I would also like to know if this is something that is cross platform. Please update.

First and foremost, I cannot predict the future.

But from the looks of things, I would guess that we will not have too many more 10% increases and that this "new paradigm" of ever growing difficultly will not be sustainable. I would suspect that we might even have a difficulty decrease in the near future (2 - 3 months).

The costs of getting into the 3m difficulty range are in the 10s of millions of dollars and do not take into account the net effect of driving out smaller miners (less than 5Gh).

This assumes no new discoveries / technologies that have any great impact on mining.

Again, I cannot predict the future and have been known to be wrong before.

Do any of these projections take into account the capital outlays needed to create the extra Th/s of computing power and the effects on future difficulty increases? How long do you believe that 10% increases are sustainable?

Right now, we are hovering around 12.5Th/s. To increase this 10% would mean that 1.25Th/s of new computing power would need to come online over the 10-14 day period. That is over 4,150 5830 video cards assuming 300Mh/s per card. That is $600k (for the most cost effective video card) in video cards alone not to mention other outlays of capital. If miners are buying 6850s, 6870s, 6950s or 6970s, the net dollar amounts move much higher.

Also, if we have a 10% difficultly increase for this round, to get to another 10% increase would mean another 1.375Th/s would need to come online over the next 14 day period.

Unless there is a new technology to drive more Gh/s per $$, I would assume that this will not be a sustainable trend and that we will eventually see a tapering off of difficulty increases.

Also, with more difficulty means that smaller players will be moved from being profitable to unprofitable which will have a net decrease of the total hashing power of the network.

Thoughts?

Maybe i missed this earlier in the thread, but how is the motherboard mounted to the case. Are you using a prebuilt MB tray?

I would be interested in a case like the original (low in height) for 2 PSU, 1 MB and 6 double wide GPU.

I would be interested in a bulk buy after buying one for testing purposes.

Would you mind posting your sketup file?

Do you have a link to buy a blower fan like that?

I am running 5gh/s with ars bitcoin and am within 5% of what the calculators estimate I should be making in a 24 hour period. 2% accounts for stales (my stale rate on ars is 1.0773%, the lowest I have had of any pool I have tried) and my donations to the pool. The other 2% can be attributed to the variance in the work you do for each share. Some shares require more work than others.

Ars bitcoin is a 0 fee pool unless you choose to donate. I believe the deepbit has a 7% fee built into their PPS which is why payouts would be lower over time.

I am not trying to start a flame war, just want to put the facts about my operations in the hopes of helping others. 

In my limited experience, I have made the most BTC per day with http://arsbitcoin.com. Their PPS system is fair and cannot be gamed with pool hopping. They also have a large BTC buffer now which will be helpful for unlucky times.

It will be neither as good nor as bad as we think. There will be a great deal more turmoil with the currency, but, with that said, I think bitcoin is robust enough to withstand these future situations. As for price predictions, until we break the downside trend currently in place on mtgox, the price will stay around $15 with market players still able to create large swings in the price. Once we break out of the downside trend, I would think we have some more headroom to the upside, but I cannot predict the future. 

I would just make sure that you are able to run multiple cores for the cpu. With the current kernel implementations, your cpu will run at 100% with the single core semprons. This is an issue with OpenCL that AMD still needs to address.

GPU Mining with a 5850 oc'd to 360 mh/s and 9 HD6950s running at 330 mh/s for about 3.3 gh/s right now. I have 6 more 6950's waiting to come online and am also waiting for some more fans to start overclocking the 6950s to at least 390 mh/s each. I hope to have close to 6 gh/s by the end of the weekend.

I am currently mining at btc guild with 3 gh/s and getting a stale rate of about 2.3%. If I mine with deepbit, will my stale shares be less?