So.. Another 20 hour round coming up or is push6/mysql lagging again with publishing previous blocks

Finally someone gets it..

What good is it if a slow pool's variance evens out in the next two months, if the current difficulty level only lasts 2 weeks or less?

You'll still be making less & less if you run into just a few unlucky streaks, because diff. is going up all the time.

With low variance pools that have massive hash rates, you are almost guaranteed to get 95-100% (or more if the pool is lucky) of your expected earnings.

Stop saying they aren't registered when Tibanne Ltd. runs Mt. Gox and pays taxes in Japan. They have also hired personnel so it's not just '2 guys running it in moms basement'.

You can even phone up the landlord of their office, Cerulean Tower, Shibuya, Tokyo and ask the receptionist if such a company operates there.

The office rents there are about $20k monthly so I wouldn't say it's a low budget operation.
It's in one of the finest areas of Tokyo.

AMD manufactures every single GPU at TSMC in Taiwan, then sells the associated chips, voltage controllers, etc. needed to build the reference design to companies like Asus, Sapphire, XFX, etc.

After a few months have passed, those companies usually make their own modified version with improved coolers, VRM's, PCBs etc. which means they don't have to order those parts from AMD.

The only part graphics card companies "need" is the GPU chip itself, they can build everything else from the ground if they want to (like in the case of the Sapphire Extreme cards which are completely different from reference cards) and make extra profits

How does that differ from all the world's gold holders panicking and trying to liquidate millions of ounces of gold within a few hours?

How is any commodity or currency or investment 'safeguarded' against market volatility? I'd love to hear your explanation.

Commodities can *only* be liquidated if there are people buying the commodity (be it gold, silver, palladium, platinum, oil, coffee beans, tulips or bitcoins).
Obviously if there are 10 million people selling something and only 1000 people buying, the price will drop because holders want to get rid of their possessions for any price available.

Lack of profitability in mining means slow or totally stalled bitcoin transfers.
Without profitable mining (or someone mining even at a loss) bitcoin dies because coins can't move around.

Even traders need to deposit bitcoins or withdraw them in many cases. So they are dependent on miners as well

Hong Kong if you want 'quality' (in the Chinese sense)

and mainland China if you want stuff that was thrown together as soon as possible without any testing
with whatever materials were obtainable.

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/pci--e-cable.html

It's not bad luck.
I'm 100% confident this was another 'mistake' and in fact many different rounds simply reported as one huge long one.
So there is not a 10+ hour round going on again in fact.

See the payout stats in a few hours if you don't believe me. I've done the math, compared dozens of pools and this is the most likely scenario.

PC gamers & console manufacturers define the modern GPU market. They are the driving force behind the stock price.

Scientific calculation and workstation graphics comes close behind, though Nvidia has a massive lead here.
Those two markets buy more than 99% of the millions of GPUs sold every year.

Bitcoin miners with their 20-30k GPUs (vast majority old 5xxx series cards or 6990 dual gpus) worth a few million dollars are nothing in comparison

I have 50% of my miners at btcmine.com which has about the same hashrate as bitcoins.lc, and nearly all of their rounds fall within the average timeframe expected to solve blocks, about 2-3 hours. http://btcmine.com/stats/

Registration being closed or not isn't really relevant for solving blocks (while it does deter new pool hoppers)

It's not temporary either, I have all the pool stats available in an excel table; They don't even have a single round that took more than 15 hours, and very rare ones at 10-11h.

Though, if you read the thread Jine has already given a possible solution, and that is the recent big amount of stales at bitcoins.lc which is stretching rounds.
If you look at the full round history of bitcoins.lc before a week or two ago, you will see a quite natural distribution of blocks for many months.


No, "some rounds" falls within normal variance. Even 10 or 20 unlucky rounds fall within normal variance.
If 95th%+ percentile rounds had a much, much more frequent occurrence than 5% (let's say 20% over the next 1000 blocks), then you could suspect foul play.

