I'm working on a website, one of the key parts I need is a vertical progress bar (or progress meter for some) that instead of your typical simple color background is a stack of bitcoins. An example image is this: http://d1euk9k8t2kc51.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Bitcoin-VectorToons-002.jpg obviously it can be just a straight stack of coins as long as the top part shows that it is a stack of bitcoins. All graphics need to be custom made (please make vector images even if the plugin itself uses raster images) or from an open source (if you do please state where). The progress bar needs to react to transitions e.g. when setting a value it should lower/raise the stack as an animation. If you can integrate it with https://github.com/minddust/bootstrap-progressbar then that's good but mainly I just need compatibility with Bootstrap 3 and jQuery.

Ultimately I'm not looking for it to be exclusive, it can be done as a open source github project as long as the licence is under something like Apache or GPLv3.

I am putting up BTC0.11 for this upon completion, money is waiting here https://blockchain.info/address/1B5waNH9ZiGdhWVEaJyUeJvTMNCr4QAz9o. I've signed the title of this thread for proof of address ownership, HEUr8WHsPo0kzmqX2lkb9MAWLb/JMaQItUMbkEApZIy64qSgPcf2tzyrC9StfQQ3cOG/MCahKDAR8k7qMMNmo3c=. I will need to have a hosted demo for me to try and work with so something like jsfiddle is fine. I'm willing to set up escrow if necessary but prefer not to if possible.

I'd like it if communication is kept in this thread to be nice and open to all but if you feel it's really necessary then do message me privately.

I dunno, there's only one previous crash and it was hardly that bad considering how much the price increased

This is all true but the that's the nature of mining, your risk is picking the horse to back, but you should ultimately do cost calculations taking into account that bitcoin will likely rise as is the nature of bitcoin to do so. I bought my KnC Mercury when bitcoin was £70 and then it went 4x that and as long as it stays reasonably high, I don't see it going less than £140 personally, then I'm easily going to make a decent profit.

I always feel that there's a bit more safety in mining as the hardware is 100% yours but now that it's all ASIC based that's probably not much of a comfort if bitcoin did go wrong in a big way.

I think ultimately people will spend bitcoin, but yes, there needs to be good discounts, it's just difficult for merchants because you have to pay your on going costs which will normally need to be satisfied in a typical fiat currency. It's a little catch 22 in that respect, it takes more people spending bitcoin to get more merchants and service providers to accept bitcoin yet it requires more discounts to get people to see using bitcoin as better over using the likes of a CC provider or paypal and it requires merchants to be able to pay off costs with bitcoin over converting to fiat consistantly.

I think a key issue for bitcoin is it's main strong point is selling digital products and services, things where they're consumed and ultimately you don't want chargebacks and also bitcoin is great for micro-transactions because we all know how a few satoshis can grow over time, these also hopefully don't require as much overhead.

I think now is as good a time for new merchants though, casual bitcoin adopters will be ok with spending small fractions of bitcoin if their coins are steadily increasing in value and for the small expenditure it will help an economy grow and in itself further increase rest of the bitcoins they've hoarded.

Not true, BFL are making ASIC miners in a graphics card form factor so it would be useful for that

Honestly, it's probably got to be $2000+ dollars in mind to make it worth while or at least that was the cost of a Mercury KNC miner + tax and shipping (I'm based in the UK) at the time of it showing up it didn't even look like I would get the holy ROI but ultimately with these price increases it's now a dead cert that I will as long as we don't see a major plunge. Eruptors blades/usb aren't worth it, pricey, underpowered and not energy efficient enough for the difficult increase rate, your best bet is to look into the next generations of devices coming and hedge your bets, I thankfully never went in for the likes of BFL or Avalon which have disappointed many. If you want to help the network then go and get some USB miners but I'd be surprised if you got ROI particularly quickly if at all.

You can always checkout http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ though

I just thought I'd add to this thread in case anyone is following it.

1) Firmware 0.98.1 came out and fixed my issue that I now run at a full 140Gh/s on my little mercury, which I'm told is officially only suppose to do a max output of 144Gh/s by Kncminer customer support.

2) Kncminer have been amazingly good when in comparison to the horror stories of BFL and others who have been either late to the party or went bust in the process, I'd happily get more devices in the future if they keep up the standard and just improve on the few niggles of the first generation.

