Bitcoin Forum

I'd be interested in seeing something like "expected bitcoins generated/day" next to (or in place of) the khash/s number. I'd rarely need to see the khash/s number since that won't change unless I make changes to the software or hardware, and the bitcoins per day figure is what I really want to know.

I know I can use the calculator at http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php but it's still easier just to see it displayed automatically.

what one could "expect" depends on luck and how much of it you expect to have on our block lottery. :D
i guess that's pretty hard to calculate.
the average time to generate a block shown on the calculator website doesnt mean, you'll find a block after X days,
it still might happen, that you dont find one for a very long period.
people would complain even more than they do already, if the client tells them "you should have generated xy coins so far, but you had no luck".  ;)

Agreed, I had a 933MHz PIII generate (2) blocks when I have other machines running multiple cores that don't generate anything. It's mainly luck of the draw with those that have faster systems having a bit better luck.

I setup a new system for the farm a few hours ago and it got a block within the first hour, I was stunned, it wasn't even that fast, like 135 khash/s old PC.

hehe,
i just checked my old pIII laptop, that i set up ~12hrs ago,
it does ~150khash/sec @1066MHz and already won the race 10hrs ago.  ;D

I've been running two laptops. One does 1280k/sec and the other 580. The 580 found one first. It does run 24/7 though and I make my faster one stop when I do other stuff.

Oh, I keep hearing that there should be 6 blocks an hour, but it seems more like 80. And didn't the difficult just rest? So shouldn't it be close to the goal? I must have some misunderstanding.

Difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks.

The amount of processor power being applied is increasing faster than the difficulty is adjusting so we're getting about 27 blocks per hour at the moment.

There will be a big difficulty jump later today when we hit 68,544 blocks.

I think of my machines running bitcoin as slot machines. I put in CPU time and energy costs in at a regular rate, and once in a while I get money back. If I'm to treat bitcoin as part of a business, then I need to be able to calculate my expected return on investment, just as a casino owner needs to be able to calculate how much money she's making off of her slot machines. I know that the bitcoin generation difficulty will stabilize at some point in the future, but at this point it would be useful to me to be able to calculate my ROI quickly and easily.

So, if nobody else is going to do it, I'll probably make a patch for this. Bitcoin donations appreciated, of course, and would help motivate me to make it available quickly. :)

Many businesses are like that.  For a car salesman, when will the next customer walk in the door?

On the OP's question, it's a good feature, but the question is, how would we word it so people don't expect to get something after that specific amount of time?  "it said 7 days and I waited more than a week and didn't get anything!"  Approx, average, but still they're going to think that way.  It can't be a whole sentence, unless we think of somewhere else to put it, but where would that be?  Suggestions?

The difficulty quadrupled a few minutes ago to 181.54.  It's going to take typically about a week to generate now.

You're right, it would be useful, you just can't do that (anymore precisely than a weatherforecast for next year).
as mentioned, a PIII singlecore mobile-cpu running 150khash/sec may generate 50coins in 2hrs compared to a triple-core 1500khash/sec cruncher running 4 days without generating anything.

what would your forecast look like on those 2 machines and what would its users say/think, if the output isnt even close to what it tells them?

Not really "better luck" but rather "more chances."

A faster processor is just like buying more lottery scratch tickets.  The more tickets you buy, the better your chance of winning.

How about a compromise, have it show the current "difficulty" in either a number or scale function. People love visual stuff. When the scale is lower, expect it to rain, when the scale is high (or higher number) don't get your hopes up.  :)

I believe you can. Each of these pseudo-slot machines are statistically independent and have finite variance; the law of averages applies. It's very different from the chaos situation you have in predicting the weather, which is sort of like trying to play a pinball game twice exactly the same way. You can't play the exact same game of pinball twice, but if you had a million pinball players, you could calculate the average score across players very accurately.  If you had a million slot machines being used 24x7, you could calculate your income very accurately.

In fact, the bitcoin algorithm itself depends on being able to predict the total rate of increase of bitcoins, so it has to be possible.

It does, but it's using calculations based on the swarm. I think it would need something new to predict what an individual computer will do.