Bitcoin Forum

According to this bitcoin calculator (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php), I should be getting 4.53BTC/day.  I have 1100MH/s split up in the following manner:

5850 - 265MH/s
5850 - 265MH/s
5770 - 172MH/s
4650 - 22MH/s
5870 - 370MH/s

I'm mining with deepbit.net, and recently changed from PPS to Proportional.  I haven't had a machine go down at all over the last 48 hours, and have been watching the "BTC in last 24 hrs" counter on the deepbit website.  It's been down as low as 2.96, as high as 3.68, and mostly in the 3.10-3.20 range.  Right now, it's 3.30.

Why the large discrepancy between what I am getting and what the calculator says?  Just bad luck?  I would expect luck to even out quickly in such a large pool.  It just doesn't seem right...

Has anyone else done this sort of analysis on their own mining?

Deepbit had some brief downtime today. That might account for some of the discrepancy.

Even in the previous 24 hours, it never went above 3.68.  :(

3% fees, bad luck, and downtime all conspired against you.

Yes a few times and mine over a longer term (a week for example) and has always come in about what I'd expect. Over a day the sort of variances you're seeing aren't unusual even in a large pool. Apart from the "real" luck you might also be happening to view the stats at times of day that don't look so good because of a long round either (or both) sides of the 24 hours.

Switch to a fee-less pool SgtSpike.

Deepbit had a unluck of 33% there, no way to change that.

May I recommend BTC Guild? It's in California and the Pool owner is pretty awesome and friendly. Fairly new with growing pains but it should get better fast.

tell me about it.  Eligius US pool went all day (Saturday) without a block.
http://eligius.st/~artefact2/

So many people, starting mining...
With very little knowledge of how things work...
I think this is bad sign for everything...
These people will not stop mining...
When cost of mining > profit...
That day is fast approching gentlemen...

Look at the Statistics page for current luck situation. We had 33% worse luck yesterday. Now it's already normal.

Btw you should be getting a lot more from your 5850-s. Somewhere around ~340 Mh/s with just clocking the core to 900Mhz, which for most 5850-s doesn't require increase in voltage  :)

Yes, and with difficulty expected to rise 50% soon, mining is going to come to an end for a lot of people.

5850's ... clock them to 900MH/s how?  MSI afterburner won't allow it, that is for sure.  I think it stops at 800MHz and I run at 775MHz without difficulty at 291MH/s with Phoenix 1.48.

[ATIADLHAL]
EnableUnofficialOverclocking   = 1
UnofficialOverclockingEULA   = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
UnofficialOverclockingMode   = 2
AccessibilityCheckingPeriod   = 0

Paste this in MSIAfterburner.cfg and save  :)

Edit: Paste it in place of Default [ATIADHAL]

Unfortunately most of them probably don't know it. It may take some time for some of them to figure it out, and some probably won't. Those types will (hopefully) get frustrated or bored eventually. Then there are the believers who run the hardware despite profit just to add something toward secure the network, though I'm sure they are quite a smaller percentage currently.

Thank you, I will give it a shot.  I have an XFX model [basically reference but a little better cooling ... some pipes and a fan].  I'll report back if it gives me any trouble :)

Thanks again.

EDIT:  It worked.  I couldn't push it to 900MHz with Aero running, but I switched to basic.  I lowered my memory clock to 800MHz and am running the core clock at 850MHz and getting 320MH/s, so I am happy with that.  The temperature is sitting nicely at about 76C and fan ~60%, so I am going to stick with that for now :)

I believe that calculator gives you a very rough estimate of of the probability of solving blocks while mining solo in a totally static environment, but I could be wrong.  I'm under the impression that it is kind of a "best case" estimate.

Does a 50% increase in diffuculty directly translate to 50% increase harder to mine? So 2BTC/day would go to 1BTC/day? What's the proportion?

Yea, think so.

No, if the difficulty increase in 50%, your earnings will be multiplied by 1/(1+0.5), thus, divided by 1.5 factor.

100% increase would make it twice as hard to mine, not 50%.

Say the difficulty went up 50% from 244,000 to 366,000.

366,000 - 244,000 = 122,000
366,000 / 122,000 = .333 or 1/3 harder

Well, one is running on a 400w generic-brand PSU that tends to restart the computer at some point overnight if I try to overclock the card at all.  Figure it's better to leave it stock until I find the issue.  The other one is running in my main desktop, and caused all sorts of problems if I overclocked it, including games not starting up or locking up, randomly swapping between aero and basic, etc.  Just more trouble than it was worth.  I'd rather have a machine that runs well for my primary desktop than a machine that gets 80 more MH/s.

Thanks.  My 24 hour average did jump up to 3.98 now.  That's still a good 12% less than what the calculator says I should be getting though... are we still having a bit of bad luck, or are my calculations off somehow?

Yes to the first part. No to the 2nd.

With a 50% increase in difficulty, 2BTC/day would go to ~1.33BTC/day.