AVG is complaining to me that the minerd.exe in the Windows zipfile contains a Trojan, Generic29.JAV

Hello all, feature request and/or point-the-noob-in-the-right-direction request if this feature's already there somehow...

As I understand it, the Tx columns currently show how many *receiving* transactions the corresponding addresses have had. Could you add a column to show how many *spending* transactions they've had? Or even just a simple yes/no to the question 'has this address spent coins yet'?

I ask because I've been transferring coins between different wallet addresses, spending coins and then receiving more into the same address, turning off the 'send to change address' feature, generally doing all these things that I now come to understand are a slight security risk. I'd like a quick and easy way to see which addresses I've spent from, so that if there are any coins still in those addresses I can move them to a 'clean' address.


Yawny stuff follows:

... Just to check my understanding here: you've got private keys, public keys and addresses. They're related to each other by public-key=ecdsa(private-key) and address=ripemd-and-sha256-and-stuff(public-key). Both functions are currently irreversible (or 'computationally infeasible to reverse'). When an address receives money, only the address goes into the publicly-viewable blockchain. But when you spend money from an address, the public-key also goes in. You need the private key to spend money. So the security risk is that it's less secure to store coins in an address from which they've been spent before, than one which has never spent coins. 'Cos the former means everyone can now see the public key for that address, so to get the private key (and hence spend the remaining bitcoins) would require 'only' the ECDSA algorithm to have been broken, whereas to spend coins from an address which had never spent coins before would require ECDSA and RIPEMD and SHA256 to ALL have been broken. Right? So that's why we're supposed to keep generating new addresses for each transaction? And use change addresses?

Hi all. In my continuing efforts to track down why I just can't leave my goddamn miners alone for more than a day without one or more of them packing up, I've come to realise that the mobos are about the only variable left.

One of my rigs has some cheap-ass motherboard, the brand/model of which I forget at the mo. That rig generally runs for a week or more at a time, and if it crashes, it generally manages to reboot automatically and successfully, and carry on. The other two rigs each have the Asus Crosshair V Formula motherboard. The boards cost me £170 each, I bought them as the cheapest I could find with four full-length PCIe slots. It's these two rigs that just can't effing stay up, and I want you to tell me why not!

These boards seem to be designed for hardcore gamers, and they have a whole lotta bios options for overclocking. I don't know what any of those mean. I have reset all the bios options to the factory default, except for the one I need to change for BAMT's sake - something about making a USB stick get treated like a hard disk drive. Each mobo has an 'overclock' button and for some reason, that button needs to be switched ON or the rig cannot boot up at all.

Can anyone shed light on what's up? Preferably other peeps who have this actual board?

Hello Coinlab, your servers are/were doing something funny again. They started around 1830 UTC yesterday. I noticed at around 2330 UTC and switched over to BTCguild. If you guys can confirm you were playing around and you've stopped now I'll switch back.

ETA desired feature: send an email out whenever you mess around with the servers, explaining when you started and when you're likely to finish!

No, YOU'RE a scammer!

(Not too sure who I'm replying to here, but does it really matter any more?)

From now on whenever you start to type the pseudoword 'alot', a buzzer will go off in your mind. You may choose to ignore it, but you can't stop it going off. My work is done.

150 views and no replies? How could that be?!

This. This is what I meant when I earlier mentioned I'd have to go back to BTC Guild. And this is what *seemed* to get fixed a week or so ago. My rigs had been rock steady until a few hours ago.

Yoohoo! Coinlab! Your servers are on fire!!

Everyone in this thread should just go half themselves.

There was a time I thought stuff like that too.

I'm not sure what I was thinking it about, but damn, if those weren't the best cookies I've ever eaten. Never had such strong ones since. 

Guys, I don't mean to sound like I am a shill for CoinLab, but did anyone actually read posts #21 and #23? I've joined them recently and it sounds like exactly what this thread is asking about. Admittedly all they've got is promises at the moment... but then, so do all the purported ASIC manufacturers who have caused us to ponder questions like this in the first place!

Now isn't really a good time to start mining. The reward's halving in December and ASICs may or may not be on the horizon (it's all vapourware at the moment). You're unlikely to get the cost of the rig back even if ASICs are all a bald-faced lie. If they're not, don't even bother getting a GPU based rig. Place an order for an ASIC instead (but then what if they ARE a scam? Aaarrgh.)

Put it this way: don't bother investing in mining gear until January when the dust settles. Certainly I'm not placing any ASIC orders until one of these mythical beasts actually gets seen in the wild. That'll either make me a late adopter, or a savvy scamproof know-it-all. Time will tell.

Are all of you having a stroke?

Or am I? 

Everything you're doing is fine.

Well, not really, because apparently the ASIC revolution that's just around the corner is going to make all GPU mining a waste of time, electricity and money. But for now (probably until the new year) mining with a GPU is okay.

It doesn't matter a great deal which miners you use or which pool you're with. I haven't used BitMinter myself but they seem as good as everyone else. As far as the reward method goes, I prefer PPS because it has the lowest possible variance, and it's the only method I can actually understand (and I'm a maths tutor ). But my understanding is that all the other methods eventually give you the same expected return. They just have a bit more variance, which means that in the short term, say a couple of weeks, your returns might be significantly higher or lower than you expect, but over the long term it all averages out.

Which wallet program you use doesn't really affect your mining. I use Electrum because it's 'thin' - no huge blockchain eating up my time and disk space - and because it has a passphrase to determine a 'seed' with which you can regenerate your wallet keys even if you formatted your hard drive. That's nice because it basically means you store your bitcoins IN YOUR BRAIN. I gather Armory also does something like this. But if you don't mind waiting around for the blockchain to catch up, by all means stick with the official bitcoin client.


There's no doubt that ASIC machines ARE going to come on to the market sometime, and once they do, GPU mining is dead - there's no way it'll pay back the cost of electricity. But I'm a bit skeptical it's going to happen exactly when all these press releases keep saying it will. 2013 Q2 - almost certainly. 2013 Q1 - probably. 2012 Q4 - I don't think so.

That sounds about right for stock settings (I get 321 or 322 so neener neener). If you can get the memclock down to 300 MHz successfully that'll get you 327ish and less heat and power consumption (actually not sure how much power you save, but less heat is always good). At 800/300 they can do 369 MH/s.

At the risk of talking down to you... have you uncommented the relevant lines in bamt.conf? You need to remove the beginning '#' on any line that you want to take effect. And of course, remove noOC from blah/blah/ACTIVE if you put it in there to test the cards.

I've seen you want to run the cards at 875/300/1.075. Ouch! I'm not sure it's possible to set the voltage above 1.05 in BAMT. If I were you, I'd leave them at 725/1000/1.05 for a day or two. Then gradually reduce the memclocks by 100 MHz at a time until you get to 300 MHz, leaving them for a few hours or a day at each intermediate setting to check they're happy. Then once you're at 725/300/1.05, bump up the engine clock similarly but in increments of 5 or 10 MHz until you get to 800 (or possibly 810 if they can take it... not in my experience)

Of course all that assumes you actually can set the clocks at all. Have you tried running atiweak? Do the following on a command line:

atitweak -A0 -P2 -m900

Then check with gpumon and/or the web interface, that the memclock has been set properly. If it hasn't then something's very wrong.

Been back at Coinlab for a couple of days now, and this time, the pool communication is rock solid. Thanks for doing whatever it is you did!

How about if we keep selling each other the box, back and forth, over and over and over? Pretty soon we'll BOTH BE MILLIONAIRES!!!!!!

What he said. Or the bits of it I understood anyway. BTC Guild - rock solid. CoinLab - sputters like crazy.