My oily erupters have gone 20 days since their last breath of air. They are still doing well in their new environment, which looks a bit different to the first iteration.

https://i.imgur.com/yFitRRr.jpg

Because watt meters are usually designed to measure 0-1200 or 0-2400 (region dependant) watts. Like many measuring devices they work poorly at their lower end. This is especially true if your wattmeter only displays 1 significant figure eg "2 watts". All of my watt meters (I have 3) have error of +/- 2% according to manuals (one also says +/- 5 watts when <50 watts). Obviously this is not good when trying to measure devices using ~2.5 watts DC / or perhaps 3-4 watts AC.

If you want to measure small power levels, a better idea is to use a digital multimeter in series with the load and measure the current flow directly. I have found most hubs and USB ports output at 4.9 to 5.1 volts. verlts x ermps = whaaats.

My calculations show that for older systems ~0.5 chainsperday eg. Core 2 Duo (higher end models), i5 mobile (higher end), i3 (higher end), or i5 desktop (lower end) (or the Xeon or AMD equivalents of any of these) will find a block every 15-20 days on average. If you want to find blocks regularly ie. 1-3 days you need the very high end CPUs that have come out during the last two years. Possibly some older Xeon/Opteron CPUs with release prices >$1000 will also give you frequent blocks.

It's important to realize though, that bad luck with such infrequent blocks can result in months passing without finding any. For example I have a i5 laptop that's mined for over 50 days without finding a block @ 0.55 CPD.

I could provide my own anecdotal evidence that this is not the case (for me).

I have four Core 2 Duo machines that in total are about twice as fast as my main core 2 quad system. The 4 slower machines have found 9 blocks in a month and my faster machine has found 5 which is what you would expect.

But again its meaningless with so little data.

I know it's not perfect, but you can usually get a reasonable estimate of performance from comparing CPU that you might already have to their cpu mark (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php).

In this case your Opteron 3280 is not in the list. Sadly Opteron CPU are not quite as common as Xeon and so there aren't results for most Opterons on the site.

If you download PC Mark from their site and run all tests, and upload the results it would be useful (probably to many people, not just yourself). If you can tell me what CPU mark it gives you, then I could let you know if it agrees with marks from similar scoring CPU that I might have.

Generally though we are seeing a few people overestimating the CPU's they buy. And there is not much you can do to optimise your results as long as you are sure it really is using close to 100% of CPU cycles at all times and also you have used the 64 bit version of HP.

Thanks for the link it's exactly what I was after.

Looking back over the last half-dozen or so pages, it seems this thread is now less about DGC and more about Vlad's fractured psyche trying to work itself out (in text form). 

Well primecoin has been out for a few months now and its difficulty is currently very stable. It has been precisely 9.86 +/- 0.01 for a week or more (I think, from my manual checks. All the good graphing/data sites seem to be down or no longer updating).

If botnets were growing day in and out we'd see diff rising but we aren't. It's unlikely that botnets would be growing and other users would be dissapearing at exactly the same rate so I don't think that is a likely possibility either.

yes, because mining bounties does not work the same as local mining


yes

Ugh, typed up ~1 page response. Database error when posting. I need to remember to CTRL+C large posts before submitting them...

quick version:

1) Any real evidence of this aside from a few AV companies blacklisting the code? Same can be said for bitcoin and also all the other scrypt altcoins that are worth a damn.
2) price tanked well before the alpha/beta release to donors. had nothing to do with news of the failure because the failure came much later.
3) Not really, it was always going to be a GPU accelerated miner not a GPU dedicated miner. Most litecoin rigs have poor CPU and would have struggled. Made worse by their outrageous CPU:GPU performance ratio mis-match. I think even if it spread amongst existing scrypt miners who became interested in primecoin, they'd still be washed away by the VPS miners who rent VPS CPU by the hundreds or thousands. I think too many people thought that the GPU miner release would be like when bitcoin got its first GPU miners. In reality the mathematics of primes and SHA-256 are nothing like each other and the hardware required is not the same. This should be evident from the GPU miner project failure.

Not really. Lets disregard cooling power requirements for fans etc. Calc'd with my local power rate: $0.30 /kWh. Block erupters cost about $20 USD each right now.


2x BE at stock @ 5 W total (~2.5 watts each) for one year:

1x BE OC'd at ~750 MH/s @ 16 watts for one year:

The difference in total cost is not made up by the OC'd erupters 90 extra MH/s.

So those overclocked BE are actually less profitable than two stock in the long run. My calculation also disregards costs of OC parts and the time you spent modding it. Plus, I doubt that (in a purely statistical sense) a BE with an OC that high would outlive stock BE's on month or year long timescales.

oclvanitygen -D 0:2 -i -k -o foundMANY1111111111116234234661s.txt 1111111 1tri11ium 1heartofgold 1aaaaaaaaa 1bbbbbbbbb 1cccccccccc 1ddddddddd 1eeeeeeeee 1fffffffff 1ggggggggg 1hhhhhhhhh 1iiiiiiiii 1jjjjjjjjj 1kkkkkkkkk 1lllllllll 1mmmmmmmmm 1nnnnnnnnn 1ooooooooo 1ppppppppp 1qqqqqqqqq 1rrrrrrrrr 1sssssssss 1ttttttttt 1uuuuuuuuu 1vvvvvvvvv 1wwwwwwwww 1xxxxxxxxx 1yyyyyyyyy 1zzzzzzzzz 1222222222 1333333333 1444444444 1555555555 1666666666 1777777777 1888888888 1999999999 1000000000

Interesting that they scale so inefficiently... you could run 2 stock BE at for 5 W for those MH/s.

I'm ambivalent because I'm more worried about the current exchange rate of XPM and how its a loss to mine unless you have very efficient CPUs, very cheap power or both. Even the VPS boys won't be happy lately, most are running at a loss from what I can see.

Also are you being honest with yourself when you say "I don't have any feelings of my own on it, because I didn't donate anyways." because your Last Posts seem to indicate the GPU miner is the main thing you discuss?

I think the two models on the right (with CE marks) are the slightly revised models that also have the slightly different LED on them. Hope to place an order soon... only get paid once a month... arggh. 

Yes if you do statistics wrong it can mislead you. If you do it right it can enlighten you. The same can be said for most things.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

Although a bit subjective to the OPs own opinions on each coin, this is a pretty good starting point if you want to learn about some of the different altcoins.

Sorry, I can't agree with this, and I have found several thousand XPM in total now. I think you are falling into the trap of seeing patterns where there really are none: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Similarly a gambler remembers theirs successes more than their failures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias), especially when they also perceive a 'lucky streak' or 'a round of wins': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-hand_fallacy

Our brain evolved to allow us to find and kill things really well, while not being killed by other things ourselves, to do well socially and to have lots of sex offspring. Interpreting temporal occurrences like found XPM blocks, and indeed any kind of mathematical concept was never really what the brain was evolved for. To get around these limitations of our own minds we created the field of statistics.

I suspect if you perform rigorous statistical testing you will see there is not really the phenomenon you describe.

Always love seeing pictures of 1l1l11ll1l's sexy rack.

Why not just use the 5v rail of any ATX PSU. It's going to have better stability (regulated voltage output) than any $1 chinese generic power source that comes with a hub.

If you are worried about something shorting and the PSU dumping tens or hundreds of amps into the wires / BE circuits, add a inline fuse holder with some fast blow fuse(s). They are like $1 each from any electronics store.