There is no poll but there is a thread.

Power in US can range from $0.20 per kWh down to about $0.05 per kWh.  I think the DOE says the average is  $0.12 per kWh.

If you were going to create a co-location warehouse I would imagine the Northwest would be a good spot.  Some areas have cheap power and they also have mild summers, and low risk of natural disasters (would suck to have a tornado rip the roof off your warehouse and eat $100K in rigs).

Seasonic, Enermax, & Corsair are top shelf IMHO.  If I had to pick only one it would be SeaSonic.
XFX, Coolermaster, and Antec are decent.
I had bad luck w/ Thermaltake and I think PC Power & Cooling has gone downhill since OCZ bought them (OCZ packaging so-so units in a premium brand name).

Personally I would stay away from the junk and house brands.  Good clean power is just too important to save a couple bucks.

Likely you just started a thread war though because something I said will rub someone the wrong way.

" WTF he said x about x?"

I love coming home and seeing that box on the front step which says "warning: may contain awesome inside"

Yeah the tubing is the Lowes chepo vinyl stuff.  I got better tubing but no sense in cutting it up for test loops.  It was hard to keep it from getting kinked but I intentionally kinked some of them to increase resistance to simulate a server loop.  Not very scientific but luckily this pump seems have more than enough juice.

Most watercoolers measure resistance in terms of ft of head loss.  It varies by waterblock and finding exact specs can be tough but resistance is usually on the order of 1 to 2 ft of head loss per block at 1 gpm.  If the blocks are in series then the head loss if cumulative.  If the blocks are in parallel the head loss for the loop is the most restrictive.

There isn't a lot of information because really modern blocks aren't that restrictive and modern pumps have more than enough head.  This can make it tough to find good stats.  I have found reviews on pumps tend to have better stats on loop resistance than review on the blocks themselves.

Restriction (head loss) increases with flow rate but flow rates > 1 gpm really don't improve cooling much (1 gpm can transfer ~500 watts of energy w/ only 1 C rise in water temp).  The loop will reach an equilibrium between flow and resistance.  The goal is just to make sure that is >1 gpm.  I am planning for ~1.5 gpm flow through each loop.  6 loops = ~9 gpm across the main line.  The reason we want >1 gpm is to ensure turbulent (not laminar) flow through the block.  Older blocks required much higher flow to be turbulent but modern blocks have improved on that too.  

Sadly watercoolers today have it too easy.  Blocks are less restrictive, they avoid laminar flow even at low flow rates, pumps have higher flow and can handle higher pressure, larger tubing means less loop resistance, etc.  Compared to 10 years ago it is kinda hard to build a bad "normal" loop.  The bad news for us "extreme" builders is that means less stats on flow & pressure because for normal users taking any decent pump, any decent block, and any decent tubing likely will work just fine.

Nobody answered the OP question.

The only thing that increases price (in long run) is adoption & usage.

So it comes down to "Why would someone use LTC over BTC?"

Things like "I have a lot" or "you can CPU mine" are meaningless.  Merchant X wants to accept a crypto currency why would he pick LTC over BTC (or even LTC and BTC)?  If there is no genuine answer then the currency has no value.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin's silver right now.  That may change and a "silver" emerges but LTC IMHO doesn't provide enough of a tangible benefit to break that dynamic.

Silver didn't become Gold's "Silver" just because it was different.  Silver became Gold's silver because it is hard to subdivide Gold into small & usable amounts.  When a days worth of food is 1/200th of an ounce of Gold either you need something "smaller" or you need to stamp coins the size of a tiny screw.  The fact that tiny slivers of gold are difficult to transact with was the opening that made silver, gold's "silver (and copper silvers "silver").  Bitcoin can easily subdivide down to 1E-8.  Right now if I owed someone 1/200,000th of a penny I could pay them with Bitcoin.  Granted the minimum with no tx fee (dust spam avoidance) would be 0.5 cents but that is still a small amount. 

If LTC is the silver for fractional cent purchases well it has a problem. So what is the reason for a merchant to accept LTC other than a) you have a lot or b) you don't have a big GPU farm and that is unfair.

+1

Sadly given how little humans have evolved I think automation will lead to massive poverty rather than a post-scarcity utopia that it possible.

An interesting piece of fiction:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

So you added the cost of 2 FPGA and assumed that is what the final product costs?

No PCB required, no USB controller, no DC to DC power supply, no production costs, no testing costs, no yield issues.

Just drop two FPGAs in a baggie and ship it out by first class mail with a bunch of stamps.  Who knew FPGA miners were that easy to make.

I showed no -10 MH/s per card on a farm of 24 5970s.  You sure you weren't just seeing variance.   Still even if it is -10 MH/s if it saves you 20 watts you likely come out ahead.  Using affinity still keep a core burning away at max clock rate and current.

You are aware the DRIVER is what affects the cpu bug.  The SDK is what affects OpenCL performance.  You can use any driver (including one with no CPU bug) with any SDK runtime (including the one you believe is +10MH/s better).

$150M monetary base is larger than some nations.   To put it into a useful context Paypal for example only processed $5B in transactions last year.  With a velocity of 10 (money changing hands 10x annually) $150M monetary base could support $1.5B in transactions.

If 30% of Paypal is a nerd niche well I welcome the nerd niche.  Still for the last time why is 10 years the finish line?

Higher deflation is certainly possible in the short term but I put the finish line for Bitcoin at decades out.  Bitcoin is still inflating (printing money) although that rate of inflation is continually declining.  Rapid adoption in the short term could result in significant deflation however as the base grows the rate of adoption as a % of that base will slow and deflation will slow with it.

