They've bumped the chips, tested them at 350mhz which they passed IO validation and they should finish packaging this week and then final assembly next week. Sure they've missed a bunch of deadlines, but they're actually in a position to start shipping shortly with a high degree of certainty.The same company that said they would ship in November of last year and has yet to ship anything more than a couple test units. Late June is a pipe dream for batch 3 orders. It's also laughable to think that there is any pressure being exerted on the market that isn't speculation. Bitcoins are an intermediary method of payment. It doesn't matter what the exchange rate is for Silk road or gambling since those bitcoins are being immediately converted into dollars. Not only is it a market driven by pure speculation, it's also a speculative market where the end game is essentially a worthless commodity. Bitcoin will never gain widespread acceptance because of the inherent faults with it: enormously long transaction times, deflationary, and lack of protections.
It's back to 44$ this morning.I think tea was right at least about the price. Current price is $35, high today was $49. That's a hell of a drop.
Actually no, that didn't help at all. What the fuck is a block, and what is it mining? And what is the purpose of it?You can start here :https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining
It just sounds so absolutely pointless.Your crunching them pointlessly because that's the balancing mechanism to keep the input of bitcoins in the market constant and also give enough time for the solved blocks to propagate in the network. The system is made so all the miners "solve" one block every 10 minutes. If you add more computing power to the network, the block will be solved faster so the system will artificially inflate the difficulty of the next block to slow everyone down going back to 1 block every 10 minutes.
You're not curing anyone, you're just helping keep the network alive and protected. The more miners there are, the harder it is to take it over. The more users there are (with the regular bitcoin client, not the mining client), the more backups you have of the whole blockchain (transaction history) and the harder it is to take down.
Maybe so... But, I have read and asked questions but I can't see the utility in pointlessly running my computers at full capacity to crunch numbers that serve no purpose but to generate an artificial currency that means nothing except to a select few computer people.No it's not, it's actually one of the smartest things I've seen in a long time. That guy thought of everything. Again, you gotta read up a bit to really understand the system and appreciate it's genius.
Sounds like you get it just fine. The thing that will make it clearer for you is that bitcoin was never intended to function as an actual currency. It was a proof of concept from a technical white paper. Mining was never intended as a means to make money, but as a reward to ensure that transactions would continue to be processed in theoretical crypto-currency land. It was thought that increasing block difficulty would discourage people from throwing ever increasing processing power at the blockchain, but that was clearly mistaken. Bitcoin would work just as well if everyone was still mining with spare CPU's, but as the speculation bubble grows people go crazy in a race to the bottom as FPGA's and ASIC's hit the market to allow truly blistering speeds of pointless busy work. Again it makes sense if you realize that it was never meant to actually be used as currency.I'm not insulting anyone or anything, I just don't get it. Oh well!
I don't think it'sentirelypointless. The psychological effect of requiring "broken eggs" (a.k.a. the real cost of converting electrons into heat via a gratuitous ritual of esoteric computation) to "make an omelette" (a.k.a. bitcoins, a.k.a. monopoly money) seems to have done something good for bitcoins.It just sounds so absolutely pointless.