What makes it a ponzi scheme right now, IMO, is the fact that Bitcoins are only a store of value.  That's all.  They're something that a few people agree have some worth.  Some will argue that mining is the "good/service" aspect of it - analogous to those stocks that keep getting mentioned.  That's incorrect.  There's a difference in Bitcoins and stocks.  Publicly traded companies MUST demonstrate utility, or a likelihood thereof, in order to get bought.  Bitcoins do not.  Bitcoins at this point are just an idea.  An idea with much potential, but an idea none the less.  I got into Bitcoins heavily when I saw the article on MoneyLaundering.com - that was my "buy" signal.  Some day it might have utility to criminals, but right now, who could a drug dealer find to move $50MM USD of currency across a border, in an end-to-end cash to cash exchange with Bitcoins as the conduit?  If such an exchange exists, they certainly don't make themselves known.  So until it has at least a modicum of utility, beyond storing value, it's nothing more than a house of cards.  And again, I'm hoping the utility aspect will improve, because the ideas are strong.

You clearly missed the part where I stated the _ideas_ are revolutionary.  I was referring to the design from a technical and logical standpoint.

Cablesaurus.com (the guy who sells the modded PCI-E ribbon cables with molex power connectors) did have a custom mining case on his site yesterday, capable of holding 5 GPUs up and off of the mobo for better cooling.  However as of this morning it's not there anymore.  It was listed for $220 (plus shipping) and would require a $25 cantlievered rack shelf or similar in order to rackmount it.

Meanwhile I've developed the functional equivalent in a rack-mount form factor, capable of holding 5 GPUs and two PSUs (or one) which I can sell for $120 out the door, plus shipping.  Lead-time would take about a week from this Tuesday, as I've got to buy another drill press and pull my tap/die set out of storage to finish these off.  Alternatively I could sell you plans and a parts list for about half of that, but it'd get you started sooner.  Either way you'd need riser ribbons in order to use it.  PM me if interested.

I looked at the viability of doing something similar, using 48 volt telecom rectifiers as a PSU (but flipping around the ground reference, because they're all negative voltage).  They deliver substantial current on the cheap (200a at 48v, so 800a at 12v if you run them through a bunch of big ass batteries).  But at the end of the day you will have spent 1k on batteries and regulators, plus cabling, plus capacitors and diodes, yada yada yada.  By the time it's all over, you'll end up with 1.5k worth of crap, and a whole bunch of work, just to power up your "30" video cards, with a single point of failure, and a bunch of electronics that are hard to understand and hard to work on.  I looked at other options, like inexpensive 12 volt battery chargers, no dice.. they're too expensive.  The cheapest option you have is the $1000 worth of PSUs.

By the way, I read your other thread about the smoked components.. I've got a pretty good idea of what happened and why, based on a critical omission on your part while describing your setup.  Of course I'm going to be a troll and not reveal what it is, both because it's already been asked/answered on the forum at least once that I'm aware of, and because I'm not going to help anyone devalue my investment in mining any further by making it any cheaper for you, or anyone else, to do business.  Knowledge is power, and when you don't have it, sometimes you have to pay for someone else's, i.e. in the form of those expensive PSUs.  That smoke should make you less bullish on playing with fire, not more.


He seems pretty determined to do so, doesn't he?

The correlation is that newcomers buy up coins, price goes up, kiddies run out and buy as much hardware as they can.  Since Bitcoin has no utility yet (except for criminals or people who want to make micropayments without fees), it's essentially nothing more than a glorified ponzi scheme - the machine needs new entrants (investors) to keep the scheme running, otherwise it fizzles out and dies.  Though I do hope it becomes much more than that, because the ideas behind it are revolutionary.

You're not listening.  Difficulty will soon increase.  That's a guarantee at this point.  The forex value of Bitcoins, in US dollars, is not guaranteed.  They could go to $0 in 19 days, 7 hours.  Don't ever assume the forex will keep pace with difficulty.

For the benefit of others, and because it's unclear whether a long polling problem still exists with the proxy code, would you care to share the nature of your problem and the solution?

For long polling to work correctly through the proxy, you'd need (at minimum) to have a long execution time in php.ini.  Something like this:


That assumes it would take 2 hours (probably a maximum of maximums) to find a block, so I added an extra 5 minutes for additional padding.  In actuality I've never seen it take more than 40 or 50 minutes to find a block though, so 7500 should be perfectly fine.  Note that modifying php.ini is a global setting, so you might be able to/might want to modify this only for the virtualhost that runs your proxy, depending on your specific OS and apache/php implementation.  Don't forget to restart httpd to make the setting take effect.

Also there might be other settings that need to be modified, as it's really not normal to have an http connection open for 2 hours.  But this one is the most obvious.