So as I indicated above if Bitcoin deflated at 15% for the next decade, 10% for the following 2 decades and 5% for the next 2 decades it would have a monetary base of $12B.   Hypothetically if 50 years from now Bitcoin had a $12B base and continued to deflate at 3% to 5% per year that would "kill the economy" or be a "nerd niche".

Well one can only hope for such killer deflation and niche status.

2 houses 18 months later?  really?

That would assume an annual deflation rate of 40%.  How about deflation rate of 4%.  Why buy a house today if you could get 2 hours in 30 years?  I don't know maybe because you could own a house today?  Also monetary deflation doesn't mean all prices will fall equally.  If everyone thought buying a house was a bad idea then enough people wouldn't and prices wouldn't fall as much.  Less new homes would be built and relative to monetary deflation prices would RISE (in real terms not nominal ones).  When that happens you rent will be rising too.  Eventually an equalibrium will be established where buying a home (even if you could buy 2 for the same price in x years) would be preferable to paying more and more of your income in rent.


Lets assume a quadrillion % population growth per second is acceptable.  Humans would kill themselves off in less than a minute.  Yup human race is fatally flawed.  How about you assume something less asinine than 33% deflation?  Yes hyper deflation is bad, so is hyper inflation? Would 33% inflation be better?

Why is the finish line 10 years from now?  How about 15% price deflation over the next decade, 10% over the next two decades and 5% of the next two decades.

That's a $12B monetary base.  Larger than most nations in the world. 

p2pool shows a global hashrate stat shown at "/rate" or on the p2pool command line.  Anyone know over what time period that is calculated?  Last hour? Last day? Last x shares?   I got an idea for a promo / contest involving p2pool.

The difference I was alluding to is that difficulty changes don't affect supply.

Difficulty = 1 or Difficulty =1 million or Difficulty = eleventy quadrillion supply is still 50 * 6 * 24 = 7200 BTC per day.

50% drop in supply rate does mean miners make less in BTC terms but there is also less new supply making it to exchanges which should be bullish to prices.

Given the choice of difficulty doubling OR reward being cut in half I would take the later anyday.

Sadly inflation makes that number much larger.  Strip out the effect of inflation and you likely are talking about $30K in 1970s dollars or $1K a year.  Some of that is gains so maybe $500 in 1970s dollars saved a year. 

WTF were the Boomers thinking?  I won't feel comfortable until my Roth IRA & 401Ks have $1M (in 1995 dollars).  $88K? 

Some photos

The manifold.  5 test loops.  The balancing valves make it easy to keep flow even through all loops even if I create artificial restriction in one of the loops.  No rigs attached yet but hopefully I can get the first rig hooked up tomorrow and maybe second partial rig by this weekend.  If all goes well then I need to order 20 more waterblocks and for on the next 4-6 rigs.


The pump assembly.  Used two unions and the assembly to the left is the bubble eliminator MK II.  The larger pipe size slows the water velocity down which makes it easier to separate air.  Air flows up the T line which is where additional coolant is added. 


The radiator.  Also 4 of my existing aircooled 3x5970s rigs.  Will be nice to have some peace and quiet in the garage again.


The entire loop.  I am currently using 3/4" tubing but hopefully this weekend I can mount manifold properly to a sheet of plywood (which will mount to side of server rack).  Once everything has been tested in their final position I intend to replace the tubing with 1" PVC.

1 GH/s should be easy.

7970 gets ~0.6 MH/s per Mhz.  A 7990 clocked @ 850 Mhz should be ~500 MH/s per core or 1 GH/s total.  A small overclock to 920 Mhz would net ~1.1 GH/s.  A large overclock to 1000 Mhz would be ~1.2 GH/s.  Honestly I don't see clocks being pushes higher than that not with the thermal limits of single chassis and the current limits of 3 phase VRM (vs 4 phase for 7970).

Although I don't have much hope I would be interested to see the results TRL.

it probably will work but I am not positive.  That is why I used MSI 890FXA-GD70 motherboard.  It has 4 16x slots 2 apart. 

Likely you may need to do some trial and error to find something which works with a single slot.

He creates a single 1 satoshi transaction from one account he owns to another.  Tada 2 tx block. 

Look this may (and likely will ) go nowhere but the doom & gloomers need to lighten up.

For any change to happen it must be supported by 51% of the community.  If the reward curve is roughly the same, total # of coins is roughly same, and annual inflation is roughly the same AND it is supported by 51% say of community that will KILL Bitcoin?

Fuck Bitcoin is pretty easy to kill.  Forget massive hashing farms, secret NSA ASIC designs, and 51% attacks just make a proposal that is wildly popular, get overwhelming majority to support it and then the protocol dies.  I never knew Bitcoin had this fatal popularity flaw.

I like it.  The adjustment would be roughly 0.6% decrease in reward per difficulty adjustment (2016 blocks) to correspond to a 50% drop every 210,000 blocks..  I say roughly because only looked at the % difference over 210,000 blocks.  The "stair step" effect means the actual decrease is smaller.  Halfway through next difficulty adjustment is is block #315,000 but that isn't a difficulty change block.  The 150th difficulty change is block #302,400 which might make a nice round number.

Still it is mostly academic.  It is nearly impossible to make protocol changes even modest ones.  Hopefully some alt-coin incorporates a continual decay function into the the block reward where reward is simply computed based on the height of the block.  Going from x coins to 0 coins in exponential decay over the timeframe desired.