Excellent timing to confuse the hell out of me lol. I was just configuring cgminer for failover to slush and it seemed as if it kept defaulting to the wrong pool ROFL.

Everything seems to run smooth now.

You might be surprised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov8m8gJNeGA
For those not wanting to watch the boring video, saab put a couple of regular 5 door cars on a test circuit and floored them for 100000 Km. IIRC, they only changed tires and topped oil. This is 25 years ago with cars that frankly, where no good (Ive had one for a short while decades ago. To be fair it had 250.000 Km on it when I got it lol, so perhaps they were not that bad).

Anyway, the car analogy is somewhat flawed, as I think flooring a car non stop is probably less abusive than driving it in the city, doing short distances and lots of cold/warm heat cycles. Although some of that actually may apply to gpu's as well (the heat cycles).

Electromigration is the real killer. The longer you run the card, the hotter you run the card, and particularly the higher you set the voltage, the bigger the chance of a card failing due to electro migration. I cant think of a good car analogy, other perhaps than tires wearing out and eventually blowing, but more info here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

edit: btw the last paragraph of that wiki article also explain why "baking" a card in an oven can sometimes fix it, if the electromigration occured in a solder joint. Heating it and melting the solder again, can actually fix it.

Ill bite.
Bitcoin source code is changed first on Gavin's computer, preventing copying but when he commits new code to github, it allows public access.  Its one of bitcoin's underlying fundamentals that changes every night, as the sourcecode is updated, thereby influencing BTC exchange rate.  Smart investors use that data to calculate and predict price swings.

See, that wasnt so hard?

 

Taking bets?

[spoiler]
Being Belgian, and more precisely, Flemisch, Dutch happens to my native tongue as well :p
[/spoiler]

First post doesnt mention it AFAICT, but indeed, I missed it in the readme. For those as blind as me:

TQ is Total Queued work items.
ST is STaged work items (ready to use).
SS is Stale Shares discarded (detected and not submitted so don't count as rejects)
DW is Discarded Work items (work from block no longer valid to work on)
NB is New Blocks detected on the network
LW is Locally generated Work items
GF is Getwork Fail Occasions (server slow to provide work)
RF is Remote Fail occasions (server slow to accept work)

Thats most of them at least.

That just made my day If only you could act as if you were smart.
Anyway, Ive made my point, unsubscribing and pulling out. Good luck with your lottery trading. Im sure your ability to discern trends and changes in fundamentals that simply arent there in a market as volatile as this, will make you rich beyond belief.

Apologies, as Im sure this has been asked before, but I couldnt find it and I dont really feel like wading through 90+ pages..
so could someone kindly explain all the numbers shown in cgminer or point me to a post where I could find it?



From the top, the 5s and average, that I understand . but what is
Q?
A(ccepted?)
R(rejected?)
HW (HW error?)
E(fficiency, but what does that mean?),
U?
TQ?
ST?
SS?
DW?
NB?
LW?
GF?
RF?

Absolute size has nothing to do with it. Look the oil market and other commodity markets. They are certainly big enough, but that doesnt prevent speculation from driving prices opposite of underlying fundamentals and create huge price swings. What matters is the % of pure speculation versus actual trade. In most commodity markets this used to be around 25% but over the past decades this has grown to 50-70% or more through derivative trading, with the known results of huge price swings in things like oil, corn, metals etc, which are more often than not uncorrelated with (expectations of) supply or demand. In bitcoin this ratio is like 99%.  

Bitcoin prices can only stabilize if trade becomes a bigger part of the bitcoin economy than the exchanges and bitcoinica's. As long as demand is primarily created by speculation, price is set by speculation; and so even if you wanted to accurately predict a future price, you simply have to look at the other speculators rather than the 1% that is (what I consider) the fundamentals.

Touché. University never prepared me for this, I am indeed clueless to understand how bitcoinporn's revamped website caused a 100x increase in BTC exchange rates or what other "fundementals" caused the 90% drop over the last months. Since you seem to think its fundamentals driving these fluctuations, maybe you want to share your in depth knowledge with us?

Could whoever stole bronan's enter key, please return it?

If you honestly think changes in underlying fundamentals explain even a tiny % of  the price swings in BTC exchanges, I can only LOL.

Here is the thing, Ill try to explain so maybe even you can understand. Speculating on future prices or value of things in the real economy is good. It helps establish a "true" price, it helps trade, it makes things more predictable, it can hedge risks etc.

However at some point, if speculation becomes bigger than the real world economy thats being speculated on, then you have a  BIG problem, because speculators are no longer trying to predict real world changes in economy or finance, but are trying to predict what other speculators will predict. It doesnt take a genius to understand how this creates huge bubbles and bursts. This is precisely whats happening in the real world commodity markets (*), and bitcoin is a caricature of this, with speculation FAR FAR outpacing any realworld trade.

(*) Just saw this:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7492
Interesting parts start at 4 minutes.

I couldnt disagree more. If you see bitcoin as a currency,  like I do, its only reason to exist is to allow trade; and if there is no commerce associated with it, it has no value. All speculation does is anticipate on future economic activity that may or may not happen, and in this case, the speculation itself is preventing the economic activity from happening. That will never stabilize, its inherently unstable.

