Personally I think DMG is a dead end... not good for miners but ok for the pool.

Why don't you simply use eligius' payout schema so the pool can never go broke? It's at least fair and easy to understand. My primary issue with most payment schemes are that they punish users when they have punish miners who have downtime --- more than they reward miners who don't have downtime. Which is why I only mine on pure pps or prop pools. Although I would make an exception for elegius... except I want to be able to register a username and have more stats than having to search for a payment address.

If you were to use that with the existing "lock in payment addresses" for each worker/user that would be a winner.

So I happened to pickup a couple of the gigabyte cards - imo the custom cooling in junky. The cards vent heat in all directions and in addition to that the back side of these boards become quite hot. No chance of running these on board without it overheating whatever's behind it.

IMO the ref. design with the canister is much better since it vents out the back of the case.
HIS-iceQ or Sapphire Vapor-X are the best options imo.

personally, I recalculate it periodically.

I choose to evaluate my operation as a whole. Total cost to run relative to earnings at btc/usd rate. I include a repayment plan for any hardware i've purchased. Often this amounts to vastly reduced earnings in a given time period, since I'm inclined to think of the $700 profit as 'paying off' the last 2 graphics cards I bought and only making 100 bucks that week.

Me too.

Personally, I'm just hoping that the single actually start shipping around the time the jallys do... because it's starting to feel like ordering larger units was a mistake.

Yes Stratum is pooched for me also - attempting to submit a share disconnects from the pool.

Thanks for all your hard work... Decided to give it one more try. Pools back up for me & login is nearly instant.

Keep this up and you'll be getting even more of my gh/s rigs as they come on line this week.

FTFY & L2MacroEconomics.

 It's an interesting idea... but frankly... why bother.

Why not just use something along the lines of Eligius payout schema so the pool can never go broke. . .

And pools dead for me again.

It was good for almost a week before this.

And I still can't login.

Guess I'm done.

Agreed. I don't know very many serious miners (10s or 100s of gh/s of mining hardware) who'd operate at a loss for very long...

That being said, I'm still adding GPUs to my fill slots on my rigs. the 7950s I'm buying are still profitable at anything over 12.50 But I'm not actually selling any btc currently. I pretty much sold all my reserves when it hit 240, so the hardware I'm adding and the electric costs are covered until the end the end of the year. Now I'll just forget about the market and take another look in december. My biggest decision is how much of the left over fiat from my profit taking pre-correction should be used to purchase btc at these lower prices.

I guess that's just the difference in perception between us. Having been involved in a myriad of products from the initial design all they way to finished product... I can tell you from personal experience that having chips come out drawing more power or generating more heat than expected isn't the end of the production cycle. Sure it can change the game. But you don't just junk the entire design and do something else.

Once upon a time intel was developing Silverthorne - it was designed to an x86 processor for cellphones. They were trying to compete with motorola and mitsubishi. The tech worked, but needed more power and generated way more heat than expected. This tech didn't just dry up and go away... The changed the sales model, rebranded it under centrino as "Atom" and pushed it for handheld devices like tables and netbooks. This lead directly to the explosion of tablets as a consumer product. I don't believe there's a single cell phone that has an atom in it... but there are micro computers (in use as terminals and budget pcs) and hundreds types of tablets and 'netbooks' (micro laptops) that use them.

BFL is on the right track - redesign the board to supply the power needed while keeping temps stable, change the sales specs and ship the coffee warmer to consume the old tech board that would have been singles. Personally I think the very best move they could make would be devolping something where the top of it was a massive heatsink. and making it modular, to be plugged into the rack assembly they would sell. I'm thinking 4u rack that takes 3 mini-single modules. maybe just 4 chips per device.

I think the biggest hurdle for them is giving up the tiny size they had from FPGA days, get over it, go a bit bigger so you can cool the thing effectively... etc. Give me a metal packaged chip (or 4) that on a board that has AM3 holes for mounting a cpu heatsink and fan on top of it... that would make me very happy. Design the entire thing with a stacked heatsink that has a pair of 120mm fans on each side... design them so they could be assembled into a wall via interlocks on the sides, top and bottom of the case... one side air intake and other side of the wall being the exhaust... have the thing blow through.

poppycock.

Just keep repeating it to yourself over and over until you believe it.

Miners are the primary suppliers of bitcoins for sale at sane prices. The vast majority of miners sell some large percentage of mined coins to cover electric and hardware costs. Whatever's left they speculate with...

