the luck. coincidentally the larger your hashing power - more luck you have, deepbit in its share size is more lucky finding blocks than any other pool.  i totally understand that i or anyone can go solo mine and by some odd chance be getting all blocks for the rest of your life and everyone else be making nada -   very unlikely though, so the more hashing power - faster blocks can be solved. in my view as i have repeated previously i feel more lucky mining at deepbit than dancing about 0 fees elsewhere or going solo, for now.
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What the hell are you talking about? The higher your hashing power the LESS luck you have. That's what variance is, it is how much you stray from the norm (good / bad luck).

If you have more hashing power you have lower variance, meaning you have less good / bad luck and are closer to the calculated average.

You can feel however you want, but that's not how math works. And since bitcoin is a digital currency math is what rules.

People want to see their account ticker steadily growing. I can understand it. I should be soloing by all reason, but I can't really sit there and wait for a week without any report of progress, just psychologically it doesn't work for me. Now, pay-per-share is without a doubt the absolute worst thing you can do if you want to make the most money, so I'm not saying that it is a good idea, but I can understand it.

Good to know all those other pools have PPS model though, I've been telling people that deepbit was the only with that. Just another reason to consider deepbit not as necessary for newbies.

You don't need to force someone to run 2 gpus. Just look at the statistics page of any pools. Compare their hash rates with the amount of blocks they've solved. Then calculate the difference of fees. Done. It's very simple math and you will see very quickly you're wrong.

No, that is not at all how it works. Every block solution is independent of the other. If you are talking about of the 2016 blocks per difficulty level I guess that's true, deepbit solves the most blocks out of all the pools. And as you stated each individual miner is paid proportionally of that to what they contributed.

The only difference between pools is the luck of that pool, whether on average they solved more or less blocks than their proportional computing power should have. A user who has 1% of the total networks hashing power should however on average earn 1% of the bitcoins (minus fees).

Supply shortage of what?

5xxx series gpus are last generation and are discontinued
6xxx series gpus are plentiful and in abundance (current gen tech)
6990s are a top end dual-gpu card and as always targetted only at the highest echelon of users, so created in limited amount intentionally.

Japan has nothing to do with any of this.

Well this is simply the problem with people (today? always?) that is widespread, not limited to bitcoin. The old aphorism "If it aint broke, don't fix it." comes from this thinking. I don't really know how to get people to realize that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." They just simply don't seem to want to listen to it. This is part of why I don't feel it is ethical to attack Tycho for what is not really his fault but ours.

I agree that I'd prefer to see deepbit continue for the long haul, but if we are in a small model world version of what bitcoin will some day be, I don't really see the point of saving something doomed to fail.

EDIT: And if this turns out to not be a problem at all, that's great too. Yay.

Your graph assumes someone cashes out daily. Although it's a convenient argument for people saying "Zomg coin speculation means you shoulda just bought coins!" it's not true. There is nothing to the argument.

Here's a simple scenario, but not oversimplified:

25BTC = $475 USD today. Cash out, buy 2 5870s from ebay at inflated prices, wait 4 days for shipping. Put it in existing rig.

You now have 850Mhash/second, and about 6 days of this difficulty left, give or take.

Assuming low variance -- That's 9 BTC before jump.
If we assume a 30% difficulty increase thats roughly 11.16 more BTC (20 total) after 10 days.
Assume another 30% difficulty increase that's roughly 8.9 BTC after 10 more days.

30 days total: 29.06 BTC. You now have more BTC than you started with, the new price of BTC is irrelevant, and you also have $400 worth of video cards. The reason I say price of BTC is irrelevant is that 4 BTC = $75, far less than the cost of electricity. If BTC value is lower you would have lost money on holding BTC. IF BTC value is higher you made more money than you would have anyway.

If you change difficulty to say 40% increases you get 9 + 10.8 + 8.3 = 28, still more
50%: 9 + 10 + 6.7 = 25.7

This is about the limit of the 3 difficulty window return scenario. 60% requires 4 difficulty jumps, and is incredibly unlikely as a scenario. As it would be a 2.3M difficulty after 40 days month, or a 400% increase in difficulty / hashing power (16.something THash/second).


