The issue being, we're dealing with highly technical products (Linux, Bitcoins, Video recording technology). Rather than in the product itself, some blame lies in the developers.

Developers of those technologies are usually very skilled in their own area of work, some perhaps nearing genius rather than being 'ordinary workers' but the communities are generally (note: not always) socially inept. You could compare them to a collective mind of autists or aspergers.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is known to continuously bring up this issue on the Linux mailing list because he gets annoyed by completely introverted and shut-in people who pay zero attention and regularly ignore the common usability of the code they write, rather only focusing on the 'function' which even an experienced programmer might have a hard time understanding.

The more user-friendly and social you make your technical product the more users and revenue it's going to attract. That's a simple fact and you can see it in every success story. Companies like Apple and Microsoft go to painstaking lengths to make their technical products as accessible to the typical non-geek as possible.

At the other end of the spectrum you have geeks who are good at programming and make phenomenal products but are irritated by the incompetence of the end user (typical Joe or Jane average), completely unable to grasp the fact 99.99% of the population has no idea what the hell they are trying to explain in highly technical terms.

People don't want command line interfaces. People don't care about kernels or which type of cryptography provides the highest security. People don't want to go through 5 hoops just to buy something online.
This mystical "people" is the average person on the streets. He or she wants something that will improve their lives or entertain them with the least possible effort.

It's no joke. I'll pay good money for post-2009 (revaluation) North Korean bills, esp. the ones with Kim-Il-Sung's picture on them.
Don't care how they were smuggled out or obtained, will accept even blood stained ones as long as they're genuine
So far I only found a few on Tor & those were snatched in an instant by somebody else

The old ones before 2009 are worthless except as souvenirs because they were embezzled in full lots from the central bank by employees and diplomats & sold overseas for pennies on the ₩ after revaluation (they were supposed to be burned)
no longer having fiat or real collector value and basically just being colorful toilet paper like the trillion dollar bills in Zimbabwe

I'm getting between 2-4% lately (1 week timeframe), which is a bit worrying.
Sometimes the 15-min window shows even up to 7% of current submitted shares being stale.

Doesn't happen at a few other pools so it's not a hardware issue.

5770 is faster than a 6770 despite the naming. The old 5xxx series architecture is more efficient for GPGPU tasks.
A 5770 oc'ed will usually do 10-20mhash more at the same frequency compared to a 6770

Besides, 5770's these days run for about $79 to $99 not $130, which makes it a bargain if you can find one, easily one of the best $/mhash ratio
(at best, $70-80 dollars for 200mhash at 960mhz)

Newegg displays absurd prices for products often out of stock or not produced anymore

Anyways, out of those options you listed, the 6770's are most cost-efficient

lol. I was thinking the exact same things.

At worst a driver could get corrupted as the entire system freezes when you downclock the memory too much. The card can't die from any amount of downclocking, hell, even excessive undervolting will just freeze the system.

Screen artifacting after changing clock frequencies doesn't indicate bricked memory or a broken card, that happens every time when components are run at specifications not suited for operation, which means you have to tweak them

& A DVD drive can't be dead on arrival if you have been using it...

You can get one for free if you had an open trade when the site went down.

Besides, it's not "noise", it's unbreakable unless someone gets physical access to your key

Silkroad is not the only onion site selling drugs.
English speaking countries are not the only countries selling and buying drugs.

There are tons of hidden services not listed in any directory with fast user interfaces and loads of users.
There are tons of sites on freenet and i2P selling drugs, weapons, etc.

Just a few hints. (I'm not a druggie, merely saying what's happening)

Well.. Take gold for example. Assuming you don't own nor have previously owned gold bullion, you are speculating the price will not hold up and will crash at any time.

Your opportunity cost is a few hundred % over the years.

If you believed it's a sound investment & had the courage to invest in it, you would speculate by buying gold.
Similarly, by not buying relatively cheap BTC at $13 per piece, you are speculating it's overpriced and not worth spending your money on as an investment.

Opportunity cost of not buying BTC at current rates is unknown, but previous people who had the chance to buy at $0.2, $0.5 per coin etc.. Were obviously speculating there would be a bear market & potentially lost tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The amount halves after 230,000 blocks have been generated.

DDoS'ing the server just because they 'get pissed' means they are juveniles and unprofessional miners. Which in turn means they will eventually run out of proxies and keep getting blacklisted & wont be able to mine anymore.

There is no financial incentive in bringing down a pool for 'revenge', only personal petty motives

I stand corrected, didn't know you had the method live already. Only read a while back that you would be adding it 'soon'.

