If it has 2 power plugs its first gen. If three plugs (they could melt, I remember replacing those) it's later version and should work with CGMiner.

Oh let's see. I think there were three firmware versions.

The first Monarchs only seemed to work with BFGMiner 4.20 on Windows. It was weird, there were sync issues with all the little engines talking at once that blew up other versions with queue mismatch errors between requested work and produced work. I spent some time whacking away on the BFG code and I think I got it to work with later versions but it really wasn't worth the effort. Setting a very high difficulty helped here as the engines would not all be replying at the same time when they had a lot of work to do. But this caused stale blocks with P2Pool. Which doesn't exist anymore......

Second version was the best, worked with CGMiner and most others. I dont recall a third firmware version.

Changing firmware was not very easy, they made hardware changes through the runs and reflashing a Monarch board with different firmware would result in a bricked miner. Double fun was that the boards weren't easy to tell the difference from (other than when they went to the high frequency metal FETs on the later boards.)

I'd say just fire it up and let the pumps circulate to keep the rubber gaskets in those water blocks pliable. I still have the 4.20 code for the first generation miners if anyone needs it.

And India and China are going to war. Bullish for Bitcoin?

Become? When were they not? 401k was always a way to get rid of pensions, which seemed to work (well as long as you don't change the rules in the middle of course) and in that scam they succeeded amazingly well. Remember, retirement is a negotiated item and term of employment, it's never a *gift*. You took that retirement agreement instead of taking more money.


Use care, remember the R's happily created fake money (CDOs and such) in 2000-2008 and used that to "fund" the "economy". When that collapsed the hole was filled by the D's with fake printed money cash, but the debts were incurred under the friendly Bush administration.

I hold R's to a higher standard because they profess to be "fiscally responsible". Well, at least when they are not in power, of course.


Yeah. I wonder if prostitutes are subsidized by the Govt at this point. That used to be a pretty free market. Ah well.

While I think that Torque's assertion that COVID is a "manufactured emergency" is a complete crock of shit, I do think that the stock markets are no longer "markets" in the traditional sense. When junk bonds (totally unsecured, trash) are bought by the government using the "money" of the "people" we have ceased to have a market that rewards innovation and punishes ineptitude. There is no more risk so companies should make the crappiest decisions possible to increase short term reward to the stockholders. When things go bad stockholders win by making the money machine go brrrrrr....

So consider COVID a convenient excuse, replacing the "well, we have to elect Trump at any cost, so the US taxpayer should fund his re-erection".

The next logical step of course is for the government to only invest in "right" companies. The reason for this is we certainly wouldn't want money going to abortion clinics (R) or gun companies (D) or whatnot. At which point the only fundamental axiom that will matter to the "market" is that of political pull.

The depressing part is this outcome sits at the feet of the mighty 401k: Once you set the perception that if the "market" fails you will be eating dog food in retirement it simply becomes another socialized version of "social security". The fact that well connected people (ie: pull) will profit handsomely from this is simply a "cost of doing business".

I believe this is why the Republicans always wanted Social Security to be invested in the market. However they seem to have accomplished their goal by raiding SS funds and using the IOU's to fund the market anyway. Ah well....

Wonder if any free markets exist in the world, aside from bitcoin.

What a complete cum-dumpster. Ah well, lawyers can say anything, I'd say drop this in the trash.

To be honest I still use an IBM X61 Thinkpad with a 2ghz Core Duo processor as a working laptop. Thing is well over 10 years old, and with 8gb of memory and a SSD drive it's still just fine for most work. SSDs were probably the biggest performance boost in the last 10 years, spinning drives just suck.

Naah. America isn't a totalitarian dictatorship that tolerates no dissent.

Bigger reason is Trump does not have a Praetorian guard. I think the only people he can really command would be the TSA and the other flunkies in Homeland Security. That's not much of a problem.

Why? It's like Tiennamen square was in the 80's. Fewer people and a bit less insane.

Or like those dirt bags who took over a Federal park a few years ago. Except with less guns.

No big deal, just ignore them if you don't like it.

And bitcoin drops back to 9700. This is really kind of boring. Blah.

Seems more like a nice drift up to 10k as opposed to yet another fake run.

No this is more 42 gallon Glad trash bags filled with nitrous. I'm a professional.

I got a similar message from Nitrous. One odd thing about N2O is I go back and forth in time to every other time I have done or will do Nitrous and get to chat with myself. Very odd, but on one of the last trips I got the message: THIS IS A TRAP! from the future and gave it a rest.

Fascinating stuff. Only drug that can take you to the highest levels of a 5-MEO-DMT trip (another story), then 5 minutes later you are totally back to normal.

Nice job! Yeah old dryers would put the timer bridging one line of 240 and neutral. Even worse was when they bridged to frame ground, which can cuase fun if one of the hots open up. Which happened to you.

I'd try acid again, but man you need a whole weekend to shoot to do it properly. That stuff trashed me on Sunday when I took it on Sat morning, and that was when I was young and full of energy. Tricky stuff, can really rewire your microcode if you're not careful.

Damn, just noticed this got merited hard. Thanks Bob, I'll work on distributing that in the thread.

Best political map I have seen this week.

Well, I went to a local protest.... 60 people or so.

Everyone was wearing a mask
I stayed 6 feet away from anyone
I wore a normal mask not a respirator
  Figured if everyone was wearing it would be safe if not I would leave immediately.
  Outdoors
  6 feet distance possible
  Stayed an hour
  didn't touch anyone or their stuff.

We'll see if I come down with anything. More risk than normal but time to roll dice a bit. But it was pretty nice to see people. No violence, no big deal, no problems, cop drove by once and waved.

There you go. Going to a major protest with people without masks there would be insane in my opinion right now. But people choose their risks and it looks like a lot of idiots out there.

Given that "team" was only formed in 2016 it sounds like it really does need to be retooled. Maybe train police to be police and not "special paramilitary units".

And Buffalo? What the fuck are they worried about up there?

Well, there is Canada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVC677-YmfM

In 1812 Madison was mad
he was the President, you know

but he thought he tell the British where they ought to go

He thought he'd invade Canada
He thought that he was tough

Instead he went to Washington.....
and burned down all his stuff

And the White-House burned burned burned
and we're the ones that did it

It burned burned burned
while the president ran and cried

It burned burned burned
and things were very historical
and the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies
wa wa waaaa

in the war of 1812...