Anybody got a link to how account status is calculated?  Based off activity or posts?

It already happened.   http://www.zdnet.com/the-worlds-first-bitcoin-escort-agency-7000021209/

Sorry to necro, but this honestly made me chuckle as I pictured The Bunny Ranch advertising that the world's oldest profession is now accepting the world's newest currency!  I mean, who wants to invest in mining when you can be the mine that's dug out.   

+1

Similar to the gold rush of 1849 - it was never the miners that made out with the profit, it was the hoteliers, the retailers of mining equipment, and the convenience services (bath & extra).  If you really want to capitalize on crypto at this stage find something that fills a void and others would be willing to pay for.

While mining may not be profitable for many newbies, anybody with a desktop pc can do it.  This at least meets the criteria of "idea for a newbie to earn a little coin".  I mean, shoot, my daughter has a pc she doesn't use during the school day with a GT260 vid card on it that with cudaminer is lucky to get 40kH.  40!  That's crap.  But I let it run anyway and still get about 100 Dogecoin/day from multipool.us and since +100 Doge is more than I had the day before then I let it run.

Yeah, you may say the electricity cost isn't worth it and it's probably not.  But backing any new idea that could be worldchanging is rarely profitable in the early stages.

I don't trust gambling sites.  I suck at real life gambling when I can see everything on the table in front of me so the last thing I want to do is click a button on a website and hope the programming on the backend is set properly to mimic real life machines (which are only required by law to payout 75% of the time in Vegas).

Maybe not if all you want is immediate profit.  But there's other reasons to mine:  to gain the experience, spread the word about crypto and the many ways to obtain coins, to support a particular coin that you wish to see succeed, etc..

If you find a coin you think has real value beyond that which Bitcoin already offers then by all means, start mining it with an investment cost you can afford to lose and then hold it.  If others see it as valuable as you do then profit will be gained when the coin starts to exchange for more (and not currently reflected on profit calculator sites like coinwarz). 

Cryptocurrency may not be as new as it was 6 years ago but the average person on the street still knows nothing of it.  I see a lot of folks advising against anybody getting into mining at all these days but for many it's the first way they can see the actual process in effect.  Buying bitcoin with straight up fiat currency to play with on the exchange, hold on to, or spend at an online retailer alone doesn't give you a full understanding of how it works and why it's important for miners in the process even long after the last Bitcoin is rewarded for discovering a new block.

Just my noob take on it.

Profit calculators are only useful if you sell the coin as fast as you mine it.  If you find a coin you have faith in for long term value it doesn't do so well. 

I have very little input on the 2 items though.  That power consumption varies wildly.  Are they both plug & play?

I equate the exchanges to futures speculation.  There's a few coins with merchant adoption but many with none.  Until such time as a coin becomes a viable replacement for wages, retail purchases, and the such it's all a guessing game based on press releases.

But yeah, both good & bad news seem to cause price fluctuations that's hard to understand.  Even run ups on coins with no real purpose are amazing, but when the market cap increases it opens the door for more day traders to come in and move some shares back and forth just enough to get a profit and get out.  Then it's back to being a fairly useless coin that somehow generated interest 1-2 days.

Same one I'm thinking about.  Half the price roughly, half the setup concerns.  Once I get this rent house sold I may be able to talk the wifey into something more like the Gridseed 80.  Doubtful, but she's onboard with crypto, just doesn't care for the frying of motherboards & psu's part.   

Certainly it's a race.  We can't expect to have 100% approval not to use ASIC's for financial gain.  So then we either join the arms race or accept our lot and pickup the scraps.  I've only really learned of cryptocurrency about 4 months ago but I'm all in.  For a while there I was trying to figure out what all the hoopla was about with the anti-ASIC crowd (not lumping you in there, you just made me think about it).  If it's a more efficient way to mine & distribute the coins then it just makes sense to go that route.  I get that there might be a feeling of unfairness to some but such is life.  I can't afford to jump on the ship at the moment but I do think if I had held off on setting up a GPU mining rig for another month or 2 I could've gone the ASIC route and saved money, headaches, & electricity.  In the end, cryptocurrency needs to thrive and expand.  If we make profit, great.  What we need most is utility for the coins as grendel25 mentioned.

