The only way to realistically mine anymore is using video cards with special drivers working in a mining pool. From what I understand most mining anymore is done with supercomputing clusters on behalf of Wall Street hedge funds.

Best quote from the bitcoin dev thread in 2010
In 2010 N900 = $600US
in 2013 100BTC =~$10,000US

A bit off of the thread topic, but has anyone seen this?
https://bitpay.com/960000/donate
a Bitpay appeal for donations to the Maemo community, is this legit?

never seen it, and it's hard to tell how legit or not it may be..
BTW there's a Maemo eV general assembly coming up, so please please anyone who's a member or wants to be one needs to be there.

Oops. https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=95856
The donation address is good!

Unfortunately that is not true any longer!
The bitcoin handler Bitpay has terminated our account for not being used and we currently cannot receive bitcoin donatins.

Why not just have the board make a new wallet and post the receive QR code?

I really hate the concept of storing crypto in an institutional wallet where they can abuse it in all ways that holding a real crypto wallet is immune from. It is the difference between holding cash or gold in a sketchy uninsured vault owned by some rando guy with a generally bad reputation who is always hounded by a corrupt asset seizing government vs your own hidden vault or buried treasure chest. I suppose the concern is anyone with the spend keys could empty the wallet vs a organizational bank account with two signers.

I am sure there is any number of cool zero-trust ways to set up a split key layer cryptographic sum interface so any two or three fractional key holders from the collected Maemo officers could combine to send a 'spend' command to the blockchain for the main wallet. If not there has to be any number of maths PhD candidates who would love to hack that challenge for a published paper and it would be quite useful to any number of organizations who wish to dump banks.(yes there are various problems with each crypto currency as well as volatility vs fiat currency).

As far as I understand the reason to choose an institutional provider was to enable immediately converting the bitcoin donations to euros and transferring then to our bank account, preserving the paper trail in doing that.

The board has no intention in hoarding assets as bitcoins so this was the simple solution.

It just turned out not to be that good as it indeed left us in the mercy of the exchange ageny that could terminate our account just like that.

Yea...
It is the musings of someone who wishes that we could live in a world without the suspicion and reality of fraud.
The on/off ramps between crypto and cash are the arreas with the most friction. I hope the receiver wallet is not still active and funneling any Maemo donations into blockexplorer pockets though.

I've been running a home-based bitcoin server on an N900 (Cortex-A9 ARM processor) for a few months now. So far, the experience has been pretty good. Lets We researched and tested each of the cryptocurrencies and here is our experience about the casino. The device is cheap ($80), small enough to fit in my pocket and has enough horsepower for my needs. With the price currently hovering at about $100 the device is actually becoming quite affordable for those who don't have a lot of money to throw away on hardware.