2012/8/14 Gary Mulder <flyingkiwiguy@gmail.com>

Any major governmental reaction and the resulting negative publicity and loss of confidence would

Any publicity is good publicity. The more the US gov bashed on drug trading with BTC the better it was. Same will go for "it is undermining governmental authority and putting civilians at risk". So what is the marginal cost of mining Bitcoin?

The cost is not marginal. The performance of the network exceeds even SETI@Home. It is the largest distributed computing effort ever done by end-users (supercomputernetworks for the LHC for example are still bigger). It would seem you're taking this the wrong way around. If the Bitcoin rises in value the mining increases with it. If there's money to be made with mining it is done right away and thus the amount of money made is lowered. On the other hand no miner will sell for underneath the mining cost. The 50% premium may well be the cost of running hardware at the current risk assesment. Nevertheless the cost of mining Bitcoin knows no upper bound. If Bitcoin would break 1000$ mining will cost right around there. The two prices push and pull eachother. Be carefull not to confuse money theory with practical considerations or at least do so conciously. GPU/FPGA/ASIC doesn't matter when we talk about mining as we do now. -- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE