What if you kept everything the same, but promoted it as a "social status codification mechanism" or something like that? That is, make Bitcoin ownership a way of accumulating social status (among some sub-community -- Bitcoiners, if nothing else). The more coins you have relative to others, the higher your rank.
Interesting, and such a thing might be valuable, but that would seem to imply non-existence of currency exchanges and prevent it from serving as both social status and money simultaneously.
Btw, I want to compare Bitcoin mining rigs to supercomputers. I figured a reasonable way to do this would be to find how many floating point operation equivalents per second they are calculating. Since the hashrate is known, all that's left to make this calculation is the number of flop-equivalents it takes to perform a SHA256 hash.
I can't find this information anywhere. Do you know how to derive it or where the information would be?
(hashes/sec) * (flop-equivalents/hash) = flop-equivalents/sec
(Replying to you so someone actually sees this comment.)
There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.