With sufficient CPU power I hash my forged block that transfers all the coins to my account. Then with sufficient CPU power I confirm it six times in a row. Your version of history where I don't have all the coins is now an unofficial fork of the blockchain that the clients delete.

rat

Jeez, you combo-breakers, now he will have to start another thread!

dedicated

conjob

Imagine you have a hat with 100 pieces of paper in it, numbered 1 to 100. You pull out a piece of paper every minute and look at what you got (then put it back and shake up the hat). If it is lower than 20, you win, and you would win on average every five minutes. If you started checking numbers faster than every minute, I could slow down how often you win by making the highest winning number 15 instead of 20.

Bitcoin mining is kind of like that, but instead of 1 to 100 numbers, there are 1 to 1.1579E+77 possible numbers that you get when you take the hash of some data, and Bitcoin awards you 50 BTC if you find a hash of the current transaction block that is 1.7248E+61 or smaller.

A SHA hash is a complex mathematical formula that original data is put through, and the formula creates a number on the other side, like a 'signature' of the original data. Other hashes you might be familiar with in computers are MD5 or CRC. Since hashing the same transaction block over and over would always give you the same SHA hash, your computer adds some more random data to the end of a transaction block (called a nonce), to change the hash that comes out. SHA is cryptographically secure, in that it is impossible to tell what the hash will be from the nonce you add, so there is no shortcut around just trying billions of different nonces and checking the hash that is generated.

The round was what you would call "unlucky", not difficult. The pool members had what might be the most unlucky round yet in a big pool, certainly the most unlucky at the current Bitcoin difficulty setting, submitting 10,048,350 difficulty 1 block hashes (called shares) before finding one that was also the full difficulty, 1,563,028. It took 6.4x as many shares compared to an average round to find a full difficulty hash of a Bitcoin block. That's about 43,157,000,000,000,000 SHA hashes computed.

What are the numbers and formula you are using here? Certainly claiming the probability is over 100% is math fail, but the correct answer for the probability is not this either. If you want to let Google do the math for you, it is a

100 * ((1 - 0.0000000000000001489590023459044440534704278888966655358)^(560 * 1 000 000 000 * 60 * 60 * 20)) = 1.13740682

probability of not solving a round until 20 hours, at 560Ghash/s. (that's 1.137%)  With this probability, it is certainly reasonable to have one in the total 266 rounds done by the pool since its start be this length. Difficult difficulty is difficult.

You haven't applied that much critical thought here. Just a handful of antivirus programs identify the ufasoft miner, and they identify by name because of its potential of being installed without user's knowledge. The source code is available at the author's site, you can download it right here. You can inspect the source code for virus-like behavior, and if you build it in the same development environment as the author, you will likely get similar virus warnings on the exe.

All mining software that is widely used is open source and hosted at sites like github, where source changes are transparent. The only people that are going to be infected are the greedy that fall for "new hacked miner triples your winnings" trojans.

This is antivirus software doing bad stuff like it normally does. With names assigned to it like "Win32/Spy.CoinBit.E", and "PUA.Tool.Ufasoft.BitCoinMiner" the antivirus companies have specifically added guiminer to their antivirus software list. PUA = Potentially Unwanted Application, because Bitcoin mining software can be covertly installed on someone's computer, and you would want to be alerted if you didn't know it was there (but certainly not to have it auto-deleted, I've got lots of stuff AV software wants to delete off my computer, but these programs work just as intended and are not viruses or trojans)

Bitcoins can never be destroyed, the blockchain knows they are yours and will not forget. Like an omniscient overlord, the bitcoin network will be passing around blocks containing records of your bitcoin earnings long after you are dead. You can only choose to spend them or not. Your wallet only allows you to send them to someone else. They will be looming over you like a spectre of guilt, robbing you of your life essence, until you are destitute from your new obsession - sleeping in a cardboard box outside the loading bay of your former employer, hoping that you can get a tossed out hard drive to recover a wallet from, but alas, you will find no relief from your self-inflicted burden.

People with a lot of experience find it challenging. It's a new frontier, where you don't read the documentation, you write the documentation. Even if you get the basic pool software pushpool set up, you have to write your own front end web code to interface with a database and manage payments and users accounts, and have the technical abilities to fix database corruption and solve network issues as they come up, basically the skills to work at a datacenter. Then you need to quickly attract users so that the pool doesn't linger with only 20 users barely solving any blocks.

BTW, I want to build my own space shuttle, but have no experience in aerospace engineering. How would I do this?

You don't want or need crossfire for mining. What you do want is a monitor (or a fake monitor plug) hooked up to each card when the computer boots. That should do it. The Catalyst 11.7 early release drivers for Win7 are supposed to not need a monitor connected to each card for OpenCL to work.

That's some pretty fast hashing there!

I sent off the results of my log file analysis to the pool admin, that for around ~5-6 seconds after I get the LP new block push, the pool rejects shares that should be valid for the new block. Some people, however, start getting the rejects a second or two before they get the LP, like the server already knows the old share is stale but hasn't given that particular user LP push notification of the new block yet. It's seems to be a maximum of around ten seconds of rejects out of a ten minute block.

It seems like two factors are at play: first, it seems to take a few seconds for pushpoold/bitcoind to send out new block notification to every single user before it resumes accepting submitted shares. Second, miner software seems to be quickly making new RPC/TCP connections to the pool when they don't get an immediate response, and then sending these unexpected shares to the new connection gets a reject. I know they have a top-notch team looking at this - they probably made more improvements to pool software in general in the last month than other pool admins combined - before bitcoins.lc, the reject rate at pools was closer to 6% and they've already got it down to <2%, with patches they've shared with others.

I wonder if he's got a dual gpu fake screen going, and the miner likes to go the second screen without a monitor plugged into it...

So tired of all these spammers, "look I just found a new pool, click here", which is exactly what the pool owner wants, free spam. The more you spam, the more you make, and why would you be a dummy and click there, when you can go start your own team and try to find more people to spam to click here and pay you! I've already blocked a dozen of their banners, now I'm about ready to do some throat punching.

The only people saying anything positive about this pool are ones that have referral links in their signature and reply to each others threads.

If difficulty can be constant for a while, miners won't see exponentially diminishing returns looming on the horizon, and may gain confidence in investing in hardware equity that won't turn a profit for three months. I see the difficulty growth barely on the positive side in the next two cycles, with about 50% profit-taking, 40% holding, and 10% reinvestment after, and new mining stronger in October when energy costs are free instead of double (heating your home in winter instead of making your air conditioning run in summer).

Blocks 133056 -> 135072: 12 days 8.8 hours

New difficulty-equivalent hashrate from first 48 hours of this round: 1581572 -> 1563027, -1.2%

Current trading price: $14.25

Buy energy hit stiff sell order resistance at $16, and stagnating at that price was enough to trigger some more cashout. I don't see publicity driving more get-rich-quick money in, as markets have settled in since gox 2.0 and there is not much to report. Mining with new hardware is a break-even proposition. We are approaching the 'viable currency' phase of bitcoin's life.