So true...  I feel sorry for peoples who still buy 50GH/s miners at twice the price you could get a 60GH/s miner a few months ago...  I would definitely wait for prices to drop before buying another ASIC now.  Being at the end of the line, when you receive your order, you won't make ROI.

The only one thing is that to still be "part of the game" in a few months, you'll need an ASIC.  All the rest will be like having a very power-hungry CPU today.  And I think it's safe to assume that once the difficulty goes up, and people calculate the ROI, then ASIC will just stop selling at the ridiculous prices they are now.  The prices will drop, and ASIC will get faster too.  Until then, as said, the high prices are sustained only because peoples are bad in math and basing their ROI based on today's difficulty, in an dream world where they would get their ASIC tomorrow, with current difficulty.

Don't worry son...  Difficulty will rise...  As the ASIC start shipping  I think that whatever the BTC price does, at this point, just filling the pre-orders, the hashrate will rise.  And now, ASIC is a lot more profitable, power consumption vs return income.  So, even if price goes to 50$, or even 10$, ASIC will come!

If it were pre-ASIC era, then it would be another story.  Not a lot of folks are FPGA-mining.  GPU then would be the dominant miners.  But now, I don't think loosing even 50% of the GPU would make more then a dent on long term.  Well, in fact it is to be expected that GPU will phase out, unless BTC goes to 1000$ or LTC and other scrypt coins raise relative to BTC (in which case we'll see GPU migration).  But until now, it's pretty staying near 1 to 1.

Diff. is taking a small nap before it boom right now.  Expect the next weeks to be 'fun'

  +1 on that last sentence!

Still waiting for my single...  Should ship sometime...  Probably in one of the 'next week' that happen to fall within this year

Site is down (or DDoS) again...  Pools still up.

Payout seems to be stuck again...  Been waiting for hours for FRC transfer that doesn't happen...

I set it to 50, and I have 175 FRC confirmed FRC.

Well, I took pretty much all I had in BTC when price was at around 200$.  I could have made much more though, as I did a lot of day trading, winning big money, losing big money, to come at about the point I started with!  I sold a few time to catch up a few days later (at loss) when I saw that the "bubble" didn't want to pop.  But I prefer to say that I also could have lost a lot more, and I stopped at about the right time.

Although I continue mining coins at 3.54GH/s (array of custom FPGA design).  I remember those days where the mining profit calculator was telling me 1000$/months (with less hashing power).  Up to 2 weeks ago, I still was at 500+$/months.  Now it's barely telling me 300$/months, the difficulty will raise again in a few days, and the BTC price is melting   Yet, I burn approx 41$/months in electricity, so I still have a margin   If this BFL single could just arrive now...  But, however, when I used to pop a BTC per 3 days (with less processing power), I now only pop a BTC per 9~10 days...

So, I still make some BTC, but tend to cash out regularly, like once per month.  I don't hoard anymore.  If I would have had a few K$ worth of BTC, the story would be different, but now, with less than 250~500$ worth, and the price that don't increase much, what is it worth to keep BTC and hope it raises 20% in a week.  That would give me 50$ (assuming I had 250$ worth of BTC), when I would make that 50$ anyway by mining in that timeframe.

Well, it's not such a bad strategy after all, considering that I would have lost more holding to BTC than exchanging regularly for fiat.  Really sad days for Bitcoins

Well, invested around 3K$ in BTC, pulled out about 13K$, plus a few things I bought, like a BFL SC I'm still waiting for (that was 1.3K$)...  So I made about 10K$ (net) in fiat.  I put most of it in RRSP and savings, to buy a house and plan some extras (vacation in the south with my little family)   I have about 10K$ in savings now...

Indeed...  That smell bad for Bitcoin.  I think that's the general feeling that is in the air right now.


Don't worry... being in Quebec, with all the taxes and fees (over 50% of your income if you add up every taxes here and there), revelations about the corruption in the construction industry (Charbonneau Commission), uncertain economic future, I can only agree with you

10 Fridays and we may be able to use CPU miners again

Edit: Oh, and by the way...  probably 10 Fridays and I'll finally receive by BFL ASIC... hehe  Calculate the time to ROI now!

So, I thought that prices would just slowly raise up after having "slept" at 120~130$, but it looks like we are in a big depression.  Pretty much like in 2011.

Before the 200+$ peak, there was great expectation, opportunities, lot of good news, media attention picking up, perfect timing of events.  That was followed by a correction as the prices just raised too quickly.  Now however, it seems that people are just loosing faith in Bitcoins.  Go everywhere and you can see that there's general uncertainty over the future of Bitcoins.

The biggest problem now is how people perceive all of this U.S. regulations.  The regulations are mainly for avoiding money laundering.  The takedowns did have some legitimacy, for example, the Liberty Reserve was well known for tax evasion plots.  However, we are currently now in a void.  The U.S. would really need some big BTC exchange, who play along with the U.S. rules, to give more confidence.

