Unfortunately there are many reasons why that equipment could've caught on fire. You can't just put it down to overloaded cables.

If you don't have any computers with half decent CPUs, then you are out of luck. If you have a bunch of computers around with at least core2duo era CPU then you may be able to make a small profit or attain break even against electricity costs. With my systems at home, in Australia with $0.30/kWh and a bunch of core2/i5/i7 CPUs I was able to only just reach break even against my entire electricity bill (including hot water etc). ie. mining on average $7 to $8 per day and paying that much per day in electricity. However, this was BEFORE diff=10, so it's probably a lot different now.

If you have no electricity costs then you might be able to scrape together a few $/day. Then it purely becomes "how much hardware do you have" and "how cheaply can you attain new hardware".

You probably cannot sustain profitable VPS mining if you had to ask this question. Only consider VPS mining if you run the figures in great detail before you purchase anything. A lot of VPS miners ran at a loss even during the earlier days of primecoin mining, I suspect not too many do it these days now we are past diff 10. The market bolstering caused by BTC-e adding XPM to their site, probably helps a lot if anyone still does VPS mining. I suppose some early VPS miners may have held all their mined XPM and now that the XPM market and BTC price have exploded then they may have done quite well for themselves, but this is a gamble I'd say most people are unlikely to make lightly.

If you want to mine with large profit margins (larger than mining BTC or other SHA-256 altcoins with ASIC) then you should look at scrypt coins "shitcoin flavour of the day" which according to my own (personal situation re electricity) calculations can have margins of 3:1 or 4:1 vs electricity costs and reach "ROI" within 60-90 days. To the best of my knowledge no one mining CPU coins (XPM/PTS/Quark-based) or SHA-256 (inc BTC) can claim such high margins. The biggest downside to scrypt coins seems to be that if you aim to make absolutely maximum return then you need to devote a (un?)reasonable amount of time each day to monitoring the best coin to mine / preparing to mine newly released coins etc... This is only becoming more true as new coins (and even old ones) are adjusting to negate the effects of profit-switching pools, which means that you can no longer even take that lazy option.

Hi,
any proof?
thx

I'm horrified that given recent events people are still mining on this pool.

The security incidents and failure to resolve them in a reasonable timeframe >1 month show that this pool cannot compete with the other large pools (and perhaps better small pools).

Going almost two months without any update to users was also unacceptable and I question the whole "we're working too hard to fix it, so we can't take 5-10 minutes to type a response in our own pool thread on BCT" thing.

To throw fuel on the fire, their first response in almost two months with the 50btc account was a rebuttal against one specific users comment/accusation, when in reality they should've just ignored that user and updated everybody else on what was happening. Perhaps they actually hired BFL's esteemed rep to manage their public relations?

There are plenty of other pools to choose from. I suggest if you are still mining on this pool you re-evaluate your mining situation. You are essentially telling your miners to piss against the wind and then complaining when your legs get wet (ie. you don't get payouts).

Said as if the typical person does them daily.

I think I've said it 1000 times now.

If you just discovered primecoin/hp and you have to ask this question, then the answer is "just leave it alone and run the default settings".

Been mining crypto since early 2011. Some advice: Do not ever rely on a future event occurring or a future development actually proceeding. Consider if it's really wise to mine and hold with the unproven expectation of a potential future event. If it doesn't happen, what will you be left with? If the project tanks, and PTS follows, what are you left with? I know this may be hard to hear, and I know this is BCT forums: inhabited by some of the most positive-thinking and endearing true believers of any technology of recent times, but you should always have a backup plan / eggs in multiple baskets to mitigate your risk. Just my BTC0.02

I'm shocked that they'd choose the 3M liquid (Novec 7000 Engineered Fluid, 1-methoxyheptafluoropropane). It is at least 100 times more expensive than using a light oil. And even that is far more expensive than if they reduced the physical packing density of the miners and air cooled them like in any conventional datacenter with ambient/evaporative cooling. So I'm surprised to see them claim that their reduce floor space (and saving on rent) is the more economical option. Especially since the entire 'mine' will be irrelevantly inefficient within 12 months and won't be worth the electricity bill. Good for them though, the rest of us can only dream of having that kind of capital.

Out of curiosity, are you running the same wallet.dat file on all of these machines?

Unfortunately optimizing the parameters seems to require either a lot of time or a lot of machines (or more likely, both). I would say that you are in a good position to do some hands on testing for us.

Almost 0.1

A lot of you might want to think carefully about whether those really are double-digit numbers of bitcoins the site claims you had.

As others have pointed out, the database on their site is corrupted, and some say 10000x figures are being shown.

Unless you were mining in late 2010 or early 2011 in a quite serious manner, or mining more recently with extremely huge mining rig arrays, then I don't see how you'd even have 10 BTC. And if you were leaving so much BTC on a pool well that is just bad practice. IIRC this pool encourage / had enabled by default autopayouts. So you are kind of to blame if you were using it like a bank and actually did have whole integer values of coins on the site...

Its on their site. But the meter is probably inaccurate.

No, it's harder. Difficulty has been continously rising since passing 10 diff too.

Your software has mislead you. The number of operations (SHA256 operations) that are completed per cycle are known. The frequency of the chip is also known and it is a fixed value too (based on the oscillators in the circuit). As a result, changing timing options does not result in a real improvement. I suspect your mining software is giving you a false measurement of their performance.

Yeah you leave the "10" (integer) part off:  10.1326 becomes 0.1326

As for if parameters should be changed, well someone smarter than me will need to weigh in for that. 

Because the fractional component in diff 10 is still so large (>99%) as expected the daily mining reward is essentially the same. We'll see how its going when it 'stabilizes'. I see on your charts its more or less a vertical trace at the moment (probably will be for the first day).

I hope you're all enjoying your new chainsperday values 

Any coin that can be mined traditionally on CPU (ie. SHA based coins including bitcoin) but now days in particular XPM and PTS will be flagged by AV companies (for whatever various reasons we here shall tend to disagree with). The short of the matter is that some clueless victims get miner clients installed on their PCs without their knowledge.

You should upload the official bitcoin or primecoin client to www.virustotal.com as an example, but more importantly read about how to identify and when to expect false positives. Users can also vote on virustotal to indicate whether they think the file is OK or not (such a system is open to malicious abuse though, so always be skeptical).

Thanks to ReCat for the suggestion re PTS. However my experience with it did no go so great. I think I will stick to what I know (XPM).