Oh... just saw this thread... I wonder what gridseed 2.0 is going to look like... the specs listed in the OP show some nice power efficiency predictions - at least on the SHA side.  Will be interesting to see the actual products that come of these chips.

Welcome to the forums SFARDS.  By the way... what's up with the deer on the desk?

My first miners were 5 Ant U2 sticks... that I've still got running today (on ck.'s solo pool).  Those were almost immediately followed by an S1... and then about a week later another S1... lol.  My very first mining payout was from p2pool almost exactly a year ago.

Ahh the good old days... lol .  It really shows just how fast the whole Bitcoin phenomenon has grown.  You want to make 0.5BTC a day mining now, you'd need about 46.5TH/s!

I was going to write something similar... OP really has no business even attempting this with so little knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes.  Posting the contents of his bitcoin configuration files including passwords, his IP address... might as well just leave the door open to his house.  Hopefully this is nothing more than an academic exercise to learn and not intended to ever be utilized in a public venue.

Where are you trying to install crypto-dice?  You'll have to make it so that machine can talk to the machine running bitcoind.

Possibilities:
* wallet not encrypted
* key logger on your system
* wallet encrypted with very easy to crack password
* wallet-stealing malware on your system
* wallet stored in publicly accessible location
* RPC ports open to your Bitcoin client
* no RPC password or very weak one
* allow any IP to connect via RPC

Sorry for your loss.

Yes... that's exactly how you connect.  For example, if you wanted to connect to my node:

Thanks for explaining it in even better terms than I did!

Pretty well-written article.  I'd change the last sentence of your first paragraph to not reference any specific number of coins received, because that number changes (as you point out later).

ROI, while very much discussed, really has nothing to do with mining.  Sure, we'd all like to make a good return on our investment, but the fact is that our profit or loss is not a part of the mining process.

Your definition of Hash is confusing.  The hash is not the number of calculations a miner runs through in a second.  That would be h/s, or kh/s, or th/s, etc, and you do a fine job of explaining those.  Your second sentence is a better explanation of what a hash is.  I'd just write that as

Your definition of ASIC states, "In general, an ASIC is an electronic chip designed for a specific use."  It's not "in general" at all, it's exactly what it is.  Ditch the "in general" lead in of that sentence.

When you're defining a block, you state, "see above" for the definition of the block chain, when in reality, you explain block chain below .

A bit later you state this:
That's not true.  A block may contain all of those transactions, some of those transactions, or it may contain none of them at all.

I'm being a bit picky here, but you state that the blocks prevent double spending and attacks on the network.  Well... the transactions included in blocks that are on the accepted block chain prevent the double spends because they show the sender no longer has ownership of the coins.  I'm also not really sure how a block prevents an attack on the network.  I'm more inclined to accept that the sheer size of the network and the difficulty in controlling over 50% of it is what prevents an attack.  Maybe you're thinking about some other kind of attack here?

When explaining mining specifics you mention the fee of 0.0001BTC.  You might want to include that the fee is for every kb of data in your transaction.  For example, somebody sending 1BTC as a single input would only have to include that 0.0001BTC; however, somebody sending that same 1BTC with 1000 inputs would likely have to pay a higher fee.

A miner is not necessarily generating millions of hashes a second.  Just state that the miner is generating hashes per second... or since earlier you stated the most common measure of hashing power is GH/s, you could state that a typical hardware miner is generating billions of hashes per second.

Please don't tell people to try and find ways to take advantage of things like utilities included in rent.  Sure, if you plug a smaller miner like a U3 into the wall and run it, it might not make much of a difference at 63 watts of consumption.  However, you start plugging in multiple miners drawing kW of power, that's akin to stealing.  Somebody's going to notice your electricity usage is way above what is considered normal and fair.  There's no such thing as free electricity.  Somebody's paying for it.

The mining calculators typically either don't account for changes in difficulty, or only allow you to enter a static value (like 5% increase).  You do a good job explaining that just because a calculator says you're going to earn X, you're probably not going to make X.

I like the little walk through time you've got at the end

You're going to have a problem with only 30GB of disk space.  Wow, and you've only got 512M of RAM?  Yeah, you're not going to have any luck whatsoever installing bitcoin.

True.
Not true.  There wasn't more work and effort put into the solution of that other block.  It's a majority consensus.  You and I both solve block number 12345.  I submit my block to the network.  You also submit yours.  If more nodes accept your version of the chain, then my block becomes orphaned.  I say to a node, "Hi, here's block 12345".  That node says, "I've already got 12345, you need to update yourself with my copy."  Eventually every node has your copy of the chain and my poor block 12345 no longer has a parent on the chain (the block it claimed as its parent has already been linked to your block) and is orphaned.

At least you realize the question is a very subjective one, and because of that, you're going to get all kinds of different answers.

You do have things a bit askew.  Generally, the larger the pool, the smaller your reward per block.  In simplistic terms, let's assume I've got 2 pools. Pool 1 solves a block every hour.  Pool 2 solves a block every 24 hours.  All things being equal, this means that pool 1 has 24 times the hashing power of pool 2.  Hence, your contribution on pool 1 is worth 1/24 of what it is on pool 2.  So, sure you'll see 24 blocks solved by pool 1 during the day and it all looks nice, but you're only getting small payments.  When pool 2 solves that block after 24 hours, you get a larger payment (24 times larger than each payment you get on pool 1).  However, as I stated, all things being equal at the end of the day, you've received the same BTC from each pool.

P2Pool is a great choice for a backup if it's also your primary.  Pick any nodes you want and when you fail over no work is lost.  Using p2pool strictly as a backup is not the ideal choice, simply because of the difficulty of finding a share to get onto the chain.  Kano's pool really isn't a good choice either because unless you're going to be mining on it long enough to get over the dust payout threshold, you're not going to get payouts when blocks are found.  You'd be better served going with a pool like BTC Guild where you can setup an automatic withdrawal threshold or manually withdraw your coins.

You sent $11,500 of BTC to some entity without even bothering to do any research beforehand?  What in the name of all that's holy were you thinking?

Nicely done.  Are those results based on purchasing BTC mining contracts, or other options and converting the payouts into BTC?

You will need to do it for each of the private keys you exported from your MB wallets.

In regards to number 2, you do not want to run the same address on multiple computers.  Things can get messed up.  Change addresses are different between the multiple machines for instance.  If you really must have wallets on multiple machines, point them all to a single data directory that is available to them... like if you've got some NAS device.  Backup your wallet.dat frequently (USB sticks, external drives, etc).

It's beneficial to the network if you're running a full node (i.e. you've got port 8333 open).  There is no direct financial benefit to you for doing so.

Maybe they've got 26 pool servers that all connect back to a single stats tracking database, and that's the server that went down?

Sounds to me like another convenient version of "my hot wallet got hacked".  Why people continue to mine on this pool is beyond me.

First, if your nickname is any indication, Semper Fi devildog!

Sadly, you're not going to mine anything with your PC.  You're like 3 years too late.

I'm sure a number of us are indeed quite well aware of the resources the core client consumes during initial blockchain synchronization.  What the majority of us are saying is that the problem is NOT the software, but rather the HARDWARE you have.  Your opening post states:


Your first statement is simply not true.  There are plenty of users with consumer grade hardware that do not have your problem.  By the way, you acknowledge the problem in the same post:


You then state later on that Skype causes the same overheating issue.

Your problem is your hardware - not the software.