I've tried the 0.98 firmware, functionality wise it's good but still only at the 100Gh/s rate but I did see a message about not using a core so thinking about it, running the coreenable firmware again might do the job.

+1 on the surge protectors, make sure anything going into your devices has electrical isolation in the way of surge protectors, you don't want £1500+ worth of equipment going up in smoke because you didn't spend £10 on a surge protector.

So once these devices become obsolete, what hashing rates do you think there new devices will run?

Agreed, but haters gone hate I guess. It's seems just because you can afford expensive hardware you're no longer allowed to ask for donations for taking the time to make a video for others. It ultimately helped me to at least check the insides because my fan was lose on arrival.

I think you're right that the system requires the cores to be a bit more toastie to get the most problem is the mercury with one core doesn't make much heat it's the opposite it makes three room colder with the front fans. The front fans seems unessecary as they're constantly at 100%, same with the heatsink fan as well.

I'm doing most my diagnostics over SSH so it's easy to tell when it's not work CGMiner was directly doing nothing, in this case it was because there were no cores to send work to.

And things just go from ok to worse for me, tried to go from 0.95 to 0.96, now it seems to now not want to work at all, just happily sitting at 0Gh/s, just great. It feels like as hardware goes they made a pretty good piece of kit but as the software goes it's dodgy as fuck and who ever did the work on most of this should be shot, like I don't even get why they've made it so you must clear your browser cache between firmware upgrades, it seems pretty diabolical as a starting point.

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Ok, 5 minutes afterwards (I noticed the red LED was constantly on and the green off) I managed to get it back again, still under 0.95 firmware though, all I had to do was apply the EnableCores firmware from the support page and it got it back online, in case any comes across it https://www.kncminer.com/pages/support

Looks like any of those performance enhancements of 0.96, 0.96.1 or 0.97 are not going to be achievable for me, which is annoying cause I could really do with that 50% boost

No, no hardware errors as such but with the 0.97 firmware I was receiving a pure wall of:

 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 3 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 5 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 5 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 2 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 5 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:12] KnC: accepted by FPGA 3 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 4 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 5 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 2 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 1 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 5 works, but only 0 submitted
 [2013-10-25 19:33:13] KnC: accepted by FPGA 4 works, but only 0 submitted

From a quick google search it seems to be common side effect of upgrading to the 0.97 firmware, I'm leaving it running for a bit with 0.95 now. It's been running between the margins of 80Gh/s and 100Gh/s. Noise is starting to bug me though, I'm thinking I might purchase a fan controller and hook up the two front fans to is as they seem unnecessary on the Mercury, the core is only running at most at 45 degrees, i doubt they're doing anything but sucking up a bit more electricity.

joae1975 what mining pool are you running with?

I have to say the video did help me. My mercury came reasonably banged up. Side of the box was ripped plus the fan on the Heatsink had fallen off.

Only thing it would of been nice to know is that to open the case you need a torx 20 screwdriver, had to go out and get one right away.

I've also had issues with firmware as well. Had to go from 0.97 back to 0.95 as it caused me to only mine at 2Gh/s. Haven't done any higher than 100Gh/s so far.

Guessing you couldn't tell me how noisy it is from a foot away, in decibels?

These what you're looking for?

http://linitx.com/category/riser-cards/161/36,161

I've used Linitx before for other parts, they're pretty good but it has been a fair while since I've used them.

Most use cheap raspberrypi boards over a laptop, saves electricity as well

The price of bitcoin factors in heavily to buying equipment. You have to hope that the coins you mine are going to get an increase in value. Mining is just a more secure form of investing as you at least have the hardware if you can sell it on if the value of the coins mined don't flourish as you hope. Obviously if you don't have the facilities to run the hardware then yeah, buying coins directly is a better option.

Yeah I did, but I ran a small operation, bought 2 GPUs and stuck then in an already high powered machine, ran it for a few months and made double my money but that does involve knowing when to sell out your coins and not being too greedy.

Block Erupters aren't very economical pieces of kits, you'd need a good number to keep up with the difficulty rate

I'd say little yes, it's not because ASIC is a problem it's the fact that previously we were all mining coin with readily available hardware so it felt equal opportunity but now it's difficult to get hold of good hardware and at the same time a lot of shifty people are trying to dupe people with fake offers to buy miners or even the people selling miners genuinely are quite shifty like BFL, unless it goes back to how it was I feel the system will lose a lot of hobbyists because it comes down to how do you compete against such people?