I'd probably be up for this. I have a few questions and comments...

Do you mind saying why you need the 15BTC? Is this purely to build up your "trust level" or do you have a purchase in mind? If it's for a purchase, could you wait until you had saved up the 15BTC? Feel free to answer as much or as little of this as you wish: I'm mostly being nosey!

It sounds like you could pay rough 1BTC every day and a half. Is that what you had in mind for repayments? Would that give you enough "wiggle room" for other expenses? Would slightly higher payments every 2 days work better for you?

I'd also be interested in hearing comments from other people, particularly in relation to handling defaults. I'd imagine if you were to default I'd post at "the list of honest traders" thread - I'd be particularly interested in people's thoughts on when to do that - after one default, after one default and a week with no payment, after a year (!), whatever...

One final thing: this is a potential 33% return on my "investment". Is that fair, and if not what should I do with the unfair portion? Donate it to a worthy cause? Which cause?

If you run Windows, put double quotes around the argument values (e.g. -o "http://mining.bitcoin.cz:8332").

If you run a Unix-like system (Linux, BSD, OSX etc) put single quotes around the argument values (e.g. -o 'http://mining.bitcoin.cz:8332').

Agreed. It is, however, possible to offer Wikipedia editors rewards for doing work, like bringing an article to good article or featured article status. There's currently a reward of 23 BTC for translating the English Wikipedia Bitcoin article, and this approach does seem to work.

Those prices are totals, for the entire three months. The prices in the OP were per month prices :-)

I don't know - I was talking about the recent decrease :-)

Price has risen from the mid-70s to the high 80s in the past three days. Whether that will translate to an increase at the next difficulty change I don't know (I'm still betting it will), but I'd be very surprised if difficulty went from 68979 to 62185. My feeling is that some miners were off-lined when difficulty hit 76193 - it'll take them far less time to come back online than someone purchasing a new mining rig. Just prior to the most recent change, I saw the estimated difficulty increase steadily, from 66000 to 68979. It's too early to get an accurate idea of network power, but I'm guessing it's increased further since the difficulty decrease.

Edit: ...and network power has been increasing fairly steadily since hitting a nadir shortly after the difficulty change to 76193.

I'd love it if you were correct, but I suspect the recent difficulty decrease combined with what appears to be a bull market will result in off-lined rigs coming back online. Not sure if 90000 is realistic, either, but I'd be betting on an increase, certainly.

Currently 54. I've not closely monitored it, but it seems to be usually around 40 most times I've checked - I was surprised at 54 when I checked just now.

It's supposed to increase hash rate - at least, that was what was observed on Windows. (And lower wattage and temps - if that's all I get I'll still be happy!)

Not --pplib-cmd, and I've not tried it (only just found it...) but ATIPower sounds like it might do the job.

The 114569 blocks are the blockchain - the chain of all blocks generated to date, by everyone on the bitcoin network.

The 17210 represents the number of blocks generated by the entire network since you were sent the 0.05 BTC by the Bitcoin Faucet: every time a block is generated by anyone on the network previous transactions are confirmed.

1784 khash/s probably won't generate any bitcoins (it might, but the chances are remote: according to this calculator it'll take you 2123 days, assuming that difficulty doesn't change). You could try mining for bitcoins as part of a mining pool - that way you'll share in every block mined by the pool. Your share will be small, but it will be better than nothing.

Sure, but the same applies to the UK treasury/Bank of England/whatever as well - why interfere with an international currency? All the UK can do is prohibit me from using bitcoins - non-UK residents it can't touch. One government is a problem only to a subset of bitcoin users, and bitcoin is not directly analogous to national currencies anyway.

Let me google that for you...

...results in this.

All good arguments for the state wanting bitcoin dead, and I can certainly imagine the FBI and NSA acting covertly against bitcoin, but the reasons you give seem to me like reasons why the CIA would privately like bitcoin: money laundering - ideal for paying assets; drugs - ideal for financing covert operations; terrorism - "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", etc.

I wonder... are there CIA agents using bitcoin, right now...?!

Chinese students - welcome! Various people have made offers that may be of interest to Chinese students:

"jimbobway" has promised various rewards for jokes or funny pictures.

