I've been doing some Litecoin & Feathercoin mining with cudaMiner on my laptop - it's a Lenovo W520 with a Quadro 200M GPU.  I get a max of about 46 khash/sec regardless of the settings. I've mined about 1.5 feathercoins in the last couple of days - a whole $0.69 USD :-).. The machine actually runs pretty cool, but if I add some CPU mining (about 24 khash/sec on the i7 cpu), the overall hash rate is only about 54 khash/sec and it runs the fan at the highest speed. 

I'm thinking about building a real mining machine :-)

Seriously, Digger, I'm surprised that you have time to log into Bitcoin Forum ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=32194 ) but you don't have time to respond to the concerns about the pool..  It's starting to look like a scam.

After coaxing my laptop to mine .55 LTC, I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS! http://youtu.be/nP9gSfXgir0

Interesting.  I hadn't noticed that the hash rate had dropped so much - guess that's why it's taking so long to find the next block!

I find it hard to understand any reason to make the minimum withdrawl to be 2 LTC (retroactively) unless the goal is to "trap" those like us with a small amount of hashing power.

Are you saying that you couldn't withdraw even when you got over 2 litecoins? 

I'm curious as to the transparency and economics of pools..  Obviously pools have the cost of their machine time & internet to run them.  I'm wondering about the other economics:

I saw one pool that said "we've loaned the pool $XXX so that it can do payouts, thus we are raising our % fee".  What the heck would this mean, and why would they ever need or do that?  Doesn't the pool simply pay out the cryptocoins that it finds?

Many pools don't let you withdraw your funds until they get to some threshold, citing "fees".  Is this just a way to recoup some of the costs (see above) of running the pool?  What would they mean by "fees"?  Are they just expecting that they can keep any funds that aren't eventually withdrawn?

What are the pool owners doing with the coins while they are parked at the pool? I guess they could secretly short the currency, or do some other type of speculation with my money.  Has this been a problem?

Thanks for your comments!

Could you explain what you mean by this?  What "transfer fees" are you talking about?
Also, it would be nice to document this in the "help" section of the pool..

The big advantage FC has is that (I'd bet) a heck of a lot of people have them.  For example, I mined for 8 hours on my laptop and have 120 of them.  That's the kind of broader appeal that will get some actual use.  I have very little interest in sending my $$ to Japan so I can buy some bitcoins so that I can buy stuff here.  That's probably going to be just for speculators hoping the value will go up (and apparently being successful!).

It's unfortunate that FC was setup so the people to hop into it the first couple of days could make so many.  I would think a "proper" altcoin launch would include a broadbased announcement, a reasonable difficulty to start with, and some amount of infrastructure (pools, etc) so that it doesn't appear to be just for the benefit of a handful who are premining or in at the first hour with some serious hardware.

I'd like to run this on Windows - I'm wondering, is everyone compiling this from source?  If not, where are you getting the executable?  The mega.co.nz address doesn't appear to be working.  Thanks!

Isn't this the real problem when talking about exchanges?  

I mean, the creation of a BTC to LTC exchange would be fairly straightforward.  You need an order book, and a process for matching buyers and sellers.  You'd also need some type of two phase commit protocol that would gather the BTC from one person, the LTC from the other person, and distribute those back to the proper parties. A lot like the World of Warcraft trade window.  This would be great if it were a "distributed" thing, and ideally not relying on the trust of any of the three (or two) parties.  This seems like something that's achievable with crypto/p2p technologies.

Another way to look at that part of the exchange would be a secure p2p technology where you actually put your bitcoin or litecoin in the bid/offer, and when they matched, the transaction would happen.  if you were to cancel the order you'd just get the cryptocash put back in your wallet.   This would be a really cool project!  Another thing I've worried about RE bitcoin is that if I pay someone with bitcoins, they have the coins first, then I get what I paid for, right?  The fact is, they could give me what they promised or not, I'm still out my bitcoins.  Some sort of protocol like the WoW trade window could let both sides verify that they are getting what they were looking for (in the digital realm, of course).

However, fiat currency is a real problem.  Anyone sending their dollars to an account held by someone is putting a lot of trust in them.  In other words, when I send MtGox my BTC and "sell" them, MtGox is going to send me back the $USD (hopefully).  Since MtGox is centralized, they are a closed system - the USD out came from another customer that sent USD in.  

To make a distributed/federated exchange we'd need all the endpoints (member exchanges) to be able to move USD between them friction free and securely, which is what would happen when the buyer and seller are in different member exchanges. Otherwise, if MtGox users were buying and btc-e users were selling (and retrieving their cash), btc-e could be drained of liquid funds very quickly.

I thought colored coins might help since I could create coins (eg. tallcoins) for each dollar I have in my bank account.  However, who is going to take tallcoins in exchange for a bitcoin?  I could promise to pay anyone 1USD for each tallcoin, but when someone knocks on my door and wants the money, who knows if I'll cough it up.  You'd have to trust me, right?

Probably should be in the FAQ section, but does the Newbie restriction get lifted automatically after 3 hours and 5 posts, or does someone have to go mark me as "graduated"?  
whoops, I just noticed - apparently the system checks every 10 minutes and releases qualified people out of newbie jail..

A couple of thoughts:  There isn't a "guaranteed" profit model much of anywhere.  For a new exchange, you'd have to calculate your expected fees, etc. vs. your expected costs and development costs.  It's always an estimate though!

Also, I think regular investors are looking at bitcoin because it might be good for speculation!

what do you sell for bitcoins?  And how do you establish their value WRT fiat money on sales?  Do you convert everything to (eg.) USD first?

Have they shipped anything (not an FPGA)?  I'm very skeptical since it generally costs many millions of dollars to develop & produce an ASIC.  What trick does Butterfly have?

I'm curious, with fpgamining closing up shop (they said they didn't get enough orders), how can you be more successful?

I'm wondering, what's the difference between this and simply buying some bitcoins on an exchange?  You're basically funding the mining that someone else did..