Multiple errors in your post.

The Bitcoin difficulty has never been bumped up by ASICs, because ASICs have not yet been released. They should come out in December/January.

Mining is still profitable today. I am still making money with GPUs (a little), and with FPGAs (a lot). Even after the halving due tomorrow, my GPUs will still make money. It is all about electrical costs. If you pay less than $0.20/kWh, a HD 7970 can still make money. Worldwide average is $0.10/kWh.

ASICs are not expensive at all. The most power efficient ASIC vendor, Butterfly Labs, have ASICs starting at $149: http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

I highly doubt the majority of the 40k coins circulate within MtGox without leaving it. Or else traders would erode their capital because MtGox charges hefty trading fees: https://mtgox.com/fee-schedule

This still means the 9M coins will trade in about 7-8 months. Or 3-4 months rather, since the MtGox volume has recently increased to 80k coins per day.

It is because people *think* they can profit more by day trading the coins, as opposed to merely hoarding them.

Did you read the part where I said 40k is SIX TIMES the number of coins introduced daily? This is not "irrelevant noise". 40k per day also means the entire market (9M coins) is traded every 7.5 months.

You are wrong. The "hoarding" argument has been beaten to death. Current evidence shows that people are NOT hoarding the coins: every day, 40 thousand coins change hands on the single largest exchange: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html This is six times the number of coins created daily by the network (7 thousand).

In other words, people are not hoarding them, but are trading them very, very frequently.

And this is just measuring MtGox's volume. Other trades (merchant sales, other exchanges, etc) are likely doing even bigger volume...

Governments tend not to like their citizens taking part in transactions that don't have a paper trail.

You mean like... cash?

It's more than one engineer for god's sake... You too need to read the research papers!

We are just starting to be able to understand how to reliably reproduce it. See the table starting on page 16, more than a dozen groups have reproduced it: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2012/2012Celani-WSEC.pdf

Believe it or not, I am willing to bet $5k that Ni-H cold fusion is real! We can use longbets.org Contact me at this.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com

I give up. I gave you links from multiple independent research groups who show something needs explaining but you keep ignoring them... Read again from Thermacore, the CERN, Piantelli, Focardi, the Italian ENEA (equivalent to the US Dept of Energy). All are linked from http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 You have to read the research papers yourself and then make up your own mind.

Give me a break, "ecatnews" just happened to have the best quote from this NASA engineer. His quote remains nonetheless correct.

Come back with some quality studies published in reputable journals and reproduced by numerous credible scientists, and we'll talk.

You do realize it is impossible to reach this situation if everyone had your mindset... You have to have people "crazy enough" to remotely believe in the possibility of LENR to study it and eventually prove it or disprove it. Your behavior is exactly what has been holding back LENR research for 20 years. Instead of bluntly rejecting it, you should be open-minded and support the current research, even if you currently don't believe in it.

For the record the Focardi report was published in a peer-reviewed journal (Il Nuovo Cimento).

Thermacore (DARPA contractor) reported anomalous heat in Ni-H cells: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf

Very recently at the WSEC 2012 conference, Celani also reported excess heat: http://www.22passi.it/downloads/WSEC2012%20Present.pdf

So, technically speaking, I agree with you, no one can unambiguously prove LENR today. I am just pointing out research and experiments that indicate there are datapoints that current theories cannot explain, and that we may be at the verge of finally proving LENR.

You really ought to read my blog post. It is not biased because it merely quotes and links to other trusted external resources (such as NASA) referencing similar successful experiments.

The single experiment I quoted (900 extra MJ) was run over 278 days. That corresponds to 37W of heat produced continuously, in addition to the heat produced by the input power which varied from 149.6W to 94.3W. All this info is in the PDF I linked to.

Even today, the NASA scientist interviewed in the video referenced by TFA re-stated that "production of excess energy has been demonstrated": http://ecatnews.com/?p=1868

It is time to stop saying "I won't believe in it until it has been reproduced". It HAS been demonstrated/reproduced. We can't explain the phenomenon. So it is time to pour research effort into LENR...

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61

This covers 20 years of research of "anomalous heat" coming from nickel-hydrogen cells which is the basis of Rossi's technology. Did you that numerous prominent Italian scientists believe Rossi is onto something? Did you know that a former Greek ambassador to Italy and scientist became involved with Rossi to manufacture the E-Cat via an independent company (Defkalion)? And now this company claims to have reverse engineered Rossi's device, and is on a race to ship something before Rossi?

I have been following very closely the whole story around Rossi's E-Cat device for 3 months, and it is so much more complex and fascinating than what you all think...

You are wrong. The anomalous heat detected in some experiments is statistically significant. Just one example: in a 1998 experiment, Focardi had set up a cell that ran continuously for 278 days and produced an excess power of about 900 megajoule: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FocardiSlargeexces.pdf

The problem is that this experiment, and many others, despite providing very interesting results, have been mostly ignored by the scientific community purely because of the stigma associated to Cold Fusion research. This is frustrating!

The submitter is also incorrect when saying that Rossi provided no details about how his reactors work. He explained that (a) he processes the nickel powder to create tubercles and enhance its contact surface with hydrogen, (b) he uses 2 nickel isotopes to enhance the reaction, (c) he splits molecular hydrogen (H2) into atomic hydrogen (H1), (d) he uses high pressure and temperature to initiates the reaction, etc.

I used to think that Rossi's E-Cat was a scam, but after researching deeply the subject, I am now convinced this guy might be onto something, see this post I wrote explaining many Cold Fusion experiments that seem to support Rossi and that have been ignored by the community at large: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61

On "why does NetApp sell their PCIe NAND flash card $30k?", here is your answer, Chris Rima: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=37

In a 3 words: because NetApp can.

It's not the components or engineering behind the card that cost $30k. NetApp prices it so high because the card boosts the performance of their filers by about the same amount as a ~$50k shelf of SAS disks (click that link and go read NetApp's own marketing documentation). They have got to have price points that make sense to customers.

(I know a fraction of you will think "No way!". Well, arbitrary price markups on enterprise gear do exist. This NetApp Flash Cache is effectively priced $150/GB. How do you think that certain competitors can even sell _enterprise_ flash at well below $10/GB? We are not talking 25 or 50% less, but a whole order of magnitude less expensive!)