No; what I mean is anyone wanting to use bitcoin as a currency and trade tool, rather than a lottery doesnt like this volatility.  Its one of the major factors holding bitcoin from gaining more widespread acceptance (and thereby also, from increased price stability, nice catch 22).

Anyway, im not naive enough to expect posting will make anyone stop playing the lottery, but Im gonna voice my opinion whether you like it or not.

And just as many of you will have made just as many bad decisions. Thats not the point, the point is that bitcoin as a whole is losing badly from the volatility caused by this kind of short term trading gambling.

+1
I also like the site, biggest problem is not enough players, and payouts.
As a test, I tried to withdraw a small amount, and 24h later, I still havent seen it. That doesnt inspire confidence, particularly when a few weeks ago my account vanished and my wallet was reset to zero. To be fair, this was mentioned on the website as a potential side effect from a server upgrade, and an email quickly restored my account and balance, but these are things that really really should be avoided.

edit, and now I cant log in. I get

login was unsuccessful. Please correct the errors and try again.

"  Unable to login due to internal errors: The type initializer for 'wcPINVOKE' threw an exception."

For now, http://sealswithclubs.org seems to work just fine

+1
And it is not even be a bad thing. Bitcoin is in dire need of some trusted service companies, some exchanges or wallet services or whatever being regulated and audited I would see like a positive step, not a negative one.  As the saying goes, trust but verify. Also keep in mind bitcoin doesnt depend on such oversight, and you are free to use whatever company you want, licensed or not. But Mt Gox getting a license would inspire trust among many, I really cant see how that would be a bad thing.

Quite happy at bitminter (see sig) with incredible low stales (less than 0.1%). But there is no merged mining there yet.

If bitminter would ever come under attack, I think Ill test out p2pool.

disclaimer: I dont know what Im talking about, but if the server was up and pinging showed no problem, could it be bitcoind having (had) trouble connecting to the bitcoin network? Is bitcoind using a different connection? If so, could this possibly be related to a DDoS attack?

Anyway, I dont seem to have lost any work, perhaps thats the advantage of using slower cards .

If enough people believe your predictions, it becomes a self full fulling prophecy no matter what you predict. Just about the *only* thing determining BTC price currently is short term speculation, so what you are really predicting is the behavior of short term speculators. It makes no sense, and frankly, its undermining bitcoin's usefulness as a trade tool I wish Satoshi had implemented a "tobin tax".

And it was thoroughly debunked back then, but it seems despite everyone's attempts, you still dont understand how bitcoin and mining works. To argue from the perpective of production cost is stupid.
There is no production cost, its not like oil or cars, my 486 could generate the entire blockchain and produce one block per 10 minutes all by itself.  heck, I might even be able to do it by hand if no one else is mining!

Its because there is a value attributed to bitcoin that more miners mine than just my 486, and therefore, the cost goes up, but the amount of miners and therefore the production cost, is dependent only on the price attributed to BTC (mostly by speculators) and for a tiny % for now, transaction fees. You cant just turn that relationship around and pretend its valid. Its not.

Oh well, why do I even bother trying again.

Allright, Im again mining with 2x 5850s.
Took a bit longer than anticipated but had some cooling issues and then I had to borrow one of my decent PSUs to my neighbor. I didnt want to wait too long, so now I have a rat rig thats powered by 2 old flaky ~300W PSU's, one powering the GPU the other the rest. Hey, it works .

More good news, I ordered another XFX 5870 for cheap (120 euro woohoo) and my neighbor is buying me a flashy zalman PSU, so i may actually power the beast.

1 GH/s, here I come

Fascinating thread

I just noticed this:

Product includes: Fully assembled unit with Enclosure, PCB, USB Cable, PSU & driver software (including Bitcoin block mining application).

It doesnt mention the FPGA('s) or other ASICs.  One would think "fully assembled" means just that, but then why mention PCB seperately?
If this is only the bare board and PSU, that would go a long way explaining the price.