Now, the world being what it is, for sure, a lot of people probably did invest in Bitcoins with questionable motives.  Big investors, wanting to hide some money away.  And there's probably a few cashing out while they still can.

But even for the 'good guys' out there, for sure there are other investors that are uncertain about Bitcoins future.  So they pull out.  That in turn drive the price lower, leading to more uncertainties, more doubts, and a general medium/long term downtrend. That's basically a bear market.

What will drive the price up now?  For a start, would need clearing uncertainties with the U.S. regulations (more precisely how people perceive it).  It would need some good news also, like big company accepting Bitcoins (read Amazon, Paypal, WalMart, etc.).  The last one is not a joke, remember who actually killed the HD-DVD in favour of the Blu-Ray...  Well, not 'killed', but tipped the balance

So, the future really is uncertain...  It may dip to nothingness, or may well flip side and go up to 1000$ in a few months.  'Satoshi Nakamoto' did invent a really great concept, and he was able to forecast a lot of things when he implemented the blockchain, but he surely could not have predicted how the very basic human nature would drive it's project

Well, it's just my theory...  My 2 cents worth (my 0.0002BTC worth!).

One of the problem with 50BTC is the rounding of the payout per share.  Before, when the difficulty was lower, and earned 500+ Satoshi per shares (ahh, anyone remember those days!), it wasn't making such a difference.  But now, with difficulty of ~15,605,633, you see that 50BTC gives a payout per share of 155 Satoshi, when in reality it should be ~155.39 Satoshi.  That mean you're letting away an extra 0.25% per share.  That is basically equivalent to a fee of approx 3.25%.  And it's the same for all per-share difficulty.  Whatever you set it to, the payout is a multiple of the base difficulty.

Not much you say, but things will only get worse when the difficulty increase.

As said in other thread, does someone want to back me up in thinking that this looks like plain old price manipulation

Smell like plain old price manipulation

I just bought cheap coins at 100$...  Let's hope it goes to 120$+

Yup, I saw this!

I'm as baffled as you though!

That the whole idea of a pool.  It's like buying lottery tickets in a group, 1000 person each buying a ticket for example.  Sometime, someone have the winning number, but the gain is shared across the whole group.  The 'block found' is just an indication, an add-on feature of the pool to say that you had the lucky ticket, 'just for your record'.  Still, you get reward according to your contribution.  The more numbers you put on your ticket (the higher your hash rate), the more you earn.  You may be 'unlucky' and never find a block, but still, you put your chances in, and get rewarded accordingly.  Or you may be extremely lucky, like me who happen to have found 2 blocks which go against the odd, still I only brought the equivalent of 17BTC to the pool to date (and brought like 8~10BTC total at the time I solved the 2nd block).  But I don't get more reward, noticed or even get praised for it, that's just pure statistical luck.

And no, if you do find a block, you can't solo submit it, as you have just the header, and can't re-create the whole block, which only the pool know how it assembled it.  The only thing you can do if you want to 'disturb the odds' is negatively by holding (not submitting) a winning block if you happen to find one, but it bring no goods to anyone, as the pool will then be short of 25 BTC.

That's it, I moved to Eligius for a while...  Will see in a week if things are better at 50BTC.  I just wonder how many times the admin will come and have to lower the hash rate in the title before fixing the problem

Site is down, so is the port 80 pool  

Luckily, Eligius also have port 80 pool.

I have 1 mining unit at my job that has nasty corporate firewall blocking everything except port 80 and 443.

Very sluggish, seem general.  My workers take a long time to update or submit shares.  I'm getting more invalid shares too.  And I often see that my miner temporarily switch to another pool (that happen when 3 consecutive connection attempt fail, for both main 50BTC pool and backup 50BTC pool).

Where I used to see a pretty 3.54GH/s flat line, I now see a very wavy line between 3.1~3.5GH/s, so I'm loosing BTC in the end.

Is there a flood?  DDoS?  Or simply too high a jump in hash rate?  I don't know... 

That's exactly what I said...  US seize the domain name.  The site is still up, but for 90% of the users used to type '.com' the site is inaccessible.  It happened a lot with torrent sites.  U.S. can't shut down the trackers, but since they used a '.com', the U.S. revert to seizing the domain name.  That's how The Pirate Bay switched from .com to .se (and now .sx for similar reasons).

A lot of sites like Liberty Reserve went along pretty undisturbed until Bitcoin got more attention.  Then the U.S. just got an opportunity and invented a new law that they seem to use liberally to shut down anything they can.  They are not stopping the 'problem', just making it harder to evade it's fiat control.  And they are pretty much doing show-up to the world.  Why has the U.S. stayed low profile and then, a day, suddenly jumped in with all it's guns, that's a mystery.  But all of the 'bad' news on Bitcoins and drug buying, money laundering, etc. probably precipitated the things.  In other word, a sleeping monkey in a U.S. agency just woke up or got bored of playing solitaire all day long