Looks like the best thread to add to.

I'm giving up on Bitcoin7 because it is too unreliable.  I have been trading EUR and USD there and despite providing evidence to their support people, they think I'm making up problems.  Two big faults.

1: If you trade at a price different to highest/lowest, it will transact at that rate.  For example, if the highest bid is $10 and you put in a sell at $8, you get $8 (where the difference goes is a mystery)

2: When I trade EUR, lots of the time it converts it to USD.  This is a real pain if selling.  I've tried selling at EUR8 and then it zapped over to USD and sold at USD8 when the USD price was closer to 10, then see point #1. 

I've lost out too much on their system.  Odd thing today - I can't even withdraw BTC.

Anyone else having this grief?

Helps to hold coin and $ in several places/currencies at once.

BTW the trades were in TH-LRUSD  It's hardly giving away any information to say the smaller/less liquid boards have some fun opportunities.  I've done some "interesting" trades on wbxAUD and B7EUR recently (although I have some issues with B7 switching currencies unexpectedly).  A few weeks ago it was TH-AUD, but I don't have many AUD left there at the moment.  I don't bother trading on Gox much - no fun.

Edit: an afterthought, now Gox is doing JPY I might play there a bit more, but none of the exchanges uses my home currency so I don't particularly care which is which - I started originally with PLN (zloty's?)

catching up to a different timezone, I'm happy to be "lucky" using the information I have on unknown causality.  Knowing the speed of trades helps when placing opposing bets, but that's moot.  I did both Classical and Bayesian stats at uni, but for post grad my Professor was very much the Bayesian school focused.

I was interested to wake up today and see I had sold a block of coins (about 60) around $10.50 when most of the trading was $8.40-$8.50.  I must be truly ignorant to have that happen

I should have added that most of my trades were not simple arbitrage, but coincident trading definitely helped with some of my profits (that is, I did have opportunities to buy and sell BTC at the same time with large spreads either in the same currency or multi currency).  Not sure why that would have been cheating anyway.  Maybe because I used my brain.

Historically, one of the nice things about analytics is if they work, everyone uses them and the advantage is removed, or else the real world effects get in the way.  Fischer, Blanck and Scholes didn't get rich off their work playing markets, but they did nicely out of their fame as economists/mathematicians.  (a further option is they do work, and no one would publish the info, they'd use it instead).

I was prompted a few days ago to have a look at my trading history on TH from when I started a few months ago (purely out of interest).  Over three months and 300+ trades my buy price is 10% lower than my sell price, and that's been pretty consistent, and not on trivial volumes.

A lot of trading I have done arbitrages between currencies and exchanges, and on occasion there have been opportunities to take USD1 per BTC out of the market.  Not much to do with chance there - more to do with people, their beliefs and insecurities.

Find a BOINC project that suits, seti isn't it - normally too much politics.

Malaria Control is one of the more worth-while projects (I have a friend that supports it), but there are a few good physics and bio-chemical projects if you want to stay away from the number theory ones.  Something like 70 different ones to choose from, mostly CPU, some ATI, some Nvidia.

lol - it gave me a laugh earlier today.  I don't think you are a moron, but the expression just jumped off the page at me.

"quote" we saw 6 dice land and the odds of any one of those dice showing a 1 is 1 in 1. "quote"


WHAT?  After the event, looking at the dice, that's allowable, but rolling six dice and getting at least one "1" is [1 - (1 - 1/6)^6] ~= 0.66

Spending some of my weekend looking at this and went across to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools.  The range of different payment systems introduces the advantages and that was probably the argument that should have been put forward earlier.

If the payment methods were logical and consistent, then the hop vs non-hop largely disappears.  However, having systems where, for example,  "Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of current round." provides the opportunities to maximise returns.  That's more an issue with pool rules and the motivations of operators to attract people and earn fees.

Over time, miners would probably drift to an equilibrium state where consistent payout pools and hop-friendly pools separate, and then converge as the hopped pools then confer reduced advantage because they rely on non-hoppers to extract their advantage.  Simple - if you want to give away work, belong to a pool with exploits.  Again, that was the point Vladimir was trying to make.

I've been waiting for the dip - I'm not necessarily happy or sad, just that I had set some buys two weeks ago and just waited for it to happen.

I'm not here to shoot down others without having some basis for my arguments - there are more than enough people who do that in the BTC forums.  As for simulation, I can look at actual results to see outcomes.  I could set something up quickly that would simply demonstrate that across all users and all pools, with a randomly sampled number of shares to solve blocks, that the average number of shares will equal the current difficulty.  If I participate proportionally, I will get a proportional payout.  I think the underlying point that hasn't been made well is that some pools might pay unfairly.  That harks back to the OP, which makes the point if your pool or strategy is consistently delivering poor results, then look for something better.  As I said, I'm churning shares through deepbit and it tells me at the moment it is about 3% longer per block than expected, which is nice because earlier it was at +10% (and average block time fallen from 25 minutes to 23 minutes).

The point I was making was that even for a block that has been running 18 million shares, there is a probability for the next one share to solve the block.  Blocks don't require a set number of shares to be returned before "solving", and it could continue to run for another 18 million shares to.  The distribution isn't perfectly Poisson, but close enough.

