If he or his lawyers were smart they could make a killing off this. Buy up a bunch of these old coins on the sly, hire some devs to revamp the coin and get it going again and just by endorsing it the value would skyrocket, he then could cash out and make a killing.

Speaking of which, a UFO landed in my backyard last night and said they were from the future. They handed me a Litecoin and simply said, I want to believe.

I think you would want to buy when the price is cheaper, not higher? Anyway, I agree ETH might have some more downside to it and it would be better to get a sense of where the new bottom will be before buying in.

I haven't looked into NXT much. I might check it out after typing this.

Yep, I could see the writing on the wall yesterday after it dropped down to 0.0125. I took advantage of the later pump to 0.0135 and once I saw it hesitate again on the rise, I sold off all my remaining ETH except for a small handful.

Today I had some buy orders set for just under 0.01 that filled, but I will wait until the price is lower to replace the vast majority I sold.

Hoping to see .008 or even .007 again, so I can double my ETH holdings from where I was, but on the flip side if it goes down too low it might have a hard time recovering. I am still a bit away from my 1,500 ETH long-term holding goal, but this correction is helping me get there sooner. So I am long term bullish on ETH, short term bearish.

With the exception of the early years, mining has always been like that. In fact, even in the early years it was like that as well as bitcoin was only worth a few cents. The people who made money just happened to be in the right place at the right time (they had a lot of BTC early when it shot up), because even when bitcoin started to creep up in value, so did the miners.

But for the past few years, mining is always chasing the tail end of the race. Big companies develop new hardware, mine with them a few months, then once they made profit, sell it off to consumers as the latest and greatest. Antminer S8's are probably pumping away right now in private, and in a month or two will be announced as new and sold off to the public once the S9's are working in private. Rinse, repeat, but in the end the small miner ends up getting the shaft as they barely eek out the cost of their investment. Sure, low electricity can help, but even there it is only minimal.

Larger gains could have been made by simply buying BTC last August at or slightly under $200. A $4,000 investment (@ $200/BTC) would have netted 20 BTC. Now 6 months later you would have doubled your money ($8,000). I don't think a $4,000 investment in the S7's back in August September would have made the same returns.

I have several 280X's mining and I agree with what the others have posted, lower your core as it only adds more heat and power consumption, 1000 is even fine, also lower your memclock to 1500. I played with tons of settings and they only make the most minute differences in hash-rate, so you are better off saving on the power consumption.

As far as the hash-rate. yes with the increasing size of the difficulty/DAG file, 20.3 MHash is pretty average. I am getting ~ 21 MHash per 280X right now, down from 25-26 MHash about a month or two back.

The lines are just saying that the pool detected a new block, so your hashing needs to start over. Completely normal as the Ethereum block time is about 15 seconds.

At some point you should begin to see something like the below interspersed between all the MAIN NEW_JOB lines:
 

Depending on your hashing speed this might take awhile, maybe even a minute or two between shares.

Considering that the big volume spike has only occurred within the last 30 days, even if they ordered new equipment on day one it would take time to receive it, install, configure, etc.

I have noticed some improvements over the past couple of days, so I do believe they are working on improvements where they can. Considering they went from ~1500 users to over 4500 at times in the past few weeks, I think they are handling it well. Might suck if you are trying to scalp trades during times of peak volume, which it seems most people who have been complaining are trying to do, but if you place your orders in advance and let the system handle it, it seems to work fine.

If you have the hardware already, I agree Ethereum (ETH) is the way to go right now for home mining. A close second is Expanse (EXP), it is trading about 1/12 that of ETH, but you can mine about 15x the amount of EXP per day using the same hardware and software. However, Expanse is a lot more volatile, so you may want to trade any mined coins off right away if you are mining strictly for profit as tomorrow the price could collapse.

Agreed with this. Like anything it is a trade-off between convenience and risk.

Buying a coffee or some low amount for $20-30, 0 confirmations would be fine as the risk is small and the inconvenience the make the customer wait around 10 minutes is great.

Medium transactions of $100+ you might want 1-3 transactions, but by then it is pretty safe, and asking someone to wait for 1 transaction in not unreasonable. Think maybe a shoe store, you buy $200 shoes and they ask you to wait for 1-2 confirmation, probably not a big deal.

Large transactions, maybe $10,000+ you would wait for 6 or more confirmations to be sure. Say you buying that Tesla for $100,000 using bitcoin, It would probably take longer to fill out all the paperwork than the time it would take the 6 confirmations to go through.