330 MH with a 6870  . Nice overclock!

Bronan, how long has it been since you tried a user friendly distro like ubuntu?
 Its perfect for noobs. Its so much easier and safer to do basic stuff, office, internet, email, facebook/twitter.. its all integrated, maintenance is a breeze with centralized updating, no need for AV, etc. Finding and adding software is a breeze with software center. Crashing? It doesnt crash. And if I do brick it because Im poking a little too hard under the hood,  at worst I can reinstall the OS in 10 minutes without losing any user settings or documents and even have all all the same apps and packages reinstalled.

My mother has been using ubuntu for the past 5 years. She is 75, and its perfect for her, she never really got the hang of windows, but ubuntu she gets. I recently installed ubuntu on an old PC of my neighbours, it was intended to allow the kids to surf more securely and play some games; the parents are mostly PC illiterate, the kids all under 7 years old. I expected many phonecalls initially, but Ive had ZERO. Seriously not one. I thought they wouldnt use it, but they use the thing every day, educatinal apps like gcompris for the kids,  and the parents now use it instead of their own PC for internet, email, skype homebanking.

The only real pitfall with linux is hardware (in)compatibility. If you have a machine with a buggy ACPI bios or some obscure wifi or network card that is not supported out of the box, a printer thats not well supported, then it can be a difficult and frustrating process. But its the exception, my guess is on 90-95% of PCs, you will have no problems at all.

edit: ok, and another issue is software compatibility; if you are a hardcore gamer, obviously ubuntu is no go. If you need a specific app that doesnt have a linux equivalent, it might be a no go. Video editing comes to mind. Though if its just one or two apps, you can usually run them under wine or in a VM.

Could be because of crossfire. Do your cards clock all the way down to 150/300 MHz or thereabouts? The problem occurs because the cards clock up and down from their lowest speed to something barely faster, which it does when scrolling and stuff. The solution is fixing the clocks at a higher rate so powerplay doesnt adjust frequencies and voltages every time you scroll in a webpage, but CF may have done that for you.

Core i5s difference between idle and full load is ~80W at the wall. x150= 12KW
Core 2 duo's, if you are lucky, ~65W difference at the wall, x450 =~ 30KW

Ignoring the xeons and quadro's, thats 42KW. With an average US price of $0.11 per KWH, that could be $3000/month. Could be closer to $10.000 if you factor in air conditioning. You think no one will notice? I mean, even if the fuses dont blow.

Here is an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYExKJB3K84

Good catch guys. Couldnt find that one with google image search.

Hmm? Where exactly do you see watt or difficulty in "my shutdown point is $2 per BTC" ?

In theory bitcoin mining can be profitable at $0.02/BTC and unprofitable at $200/BTC with the very same rig and the very same electricity cost. It all depends on difficulty and therefore, all the other miners.

You can not define a shutdown point as BTC/$ and ignore difficulty.

Difficulty is of course indirectly related to BTC/$ but its effect is that long term profitability is not dependent on BTC/$ but only on your MH/$ compared to the rest of the world. As such that FPGA will likely be profitable for the foreseeable future no matter BTC price, and EU or other GPU miners with high electricity costs will never be profitable for sustained periods of time. At most during short windows of opportunity when the network hash rate and difficulty havent caught up with a higher price yet.

To possibly prove a scam, Ive been looking very hard for a photo that resembles their "rig enclosure". I found only one that comes pretty close.
Here is the butterfly pic:



This is an OWC NAS:



It is very similar, but I have not been able to find a picture of the OWC from the same perspective and everything, so if this is a scam, it would probably mean they had studio photography done on a similar box (like the OWC) and then photoshopped it. Pretty elaborate for a scam. If its a 3D rendering, then its quite an excellent one.

Its hardly bullet proof evidence, but this thing may be legit. Its not like they needed fancy pictures of enclosures to make the scam work. And a more likely explanation for the similarity is that the cases are build by the same company using off the shelve parts and/or designs.


edit: on second thought, I focused on the white box, but the black box does seem more like a poor photoshop job:



Check the white around the LCD...

Hmmm.. okay, Im undecided

Duh. Of course. Fax machine listens in on calls and if it hears that horrible beeping, it receives the fax. At least it worked like that 10 years ago when I still had a fax and a land line