Of course, any rational person (with enough trust in your BTC reserves) will be mining PPS at your pool instead of deepbit

It does, pool hoppers. Or maybe 'deter' is a better word. Nobody has an incentive to jump onto pools like mineco.in at any 'certain' time to gain a statistical advantage.


Fair enough, I'll be first to admit I would run if the balance went too much in the red. If enough people did this the SMPPS pool would die from a lack of miners and thus blocks towards paying off the 'debt'.

Electromigration will degrade & kill chips that are run at too high voltages and frequencies for extended periods of time. Happens to CPUs as well. Temperature is not necessarily relevant (but can accelerate the EM process)

You were running an approx. 20% OC on the 5970 cores, on the verge of long term stability (I wouldn't, because it's a quite expensive card)

Note that you would earn much more in the long term by running GPUs at moderate OC's (5-10%) than running them at 20-40% OC and killing the chips in a few months, having to buy new cards

Do you have a link? MtRed would become one of the most popular pools if that were true.
Nobody can compete with 0% PPS.


I've mined at BTCguild for ages, it's just another proportional pool which has all the problems of pool hopping. The 0% fee is irrelevant because of the flawed distribution model of rewards.

PPS means you get paid for every single share you submit (fixed amount). Other pools have modified PPS schemes that are not the same thing (SMPPS, PPLNS)
No pool hopping penalties, 24/7 miner rewards, or incentive to jump in during the beginning of rounds, just getting paid for what you contribute. Pure PPS is effectively 0 variance over any time period.

The problem being that you need quite a lot of BTC in buffer to pull it off, in case of bad luck streaks and very long rounds.
Deepbit is the only pool which offers pure PPS rewards, at a hefty fee (10%)

$1.2k is a small lesson, you could be losing hundreds of thousands later when purchasing a home, etc.

Some people never learn, or don't even know PP can be charged back months after the transaction no matter how many public forum posts you made or what comments you used in the PP message field

you just have to let them experience 'trial by error'

Or take in consideration the fact that nobody who joined the forum 5 days ago is going to trust a random person with $1200 dollars & it's a shill of the seller to create 'confidence' for future scams

Yes, the PPLNS payment method rewards 24/7 miners and punishes people who disconnect during a round (accidental, or pool hopping, it doesn't know or care)

Slush has something similar, a proprietary scoring system.
The longer a round gets the more valuable new shares become, which solves the pool hopping problem & gives nobody an incentive to hop on slush in hopes of exploiting early blocks.

PPLNS is also foolproof and can be adapted by anyone because you don't need a massive balance of bitcoins for a 'rainy day' (pure PPS) or even a medium sized buffer (shared maximum PPS).
I think it will become a success among all pools in the future, or people will simply join pools with PPLNS after seeing decreased avg. earnings in the long run mining in proportional pools infested by hoppers

Of course pure PPS is 'ideal' for both the 2-hour casual miner and the 24/7 'pro' but since only the biggest pools with huge earnings like deepbit can offer it, it's not a realistic option.
Even they take a 10% fee because you gain zero variance in return. That's steep for big miners, and a lot of lost cash for 'certainty'.

Running 6990's at 340mhash/s per core makes no financial sense. You are paying $800-$1000 to achieve something two Sapphire 5850's will do for 250 dollars with much less external cooling (if any) needed. The initial investment takes 4 times as long to pay off

Even the saved extra PCI-e space doesn't justify it.

There is zero reason to mine bitcoins on 6990 cards unless you are aiming to get at least equal performance to two 6970's (400-430mhash/s per core)

Sounds like you have Powertune enabled on one of the cores, hampering it's performance.

Go to overdrive & set the power slider to 20 to disable PT.

Also, test vanilla (or 3% modded) POCLBM with arguments -v -w128, you should be getting minimum 400mhash/s on both cores.

If anyone wants to believe you can OC to over 1ghz from 725mhz with stock voltage be my guest

Why not post your record along with screenshot proof to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
& beat the next miner who had to raise voltage to 1.250V just to sustain frequencies beyond 1ghz for 420mhash,

and that's a premium chip which OC's better than 99% of 5850's out there

I'd say this is a pretty good achievement. They're a medium to big sized player in the filehosting market.

Persuade filesonic, filefactory, megaupload/rapidshare to accept BTC and you will start seeing mass adaption of bitcoins just for this one market

The internet is full of people who want to spend pocket change for download credits but have no means to do so (PayPal doesn't let them, no credit card, etc)