).

If the button were there, I'd use it.. Are you listening slashdot?

Mining with GPU's has a very limited lifespan as well now.. ASIC's are here, and taking over, and GPU's can't compete with them even a little.. Right now there may be a window because ASIC supply is limited, but not for long.j In a short time, it won't be worth the electricity. No matter what the price is, it will balance out that way, because ASIC is simply the most efficient way to do it (by far).