Topic: Butterfly Labs responsibility (Read 2631 times)

I agree - not their responsibility, but in their best interests. In the networks best interests as well.

Rather than lobbying, I suggest BFL branch out in their design - work with some developers to make a POS device that they can sell cheaply to B&M businesses to accept bitcoins. Heck if they put a jally in each one, they could *give* them away for free and get returns on the mining that the pos machine would do forever.

They've already got the hardware design skills, why not use them to further the adoption.

Agreed.  There is no "responsibility" here.  BFL can do what they want.  But, as they have said in the past and continue to stand by, they believe that ensuring the success of Bitcoin is a priority, and they aren't going to do anything to harm it.  Certainly, if the price went up 100 fold, then they could sell 100x as many miners, so I bet they wouldn't mind increasing adoption one bit, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have things in the works along those lines.

If you phrase it like this I agree with you.

It's your choice whether to buy from them or not.

BFL /= BTC

For those who replied to my '42mil' statement. I hope you realised I wasn't being serious...

About 128 years from now, the block reward will drop from 1 satoshi to 0 satoshi. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Long_Term

Block rewards will keep getting cut in half, about every 4 years.
2009: 50.0BTC
2013: 25.0BTC
2017: 12.5BTC
2021: 6.25BTC
2025: 3.13BTC
2029: 1.56BTC
2033: 0.78BTC
2037: 0.39BTC
2041: 0.20BTC
2045: 0.10BTC
2049: 0.05BTC
2053: 0.02BTC

After that, just cut the reward in half every 4 years. No an exact science, but close enough.

At some point, the block reward will be less than one half of a Satoshi, right?

Prove this, please! 

There is nothing that makes it their responsibility. It is probably in their best interest, just like any other business based on bitcoin. But it isn't their responsibility to make sure that your decision to buy mining equipment was a good one.

YAUBFLT
Yet another useless BFL thread.

wow, what an idea!!

you should write Mr. Bernanke with that

Just like the US should print $16 trillion to pay off their debt, right?!

Satoshi should just bump it up to 42 mil

There is no possible way to mine all the coins.

After 40 years, 99.9% of the total BTC will have been mined. After 132 years, the block reward will drop to 0. This pages has a table showing the schedule:  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply

We will never actually mine all 21 million coins. The way reward halving works, in 40 years (or 10 reward halves), each block will only reward 0.024 BTC as a reward. Now TX fees will make each block worth a LOT more than that, but those won't be newly minted coins. We will be crazy close to 21million, but never quite get there.

I thought it was gonna take like 40 years to find all the coins?

A second or third generation ASIC really depends on the future survival of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps even thrive, then it's trivial to predict that these companies will continue to invest in new products to meet demand once first-gen becomes less sought after.

The Bitcoin network is designed to produce a specific amount of bitcoin per day on average, so the arrival of ASICs will not affect this in the long run, nor will it noticeably shorten the time it will take to completely mine Bitcoin. There is quite some life in mining ahead.

If there are no transaction, it means bitcoin has died completely. Even just the act of mining creates transactions, and anybody wishing to use bitcoin for anything must eventually transact. If bitcoin survives, it will be a non-issue, if bitcoin collapses and dies out... well, again a non-issue really.

I think the whole community has in it's best interest the survival of bitcoin and its growth, but I'm not sure why you are singling out BFL as having a special responsibility. It is in fact probably more the "responsibility" (though I really don't like this term in the context we are discussing) of businesses making money directly in the BTC economy, which includes exchanges, services and stores.

In real life it isn't a single company making one tiny part of the overall industry ecosystem which lobbies governments, it's generally down to a larger umbrella group to actually do the lobbying on behalf of the industry rather than on behalf of a single business.

In some way, that's what the (apparently much hated) Bitcoin Foundation could/should be(come).