Sorry for a slightly off-topic diatribe.  Congrats on the new miner!

Just a couple of things I noticed from running an open air rig for a while:

1. Fan placement makes a big difference.  Sometimes it cools off one card but if you have it blowing across them all lengthwise the heat blows downwind to the others in the set making them hotter.
2. Dust builds up rather quickly in the fans on the cards themselves due to the static draw and no case/filter.  Blow them out every once in a while to be sure and the on card fans should spin less to achieve the same goal.

For the CPU, I have an  FX8320 I run for Darkcoin.  I used the version linked from the X11 Darkcoin Wiki specifically for cpu mining.  I think it's the instruction set "Windows miner (1.3) for SSE4-5-AVX-AES-NI systems" but I'm away from the house and can't check.  I generally run 6 threads so I can keep one open for basic cpu functions and 1 for failover (using the parameter -t 6).  Any more than that and the system bogs down so I can't use it plus it runs hotter.  6 threads on the 8320 gets about ~300 hash *I think*, don't quote me on that since I haven't looked lately.  More a set it and forget it type of thing since it doesn't pull in a lot or require tweaking.

http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/X11

No idea on the GPU settings as I haven't looked at in a while so can't say.  Mining another scrypt coin I sell off at the moment to buy DRK on the exchange which meets my needs better than mining it directly.

The memory was overclocked to 1500 but not the gpu itself.  Considering this is the "OC Edition" of the card the software out of the box also allows that to happen.  I was considering that may be part of it though.  Perhaps overclocking the memory threw off some of the voltage needs and overloaded the motherboard 24-pin connector?

I dunno.  The cards are fine afterwards, the psu's don't pop and continue to power up peripherals.  I guess I suspect there's an issue on the board itself when running 2 cards near load for a sustained period.

Just trying to find out how common this is.

System:  Asrock 990FX Killer mobo, MSI R9270 (non-x), CorSair Vengeance case with lots of air cooling

So initially, I had the setup running for over a month with no issues.  Card was hashing along at ~400kH with a temp between 67-70.  I decided to add a 2nd card to the case and double output, or at least increase it without causing the heat to go up too much.  Corsair HX850 power supply utilized, (2) R9 270's in crossfire configuration - within a week I started getting random shutoffs so I figured there was a short somewhere (the PSU would power up, I'd hear the HDD's spinning, but nothing powered by the mobo directly would power).  Found that pins 10 & 11 had been charred and wires exposed.  OK, no biggie, swap in a new power supply and RMA the PSU.

Swapped in a Corsair 750 (can't recall which one but 80+ Gold of course), same thing within a week power loss.  But this time, the wires weren't exposed just slightly charred.  I ran the cards at less intensity/kH just to keep the temps below 70.

I found an old post on here where somebody said the power draw from the PCI-e slots was too much which caused the 12V rails (pins 10 & 11) to burn up.  I'm just not sure how common this is.  It's a new board designed for crossfire/SLI configurations for up to 3 cards.  The gold rated power supply should be sufficient (right around 65-70% wattage need).  But it happened twice.  Any ideas?  Bad PSU's, bad motherboard, bad setup?

Waiting now to see if Corsair will honor an RMA since the PSU's are still under manufacturer warranty but outside the MicroCenter exchange timeframe.  The mobo is covered by an extended Micro Center warranty so at least I can get that replaced easy enough. 

Well, technically you can mine an X11 coin with your CPU and a scrypt coin with your GPU.  I've done that before to little effect, better a month or so ago when the network hash rate for Dark wasn't so high that my CPU plugging along for 300 kH would at least net something at least noticeable.

Great tip!  I've been trading on there for a month or so and never knew that trick.