I could be wrong here.. but I have read that transactions below a certain amount are forced to pay a fee, to prevent transaction spamming of the network.

The market is too unstable to make any real predictions. You might break even in a month (though not likely), you might never. Point is; this is a high-risk investment. Only spend money that you can afford to lose.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist

If there was widespread adoption of BTC, as in more than 50%, wouldn't the frame of reference change? IE, goods and other currencies would be priced relative to BTC, making BTC the standard and therefore stable? And fluctuations would in practice mean that other currencies are unstable vs BTC.

Yep, running ASUS here too. I can get 365-370 if i really push it, but never more than that.

Ok, thank you for the clarification!

Also using 11.6 and 2.4. I hadn't turned off overdrive, but it didn't help

What you wrote doesn't make much sense. Difficulty determinate the lowest exchenge value of bitcoins. Mining not worth => no transactions possible. I also miss how, in your scenario, more ppl will start mining when it will already be unprofittable.
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It's more likely the other way around, the exchange value of bitcoins determines the highest difficulty possible. That would be the point where mining stops being profitable, thus noone would buy new hardware, stopping the difficulty increases.

There are people holding large quantities of bitcoin, either bought at low prices or mined at low difficulties. These people might sell at a price where mining is unprofitable, if they fear a crash for example. Or if they just need the money.

Tested with poclbm using various flags, currently using -w 128 -v

Also tried phoenix using various flags, for example VECTORS BFI_INT WORKSIZE=64 -k phatk

poclbm is what I'm currently running. No matter what settings I tried the same result occurred. I run with -f / AGGRESSION set to use ~95% of the GPU, since I use this computer day-to-day.

But if, hypothetically, for whatever reason a transaction never gets included in a block? What happens? Since the transaction is never confirmed, doesn't the sender still own the money? Or is it lost forever?

Possible case for this to happen would be an unofficial client allowing users to send large transactions without fees, that the official client requires fees for?

I'll take breast milk straight from the source any day.

Yes, you are correct. This is the way the current system works / will work.

Look here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

And then here: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

Hi,

My 6970 shows some weird behaviour when it is overclocked. Looking at the gpu clock graph in MSI Afterburner it will flip up and down between stock and the higher clock. This actually leads to worse performance than at stock clock.

Has anyone else seen this? Found a solution? Does it mean the card has to be flashed?

Thanks!

Edit: It's not a cooling problem, it never goes above 70 degrees. The PSU is a Corsair HX750.

The only efficient cards are from the Radeon HD5000 and HD6000 series. If you could find some used 5830s or 5850 that would be a good choice. Do not buy 4850s.

And this is a big problem. Blocks need to be generated for transactions to be able to be carried out. If there is no profit in generating blocks, no blocks get generated -> no transactions are possible.

Yes, this is an extreme case. But with the current design the network will always produce 1 block every ~10 minutes, guaranteeing a consistent speed of transactions.

Bitcoin was designed to be a currency.

The idea with the namecoin variation is that it is supposed be a decentralized DNS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System). You can use namecoins (by paying a fee to the network) to register .bit domains. Currently one needs to use a special DNS server to resolve .bit.

Namecoins can be mined in the same way as bitcoins. Namecoins can be traded for bitcoins at https://exchange.bitparking.com/main.

If you have a hard time justifying a $600 expense, then I guess it's a tight fit with your disposable income (you don't have to answer this, I know some people don't like to talk about their income)? In that case, I would recommend not getting the stuff. Only spend what you can afford to lose, you have to assume the worst (bitcoin crashes, everyone floods the market with ATI cards and their value plummets).

Personally I only invested my tax returns, which I felt was "extra money" anyway.

Personally I have a third viewpoint. I don't think higher difficulty can result in higher prices, supply will be the same no matter what the difficulty. Therefore only increased demand can result in higher prices.

But saying difficulty has nothing to do with the price cannot, in my mind, be correct either. The most logical connection is that increased price leads to higher difficulty. This is because high prices will make more people buy mining hardware.

Decreasing price would however probably not lead to decreasing difficulty, since most people who already have the hardware will keep running it until the electricity cost is say more than half the income they get.