Here's a great article I found thanks to Stephen Gornick's comment about FinCEN.

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/fincen-bitcoin-users-not-regulated-exchanges-are/

That makes it clear they are viewing exchanges from one virtual currency into another as a money transmitter, which means licensing and (in the US), $100K liquid assets to get the license, etc.

It appears, though, that even just mining coins and then selling them for USD falls under the money transmitter requirements unless you are doing so through a licensed exchange. So far as I know, BTC-E and MtGox are foreign companies that aren't licensed as money transmitters in the USA.

So not only will I not be making any sort of exchange as a fun hobby project, I'm now a bit worried about the legal ramifications of just mining coins and selling them on the existing foreign exchanges.

Key trick with litecoin is memory speed is crucial. On bitcoin you can underclock memory way down since only engine matters.

Well in theory, bitcoins are trying to become adopted as a valid form of currency. That's different than baseball cards. If bitcoins are just these virtual electronic items, like say Team Fortress 2 hats, then sure, you can set up an exchange to swap TF2 hats for items in some other game. It just seems a bit too close to the financial industry to not run into trouble eventually, since it's so highly regulated?

I'll try to find the bitcoin related guidance from FinCEN that you referenced. Thanks for the tip.

There are trading platforms that could be purchased and used for bitcoin exchanges which maybe some reasonable reliability and various tools, stand alone trading clients (or metatrader compatible), etc. However I can't see ever participating (in making such an exchange) because at what point does bitcoin (and maybe other alt coins) get recognized by various governments as legal currency? If that happens, then aren't exchanges immediately under the authority of your country's version of the SEC (for USA residents)?

I mean, you can't just go open your own currency exchange or forex trading business without some sort of various oversight, licensing, etc? There are all sorts of government regulations and agencies above forex sites like Oanda, for instance. And if bitcoin really is a currency, then how is setting up an exchange any different?

You can trade TRC/BTC on BTC-E.

From Project's info he posted, looks like you transferred them along someplace else ~3 hours after receipt.

https://blockchain.info/address/1LNV3QHD4E34kSpcHXyoYSBUsAqLXzW7W1

(Your wallet decides what to send, but the deposit made it in and the coins were sent back out.)

The standard algorithm for bitcoin and non-scrypt spinoffs. It's what the miners do by default without --scrypt.

I don't like this change, since it can take a while for coins to make it into MtGox. I liked how I could do my transfer, go set my sell order, and go to bed. Once the coins finally were confirmed enough to show up, I didn't need to be there to place the sell order afterwards. Just my preference.

For performance they could move unfunded orders to a separate table and then check them for funding every minute or so and move them back to the live server once funded. Just give people a heads up "unfunded order may have an X minute delay before going live, once funded".

I'm curious. Do you consider every coin other than bitcoin a "scam"? Litecoin is the only one you didn't seem to list.

I've searched the threads I can find but it seems just a given in these methods that on a short round, if there is no backlog to pay, the pool keeps the extra shares and uses them to pay out later when a long round eventually pops up. I'm wondering why that is. If you have a short round, and there's no backlog, why not pay out the extra coins to the current shareholders? That seems more intuitive to me. Miners working right now might not be mining down the road, so I'm not sure why they should be reducing someone else's future payment delay during a long block? It makes sense perhaps if you had a static group of miners and wanted to reduce variance of your ongoing income stream. But miners come and go...

Curious as to anyone's thoughts on this.

Thank you for this tip! Never noticed this option. I'll start using it myself.

Look at cgminer or bfgminer and the --auto-gpu option, as well as --auto-fan. Those will adjust fan speed as needed to hit target temperature, and then lower gpu speed too if fan alone can't hit the target. They don't adjust memory speed though. For non-scrypt coins, you can lower memory speed and see almost no drop in hashing power, while running cooler and using less power (as I understand it).

Upgrade to latest source code and recompile. You should be able to use your coins already?

If anyone online with a sizable amount of hashing power would be willing to help me test for a few moments this evening, please drop me a PM. Thanks!

Here was a fun couple minutes.

http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?hi=103008&count=20

It used to oscillate down to like 50 difficulty. Literally, under 100. So then blocks start dropping every few seconds. And then skyrocket so high noone could get a block to add for a really long time once the big miners all pulled back out. With the new 5K floor at least the lowest drops are more reasonable, and difficulty comes down faster as needed if miners bail.

Understood. Just got another block though so I'm happy. At 50K difficulty I won't find anything, but the next time it drops to 6K or lower I might.

I'd like to see one of the sites like dustcoin offer an option to show average difficulty over a past time period instead of just current difficulty. Or maybe graph the profitability over time. Then we could make more informed decisions.

Edit: Right now we're at minimum difficulty again and dustcoin says 600% profit level. Personally I'm mining TRC coins effectively solo, I'm testing a new pool I'm working on. Have found a couple coins the past couple days though, so I don't feel I'm wasting my time with my single GPU, lol. And a 20 coin block turns into a few dollars on BTC-E. Generally, I sell all coins as I mine them. I'm much more interested in mining/pooling than currency speculation.

It seems the core problems from before are resolved and things are more stable now. Coinotron turned their pool back on, at 400Gh+ atm.

As far as earnings go, that's hard to say because the difficulty does move around a lot. When it hits the 5255 floor it seems quite profitable at the current price. The surges in difficulty come and go, they don't remain constant.

http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=20

I'd like to hammer my pool's backend with some traffic to see what sort of load it puts on the server. It isn't ready to go live yet, I still need to make a nice front end and get the payment system operational. On the chance you get a block accepted I'll send all the coins over to you. (You can, at least, see a list of blocks you found atm.)

If you have an ASIC or a pile of GPUs and don't mind farming TRC for a couple minutes so I can see what happens, drop me a PM. Thanks!