im not even convinced a substantial increasing in BTC trade will bring stability. It will bring higher exchange rates, but growing exchange rates will also lure in hordes of new speculators and speculations. As long as the majority of trade is speculative, prices will jojo. It doesnt matter how big the underlying market is, speculators will always be bigger. Look at oil, food, etc.

The only way I see to stabilize the exchange rate is what most people here so despise: regulation (possibly even taxation on transactions, like  a tobin tax) and something akin to a central bank.

Since none of that is likely to happen any time soon, or ever, as a merchant your best bet is hoping for some useable hedging tools, but I wouldnt hold my breath.

Thats not what I would get wound up about; its the fact they are offloading their losses to the tax payer in such a blatant way. Its a cliche, but socialism for the rich in its purest form.

I found this quite... interesting, thought some of you might too:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7505

since your machine runs hot, condensation is not likely a problem (unless its humid enough in your basement for waterdrops to form say on the ceiling and drop down obviously).

Many miners here seem to get their first exposure to linux by setting up mining rigs. Its a great opportunity to try it out. Its not exactly hard to install ubuntu and even easier boot a live usb stick with something like linuxcoin:
http://www.linuxcoin.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It has amd drivers, miners and everything preinstalled. Just plug the stick in and you are ready. At least I assume, I havent tried it yet.

Why does it matter if I do it for profit or to protect the network? My miner rigs protect the bitcoin network regardless of my intent.

And when mining becomes (even) less profitable, you will have less miners competing for the same reward, but not none. Hashrate will drop, like it has been, but difficulty drops accordingly, increasing the revenue per miner. Its simple supply and demand. The supply in bitcoins is fixed (for now, ignoring transaction fees), the hashrate simply adapts to it.

Its only when bitcoins become useless that mining would stop. Its an elegant, smart system.

IM perfectly fine with them "cooperating" with the DEA or any other law enforcement agency. Cooperating doesnt mean handing out private data without appropriate legal request. Just explaining them how it works is a form of cooperation. For all I know, it might even be illegal for Mt Gox to give that information to the DEA or anyone else without court order.

But this is irrelevant to the discussion; anyone dealing in drugs is going to have to assume a court order will be given. Assuming anything else, and relying on Mt Gox or other exchanges to protect your privacy when you are committing crimes, thats whats naive.

Where does it say they hand out private information without court order?
Regardless, that is not the issue, when it comes to drug trafficking or other illegal activities, its usually not a bright idea to hide behind a need for a court order.

You are assuming the buyer purchased the goods straight from his Mt Gox account. Im not even sure if you can do that, without transferring the funds to your private wallet, but even if you can, you would have to be drop dead stupid to do that to buy drugs. Moreover, it would require a court order for Mt Gox to hand over his personal details (assuming they even have them). Its not impossible, but its unlikely and assuming utter stupity.

Thats not to say bitcoin is untraceable if your paint a more realistic scenario where the bitcoins are sent from mt gox to a private wallet and then to the seller, but it will become orders of magnitude more difficult, and damn near impossible if you use some precautions.

If you want to catch silk road buyers, the obvious way to do that is to pretend being a drugs seller on Silk Road. Not sure about the legality of that tactic though, where I live I think that would not be legal but IANAL.

Sure, and I often do on my PC. But why would you run windows on a dedicated mining rig?

LOL, is that a wooden case? I hope it has more ventilation than those tiny holes you drilled on top.

As for CPU clocks or FSB influencing hashrate, that seems unlikely. I suspect it was something else, like your gpu overclock not been set.

Amazing huh, by being careful and keeping a watchful eye on your hardware you end up killing it. And surprisingly its not well known.

As for your temps; Id really look in to an aftermarket cooler. Look at this asus slide:



Ignore the absolute numbers, its for solid cap VRMS on a motherboard, which unlike with videocard VRMs, rarely blow out anyway. The point here is that that operating temperatures decreases life expectancy exponentially.

Unfortunately, I cant monitor VRM temps on my current cards, but the same logic holds true for the GPU itself. My 5850s dont break ~60C (on the default sensor but that also means around 70C on sensor #2 in GPU-Z). Thats with a standard cooler (albeit non reference). My 5870 with reference cooler should come in today, about the first thing Ill do is fit a VRM cooler (thermal right R5) and see if my accelero twin turbo is good enough.

