That's still a relatively pathetic payout, given that most computers in botnets are compromised windows XP machines running old amd semprons and celerons/p4's or worse. They will output maybe 100-200khash per second or less with the average skewing up a bit by infected machines that run modern processors capable of mhash performance.

Even in an optimistic scenario the owner is wasting his botnet capacity and risking detection due to high CPU usage by end users, who despite being technically limited, will notice their computer coming down to a crawl.

CPU mining costs more than electricity in general. It's not viable at all. On an i5 you will probably be consuming 90-95w and generating a couple mhash/s. It's a lose/lose.

There is nothing to suggest those stories were real. If I remember correctly, Vladimir or someone else pointed out it was just a brainfart on the IRC-channel and somehow became 'real news' despite lacking a source. Buzzmedia like gizmodo then re-reported it.

If you want to deny the webmaster further employment anytime soon just report him to the church.

It's obvious the church itself hasn't gone "evangelizing" about a cryptocurrency efficiency improving client on random forums.

Then again, could just be a malicious injection (based on this person's posts he doesn't even seem like a native English speaker), but should be easy enough to detect in server logs.

Bitcoin is not illegal nor is it illegal to generate. I don't know where you get the notion of "trouble" from.

I didn't notice a significant decrease of earnings on block 5081 although it was in general about 30% less than usual.

However, error messages have dropped from hundreds per hour to about 5 or less per hour. So slush is doing something right with server upgrades.

Bitcoin is not "just" for anarchists and state-haters. In fact I beg to differ and refuse to believe it has anything to do with it.

Bitcoin is not ideological. Crypto-currency has no agenda. It is a perfectly legitimate, legally created commodity.

2011-06-03 19:13:42: Listener for "worker41": 03/06/2011 19:13:42, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:13:47: Listener for "worker18": 03/06/2011 19:13:47, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:14:36: Listener for "worker27": 03/06/2011 19:14:36, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:14:51: Listener for "worker22": 03/06/2011 19:14:51, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:15:06: Listener for "worker29": 03/06/2011 19:15:06, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:15:53: Listener for "worker39": 03/06/2011 19:15:53, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:16:17: Listener for "worker16": 03/06/2011 19:16:17, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC
2011-06-03 19:17:25: Listener for "worker02": 03/06/2011 19:17:25, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC

The 'problems with bitcoin rpc' is even worse now than it was yesterday. Looked at my logs and my miners are reporting almost one error per 10 seconds.
At multiple ghash/s performance potentially wasted, going to have to switch to other pools for now unfortunately.

Running a 31% overclock 24/7 for mining is not sustainable over the long term. You will lose out financially in the end when the VRM & hardware fails faster than it would have at a mere 0 to 10% OC at stock voltage.

A 5450 will generate roughly 10 mhash/s stock, if I remember correctly. In general it will not be much better than a CPU, 5x faster at most. More with extra flags
It's a dedicated HTPC card made mainly for decoding high definition movies so it's not very powerful.

edit - yes, ~11 as the chart shows

Used ones enter the market all the time as gaming folk want to upgrade to newer cards.
Many even have warranties. I have seen a used 5870 as low as $130.

See link above, it's an official tool made by Sapphire themselves.

Well, I'd actually argue that this one is the most likely, especially given a large enough botnet and financial interest (more profit in using the botnet to forge transactions than participating in block discovery).

Even Satoshi agrees that BTC is "practically" impossible to forge, but it's technically feasible by a large enough attacker. I don't know how well the creators have prepared for an attack of this scale.

Yes, real currency can be forged as well convincibly (some might argue much easier than bitcoins) but at least it's backed by brute force of the issuing state. The only consequence of dumping illegitimate cash into a market is small scale inflation. Dumping forged bitcoins into the market will ruin BTC's reputation.

I'm not saying it will rise indefinitely into the hundreds of thousands or millions. In reality, I don't even care what makes up the price as long as it stays at that, drops lower or rises. I'm saying it still pays off to mine, even a year later. At 8ghps I'm still making way, way more than the cost of electricity and AC.

And that's going to be the same for anyone starting today. At worst, they lose out on the electricity costs and 10-20% resale value of the hardware if everything drops to zero tomorrow. At best, they pay off their initial investment in a month or less and gain profit after that.

Note that I didn't go into the specifics of what makes up BTC value. I'm merely answering OP's question about why some people still invest into new rigs. Of course Paypal/LR/ MTGOX raids etc. are possible. They just seem like a distant possibility at the moment.

Your calculation only takes in account the current spot price, just as calculations a month ago were made assuming $4 or lower spot price, and 3 months ago a fraction of that.

I don't deny the profitability is volatile at best if you are starting out just now. I just don't see a likely scenario where the price will suddenly start plummeting or simply stagnating at $9-$10 when mining becomes harder & more users become aware of bitcoin every day.

I started nearly a year ago but I can perfectly see the rationale behind adding more rigs today. It still pays itself back relatively fast, and could even accelerate at an unknown pace.

That PSU will definitely run two 6950's. In fact according to most reviews online even in a 3-gpu setup it will consume barely 500-550 watts at full load in Furmark (which is an abnormally stressing application not reflecting real world usage, not to mention Bitcoin which will be much lighter)

Your motherboard however supports only 2 PCI-e cards based on the picture. So that will be your limit. However you can run up to 4 GPU's if you later utilize a bigger (1200-1500W) power supply and two dual gpu cards such as the 5970 or 6990.

To maximize your mhash/s and gaming performance, you will also likely want to unlock those 6950's (or single 6950 if you don't plan on getting another one) into 6970's via a simple and 100% safe BIOS mod. I say 100% because 6950's (the reference 2GB variety) inherently come with a BIOS switch.
This means you can't really spoil the main BIOS in any way except carelessness.

Guide below.
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159

Unless nVidia makes major changes to the way they handle OpenCL routines, profitability will go down to zero or worse first with CPU's, then nVidia GPU's and ultimately AMD/ATI GPU's.

In fact the only thing that can boost profitability if difficulty keeps rising is newer generations of AMD graphics cards that follow Moores law & double in performance every 1½ years.

Nothing short of adding more GPU's.

The 8gb of memory is an unwanted expense, BTC mining will not benefit anything from it, nor will it be useful for your gaming purposes (unless you are a very heavy multitasker). 4 is adequate

Also, if this rig will also be used for playing PC games, your processor is bottlenecking the graphics card. Definitely do not pair an Athlon processor with cards higher than maybe a 5850 or nvidia gtx 470.

For bitcoin purposes though, the processor is excellent and no upgrade would be needed. Up to you to balance it out. If I were you I'd go a bit higher on the CPU budget and get a cheap variant of the 6-core Phenom II's since your computer usage wont be limited to mining.

Efficiency wise I would recommend

1. Seasonic X (80+gold)
2. Corsair A (80+gold
3. Silverstone Strider + (80+ silver or gold)

Though they do come at a price premium, but I use those for most of my work units.

I don't mind running a few crappy miners either since they cost next to nothing. Using basic 300W Fortron/FSP psu's they run 24/7 just fine since last Sept.,, although incur higher electricity costs and are less efficient.

And they are practically limited to 5850s and 5770s so no efficient dual gpu setups possible.