Someone would have said all the same things about electricity at home, phone, internet, cars etc.

1) Make it happen
2) Make it happen reliably and repeatably
3) Make it happen at decent speed and quality
4) Then you make it cheaper

and when you get to the point 4, things tend to start getting better quality and faster for less as well as more people adopts the tech and makes it better.

not just a toy.

it allowed us to create products affordably we couldn't otherwise make, in production, for sale. We are a typical small business with constrained budgets for creating products and small customer base.
It affords us to create products where the production costs are rather low, thus a comfortable margin product to make the product viable in the first place, with big commercial competitors, albeit the big commercial competitors have inferior products, with way higher price tag.

Further, 3d printing allowed us to rapidly prototype our product, turnaround for a new prototype can be less than one day, and we've done that many times over, and in early design stages multiple prototypes a day. Hiring a shop to machine parts for us the lead time for new prototype would be couple of weeks, and the expense would be orders of magnitude more.

Do we need more proof that the patent system is detrimental?

Let's assume the inventor won't release his invention until patent is approved - therefore we loose the advancement. It might be tiny advancement or it could be huge.

There's also examples when inventors, developers, startups don't pursue their goals because of a patent.

Indeed there are many hobbyists like that - we were just asked to provide first gen ASIC hosting, the ASICMiner 10Gh blades :O

well - the thing is that difficulty can go down as well.
Therefore it is self balancing, sure if 80% of mining power disappeared all of sudden, it would take a LONG time before reaching difficulty recalculation, but it would eventually happen.

It is self balancing over:
Mining costs (electricty + hardware + human time) and Bitcoin value

Costs go significantly upwards -> Bitcoin value is bound to follow -> BTC value doesn't follow, miners are stopped or moved over alternative cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin value drops -> Miners are being stopped or moved over to alternatives -> Mining costs go downwards
Bitcoin value increases -> More miners will be purchased -> Mining costs go up -> BTC Value eventually follows

Very simple really.

Even hosting business has diminishing returns, yet, that industry is larger than ever, growing at ever growing pace.
Same for networking business (Those who lay the fiber), returns are diminishing, yet they continue on investing

Infact ... Almost every single business follows the same pattern of diminishing returns, for some industries, it's the inflation which does it, and for most technological innovation
When the diminishing returns and growth reaches an equilibrium -> There is barely growth, and the returns don't diminish significantly anymore, it's called a mature industry. ie. farming is a mature industry
When the returns diminish faster than growth it's a industry dying, the MAFIAA would like you to be believe entertainment industry is like so, but they are in a huge growth period right now.
Gone industries in the past are things like steam engine builders (barely any steam engines are being produced today), automotive phones (everyone has a cell phone, and having a phone just for the car doesn't make any sense, it was a fad to begin with), and what else has gone by the way of technological innovation.

If the diminishing returns is stopped, innovation is stopped, progress is stopped.

I think eventually bitcoin mining will reach a stage where it's roughly 2 years for hardware break even including operational costs, and the additional years is your profit. That's when ASIC manufacturing has reached the same processing node and complexity as CPUs today and been there for a significant time. and we are there already, with newest chips being 28nm, just like the latest AMD CPU series - intel is at 22nm now.

It is possible that large processing node, like 65nm ASICs will stay marginally profitable even then for some time - when compared to electricity and human resources costs.

As a comparison point i'm using dedicated hosting industry, some 5 years old servers are still being sold today, and many are in production still todate.
Hell, the bulk of our cheapest option is with Q1'10 launched CPU, and we are still taking high end servers into use older than that (Intel L5520, which is 45nm) :)
Tho, in our use every single drive is new and minimum 2Tb size, not decade old models :) Lifespan for those is 3years and then phase out, 60%+ is expected to survive the 3 years, and target average lifespan of disks is 3years, so there will be some disks being used for more than 4 years, but a marginal group.

Mt. GOX withdrawals has been almost non-existant for the last year already, not for BTC side, but for FIAT side.
You had to wait 6+ months for withdrawals to go through, plus they took hidden charges they claim they don't take, don't provide receipt for that neither.

There are plenty of other exchanges, such as Bitstamp and BTC-E, they work just fine.
You can also go to localbitcoins.com and exchange for hard cash with someone in your local area.

As for BTC being a fad, you clearly don't understand the whole concept with it's all not-so-small details, what it means to the world and to the people.

FIAT currency value is 100% faith based, there's no backing etc.
If people decide today that dollar is valueless, the only value remaining is paying taxes, but if nobody accepts dollars anymore ....

Currently most, if not all, FIAT currencies are basicly money printing presses for the goverments, that's why we got so much inflation.

So you decided to skip the whole value as a tool aspect.
Great trolling there :)

Sure, bitcoin has no uses what so ever at all - then why the f* have people bought them in the first place :)

Anyone not knowing:
Bitcoin offers the greatest value there is: Freedom.
Freedom to move value how you wish, where you wish, when you wish, without anyone stopping you and at a low cost to boot.

If that is not value - human kind has already lost, and 1984 has become reality for the elite better than they could have ever hoped for.

there is far far far less bitcoin than there is gold, and there always will be far far far less bitcoin than there is gold. Limited to 21million coins.

Bitcoin has built in appreciation - again - limited supply. It has built in appreciation because after some gain so much, others want to join the boat as well, bitcoins get lost and misplaced etc. The supply is dwindling, while demand is growing - built in.

