So it should happen roughly 10 times every difficulty period, not too unlikely.

I wonder how often this occurs though


EDIT: Fairly often I guess


Silly timestamps.

The entertaining story of the guy who sold 10,000 BTC for a pizza in 2009. Imagine how silly that must feel today

Maybe he thinks that Dual GPU solutions function the same as crossfiring two single cards.

That's kind of a nightmare scenario that would require bitcoin to grow a lot larger and more stable than it is now. The current total valuation of bitcoin is something like $100M USD? And mining today is worth $17M USD / yr? People already speculate that > $17M will be spent on ASIC hardware in the first year alone, by regular ol' joe-consumer. And to knock out those with the sunk cost (if just that 17M sticks around), requires maybe 10x more investment than that due to high efficiency. For manufacturers to potentially load out 17M for hardware, coloc, staff, to get 8.5M / yr, seems unlikely, especially given the wide swings in valuation of bitcoin (could be worth $100, could be worth $1 2 years from now, and you might be coming up on the halving soonish).

In the long-run, years down the road, if bitcoin were looking at Billions of USD for market cap, and coins value was much higher, perhaps TX fees playing a larger role as well, you could see serious large scale business push out the casuals, certainly. I suppose part of it depends on the profit-margins for these machines (cost vs selling point), demand, and whatnot as well.

Seems cool (ha ha pun!), lots of limitations though, can only be placed horizontally, and in immobile situations (heaven help you if your 2500rpm spinning heatsink is tilted). Will be interesting to see what kind of casing they come up with as well, as again, unlike many traditional fans, touchy = baddy.

The piezo fan I like, though I don't think that it's a given that it will be quieter, as you are creating a jet stream, and depending on your application this will require some sort of jiggery-pokery, as mentioned in video. I'm also curious if there are any problems with air re-circulation in ultra-thin, cramped-quarters applications (say the inside of a phone or tablet for example), especially as these devices trend higher in power consumption.

Oh lord, now I have to dig through a centralized BFL thread for updates? Hurray...

Random BFL related fact

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/519-10-dec-2012-bfl-asic-update-13.html#post7983

Bury it my pretties. Bury it so deep no one will ever see it again.

That link returns: 3405980.70883142 for me.

Uhm... hmm... mine lately seems to be dead sadly. I can't even boot anymore (no video), so might be a different issue. I got a rainbow frozen output with the OPs image though, so maybe there is something to this link you've posted. Most disappointing though regardless.

I don't think it's a scam, I think it's the funniest joke to come out in a long time

This thread changed from making me chuckle to making me hungry in like .5 seconds flat.

Agreed, I'm not invested enough to sift through all the forums and redundant posts of this and rebuke to that. So I appreciate a thread that will track this stuff for me.

The next thing I'd kind of like to see, just for sociological purposes, would be a thread tracking the general sentiment of customers/detractors throughout. For example:

July -- Hooray we gonna get ASICs! // ASICs cant be real!
August -- Cant wait for those ASICs! // You're not gonna get them, scam!
September -- OMG ASICs almost here! // I bet you that you won't get them!
October -- ASICs delayed? That's ok, its gonna be awesome! // Ha told you suckers!
November -- Another ASIC delay? Hmm... well still hoping for the best // Look at those delays! Chumps!
December -- Another delay, but I still have faith // Haw haw scammity scam scam scam!
Jan -- ?? // ??

source: first post of the linked thread.

Google nuclear boyscout before you try to build a reactor for your rigs.

Like a good girlfriend

I had an issue similar to that, without running cgminer, so I'd be interested if you figured something out about it. I would come back and Pi would have rebooted for no reason that I could. Lately it has begun freezing completely. I'm hoping it is a software issue and not a hardware issue.

Though I see what you are saying, I disagree. But first I will say that I expect your situation doesn't apply to what was being suggested by the OP (they can correct me if I'm wrong). Taking fiat, exchanging to coin, then purchasing an ASIC is basically buying the ASIC in fiat, you simply used bitcoin as an electronic exchange medium, the same as if you used a credit card. If someone has already gained bitcoin, either through mining, or trading, and has been floating the coins around, for whatever purposes, and used those coins to secure an ASIC order, that is more akin to use as a currency (as you hold dollars in your wallet, until it is time to use them, rather than holding Gold doubloons).

Now on to the separate idea. One of the primary motivations behind investment is the idea (fact?) that your fiat tomorrow will be worth less than it is today. To push fiat out the door in the form of investment, purchase, whatever, is supremely logical, as you will not see such a great return ever again. If you can see potential for your money to be worth more in the future, it only makes sense to save it.

Whether you invest in an Ouya, a house, a prostitute, you are secure in the fact that you made a wise decision buying now rather than later. Bitcoin, clearly not so much, be it an investment, or as currency, the valuation fluctuates wildly such that it is difficulty to know what the wisest course of action is. So in this radically different situation, placing coin down on something now, with the expectation of return later, is not wise as it is with fiat investment. You either need to be using it as you said, as an investment (so in this case it was a poor investment), or as a currency (whereby you receive product for your purchase). As to whose fault it is, I don't know that I can say it is BFLs fault, aside from missed target dates.

The part that I agree with however, is that you *did* make an investment, and a poor one, which has cost you, had you plunked down bitcoin on a promise.

There was a huge spike in hashrate at the beginning of the week, followed by a huge drop later, both rectifying towards the norm.

Difficulty is calculated roughly as expected_time/actual_time, so if it averages out to having taken the same amount of time, difficulty will remain roughly the same.

That board looks... delicious.

Well I can't really say what recommendation I would have for GPUs, as your requirements are somewhat contradictory. Cheap GPUs will typically suck for both gaming and mining, more expensive GPUs will only pay back like 1/20th their cost before ASICs are likely to arrive.

But, here we go anyway, 7970s are apparently very efficient miners, and great gamers, however they are quite expensive, on the order of $300 USED, and $400+ new. You certainly wouldn't want 6 of them.

For cheapness in mining and gaming, I would say since you already have a 5870, why not go for more or a 5970?  They're about $110 plus or minus 20 depending on seller, and about as efficient as you're going to get outside of the 7xxx series. They're still beast for gaming too, which is crazy since they're like 4+ years old at this point.

My recommendation would be to avoid creating a GPU mining machine of any kind, but if you really want to for fun and giggles, the above is my recommendation.

It is not legitimate, as there is a testnet, and they also promised that would not do such a thing. To do so would not be surprising, but it would be unethical at this point.

Variance or no variance, for whatever reason the halving of blocks has provided for the largest short-term swing in estimated hashrate calculated by blockrate in the past year. Obviously it will be weeks before the ramifications sort themselves out though.