I'm not suggesting OP do this, but I would like to point out the fallaciousness of the idea that it is always better to buy coins rather than mine and mining will never pay for itself. In fact right now is an auspicious mining time. It can change, but that is where we are now. The scenario for buying coins is huge difficulty increases coupled with only moderate increases in coin value. This happened before and can happen again.

I agree that people seem to have a weirdly grand idea of the users of deepbit. Deepbit users can't be bothered to nip a potential problem in the bud if it doesn't affect them, but if there was a malicious event initiated by deepbit against other pools that didn't affect deepbit users they would suddenly rise up in arms? 

I don't want to start a pool war though, announcing deepbit DDoSes certainly isn't an appropriate response in my eyes. People will have to live with the consequences of their actions, if deepbit gets so large that it eventually overwhelms bitcoin and causes peoples money glazed eyes to miss the looming demise of what they expect to be a never ending gravy train, well, so be it.

I don't know why you are so adamant to ignore firm numbers. 30k / 10M = .3% Less than 1/3rd of a percent of (5xxx) GPU owners are miners.

Why are 58xx cards sold out everywhere? Because they are old technology. The 58xx series was launched in 2009. Nearly 2 years ago. Since then AMD has moved on, they are no longer fabricating 58xx chips. Manufacturers can only create videocards with chips AMD produced. No more chips, no more video cards. They bought a lot of chips while demand was high and tapered off their buying as demand dropped. 2 years later there is basically no demand and thus no buying. They are clearing out their last remaining stocks of unsold cards (perhaps solely to miners) and then moving on with their lives to sell the new 6xxx series, and gearing up to sell the 7xxx series.

It's very simple. Miners make up a tiny little niche market that provides no incentive to manufacturers to cater to (as they are alread buying their products). I'm not sure how to make this any clearer for you.

There are more problems than simply forking the block chain and double spending. 50% is a hard limit for being given control of parts of the block transactions. Leading to a whole can of worms in the grand scheme of bitcoin. The idea is that the less opportunity there is for malicious and potentially devastating problems with the block chain the more trust there can be in the idea of bitcoin as a viable tool.

Approaching 40-50+% lends itself to being far more vulnerable to all kinds of faith shattering events.


The more the better, but if 10% of Tycho's users moved out that would definitely grant a large margin of error. The problem is, what is 10% currently? He has about 2.2THash of power, so that's 220GHash. If you assume each user as having 850MHash of power (which is more than most actually have) that's about 250 people.

There aren't even half of 250 replies in this thread. It's a bigger feat to accomplish than you might think.

I'm not entirely sure what security threat you're referring to, perhaps this is where our disjunction arises.

There is a very specific security threat when a single entity controls 50% of the networks hashing power. That is the point of this thread and why people are crying foul of people using deepbit. This security concern does not exist otherwise, and it's a major one concerning control of the block chain which bitcoin exists upon. If you are unaware of this, that is why I mentioned that you seem to be lacking knowledge of it. If you were aware of it and simply do not care, well, nothing I can do about that. We've tried to warn people.

For about the billionth time. Bitcoin isn't reliant on last generation GPUs being available from stores. Partly because store prices are horrible (the one quick batch from sapphire to clear out stocks being the exception), partly because there are literally millions of ATI 5xxx series GPUs out there to be tapped (buying / selling / mining on their own) and partly because the existing crop of miners is fine for the moment in terms of generation of bitcoins.

What bitcoin needs is continued growth in terms of saleable services using bitcoins and continued trust and faith in bitcoin as a sensible alternative to cash, credit and carry.

The only thing 5830s being out of stock affects is people who see their computers as golden egg laying geese and want to hop on the bandwagon. Well, you can still do that, but you'll have to be smarter about it now.


I've answered this at least 5 times before, pretty sure to you too. 20-30,000 cards mining vs. 15-25million 5xxx cards. Mining is nothing.

