bbosh

I think this idea first appeared in the United States. I'm sure there's a story about how Ford sold the Model T. Few people could afford to purchase up front, so groups of people joined together and paid a set amount each month. Say $50 amongst 100 people. Each month, they'd buy a Model T and a few lucky people would get the car. So, rather than 100 people waiting a year to purchase, on average they waited only 6 months. That spawned the creation of mail order, then revolving credit, and the Western world has never looked back.

Is it necessary to buy books? At my university (in the UK), they have lots of copies of textbooks in the library. And if there's a book they do not have, you can ask them to buy it and they most probably will.

Yes, I did an experiment tracking which coins I had were fake. I found 10 out of 200.

Does the data include power information? At least you could get some sort of bound on the distance it is likely to have travelled.

But what if you are filming from the public street/highway. Surely that should be legal?

Did you invest $500,000 in real dollars, or earn it from mining?

When each shipment nets maybe $30,000,000 for the shipping company and you pay about £20,000 for the crew during that time, you'd need to save a lot of money elsewhere to make this worthwhile.

From my understanding, a big part of its intended usage is for interfacing from applications in other languages. So you can offload all of the difficult calculations from your C/Java/PHP program and get Wolfram to do the work.

> I don't see any other way around this.

Vote with your feet.

Or just contract the work out.

I haven't cited any statistic from blockchain.info, and haven't considered hardware at all. All I have done is employ economic argument, which I think makes sense. It doesn't matter whether or not particular individuals are using ASICs. All that matters is that, collectively, they are making only a tiny profit (if any). This argument doesn't require consideration of hash-rate or particular hardware at all.

A new block gets mined every 10 minutes, each with a 25BTC bounty. That's 600 * 25 * 6 * 24 = $2,160,000 per day. No rational person would spend more in electricity than the reward, hence the 1-to-1 conversion. (In fact, miners do spend more than they earn, collectively.)

Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). That's about 3,285 thousand metric tonnes per year, or about the entire annual CO2 output of a country such as Papua New Guinea.

I'm not sure you can call the Euclidean algorithm a "computer algorithm", it having been discovered some 2,000 years before computers existed.