You'll probably have better luck posting your thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0.

Your laptop is not running at 100% capacity all the time.  It would be if you were mining... which leads me to my next statement:

Do not waste your time trying to mine BTC with your laptop!

Even if the electricity cost is not a factor, it's still a no-go for you.  Sorry to break the bad news to you.

So many noobs gathered together in one thread!

A mining pool is an entity that combines the power of many miners in an effort to solve a block of bitcoins and reap the reward for doing so.  To successfully solve the block and be added to the blockchain - which is the public transaction register of all bitcoins - the Bitcoin network uses something called "proof of work".  Essentially, you are saying, "I put in a whole lot of work to verify the contents of the transactions in this block that I'm adding to the chain."  As more and more hashing power is added to the network, the difficulty in finding that magic hash increases.  In other words, it becomes harder and harder for you, the miner, to find a valid hash that satisfies the conditions necessary.  If you do find a solution to the block, you are rewarded for your efforts.  Currently, that reward is 25 bitcoins.

Since finding a solution on your own would likely take a very long time, people got the idea of combining their power in an effort to find the solution.  Thus were mining pools born.  Now that you had a bunch of people contributing work, you had to figure out how to reward those people for the work they contributed once a valid solution was found.  Quite a few different methods were devised to reward miners: Pay-Per-Share, Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares, Proportional, Double-Geometric, etc.  What really matters is that you, as a miner, are given a portion of the block reward.  So, instead of waiting a tremendously long time for the full reward of 25BTC for solving a block, you join a pool and get a lot of small payouts as the pool finds blocks.

Party - Sure
Where is the beer - Check the fridge
Hash - the magic solution that satisfied the network difficulty and allowed the block to be added to the chain
relayed by - the bitcoin node that first saw this hash and broadcast it to the rest of the network.
height - the block number (started at 0, which was the very first block)
where does it come from - from block rewards.  Every block solved creates new bitcoins (until there have been 21,000,000 created)
where do you see the blocks - try looking at the blockchain explorer websites.  http://blockchain.info for one
Why is a graphics card so important - well, it used to be.  Now, it's pointless to try and mine bitcoins with a CPU or GPU
can a miner be used more than once - Yes.
Is there a limit to how many coins it can generate - Yes.  For example, you used to be able to generate a decent number of coins just using your computer.  Now, that computer will very likely not generate any meaningful amount of coin in any reasonable time.

Well my gear has spent most of its time being rented or pointed to ck's solo pool the past few days so these three blocks equaled about what I would expect in a single block payment... Definitely not complaining though...

Edit: the latest block found on ck's solo pool was found by a guy with half an S5... 550GH/s.

Well would you look at that... 3 blocks so far today...

That PC is pulling 850W constant draw?  It's doing more than just acting as a seed box then, or you've got the most inefficient hardware imaginable .

Like I wrote before, if you can throw a regulator in there that can transform the battery juice into 12V/49A, and run 4 PCI-e cables out of it, you should be good to go.  After all, your standard single rail PSU does the same thing, except it takes 120/240V AC power as input and converts it to DC 12V.  Good luck with your tinkering, and do make sure to post up a video when it's completed

As I posted right above your reply... you need to provide us quite a bit more information.  What are you trying to mine?  How are you trying to mine it?  What hardware are you using?  What software are you trying to configure?

I think it's a pretty cool idea.  If I understand your ideal situation correctly, you'd like to drive the miner directly from the batteries, without having to convert from the batteries to AC, to plug in a standard PSU which drivers the miners, right?  I assume you'd need to have a way to regulate the output of the batteries to the proper voltages and figure out how to connect up PCI-e connections from there to the miner.

The S5 - at least according to Bitmain specs - pulls 590W from the wall.  At 12V, that's just over 49A.  Again, assuming equal distribution to each connector on the miner, you're looking at just over 12A each cable.

Sounds like a fun project and would be interesting to see if you can pull it off

Oh well... still pretty nice that half an S5 got you that block.  I'd say it has made a very nice ROI!

Perhaps you can use some of that BTC to rectify your power situation

You cannot mine 0.18BTC per day with 3 SP20s.  If somebody is telling you that you can, they are running some kind of BS scam that will blow up in their faces - and yours if you become a part of it.

Boy is there a ton of work that needs to be done on that site... half of the data doesn't populate, and the data that does is presented in strange and meaningless ways.  For example, what's up with the time column showing something like "< 328109 seconds ago".  Yikes.

I think I'll stick to other blockchain explorers that actually provide meaningful data.  As windpath stated, there's no value proposition here - it offers nothing that you can't get on other sites.

Good luck to whoever is running that project... they're going to need it.

Why would you want to yank the entire card when it's only 2 chips showing the 'x'?  Looking at the screenshot, I can see that you're mining on p2pool.  That's likely your problem right there.  The S2 was notoriously badly behaved with p2pool.  I don't know if it was ever addressed in later versions of the firmware - I think it was.

@BitmainWarranty - I'm glad to see you relatively active in the forums providing info to your pool miners.  I'd ask that either you, or the owner of the BITMAIN account would please edit the original post to remove your references to p2pool.  You don't support it.  Your code implementation on github hasn't been touched since November of last year.

Thanks.

While it is always unpleasant to see a multi-day stretch of no block solves, the reality is that this wasn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.  With the current difficulty level, and assuming p2pool averages 1.5PH/s, we can expect a block every 37 hours or so.  This last one was about 78 hours - just over 200%... a CDF of about 0.89 or so.

Now we just need a few quick blocks

That'll be a nice surprise in the wallet.  I keep hoping for one to show up in mine, but no luck yet.  Congrats to the latest block finder!

1) Strange, I've been running the QT wallet without issue on OS X for over a year.  I click on the dock icon and it shows up just fine.  I'm on 10.10.2 latest updates on an rMBP 15" from late 2013, currently running Core 0.10.0.
2) Hi-res icons would be nice.

Try installing boost? 


Also, try the alt-coin forums as this is for BTC tech support.

Try hardwiring the miner into your primary router to see if it'll run.  If it does, then it's just a matter of setting up your internal network properly.

What miner are you trying to setup?  There are quite a few good threads on virtually every piece of hardware out there.  Dogie puts up some tutorials that are pretty easy to follow: http://www.dogiecoin.com