As you said, past performance tells nothing about future probability. Therefore, all pools will ultimately have the exact same earnings in the long term, just at different speeds. Unless something is misconfigured, which can be spotted very easily by comparing the earnings of one pool to the other 20 pools in existence over the last 6 months (not over 2 days or even a week)

Deepbit is now my only fallback pool because it has the lowest variance.

At this difficulty level I can't take the ridiculous 200-1000% swings some smaller pools have in their daily luck. That's too much lost money, and before you know it the difficulty has risen already.

With deepbit, the 3% fee is nothing compared to the fact luck stays nearly always at 5-10% of the target and on many days is positive.

I'm into mining for the long term, but I can't have 50 BTC one week and 12.5 the next, then 32.2, then 15 etc...
I'd much rather take the consistent 49, 49, 49, 49 because I have real electricity bills and rent to pay for the mining farm.

I don't think you understand why pool hopping really is profitable over the long term as
compared to switching roulette tables or slot machines and why gamblers fallacy doesn't apply to block finding probability.

Proportional pool luck is determined by current difficulty factor and hash rate.
There is a certain statistical point at which blocks will be *usually* found given a large enough statistical sample (100, 1000 or more blocks)

A gambler can't *expect* to get a certain amount of heads or tails in a coin flip because the statistical probability
of either one is always 50% (assuming it can't fall on it's side) over the long term.

A miner can expect 95% of blocks to be solved in the long term at 1.56m difficulty and roughly 9½ hours spent at 600ghash/s.

If the occurrence of rounds surpassing 9½ hours becomes significantly more than 5% in the long term (let's say 20%), the miner can expect foul play.
Just as if a coin would consistently fall on the tails side over 1 million throws (let's say to a 70:30 ratio), you could suspect the casino has a weighted/rigged coin.
3-8% would probably pass as variance

Works here, all my rigs work without dummy plugs or being plugged into monitors now after reboot.

No need to McGyver with resistors after you install them..

I don't think you read the post.. If you want your 69xx series GPU to stay at one frequency, you have to disable PowerTune in AMD overdrive.
It's enabled by default at the driver level.

You don't have to overclock anything.

Not really. Even the 5970 desktop dual GPU has retained 95% of it's original value since it's release in 2009, 2 years ago.


Those are sold by amateurs who think they're worth a lot & can scalp buyers,
or chinese manuf. with random stockpiles, you can't even upgrade GPUs on the vast majority of laptops

On most laptops (except very high end ones) they are soldered onto the motherboard so there is no way to switch them out

Ok, sounds fair enough. Also that block finally became paid.

P.S. I think TheMalon understands variance he was just comparing to btcmine.com, the hash rates are very similar but their history of solving blocks is much more consistent

@JoelKatz

5.6ghash at 250 watts definitely makes business sense for miners as well at $1500.
I'd replace all my rigs, stop paying datacenter rent and run those at home.

But can a USB port (even a reinforced one) actually supply 50 watts let alone 250w? My biggest doubt.

The PSU can handle a 6990 even in switch mode 2 incl. your processor and other peripherals, it's the molex converter cable which can't supply that much extra wattage.

Your best shot is leaving the switch in default position and using two separate Athena cables, if your PSU has 4 molex connectors.

The cable is designed for 6pin+8 pin cards like the 6970. There is a very high likelihood it has not been even properly tested for 8+8 pin cards which are very unorthodox
(not counting custom made ones and the ARES/MARS cards, there are only two mass produced GPUs that use that amount of power from PCI-e connectors, the nvidia gtx 590 and amd radeon 6990)

They do happen every few months on average, but not with this frequency at other pools of similar or even lower size.

After using this pool for so long without issues, I'm having a trust problem after the last ultra-long round breaking share records was revealed to have been "3 different blocks" and there is still a 0 shares unpaid block in the system...

Sudden software bugs? I don't know what to believe. Will move away all miners until at least block 136012 becomes paid.

Then you are using a 6970M not a Radeon 6970.

It has next to no cooling; There's just a small pathetic fan on top of it, enclosed in the iMac. It will die from 24/7 mining.
The design is made assuming sprees of a few hours, after which the device will cool down.