That isn't a safe assumption at all.  The next difficulty level is going to be a doozy.  If the difficulty level were to increase today it would already be at 330,000.  And it just increased to 244,139, what, two days ago?  When the time for the next difficulty level increase comes you are going to be shocked by how much it has risen.  It's effectively already gone up 35% just in the past few days.

Long story short, at least they're only temporarily ruined.  When I first read this topic I thought you were going to say your power supply blew and took out four 5870s.  So it could always be worse 

How would that work?  If anything there's more likelihood of getting invalidated in pool mining, because you first you send the solved block to the pool and then the pool distributes it.  In solo mining, as soon as you find a solved block, you distribute it immediately, without that extra network trip.

I am interested in purchasing one "PCIe x1 to 16x Adapter Modified Riser Extender Cable" at 2 BTC shipped to the US.  Let me know how you want to proceed with this deal.

How does BTC Guild compare with the others in that pie chart?  That's my favorite at the moment.

And yes, I agree, Deepbit is too big.

Actually that's not true.  See WheresGeorge; they've been around for over ten years and the entire point is to write on money.  It's only illegal if you're mutilating the currency to the point where it's no longer fit for recirculation, but even that is only "technically" illegal, i.e. you're not going to get prosecuted for it even if you do it.  The only thing you're realistically going to get in trouble for is defacing currency with the intent to commit fraud, e.g. taking a $5 bill, bleaching the ink out, and printing a $100 on it.

http://www.wheresgeorge.com/

I'm running two 5850s for this pool now.  I've looked at all the options and I think I like this pool best, with one caveat -- I think Eligius's method of paying directly out of the generated block is better.  However, Eligius doesn't have an interface, and I really do appreciate the value of having an interface, so BTC Guild wins out for that.  However, I must ask, are there any long term plans for having payouts come directly from the generated blocks?  That seems like the optimal way to do it because it minimizes transaction fees.

It's not doing any sort of "useful" distributed computing or anything like that, if that's what you're asking.  Nobody's using Bitcoin to do desired computations; the computations are just for the purpose of, as the others have said, securing the network by making it really hard to fake transactions.

Hey Qberty, this guy shows how it's done: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8385.0

In your script do something like



Yeah, it's so simple you're gonna be kicking yourself for not realizing it 

I don't run Eligius, so it's not up to me.  But the system that Eligius is using is 100% valid; all it's doing is paying out its shares directly from generated blocks instead of using transactions.  The fault lies entirely with MyBitCoin for not properly supporting the entire Bitcoin protocol.  Losing 5 BTC sucks, but it's not the end of the world.  Heck, it may pay you back over time anyway, because you've only lost 5 BTC, but if you had kept using MyBitCoin, if it was ever compromised at some point in the future you would have lost everything.

You shouldn't be using MyBitCoin.  When you use that site, all of your private keys are in someone else's hands.  Download and run the client on your local machine and, once you get a local receiving address, transfer everything from MyBitCoin to there.

Additionally I think we've heard some reported issues about MyBitCoin not working very well with pools.  It looks like that happened in this case.  The money did correctly go to that listed receiving address, but MyBitCoin isn't showing it as available to you in your account page.  I don't know what your recourse is.  Talk to them?  If you had been running the client locally you would have the BTC in your hands now.

Nick, I really don't know what to say.  Those transactions are in the blockchain.  Ergo, you have access to them.  The only thing I can think of is if your address isn't actually 17AtLW6bEkNESifTLFRcWUYAvfb7mnUkTz, or if your Bitcoin client somehow isn't keeping up to date with the blockchain anymore.  Try restarting Bitcoin.  If that doesn't work, take a screenshot both of your "All Transactions" tab and the Settings -> Your Receiving Addresses popup window and post them here.  (Note that the only thing being displayed on these screenshots will be address hashes, so they're perfectly safe to release into the wild if you will; they aren't the private keys that are necessary to actually obtain access to your coints).

Yup, here's hoping for some good luck when it comes back up!  I'll switch back from Eligius later tonight after it's restarted, and we'll see how we do.

That address has been paid out by Eligius five times within the past two days, proof here: http://blockexplorer.com/address/17AtLW6bEkNESifTLFRcWUYAvfb7mnUkTz

Are you sure you aren't seeing those transactions in your Bitcoin client?  If that's your address then you absolutely should be seeing them.  Note that because they are generated off a block they will take 120 solved blocks to "mature" and be reflected in your account balance, but you should see the pending generated amounts immediately as soon as the block is solved.

The beautiful thing about the design of Bitcoin is that the difficulty automatically adjusts itself to account for the total mining output of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.  So if mining is too profitable, then the difficulty level will rapidly squash it back down.  Which is happening.

What, do you want to see a birth certificate to prove that I was around then?  Will the short-form certificate suffice, or are you going to go all birther on me and demand a long-form copy?   

I definitely think that switching to mBTC (and even just renaming them to BTC some time down the line, so that 1 BTC = 10^5 base units instead of 10^8 base units) is a good idea.  It takes a lot of the psychological impact away.  For the record I was also strongly in favor of Berkshire-Hathaway's recent 50-for-1 split.

I just joined BTCguild this morning.  Everything looks good so far, with the caveat of the issues that have already been noticed and are being worked on (delay in assigning pieces after a new block has been discovered) or will hopefully be worked on (pool rounding down amounts less than .001 BTC).

You need to lose your illusions of grandeur.  First you compared yourself to Microsoft and Apple (hahaha), and now you've "settled" for WinRAR.  WinRAR, which has a cumulative number of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of downloads, has been around for nearly two decades, and is backed by a multi-million-dollar company.

You and Rarlab are nothing alike.  Please understand that.  I'm a Free Software guy.  I love programs with available source code because, even if I don't ever personally inspect them, others have.  But I'm not an ideologue.  I run proprietary software too, including, yes, you guessed it, WinRAR.  But WinRAR has earned a bit of trust in my regard.  And would I download a new closed source tool by Microsoft if I thought it was useful?  Yes, I would.  Would I download a new closed source tool from a complete unknown that would have the potential to completely wipe out all of my Bitcoin holdings?  No, I wouldn't.

FFS guy, you are not Microsoft, you are not Apple, you are not Rarlab, you are just some random guy on the Internet releasing software in an area with a high potential for risk and with an already existing history of fraud.  You haven't earned anyone's trust.  And yet you don't understand at all why people might want to see the source so they can make an evaluation for themselves of the software?  Get over yourself.