Whereas I'm being dead serious? 

Well, I mine .01 BTC in about 25 minutes, so I don't know why that would enter into it.

The pool had a stats glitch, the pool had solved three blocks, but for 10 hours the stats page thought we were still working on the first round. That gave the appearance of a 16 hour round. It was fixed and the payments went out without a hitch.


I get a different answer. The chance of solving a block depends on difficulty.

Here is the probability of an individual hash solving a block: http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability

The current probability of solving a block with an individual hash is: 0.0000000000000001489590023459044440534704278888966655358

The current probability of not solving a block with one hash is therefore :
( 1 - 0.00000000000000014895900234590444 ) = 0.99999999999999985104099765409556

Let's call that chance of not solving with an individual hash (a number very close to 1, or 100%) "Z".

The probability of not solving a block with two hashes is Z * Z, better written as Z^2. Still nearly 100%. We need more hashes.

The pool averaged about 600Ghash per second. That is 600,000,000,000 hashes per second x 60 seconds per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 16 hours in the "imaginary" round. Probably around 34,560,000,000,000,000 hashes. That's another preposterous number, so I'll call that "hashTotal"

A pool trys hashTotal hashes in 16 hours, so the chance of not finding a block in that time is Z ^ hashTotal.

.99999... ^ 3.456E+16 = .02156 = 2.16% chance of not solving a block in 16 hours. Not improbable. Bruteforcing the nonce statistics don't enter into it, since everybody is doing random work on multiple blocks. Actual calculation done in Excel, not Matlab, so feel free to verify the percentage for me.

In Guiminer's options menu is an option "start minimized". If you checked that at some point, then it will behave just as you describe.

When minimized, you have to either double-click the tray icon, or right-click the tray icon and choose "restore", to bring up the GUI. If you don't see it on the screen when it is restored, it is possible that the GUI's location has been moved off the screen. Guiminer doesn't remember the screen location where it was last opened, so to reset the screen location, you can simply right-click on the tray icon, close Guiminer, and restart it to get it back in the default screen location.

Some cards just run hot, something about the variance in the silicon chip manufacturing (just like how some overclock better than others). If you switch the cards and the hot card is still is the same card, it's probably a manufacturing difference.

You can put a fan in the case blowing straight down between the cards (or even better, a big fan in the side of your case blowing on the cards), and that will alleviate some of the heat transfer from the lower card, and also help with the restricted airflow that the upper card has.

Heat rises.

It is profitable, more so than mining in a pool, since even no-fee pools keep the transaction fees won. You just have to think very long term!

Bitcoin has a test network for checking software.

Run bitcoin or bitcoind with the -testnet flag to use the testnet (or put testnet=1 in the bitcoin.conf file).

The block chain for testnet is sometimes reset, so enjoy your fake money while you have it.

Edit: "BA-ZINGA!"

I know their fee is 3%. Of the block solve prize of 50BTC plus transaction fees, they pay miners 48.5BTC. I was pointing out deepbit's profits: if deepbit is 50% of the network hashing, and solves 50% of the blocks, and keeps 1.5BTC each + ~.1 transaction fees,  they are solving about 75 blocks a day, that's about 120BTC profit -> $1,800 a day that deepbit makes.

The point of this thread is that bitcoin is designed so that no one entity has enough computer power to be able forge a sequence of blocks on the bitcoin network. This is to protect against attacks by malevolent actors. It was not anticipated that the users themselves would pool up and give a single party control over the majority of hash power.

The chart at http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ had deepbit as more than 50% of the hash power seconds ago, but deepbit just disappeared and appears to be down.

The ship has pretty much sailed on mining, you can buy $500 worth of mining hardware and it might eventually get you 25 BTC, or even pay off the equipment. However, if you are speculating that the value of bitcoins will go up, you want the low priced bitcoins now, so why not just buy $500 worth of bitcoins?

Your bitcoins aren't lost, the bitcoin network knows they were sent to your address, and your current balance. However, you need your wallet in order to spend them, so if you loose the wallet file, effectively your coins are gone to you. Have a look here for help in finding the correct wallet file that you had previously been using. Make a secure backup of it (on USB keys, encrypted passworded 7-zip on a secure storage site, etc) so it will never get lost even if someone breaks in to your house and steals everything computer they can see.

You should not use the same wallet on two installations at the same time, the wallet contains a list of one-time-use private keys used for signing your payments when you send, and one bitcoin may generate private keys in a wallet the other wallet doesn't know about.

After you have discovered the wallet file, decide on the one place you will use it and put it in that bitcoin's user directory. If it seems that you are still missing payments or balance and you know the wallet is the correct one with the addresses payments were sent to, go to a console window (or on windows, open a cmd window and go to the C:\program files\bitcoin directory), and run bitcoin -rescan, which will look through all the transaction blocks to discover any transactions for your addresses that were missed.

Nobody is going to click on your referral spam. Go away now.

That's amazing, a pool owner gets 1.5% of all bitcoins minted...and people still keep signing up...

This pool really need to earn the banhammer on this forum, I'm getting really tired of the referral spam here.

If you had really wanted to guess right: (14 days / actual number of days,minutes,seconds) * old difficulty

Well, its at 67C degrees now (computer room is 85F after hot day), if that makes you happy, with 2300 accepted shares since I restarted the miner trying to make screenshots.

One CPU's usage is pegged at 100%? And yes, that Win7 machine only has one 5830.

24/7? See quote above.

This is the exact card referred to in this thread, the $129 Sapphire -2L variant. It has a different PCB than other 5830s, and has no overvoltage control from Trixx, so this is at the stock voltage.

I have other 5830s that max out at 1030 and 990, so this one is just a rare overclocker. The low temperature is with 200mm fan in the side of the case blowing straight down on the card, card fan at 100%, in a room that has outside air going through it.

Quit doubting, negative Nancy (24/7, I just had to restart the miner trying to get a screenshot, the system is unusable at aggression=12):

I first tested it on an XP miner, where the ATI installer did not offer any driver. The name of the driver directory in this driver package is W7_INF, so that should have given a clue that there is no XP driver. I don't know if it will install on Vista. You can always use the device manager and try to force the video card to use the driver in the W7_INF directory if the ATI installer doesn't install it for you.

I did test this driver release on Win7, and the CPU bug bit again - 100% CPU on one CPU core while running phoenix phatk. Going back to 11.6, and the CPU usage is back to 1%.