Pretty naive perspective. Three things can cause mining to become more profitable.

What if BTCUSD goes up to say $100/BTC? Putting aside whether that's realistic for now, the point is there is relationship between profitability of mining and the BTCUSD ratio.

What happens if miners start to shut down and leave? Difficulty goes down, each MH returns more BTC per unit time.

More services start to pop up, like SatoshiDice, that impose a transaction fee. Have you seen the growth in transaction fees graph at blockchain.info? http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees Right now, it's miniscule (1% of mining revenue) but over time, as the block reward goes to zero, will determine the profitability of mining.

Wow. Bitcoin is not just about easy Internet money transfers. It's a distributed/decentralized system of accounting between N untrusted parties where N can be arbitrarily large. In my view, it is the seedling of the future of financial infrastructure simply because it is more efficient and cost effective. The latter is in view of society as a whole. I see it as becoming to the financial industry what robotics was to manufacturing.

That's a digression though. The big "broken spoke in the wheel" has to do with the power we give banks and the risks for society posed by the defacto standard of bailing them out when they're in trouble. It creates the wrong incentives.

From http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=227162

"Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations."

I'm genuinely interested. Could you provide a source for this statement?

It bucks the trend of {bigger,faster}=better. Its 3.7" screen with a single core processor is typical of phones two generations old spec wise. OTOH it is the right size, it has amazing battery life (48 hours or more between charging typical for me) and does not get uncomfortably warm when in use. OTOOH, the stock firmware is really bad but that can be fixed.

Is this a fair assumption? Economies don't stand still... there are new goods and services introduced every year. Doesn't this account for the increase value in a unit of currency?

I believe the encouragement to spend effect is over-rated. It's negligible in comparison to other factors like immediate need or market opportunities for greater returns.

In this day and age, I think encouragement to *conserve* is much more useful.... which you get with a "deflationary currency"

If you're saving anything substantial in any way, you're ultimately hoping that whatever it is will keep its value. Be it cash in a bank or bitcoins... there's really no difference in the fact that you're relying on something to keep its value.

That said, being Canadian (for better or worse), I also trust banks more than bitcoin (likewise for better or worse).

But I am also aware that according to statistics, given a fixed pile of wealth, spreading your wealth around is safer than "putting all your eggs in one basket".

AFAIK, the bitcoin protocol itself has never been compromised.

What has happened is the security of several individual exchanges have been breached. MtGox, Bitomat, Bitcoinica to name a few. But this is not entirely bitcoin's fault.

Bitcoin's role is only that it allowed the attackers to escape with the money.

it's not like they used rivets or welded it shut. i've taken the glass off a mbp unibody and i imagine it's about the same level of care needed. it isn't that difficult with a heat gun and a suction cup. all of about $20 at the local hardware store.

note maybe ifixit should be capitalizing on a market opportunity rather than whinging. i can't imagine it would be too hard to fashion a rug to heat just the edges to the correct temperature and make the whole process so that they don't have to wait til their hangovers are gone, about midweek, to repair these things

how many tools does a car mechanic have? how many of them are custom to some specific make?

Cursory search for "successful self published book" gives:

"Supposedly......the most successful self-published book of all time would be "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield. According to Publishing Trends, The Celestine Prophecy was the #1 international bestseller of 1996 (#2 in 1995). It spent over 3 years on the New York Times bestsellers list. As a completely self-published bppk it solf more than 100,000 by word of mouth, and was then picked up by Warner Brothers Books."

ALso, wasn't Accelerando (Stross) self-published or did he just release it after the fact with a copyleft license?

I think there's an underlying assumption in your writing: that there is no inherent good in people so they will evade taxes or sell drugs if given the chance. As for myself, I don't think that's true of the majority...

I don't know if you're writing that tongue in cheek but on face value, it doesn't seem plausible due to the need for centralization. See "e-gold Ltd" - shut down by the feds.

Anyone else notice the similarity between Llano's and Arrandale's memory controller configuration, i.e., that both put the MC on the GPU and have the CPU talk to the GPU via some protocol for data? Okay, in Llano's case there's the option of going directly to memory through WCs but still.

And then, this FSA crap seems to be going in the direction of Sandy Bridge, i.e., a unified L3 cache... as much as I like AMD, they do seem like their following in Intel's footsteps. This new architecture reminds me a little of Larabee. Not that I know much about either, but IIRC in Demers' keynote he mentioned something like 24 CUs per chip... which seems way too low, I must have heard him wrong or there must be a factor of 40 or so I'm missing somewhere...

From what I understand (I attended the AMD summit in question), Llano cannot multitask natively, although through the driver you should be able to do it and much more efficiently than in the past. I believe set up time for kernels has been drastically reduced with Llano, since there's no PCIE layer. Their future APUs will be introducing hardware scheduling so this will be better then...

"Crashes of exactly the kind I described have happened multiple times throughout history. The US, with it's rapidly growing economy, was hit by them several times in the 19th century - despite multiple gold rushes and expanding gold mining activities."

And look where the US is today... hardly a spec in the economic big picture...