This is no different than a bank holding large check deposits before you can withdrawal against them. I can deposit a $100 check my grandma gave me for my birthday and spend it the same day. I deposit a $10,000 check and they might let me spend $100-$200 of the funds right away, but they will hold the rest of the balance until the check clear sin 2-3 days, which is a lot longer than waiting around for 6 bitcoin confirmations.

Update: franky1's comment was not there at the time I wrote this post. Seems in a matter of 3 minutes we had the same thoughts.

Yes, this is a good thing indeed, as mentioned it means bitcoin is entering mainstream pop culture and not just the realm of computer geeks.

Also, I fail to understand why all the replies thinking the placement of the sign in unintentional. Unless it is a super low budget film (think handheld camera type), every scene is filmed on a set. Checking online quick, seems the budget for the film was around $58,000,000, so scratch off low-budget. This is not a real bar, thus everything you see on camera was placed there for a purpose and approved by the director and prop personal. No, the bitcoin sign's placement was very intentional.

Yes, this is pretty sad and a new low. These ransom attacks are bad enough, but if someone were to die or be injured because of this it is just plain wrong. The hospital should have backups that they can recover from, so even if they need to wipe the system clean it would result in only a few days of lost data, or data that would later need to be manually input, but the immediate damage and risk is patient safety.

Well this year seems to be the one that could do it. There seems to be a renewed interest in alt-coins in general this year. I think with the halving of Bitcoin and the publicity and new interest that may bring we will get some spill-over into the alts as well.

I think LTC should see some action this year, as well as any of the old-school coins that continue to have good trading volume. Beware those that have no trading volume, but sticking to the top 50 (sorted by volume on coinmarketcap) or so should give plenty of opportunity to catch some waves.

No, I am wishing I had bought back in when it dropped to 55 sat shortly after the pump, but I was expecting it to go back down to the 30-40's where it started. It will eventually get back down there, I am not worried about that, but I missed out on the second mini pump and could have made a bit more off of it.

I think this as well, it sure a lot easier to accumulate 1500 at $3.00, or even less than say $10 or even higher. I have the 1,500 goal in mind myself, but with the decreased reward of mining I don't think I will achieve it simply by mining. This is compounded by the fact that I sell off enough coins generated to keep ahead of my power bill. Lately with the increased price this has been better, but I will need to do a few more favorable trades to really grown my stack.

I started out mining alts and converting into BTC, but I believe it was around August last year that I actually purchased BTC outright. I remember as it was hovering right around the $200 point and I was thinking that would be a good time to get in, "buy when blood in the streets" mentality and all.

It may now, but one of Ethereum's defenses against asics was the increasing size of the DAG file. I believe this all has to fit within the GPU's memory, and keep in mind this is not one to one as there is other information that also needs to be in the GPU memory at the same time. So while the current DAG, which is about 1.3 GB and even with the overhead should comfortably fit with 2GB of GPU memory, at some point the file will become large enough that you would need a 3GB card to run it.

If you are looking to buy a GPU for gaming and to mine things like ETH on the side, yes it can be a bit of extra income. If you are looking solely to profit off ETH by buying new hardware and expecting to pay it off and keep on earning profit afterwards, you may be disappointed.

It is probably down to 14-15 Mhash now as the amount of miners, and thus difficulty increases. The income from mining ETH will continue to decline as long as price remains high as more and more miners pile in. As a side effect, once enough people buy equipment to mine, even once the price goes down the competition for those few cents of profit will remain fierce, as now all the people looking to get rich quick will need to hang on in hopes of getting their investment back.

This pattern has repeated throughout early BTC mining, then scrypt mining, and on with various alts as initial profitability predictions makes it seem like a no brainier to invest, but after awhile those predictions turn out to be faulty as people did not consider the competition, after all who doesn't want free money? In the end only those with existing equipment, or cheap electricity, or preferably both, will win in the long run. I would not recommend running out and buying a bunch of new equipment based upon today's profitability calculators.

Myself, I fall into the "I had existing equipment camp", but my electricity is not the cheapest. So while I am currently making some profit, based upon my own calculations it does not pay to invest in new equipment, even used cards since they have seen a recent run-up in price as well.

I could see this happening too. If BTC were to explode in value due to the halving, LTC seems to ride its coattails and could catch a wave.

Also, in general it seems there is a lot of renewed interest in Alt coins this year. I don't know if this is due to the ETH rise, but on Poloniex many once dead coins are returning to life.

The DOGE pump earlier this year really surprised me. It was a happy surprise as I had quite a few still in my wallet (and a few on Cryptsy too, but that is another story...), so I was able to cash out quite handsomely above 100 satoshis. But it just goes to show, with some fresh interest coming in, the upcoming BTC halving, and the gloom and doom in the financial markets, maybe 2016 will be the year for crypto's.