Every looked at the distribution of solve times in the block-chain, a nice sequence of values there.  Some long, some short, but as happily reported and adjusted occasionally, resets aiming to preserve 10 blocks per hour.

I've seen mistakes worse than that and was just checking - didn't mean to offend.  (I'm guilty of a couple really good ones over the years, especially when I was playing with electronics stuff before computers.)

The fan spinning up to max isn't necessarily a problem.  

You mention it is not being recognised in hardware/device manager.  Have you (or are you able to) plug in an extra monitor or attach a dummy plug?  Is the card detected in catalyst or afterburner?  Can you view the second/extended screen via realVNC or do you not get that far.  I think someone might have also asked what red leds come up on the back with the backing plate off.

If you can RMA (return materials authorisation) for a failure under warantee, then you're fine.  Failure outside of the time limit will be the problem.  Running at stock speeds will make a random component failure less likely, but even then you might have a fault.  Running hotter increases the chance of frying your GPU-RAM or GPU.  Fans tend to last a long time, but they do fail (I replaced a fan last month because the bearings failed - then as good as new).

Motherboard components - not especially relevant as BTC is more GPU focused.

It is a little unclear what you have done.  I've been using 5970's for a couple of years and have had six GPUs fail out of my farm in that time (different models).

It looks like you have applied paste to the top of the GPUs, like you would with a CPU install.  Do you then attach the big, ugly heatsink?  If not, when the card starts the chips will heat very quickly and turn off (thermal trip) so you might not have killed it yet.

The back-plate is a combination of protection and heat dissipation - the HD58xx series doesn't have them.  While playing with other pieces, it's ok to leave off.

Can you confirm you have a heatsink attached/bolted to the GPUs and at least one fan running?

I didn't think that was right because I've seen gold recovery articles before.  But I found this pretty picture/link.  http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/06/infographic_use.html

Maybe we could send all our old phones to OP

I looked at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32814.msg478871#msg478871 and thinking it over while walking to work gave me some entertainment.

It becomes farcical at the point it talks about "Take the extreme example of a pool hitting a 10x difficulty block"  LOL  between difficulty resets, they all have the same difficulty.  Such screwed logic is not backed by the input mechanics or the observed results.

If you want to pick on my strategy, I mine at deepbit because it was easy to set up and the fee was reasonable.  Last 24 hours average time per block is 25 minutes (yesterday 21 minutes).  Roughly 5Ghash or 1/3rd so should be getting a couple of blocks per hour.  It tells me the variance in shares submitted per block is +9.6% at the moment and I get similar payments for a 2 minute or 100 minute block, but on average 20-ish minutes I get a proportional share of what I've contributed.  If I skipped out on a block after an hour and mined somewhere else, my shares still contribute to the next block found (whenever that is, and proportionally), and same with a pool I might jump to.  My averages don't change (assuming fair pools) because my work and the distribution lambda have not changed.

btw, if the pools are set up correctly, pool hopping should make little actual difference over the long term - the notion of ethics is odd unless somehow brand loyalty counts for something - do we get bitcoin-miles for staying with one pool, I haven't looked.

Back to the point of this thread - Vladimir posted up something to help tell if your pool is biased, and added in the variable covering hopping because some people think it makes a difference.  Maybe they're the same ones who like losing money in ponzi's or gambling.

Stumbled over this - out of curiosity, a week later . . . .

I0coin: Last Price:   0.00056108
IXcoin: Last Price:   0.00119994

I suggested a reasonable hash rate because operating at 1 Mhash there are appreciable probabilities of not completing shares or making a reasonable contribution.  At least when calculating at a reasonable speed and reasonable time span, so of those noise effects drop away.

I there were no pools (everyone was their own pool- solo), or one pool, I have a chance of finding the block for every share I crunch.  If I am in a pool where people come in and out, or I jump around, my chance of finding a block does not change, nor does it change for anyone else.  A bit like playing roulette (which I don't do because of the stacked odds) - one spin or table is much like another.  If hopping worked so well, people would be doing this in casinos.

Great thing random chance.  Full points to the poster mentioning "gambler's fallacy".

Interesting, the system throws random answers (returned shares) at a problem and people attribute long solves to "luck" rather than just the normal probability distribution of solving a block.

If I jumped to a new pool that found the block as soon as I joined, I might get 0 shares out of 100, because the pool was "lucky" to find it right then, but my 100000 shares in the previous pool will contribute to the next block found there anyway.

Willing to be proved wrong, someone might want to supply a link that shows, over a period of a month or longer, for 1000Mhash mining (ie, non trivial) the average return from sitting versus hopping?

This thread and many others could have easily been labeled "the US dollar has failed" given the arguments put forward.  The US centric arguments also get a bit tiring when we are dealing with global views - reference the arguments about central government intervention in the direction of capital spending.

There is a lot of work done that is not productive.  Many financial activities (forex trading) could be argued as non-productive.  Maybe if you thought about currency as a means of exchange from apples to oranges, then you would be less concerned about the underlying.

I suppose it depends on what you want to do with Bitcoin.  If you want it to represent productive, primary industry production, then look for something else.  If you want a mechanism to swap value internationally, then is seems to do that just fine for something so new.