Aftermarket coolers tend to be pricy if you are running a bitcoin farm, but you can almost always reuse them for a new card, even if some minor modding might be needed. So I bought a pile of battle-axe cooler second hand for 6 euro each, that will come in handy if I decide to expand further.

Thats quite a drop. Something aint right there. Be VERY careful never to use 2 temperature monitoring apps at once, like GPU-Z, Everest, Trixx or afterburner. There is a bug in those cards that can trigger voltage to spike to 1.65V if two apps are monitoring  :
http://www.overclock.net/amd-ati/648462-hd-5870-random-voltage-bump-1-a.html

I killed a 5850 that way:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44495.0

It only worked for a few weeks after that happened.

Anyway, to answer the question. 60C is great. 70C is my personal pain limit. Anything over that is not a good idea to run 24/7. Its not like it will instantly fry at 85C, but its not good for longevity either.

also be sure to check VRM temperatures if you can. Not all cards support it, but if yours do, check GPU-Z. Try to keep those under 100C

Thats because by default its clocked at only 725 MHz instead of 850 for the 5870 and the vcore is therefore be dropped to 1.05v rather than 1.16v for the 5870.  Im pretty sure a 5870 can do that just as easily, considering my 5850s can do 800+ at 1v.  Underclocking will increase your perf/w if you also drop voltage, that goes for any card. It will decrease your performance /$ though. But having 2 cards also means you can tweak clock and voltage per card.

Anyway, not saying 5970s arent great cards, particularly if the prices are like that in US, but saying nothing comes close seems somewhat exaggerated and depending on how you clock and volt them, local prices, the rest of the system, how much luck you have with them breaking down (*), 5870s can be more cost and power efficient.

My 2 cents.

(*) Stumbled upon this:
ATI Failure Rate
28.57% Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 2GB
20.83% XFX Radeon HD 5850 1GB
17.14% Asus Radeon HD 5870 1GB V2
14.29% MSI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
10.00% XFX Radeon HD 5870 1GB
7.41% PowerColor Radeon HD5750 1GB Silent
6.67% MSI Radeon HD 5850 1GB
5.10% XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB
0.00% XFX Radeon HD 4770 512MB
0.00% MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB
0.00% Asus Radeon HD 5850 1GB
0.00% Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 2GB Eyefinity 6
0.00% Asus Radeon HD 5870 1GB
0.00% XFX Radeon HD 5750 1GB
0.00% Asus Radeon HD 6850 1GB
0.00% XFX Radeon HD 5670 512MB

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ek3ie/ati_vs_nvidia/

I guess I skipped the conclusion since they ignored the most important issue until there, so I didnt care for their conclusion .


You keep saying that, but a 5970 is just 2 underclocked 5870s, with arguably less overclocking headroom.  At least here, you can buy 5870s for (considerably) less than half the price of a 5970. Then there is also the fact if a 5970 dies, you will probably lose the equivalent of 2 5870 cards.

No mate, that way too cool. you will wear your fans out in no time for nothing. but I kinda doubt anything other than chilled water cooling would keep the card at that temperature. Unless you mean 86 celcius, which I would consider too high.

Ill take it!
1000 BTC it takes you more than 10 second to hack or disprove my unhackable arhm.. I dont know, obfuscated file extension enhanced password protected zip file method. Ready when you are, Ill publish and you have 10 seconds. Deal?

There might be a bit of a learning curve if you are unfamiliar with linux, but Id recommend installing ubuntu (or running a live linux USB stick). If you install the full desktop, you can use VNC to remotely operate it, but you really dont need a graphical interface for mining. Instead, use SSH to log in to the remote machine. For windows you can use  putty as ssh client.

THen pick a miner like cgminer, and the result looks like this:



 A nice window that shows everything you need to know, temperatures, fan settings, hash rate, stales, etc. You can also configure about anything you need there, like overclock, fan, pools, etc.

If your security depends on the source being secret, then its not secure, period.

Not very interesting, they completely ignore arguably the most important factor: power consumption (and therefore, cost).
They also omit some of the better mining cards, like the 5850 and 5870 and some of the better cards still available new (69x0).