Supply is dwindling because of the finite supply, lost bitcoins.
Demand is growing because more people learns about it, and wants low cost fast international transfers without arbitrary rules, regulations and the chance of someone stealing the money, with VISA, Goverment, Paypal etc. your money is *always* in danger.

Because you say that bitcoin is basicly a bubble tells that you are looking for one or two things:
- To affect the price so you can buy more
- Or you don't understand the concept nowhere close how well you think you do

Economies of scale at play.

If visa had 1/100th of the users, they still would have most of the costs and energy expenditure related - since their main energy expenditure is not the computing power.

Bitcoin is still small - just wait until it grows a bit more, since the energy expenditure per transaction expands by the hashing over and nothing else. It will eventually level off.

Besides, this point is moot.
The operational differences in bitcoin as a value totally exceeds the expenditure in energy consumption.

Unless you happen to be one of those who likes their money depreciating, arbitrary limitations, someone snooping on your payments and very high transaction costs

there were communicators back in the 90s too, N900 would be like the 5th gen or so

and this in question is not about lifetime, but maximizing efficiency and power output.
Later on, a consumer version will be detuned to 200kW or less, and last that required 150k miles or so, since it's going into a sports car, the lifetime target for that engine is going to be 200k kilometers. BMW uses this target for the M series, after that 200k kilometers, each cheaper to replace the whole engine buying new from factory than to rebuild since everything is so worn out.
Those engines still function, produces power etc. but efficiency is to shit, emissions are shit too.

Detuned to 200kW the lifetime expectancy of this engine will probably go upwards by many many orders of magnitude, and will probably reach the 200k kilometers.
Since this is so lightweight and such a high power output, it's going in to a hot hatch most likely.

Ofc, manufacturing costs might need material replacements, and further detuning of the engine, but i'd bet they'd make it upwards of 150kW - nothing spectacular, but the saved 100kg is very spectacular.

Yea and 730+ from 1.6 4AGE engines. One CA18DET from Nissan 200SX is widely known to produce about 730whp as well, so about 780 from the crank.

4AGE is considered very lightweight at 110-120kg, add turbo etc. to it for 10-20kg.

Damn right!
And this goes for servers as well.

The bulk of nodes we sell are *first gen* ATOM. Yeah, first gen. And they idle mostly, since our workload is I/O intensive, not CPU.
Even the highend gear we purchase is 2 gens old - but it's still higher end than the last high end gear.

1U Dual Quad Xeon L5520 with 72Gb ram and less than 500$ and room for 4x3.5"? Who could resist that, when we used to pay close to 200$ per month for a Xeon W3560, 32G Ram with 2x2Tb drives.
And the CPUs offer more more power than the Xeon W3560, which was introduced a year earlier, yet those W3560 nodes were purchased just 1½ years ago from a vendor.
The Dual Quad Xeons sit 95% idle -> so they don't consume that much power neither.

At home, i have a Core2Extreme 9770 with just 8G ram as my workstation - only lately has the CPU started to *nearly* max out, but i have laying around a spare FX6100 with 32Gb ECC i'll install some day when i can be arsed to. Still using that old of a CPU, and i'm not in any hurry to upgrade neither.

Indeed, at the end of they what matters for 80%+ is the 80% of users - ie. Average Joes.
Very few people purchase the very top of the line, it makes absolutely no sense to pay triple for marginal gains - even if comparing within the intel brand. For a very few people it does make sense however.

We use quite a few AMD products in our DC - they are very solid, and very nice performance to price ratio.
Because AMD is not as much used, we don't have the multitude of choices, but the highest end difference is:

Intel:
Intel D2500CCE: Dual NIC integrated, 4Gb RAM Max
Mobo: ~75€ RAM: ~25€
Total: 100€
Power: ~20W
Cost per Gb of Ram: 25€

Intel system which compares:
Intel DH61AG Mobo ~90€, CPUs begin at 150€ (low power version), 25€ 19V Powersupply
RAM: 16Gb So-Dimm as new 110€
Total: ~375€ fluctuates depending upon supply (low power version supply fluctuates badly)
Power: ~40W
Cost per Gb of RAM: 23.44€

AMD:
E350 from Gigabyte: 16Gb RAM Max but needs additional NIC
Mobo: varies GREATLY from 50€ to 65€, RAM ~90€, Additional NIC: 7€
Total: 157€ average
Power: ~30W
Cost Per Gb of RAM: 9.81€

So the AMD motherboard falls in the middle very nicely, since we deal in DATA the only figure at the end of the day what matters is RAM/€.
Also the price customers are willing to pay depends solely on storage + ram, not the cpu itself.

I haven't looked on CPU power metric at all - don't care. Even the D410 atoms in our use are like 80% idle, it's all I/O per euro what matters, so bulk of our cost is in disks, ram and networking.

However, intel is better on Wattage and Size metrics on the very low end, but this is mostly because AMD is not simply used as widely, so there isn't the niche boards available, AMD E350 board choices are *very* limited and supply is *very* limited as well.

However, in the past when we used Dual Opteron servers from a 3rd party DC, i want it curious that none of them actually worked, almost every one had broken CPUs, most of them crashed randomly etc. So i'm thinking the game was rigged at some level. They eventually removed AMD option completely, as only 10% of the servers worked.
On our own DCs, the AMD gear has worked brilliantly, except where game is rigged. We tried to do software router using AMD CPU, turns out the game is heavily rigged towards Intel as Intel is the one developing the software routing codebase, many generations older Core2Duo was faster than FX6100, further only Intel NICs provided actual performance.