The degree of speculation of any subset of miners is up for debate, it can be as simple as holding until the price reaches some point or as complicated as day trading.

~

Speculators probably actually control more bitcoin that miners... but they generally aren't placing market orders like most miners are.

Well that and based on the accounts of the manufacturing equipment they've got... they should be able to produce hundreds of units a day once they have a production model nailed down.

I believe the game has changed however... specifically - with the old power/hash numbers I figured that the jalapeno was going to be the dog of the line... and now it looks like that might the best seller, and people make end up purchasing hundreds of them rather than dealing with the larger models. That could be really good for bfl and extremely annoying for farm owners. But probably good for bitcoin in general.

My numbers say... 150 mil... but if a new player jumps into the ring it could be double that.

OP, I think you've got it pretty much right on... the company is legit, but completely inexperienced in actually delivering this type of product.

When I ordered my fpgas from BFL I was told it would be 2 months to have them delivered... they arrived 3 weeks early. When I placed my pre-orders for upgrades... I was told "expect a shipping date before march 2013"

From my perspective, I can call them anytime I want and have someone speak to me. I could if I wanted to request and get a refund... and from my perspective they're 14 days behind on shipping. Sure I was excited when they mentioned a ship day in october... but my plans were all done based on what the sales rep told me at the time of the order. So yes, I'm slightly annoyed that avalon shipped first, but I'm honestly expecting BFL to start delivering product any day now.

Even if the company is struggling on the tech side of things, the fact that they've adjusted numbers on hash rate, price and power consumption indicates to me that they're in the process of solving these issues. Expect a product soon. Anyone who says that "BFL Lied" is basing that off a misguided sense of entitlement rather than facts. Things happen when bringing a product to market, I sure some things could have been explained in a more timely manner... but so far they've had good enough reasons for the delays. Switching the packaging for example is a multi month delay at least, usually around 6 months in my experience.

I believe they'll get it sorted and a product shipped soon.

Well the miner disconnect issue does seem to be fixed... Too bad I can't seem to view the account page to see how things are going...

So here's the thing - you're going to have to use verified accounts at some point, and it's going to cost you some tax at some point.

Personally I'm verified at mtgox and cavirtex.

Whenever I get into the 8000 a month range just use the other. Depending on your immigration status, various laws affect you.

I do not, for example have to report income earned in another country while I'm a US resident. So I use the cavirtex first and wire into a royal bank account. Anything that goes into my US accounts I have to pay income tax on.

A couple ideas that help -

cultivate local buyers, some locals coming to you with cash to buy btc so they can go buy whatever it is on silkroad. Legally you'd still have to pay taxes on cash sales... but hey what you evade is your own business.

Buy some other store of value for btc - gold and/or silver come to mind, sure you'll get completely hosed on the markup but it's pretty much anon.


Eventually, if you can sustain your income level, you're going to have to incorporate yourself as a business - deduct hardware, maintenance, electricity & network services, pay yourself a wage you can handle paying income tax on... and let the business own all the hardware. You can 'cost of doing business' almost anything in this scenario including your own healthcare, insurance etc... and it's easy enough to grow it as your income increases... simply add some additional employees - who's job it is to have additional exchange accounts... etc. This amounts to going completely legit - and how much profit taking you can do is entirely dependent on you paying the associated tax costs and wages and whatnot (according to your local law).

The massive plus here, is that you'll have complete control over how much your business actually makes - and you always have the option of simply accumulating bitcoin that you don't cash out.

I think the real breaking point for solo mining is somewhere above 1% of the total network. If you're getting close to that probably best to go solo.

In real terms, if you could scrape up a terahash you ought to find between 2 and 3 blocks per day. Which should be plenty for anyone.

ftfy.

It doesn't matter what unit of denomination you keep your books in. The real judge of value is "what can I buy with it" -

at the time you bought your avalon with btc... you could have instead bought 1000 USD or 242 gallon of petrol. This is a valuation of what you spent to purchase the goods. It is incidental that what you chose to buy has the function of generating bitcoins for you. This is called income.

The key is use the same method of valuation for your income as you have for your expenditure.

So what if bitcoins increase in value and have a higher price on your exchange... as long as you can spend some of those bitcoins and buy you 1000 usd or 242 gallons of petrol... as long as you do spend the income.... you've made 100% ROI on your investment.

You're confusing speculation and capital gains with income and expenditure.

The same that will eventually happen if they do... they'll vanish with whatever profit they were able to scam.