very helpful.   

Edit: Okay I left the card running stock speeds overnight because of the problems I had when OCing.  I set the fan at 90% and the card seemed to be staying pretty cool. When I woke up the comp had rebooted.

WTF    Could this be my PSU and not the card?  It's a 450w that i've had for a few years.  Full system with a 5850 is supposed to draw <350w.

I'm also getting 85C at stock speeds when fan control is set to auto.  When manually set to 65% fan speed it goes down to 65C at load.

end edit.

This is a non reference card (they make reference and non-reference)
I'm getting 273Mh/s on stock speeds on guiminer.  When I tried to ramp it up it crashed, with higher OC's crashing sooner.

seems like I might as well have saved $40 and gone with a 5830.

does anyone have any advice?

what sort of boost have people seen from down clocking memory?
should I try bumping up voltage from stock 1.09 to see if that makes OC stable?

What's the talk about the ATI stream SDK?  Do I just go to the ATI download site and install it for a boost?

difficulty just jumped and already at 10.6 blocks per hour (supposed to be 6 right?)

so another 77% increase?!  how does that make mathematical sense?

ah that's right.  the 10 day window buffers out any short term effects.  don't know why I forgot about that.  thanks!

yes, supply affects demand.  this is a known economic principle.  I honestly don't know why the economics forum even exists when less than 1% of the posters have a grasp of the basics.

let's say that hypothetically there were 3 pools each with 25% of the total hashing power with the other 25% being independent miners or smaller pools.  If one of the pools goes out for a day doesn't everyone else get 25% more coins for that period?

I think extrapolating the difficulty curve that far is specious.  the difficulty will taper off HEAVILY if profitability goes down that much.

why is the first difficulty increase at 81%?  is that the current prediction?

there's a big difference between feeding some API data and building an engine to crawl sites.

keeping a spending wallet with you is okay.  Bitbills is more elegant though.

mining is profitable even below $1 a coin.  a correction now is good for the long term anyway.  better to see slower run ups and consolidations rather than a shot to the moon and a huge crash that shakes faith in the currency.

Does this exist already? and if not would there be any interest in such a thing?

I mean for anyone to be able to advertise an open bet, and when such a bet is placed with another (or multiple others) have the funds placed in escrow until the outcome is known.

I think there is a way to do this without a trusted third party.  But only for bets where the outcome is publicly known.

It would work like this:
when the bet is actually placed an encrypted wallet is generated with one half the key going to each of the bettors and one half going to a third party.  the third party can't steal coins without the entire key.  the only other issue is that they could hold coins hostage.  this is solved by building in a time limit such that the original bets revert to their original owners after a certain time has passed.  all the third party could do to screw with it is prevent current bets from going through once, after which no one will bother using the service anymore.

this works fine for outcomes that are public/uncontroversial.  the third party sends their half of the key to the winner and the winner confirms they got it.

edit: just thought of another issue of the third party colluding with the loser.   hmmm.  any thoughts?

I would have to agree that knight would be a fool to leave all his gains unrealized when bitcoin is so vulnerable to threats from USG.
He'd also be a fool to talk about realizing gains on a public forum.

Beacon: yeah, warpig statists need more money.  kill yourself.

so it's close enough in cost to buying coins to make it ambiguous.

I currently have a nvidia gts250 that gets about 35Mh/s.  Would it be worth it electricity wise to buy a 5850 (200+ Mh/s) for $150 and leave it running when I'm not gaming?
$150 is 21 bitcoins right now, but having a nicer graphics card for gaming as well as being able to sell the card in the future is nice if BTC don't pan out.

How long would it take to generate 21 BTC with said 5850 using deepbit or another mining pool?