Good thinking. While you are it, allow only anonymous bitcoin donations for election campaigns. Anything else is just legalized bribing

Im comparing revenue. Even if they cost BFL $0 to produce, it still takes a year at current price/diff to earn them as much mining as selling a unit would earn them.


Interesting. Please send that guy a Core i7 and let him mass produce it for me

Hint: the cost is not in the PCB or assembling. Thats maybe $10-$20 each. Assuming those are s-asics, the cost is the NRE they have to pay Altera for the masksets, IP etc. "A guy" in China cant do that. If they are regular FPGAs, or some other off the shelve chip, obviously the cost is in acquiring those.

Do the math.  Even with their specs, at the stated price it takes about a year to break even at current difficulty and BTC price. Thats a huge cashflow issue for a startup and risking the survival of your company on mining profitability and BTC price is a gigantic risk. Then there is the risk of someone else coming out with a better product, like custom asic, within the year, rendering your expensive mining farm almost worthless.

Compared to being able to sell those devices with perhaps 50% gross margin (just a guess if they are using s-asic) its a no brainer.

If there really is a legal concern regarding not knowing the identity of the donor, they could still identify people eg through their credit card, while accepting the payment in bitcoin. Its a compromise I could live with.

Some packages were renamed from ubuntu 10.04 to ubuntu 11.x. I recall you had to create a symlink to make bitcoin 0.4 work on the latest ubuntu releases, I guess they now follow the new naming scheme meaning you would have to create that symlink for older ubuntu releases. I dont recall exactly what it was you had to link.

Just try starting bitcoin client from a terminal and copy/paste the error message here, that should give us a good idea of whats happening.

This. About time too. I hope the debate will now shift to the more interesting questions:
- how are they achieving this performance? Structured Asic a la Fast Path is my guess but I wonder if anyone sees any alternatives. Maybe we should open a betting pool for this :p.
- how long until GPU mining is dead? Even for those with "free" electricity it almost makes more sense to buy this BFL product instead of GPUs. Assuming BFL is doing a first production batch of 1000 units that they can assemble and ship over the next few months,  thats already 10% of the network. And thats ignoring the "rig box". Just 100 of those would equal nearly 50% of the bitcoin network. I guess I have a few months to get rid of my GPUs  

Thats quite generous. Ill take it PM on its way.

58xx cards have no problems running ram @300 or even lower, but I dont think you can do it with 6970s.

Im looking to buy some extra coins.
If you are in the EU, I can pay with SEPA bank transfer. Outside of the EU, I guess paypal is the only option.

I dont have much of a trade reputation on here I suppose, I do have a 100% itrader rating on this site:
http://www.9lives.be/forum/itrader.php?u=21355

Im looking for modest quantities, say 10 or so to begin, but would like to buy regularly. PM or post your proposals. Ill go first if you have a reputation here.

I just tested it with IE8 (first time I used it lol), it works fine. The wiki also loads fine in Chrome, firefox, opera, opera mini, and android browser. I dont know what your problem is, but its your problem. Id hazard a guess its corrupted cache or some malware.

Hmm..? Ive never seen more than 8 connections. I am behind 2 NATs though, I assume that has something to do with it..

No need for more than 1GB. And rather than using ubuntu, consider LinuxCoin or BAMT;  pendrive distros specifically for mining.


You will lose money at those prices.


Difficulty level will also go up.
With your electricity prices its not likely GPU mining will ever become profitable again for sustained periods. Id spend my money either on buying BTCs and hoping they go up; or look in to FGPAs. There is controversy if these guys are real or not; but we should know very soon and if they are not scammers, you will want to buy their product:
http://butterflylabs.com/

Just curious how many miners pay for their electricity.  Paying means you have a variable electricity cost, so if you are on a fixed cost, like included in the rent, consider it "free" for this poll.

check pm

5970 is supposed to be discontinued by now. Its successor is the dual gpu 6990.

5xx0 cards are becoming rarities.  Deals like the above are really steals. Probably stock clearance. Second hand they generally sell for more than neweggs new price.

There are some obvious and immediate advantages to using bitcoin, but to see the bigger picture you first have to understand the problem with our current financial system. Its not so much the government's induced inflation IMO, its the money creation process itself thats entirely dependent on ever increasing debt and perpetual exponential economic growth. Its really little else than a pyramid scheme, and its not sustainable.

Maybe this will open your eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsmbWBpnCNk&feature=related

A 5970? In general it would absolutely crush a 6970.
Only when crossfire is not supported in a game will a 6970 be faster, but not even all that much.
Oh and if you are running extreme high resolution and AA settings (like triple monitor), I can see the 5970 performance being held back by a lack of vram. Both cards nominally have 2GB, but its really only 1GB (x2) usable for the 5970 since most stuff in vram has to be duplicated for both GPUs.

Anyone else having trouble with cgminer 2.0.8 requiring periodic restarts to solve network issues?

I saw this morning that my hashrate was pretty much zero on both my machines and had been for an hour or so. It kept switching pools and complaining the main pool and failover pool (slush) were too slow. Hashrate of bitminter and slush pool itself was good, so it had to be me.

Checked my internet connection and it seemed fine. Restarted my routers nonetheless. No change.

Then I stopped and restarted cgminer on the linux machine, and it instantly worked smooth again, no performance or network issues, while the other miner (windows) still kept complaining about "slow to respond" and having 0 hashrate most of the time, with only short bursts of normal performance on any of the pools. Both machines are on the same LAN, so it didnt seem like a network issues. After restarting the second cgminer, it also instantly performed fine again.

Im a little confused? Ive never had this. I had cgminer 2.0.7 running for months nonstop and Ive had cgminer 2.0.8 up since it was released with no problems.

There are plenty of SHA accelerators, I just havent seen anything in this performance range, or even close to it. That doesnt mean they dont exist, if nothing else, I kind of doubt the NSA uses FPGAs; Id just like to know what shelve to look at

What off the shelve sha256 unit would that be?