[Tycho],

Is there a way to download a longer history of blocks found by the pool?

Double spend guide for beginners:

1. Run bitcoin program. Download the blockchain.
2. Get some coins.
3. Backup the wallet and install it on another machine.
4. Connect with the first machine to some nodes and with the other to different ones.
5. Open two windows and simultaneously send coins to different addresses from two machines.
6. Watch in the log as the transactions reach different nodes.
7. Wait patiently for the next block.
8. Enjoy how the network includes only one transaction and rejects the other.

Do you really think nobody tested it?

Something funny but much less sinister happened. The chain split and the longer chain prevailed. Then the transactions from the orphaned chain were included again. The 13368 block in the current chain no longer have these transactions:



The blockexplorer must have missed the chain split.

Of course it is profitable (certainly if you already own hardware) but calculations without factoring difficulty increase are very misleading.

BTC price increases are possible but definitely not certain. Heck, the BTC price can even fall hard. If there was a futures market, it would show very similar prices to the spot prices because future is not know and the current value is the best bet. But as long as mining is marginally (i.e. BTC income larger than electricity costs)  profitable, people will join mining and difficulty will increase (that's how arbitrage works). And if the BTC price increases, the difficulty will increase even more. The rate of difficulty increase is not known but this thread is a proof that people still join the mining game and we are far from difficulty saturation.

I don't think we will see difficulty increases of 20% per 2106 blocks (as mrjones suggests) but 10-15% is very real in the nearest future.

Exponential fit. There is a calculator online:
http://www.taters.net/btcgc.php


As long as mining is marginally profitable, difficulty will increase even with constant BTC prices. And a claim of increase in BTC price is a pure speculation.

I'm afraid that without factoring future increases in difficulty, this is fairly useless.

It's an inevitable consequence of finite supply of bitcoins. When the mining reward gets lowered to 25 BTC at block 210000 (and then lower by half every 210000 blocks), there has to be some mechanism to compensate miners for their hashing effort. Otherwise they will stop hashing and without them, the transactions will not be processed.

It's probably the latter because just a day ago there were significantly fewer transactions from the faucet and much less regular.

It's not true because consumer GTX GPUs are crippled not to cannibalize nVidia's market for expensive GPGPUs and the FP64 speed is artificially limited to 1/4 of the FP64 speed of Teslas. FP32 and integer performance per clock is the same, though, therefore the difference between GTX and Teslas is completely irrelevant for mining.

Small correction. The fee is 0.01 BTC per 1KB of transaction size rounded up. A transaction with one input and two outputs (most typical) is 0.25 KB and the fee is 0.01. If your transaction has many inputs (like consolidating a wallet with many small change coins), the fee will be proportionally higher.

There is still no need to pay the fee unless you want to be (almost) sure to have the transaction included in the next block. The fee will probably become important when there are much more transactions going on and the competition for inclusion into the blocks is higher.

Unbroken.

My deposit from 1512 blocks ago was finally credited. Transfers out also work.

You are overly optimistic and you are rounding all costs down and all benefits up.

Ebay 5970 prices are rather $450 than $400. You would need a better case (or build one yourself). This one will not give you enough airflow. You need way more ventilation and a few good fans ($15-20 each). If not, you will not be able to overclock the cards, at least not to all way up. The system will not need 294x2 W but 700-750W depending on the PSU efficiency. Depending on your climate, you will need to air condition this 700W. The BTC bid price is, last time I checked, $0.87, not $1.00  and nobody knows, where it is headed (it was $0.6x just a few days ago). And if it is indeed $1.00 or more, you can be certain of a significant difficulty increase. Before you even order these parts, the difficulty is going to be 10-15% more and when you have it all running, you will be half way to another 10% of difficulty increase. Taking all that into account (especially the difficulty increase of 10% every 2016 blocks which may be conservative but during all my time with Bitcoin, difficulty increased faster than I always expected), you are going to get 1500 BTC before electricity costs in 180 days (minus 3 BTC a day of electricity costs with AC=540 BTC) which is not going to pay for this system at current BTC prices. Then, another 90 days will bring you only 300 BTC before electricity (but maybe the difficulty increase will slow and it will be a bit more). Did I mention that your eBay card may fail after a few weeks of constant use and you are out of warranty?

In my opinion, it is well worth mining with a system you already have. And it is also worth building a mining rig if you like building computer systems and monitoring it because it's fun. And the mining will eventually pay for the system (but not for the time you spend on it so consider it a hobby). But profit? Not so much unless the BTC price increase well beyond 1$ (and better yet not now but later so it does not impact the current difficulty). And for the prices, we are in the "tea leaves reading" territory. And if you expect higher prices, it is much simpler to just buy BTC, instead of the mining rig.

Did you create your xorg.conf with?

You should have this (or similar) in your xorg.conf

Read this guide and check if you did something differently:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3359.msg47174#msg47174

No, still broken.

I'm sad to say it because bitcoin-central was a great site but I think davout should sent back the money and shut it down if he does not have time to manage it at least from time to time.

There is no "5% increase over best publicly available miners" anymore, at least for 5970, because with m0mchil's poclbm git HEAD version, I get 569-570 Mh/s on stock 725 Mhz (-f 1 -v -w 128, Linux, Catalyst 10.12, SDK 2.1). It needn't to be HEAD, the improved OpenCL kernel was introduced in early February. There are other reports of 560-565 Mh/s for this card at stock frequency.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

After switching trading to EUR, will you allow withdrawal of the currently USD denominated balance to European banks?

What are you talking about? There is an API on mtgox and you can make a bot that does stop loss trading and everything you can imagine. An API is quite uncommon for small investors on "professional markets".

960440

Driving Bitcoin project does not equal driving bitcoin price. The last thing Bitcoin needs is a bubble.
We don't need "investors" who buy and hoard bitcoins. There is zero benefit from them for the Bitcoin project. And by driving the BTC bubble they can scare the merchants when the bubble bursts. And all bubbles burst.

By the way, what's wrong with MtGox? As soon as they started accepting wire/ACH/euro transfers, there is no real obstacle with buying BTCs. Buying small amounts of BTCs or buying fast is another story but buying gold is not easy either when credit cards are expensive and risky for the sellers.

Well, if BTC never got up to 1$, there would be no problem with 0.50$ per BTC. Bubbles are not good for the trust. Therefore, I claim rises in BTC/$ prices are worse than no rises.


True but in my opinion, for long term Bitcoin health, the Bitcoin economy must rise faster than the BTC/$ prices and not the other way round. And the Bitcoin economy (the amount of goods and services exchanged via BTC) does not seem to rise fast enough to justify the "bull market" this year.