Assume it stays around $3 for a few months now, and merchants start to believe in its stability and start adopting it. What do you think will happen? As BTC adoption finally begins, its price will skyrocket, a bubble will inflate, merchants will get second thoughts, the bubble bursts and we are back at square one.

Thats the irony of it. On another forum someone asked me what solution I was suggesting. I was not suggesting any, frankly, I dont have any.  The only raison d'etre of a currency is facilitating trade. If a currency ends up hurting trade, and only encouraging lottery play, you are doing something wrong.

If people following their instincts leads to a less than desirable outcome, you have to change the system, you cant change human nature, nor can you expect people to go against their nature voluntarily. In this case, the only "fix" I can think off is what most people on this forum consider blasphemy: regulation and taxation.  If anyone can think of a different way to discourage short term speculation, Im all ears, but Im not holding my breath. Even if Mt Gox could and would somehow impose a "tax" on people that convert from dollars to btc and back without there being a real world trade associated with it, all that would do is move everyone to other exchanges. Oh the wonders of a decentralized, deregulated free "currency".

Maybe someone more clever than me will come up with a solution in bitcoin 2.0, but for this attempt, I think we're basically screwed and I will be quite impressed if bitcoin overcomes this catch 22.

Sorry, no idea. Dont have a watt meter.
150W per card is probably around right, a tad more perhaps if you are measuring at the wall and particularly if you overclock.

Oh no doubt, its use would be limited for quite some time, and BTC wouldnt be an option for amazon&co. But its not like amazon is accepting bitcoins now.

What Im pretty sure off, is that it would spur a slow, but more organic growth, like trade between individuals, "ebay" kind of stuff. Right now even on this forum, most things that are put up for sale are denominated in dollar, and can mostly be bought with dollars. If you no longer have an exchange to buy bitcoins, Im pretty sure a lot of people would sell stuff for bitcoins exclusively in order to get some. Likewise  people with "too many" bitcoins, be it miners, pool operators, merchants, would be more eager to spend them on whatever the bitcoin economy has to offer, even if its just second hand hardware or alpaca socks.  Right now there is very little incentive to do so. You might as well use dollars since everyone just converts the price from btc to dollar and back,  even though the exchange rate is utterly artificial and purely driven by daytraders. I would also guess most of the btc trade (however little it is), is also converted to dollars almost instantly.

Its like the global future markets for oil, commodities, even food; they used to serve a purpose in facilitating trade, future markets, like exchanges are essentially a good thing, helping  trade by protecting producers from price swings etc. But then the gamblers took over and turned it in to a casino, driving up global prices and actually hindering trade. Most economist will tell you you need some speculation, to act as "grease", but more than 25% speculation is a recipe for bubbles and bursts, which hinder the economy, and for instance farmers now no longer use future markets, as it has lost its purpose and has become purely a casino.  In our bitcoin economy its far far worse than that, its more like 99% speculation and 1% trade.  So anything that gets that ratio down, even if only temporarily, I can only see as a good thing.

Not having exchanges for a while would be one of the best things that could happen to bitcoin. If the only way to get bitcoins is sell stuff for BTCs (or to some extent, mining), and the only way to get rid of bitcoins is buy stuff with BTCs, we might actually start developing a bitcoin economy rather than a casino.

Netrin, I think I understand where you are coming from, but your "solution" isnt one, for reasons others have explained. You are basically asking merchants to hoard bitcoins, thats not a solution to anything, its more of a problem, reinflating the bubble.

A more useful vow would be one to vow not to speculate on bitcoin exchange rates, ie not buying them with fiat currency with the sole intent of selling them for fiat currency again. A pledge to only buy BTC you intend to spend as bitcoins, and only sell BTCs you acquired through trade or mining.

Such a vow is still pointless and wont change anything, but if people would actually behave like that, we would get a much more viable bitcoin economy.

If bitcoin cant survive the loss of Mt Gox, it doesnt deserve to survive. Sure there will be a PR blowback, but I think it would be one the best things that could happen for bitcoin to not have an easy way to cash in or out, for a while at least. That would really force everyone to use it as banter, as the only way to obtain bitcoins would be mining or conducting trade. The only way to unload your bitcoins would be buying stuff with bitcoins. Circulation of bitcoins would drop dramatically, but actual trade would likely spike and me thinks thats precisely what bitcoin needs.

I dont think that will ever happen. People dont stop playing the lottery no matter how often they lose. As long as there is volatility it will attract daytraders, as long as there are daytraders and they are setting the price based on nothing but mood, there will be endless bubbles and bursts.

If anything, I have more hopes that Mt Gox' legal issues and the consequences of that will put a brake on wild speculation. If they are going to be forced to comply to financial regulations, its going to cost them a pretty penny, which I *hope* they will pass on to traders. Not unlike a tobin tax, it wont prevent anyone from taking a long term position, particularly considering the near limitless potential up and down of bitcoin, but it could, and hopefully will kill most of the daytrading casino.