"bitcoinex" has promised 1 bitcoin if anyone can find out the title and rules of a game that bitcoinex once played in China.

"mizerydearia" is offering to pay for translations of "witcoin; "noagendamarket" has promised an extra 2 bitcoins for the first Chinese translation.

"dacoinminster" has offered 12 bitcoins (enough for two teams!) if they create a "publicity stunt" that successfully promotes bitcoin in China (and doesn't end with your teacher being arrested by the police!)

I have promised three times 5 bitcoins, for three separate projects: translating an explanation of bitcoin into Chinese, developing a "business plan" for promoting bitcoin in China, and implementing a plan to promote bitcoin in China.

There may be more offers as well (I would encourage people offering bounties to post them here, or at least link to them here, so they're accessible from one central location).

Many people here, on this forum, know about your teacher's plan and think it is a great idea! We also know that it is to help you learn to speak better English. People awarding bitcoins will probably want to see that you are communicating well - you may have to talk to people several times to find out exactly what it is they want. However, there are enough rewards being offered that every team could be successful - perhaps your team could even end up with more bitcoins than you need?!

Edit: translation provided by larry, bounty paid.

I live in the UK, why would the US government interfere with something I use? (Not saying they wouldn't, just curious as to why one government would take exception to an international currency).

Incidentally, the US dollar already gets a lot of competition - GBP, EUR, JPY, CHF, CAD, AUD, XAU, XAG ... etc :-)

Ah, that's a shame.

Really?! I'd consider solo-mining viable if the average suggested at least one (ideally more) block before the next difficulty change. At 1.3 Gh/s the average is under three days, with around six days before the next difficulty change. To be honest, at 330 Kh/s (average 11 days, 11 hours) I'm considering moving back to solo-mining when the difficulty decreases next week, though I'll concede that I'll need a good bit of luck! :-)

Miners Top is showing your hash rate as 1307 Mhash/s - at that rate you could be making around 10 BTC per day on average in a bigger pool, or averaging under three days to make 50 BTC solo-mining. There's no telling when btcmine will find its next block, so it might be worth considering cutting your losses... As I understand it the shares you've accumulated so far will still count, even if you switch pools or start solo-mining, so it wouldn't be a complete loss.

Personally, if I had 1300 Mhash/s at my disposal I'd still be solo-mining ;-)

Superb, thanks!

No matter how I'm mining, I always dump the output to a log file, which I then tail (means I've got a file I can parse later if I suddenly feel the urge...)

So... using the new JSON API I've knocked up a quick and dirty cron job to append confirmed and unconfirmed rewards to my log:


(Change PWD to the folder your miner is running in, TOKEN to the API token from mining.bitcoin.cz. and MINER_LOG to the filename of your log file).

When run regularly through cron (I run it every minute at the moment, I'll wind it back to every 5 minutes shortly) this results in something like...


If anyone finds this useful, great. If not... well, at the very least feel free to mock my use of SED ;-)

A pool which guaranteed the exact same payout to all members, regardless of hash rate, will attract members with the lowest possible hash rate and deter potential members with higher hash rates. Say you're the operator of this hypothetical pool, and you set a minimum hash rate of 300 MHash/s - that keeps out miners with anything slower than one 5870, but equally someone with one or more 5970s will prefer to use a different pool - what's the point in using your pool if they're guaranteed to get paid the same as a miner using only a 5870? Might as well use a different pool and get paid more.

Your proposal would work, but it would have the side-effect of limiting pool membership to owners of one particular GPU. Personally, I'd prefer to belong to a big pool (i.e. one that doesn't limit membership) as the payouts will be more frequent.

I don't think it's a question of Silk Road ripping people off, I think (and I can't speak for jgarzik here, this is just my guess, and also partly my opinion) it's a question of attracting "the wrong attention" to bitcoin. Another poster raised the issue of "cute kitten activism". Basically, if an online service reaches the point where people are using it to post pictures of cute kittens it becomes politically tricky to shut the service down. I'm not convinced bitcoin is at that stage, yet. We need to get to a stage where "the enemy" think "yes, it enables Silk Road, but we can't shut bitcoin down because my mother and my daughter use it to X" (where "X" is something like posting cute kitty pictures). Until we get there, Silk Road is a risk. Great, yes, but still a risk.