I didn't say anything the first time I saw your avatar, only in conjunction with your post. This negates your response.

Anywho, just look at the graph that's been posted a number of times, bitcoinpool is relatively small. Large pool alternatives -- Slush, btcguild btcmine. All larger than bitcoinpool. I've used slush and am not a fan, I've used btcguild and it's basically a smaller deepbit with idle notification (but no PPS) and a lower (or 0) fee. I can't speak to btcmine, but I've heard good things about it.

The point though isn't just that there are alternatives to deepbit that are just as good as it (which there are), the point is that if you are concerned that your magical money fountain is going to dry up, then mining on deepbit makes as little sense as staying on a pool that requires your miners to restart every night. Maybe less sense.

There is a stickied newbie guide at the top of the forum. Though I'm not a big fan of its layout, it is certainly a start.

The HAF X actually has 9 expansion slots. This comes in handy for spacing the final card from the PSU. It's ridiculously expensive though, so... six on the one hand half dozen on the other.

Anyway, the set up is fine, it's a decent $/MHash set up, but it will run about as hot as 10000 suns, just so you know. The HAF X comes with this neat little clip on item that lets you install a fan pushing air onto the front of cards, except that it is only designed for a 3 GPU mobo and will almost certainly block your cards becoming useless sadly. But if you can take that concept and ziptie a fan to the front area to blow air onto the cards you may find that helpful. A piece of plastic to help force the cards apart to suck in fresher air can help too. Sadly the side fan is inferior to the HAF 932, but such is life.

Anyway as for set up, dummy plugs are relatively cheap, but if you don't want to spend more money you can just plug in a monitor to intialize the card, overclock it with MSI AB, then start your miner, and switch cards. This will continue to run fine, but if you find yourself rebooting or having an unstable overclock causing a miner to time out you will quickly find this to be an incredible hassle.

Although I've said it before I'll say it again, while I fully support the idea that deepbit getting too many people is a bad thing I will have to interject some things here.

Most miners are not on these forums, and so these warnings will go unheeded because most people just found out about bitcoin from their friend, or some news article that mentioned bitcoin and the largest pool deepbit.

These same people are the ones driving the price of bitcoin through the roof and making it all kinds of profitable. So... we all enjoy enhanced profitability and hate the threat to bitcoins security. But for now one comes with the other. You'll have to get the word out through other channels than this thread though if you want to have any chance of making a difference.


If I wasn't already sure that you knew nothing from your avatar (it could be ironic) the above confirms it. Plenty of pools provide plenty of information/return comparable or superior to deepbit. There is nothing special about the pool except for two things:

1) Highest hashing rate -- translates into lowest variance (although when there is variance, the low payout makes it very very very unprofitable).

2) Pay Per Share -- The best option for casual miners. This to my knowledge only exists on deepbit. If you are a serious miner though this is a horrible option (10% off the top).

Payouts, information, all that other stuff is just bunk though, even steven.

I'm of two minds about this thread.

1) Yes. Please influx of new people, try searching. At least half the time your thread is duplicated on the first page. It's not that hard to find the information you're looking for as your questions have been replicated ad infinitum most of the time with few exception.

2) Forums are always a daunting experience for new people, not knowing what to search and having to wade through hundreds of threads with hundreds of replies, it's really hard.


So... at least demonstrate that you've tried a bit, and I'll be happy. That's just me though, other people might want more.

THat's because with few exceptions thermaltake makes total crap PSUs.

A 1500W PSU is way way more than enough for 3x 6990s.

Try with windows first, so I can finally get some first hand data

I'm almost at the point of buying a PCI-E extender cable so I can find out for myself... but not quite.

I'm still waiting for even unofficial evidence of this. So far it's been nothing but hearsay.

The only evidence I've seen thus far is people having trouble physically getting 5 video cards (not gpus) into place. But 4 double-gpus seems to be ok (meaning 8 gpus). Still waiting on some evidence either way.