Sweet!  I just dropped a BTC address in my signature, fire at will

Regarding dummy connectors, they're not needed on Linux since X initializes all of the adapters automagically, regardless of whether it thinks there is a monitor connected, or not.  When you add the additional video cards, you'll just need to reinitialize your xwindows config like this:


I still highly recommend pooled mining though.. you'll be able to realize instantaneous benefits (in received bitcoins from the pool) in proportion to the amount of computing power you contribute to the pool, ratioed to the total.  For example, on deepbit at today's difficulty, you'd get like 8 BTC/day with 4 Ghash/sec.  Essentially it's exactly the same thing as you'd get mining solo, without the wild time variance between blocks found.  Hopefully that makes sense.

I think the absolute best bang for the buck were those Sapphire 5850s on Newegg for $150.. ahh those were the days.  Mine clock at 990 Mhz with overvolting.  I think they've dried up everywhere now, as I haven't been able to find them on the Internet.  But if you find any at a decent price, don't forget to send me a PM with the URL

I have an EAH5850 doing 934 Mhz at 1.199 volts.  I haven't done an extensive amount of tweaking on it, so higher clocks and slightly lower voltage might be possible.  I do wish it clocked as high as my other cards though :/  I won't be purchasing any more because the voltage registers can't be modified by RBE, which limits what I can do with them in Linux.

You're saying the long polling apparatus is still problematic, even with the latest code?

Just wanted to add a couple of remarks here..

While searching the forum for ways to mine on Windows Server 2003 I came up empty-handed.  Specifically I had two problems:  getting the ATI driver to see the card, and getting OpenCL to work.  The driver issue was remedied by the following:

1) Download any version of XP 32 bit driver from ATI's site, I used 11.3
2) Run it, allow it to extract the files to c:\ATI\support\11_whatever
3) Cancel the installation immediately after it extracts everything
4) In Windows Exporer, navigate to the folder where the setup extracted its files
5) Right-click on Setup.exe, go to the Compatibility tab, and select Windows XP compatibility mode
6) Click OK, then launch Setup.exe
7) Install as normal, I always use the Custom mode

That might seem completely obvious to many of you, but personally, I've been using Server 2003 for a number of years and have never had to enable compatibility for anything.  As for OpenCL:

1) Snag GPU-Z and launch it
2) Verify that OpenCL is your problem by verifying that the OpenCL checkbox at the bottom is unchecked
3) If so, go to your desktop, right-click and go to Properties
4) Click the Settings tab, then click the Advanced button
5) In the next screen, click the Troubleshoot tab
6) Slide the Hardware Acceleration slider to full (don't ask me why this affects OpenCL)
7) Hit Ok, relaunch GPU-Z and verify that OpenCL works now as it should be checked

Note that I also ran 'dxdiag' to make sure DX was enabled, but like the Hardware Acceleration slider, it should have nothing to do with OpenCL.  Hopefully that helps *someone*, took me about 20 minutes of googling and screwing around to figure that out.

The OP decided on the one-card-per-box strategy for all of the new deployments because he could get machines for something like $20 each (see previous pages in this thread).  It could be argued that when you multiply that figure out by 4, he could've bought one of those MSI boards with slots for 4 cards, plus a low power Sempron for maybe $240 versus the $80.  But the power savings would likely take 6 or so months to pay back the difference.. and one could argue that it's a wise move to pay the difference in power in the short-term, if his goal is to get as many rigs up as he can with a given budget constraint.  I'd likely employ the same strategy if I were him.

I can also confirm many blank pages and strangeness under Cent 5.x with the default PHP version 5.1.x.  A stated dependency on PHP 5.3 would go a long way I'm sure.

I have 2 of my miners (on two different Internet IPs) still blocked.  Such a shame too, I like deepbit better than any of the other pools I've looked at.

I don't think anyone's blocking deepbit.  Rather, deepbit is blocking people, probably part of some DoS protection scheme.  One of my miners is blocked as well.

I'm not quite sure why none of Bitcoin's "critical infrastructure" employs a vast network of proxies, rather than "DoS protection" which is usually problematic.

Also, I believe you should be hitting the daemon on port 8332.

Start by verifying that the daemon is running:


If so, make sure it's listening:


Verify that your iptables (firewall) is empty:


If you see entries in there, flush it with 'iptables -F'.

loooool

First to what you said about CentOS, I covered this in the CentOS 5.5 Mining Guide thread.  Lately I've been building/rebuilding my mining rigs around FC14 though, for the sheer simplicity of kickstarted (scripted) installs which are much simpler to get going than the CentOS variety.  FC14 also plays nice with diskless PXE/nfsroot, and aren't plagued by the problem of jackass developers as Cent is.  *shakes fist at kbsingh*

Regarding linuxcoin, lol @ drivers.  I think what you're referring to is the fact that the ATI drivers "taint" the Linux kernel.  That's not a bad thing, it just means that the ATI folks don't play nice with Linus and crew.

As for solo mining, I *highly* recommend joining a pool with only 4 cards.  The chance of you finding a block is roughly one per 25 to 60 days, based on how powerful the four are.  You can solve the unreachability problem with scripting (there have been several posted to these forums already which restart and/or jump your miners to working pools).  But if you insist on solo: