I expanded on my explanation given above.  But in essence no, as you would just be wasting time with the relaunch and just because they are "faster" shares, since they are also of lower difficulty they will hold less value at the pool as explained earlier.

Its perfectly normal and is called vardiff for variable difficulty, which is a pool setting. When you first start mining to a pool it assigns you work at some default difficulty which is normally quite low. Since the default difficulty is too low for your miner it solves the shares quite quickly. Once the pool detects this it will then assign you a higher difficulty to try and make it more appropriate for your hardware. This might take the two or three adjustments as you describe before it settles down to what is optimal for your hardware.

Your credits or share value on the pool are still counted the same though. For instance if you start off at a difficulty of 1000 you get 1000 points for every valid share you submit. So if over an hour time-span you submit 1000 shares you would get (1000 * 1000) or 1 million credits or points. But if the pool adjusts your difficulty to 10,000 you will only submit 100 shares over an hour period. But you still earn the same internal credit as 10,000 * 100 also equals 1 million.

The above example is just for explaining the basic concept, as each pool will behave a bit differently and will assign difficulty and weights matched to the algorithm as well as overall hash-rate so the actual values will be different, but the principle is basically the same.

The answer to your question is yes, you can run the PC without the 16x slot, but that statement assumes nothing else is wrong with the motherboard.

Now that you have indicated the main 16x slot has melted, there may be other component failures and/or short circuits somewhere that would keep the motherboard from posting. Best thing is maybe just to try and RMA the board as you could risk frying your GPU's and other components (CPU, RAM, PSU) if indeed the motherboard is shorted.

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I will change signature and avatar once I have been notified that I am accepted. Please PM me if I am accepted so I can change my signature. Thanks!

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This is the most understated comment of this entire thread.

You better wait for the next days/weeks to see how all this Bitcoin China drama plays out before wasting money on a mining rig. Coin prices are continuing to head downwards and with $9,000 in your pocket you will be better off buying coins directly than investing in mining hardware at this point in time. Bitcoin and any GPU mine-able alt coin will correct to at least 50% off recent highs and you will have a much better chance profiting by buying directly than mining. Hardware prices are still around 150% of original MSRP making mining ROI even less likely, but if this downtrend last for more than a couple of weeks I think you will see those prices begin to fall as well.

No matter what you decide, my advice would be to wait for a few more days before buying anything (coins or hardware) to see what is in store for us in the near future.

While this is true and a good idea, myself I do not consider a fan failure an actual failure of the card unless it got to the point you didn't catch it and it overheated causing damage.

I have had fans fail, especially those old 3 fan 7970's, and you can buy replacements for under $10 and easily fix them yourself, prolonging the lifespan of your graphics card. If it is under warranty you can send them in too, but $10 is usually less than the RMA shipping and it is simple enough to do it yourself.

As has been said many times already, a properly cared for GPU can have a indefinite life-span with usually the part becoming obsolete before failing. This can easily mean 5+ years of operation.

Most GPUs that have some defect from manufacturing or installation damage will usually fail within the first month or so of continuous operation, which since is within the warranty period usually pose no problem other than the inconvenience of doing the RMA.

Other factors that can lead to failure have been mentioned already in the thread, but normally boils down to the care one takes to maximizing their longevity. Electrical problems (surges, brownouts, static discharge, loose connections, bad or unstable PSU) are probably near the top of the lists, along with excessive heat (higher than 80° C operating temperature), dust, dirt, humidity, and of course physical damage.

By being proactive and trying to minimize any of the above factors will lead to a long lifespan. I have many mining GPUs that have 4+ years on them and are still hashing away, and I have several non-mining GPUs that are 6+ years old that still work but are otherwise obsolete.

I think the majority of my GPUs will be replaced not because of failure, but because newer models are always becoming more efficient and a point in time arrives where the mining efficiency is no longer worth the operating costs. This is probably somewhere around the 4 to 5 year mark as some of my oldest cards while still viable for algorithms such as Equihash are really starting to fall behind newer cards, especially those such as the Nvidia 10xx series

Moving my application over from the old (now closed) thread. Still interested in applying.

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Thanks!

Poloniex has been hit or miss recently (past  months) and there have been reports of slow withdrawals and in some cases deposits. It could just be growing pains, but it also could be a sign of something worse. In any event, I think with the way things are right now, $10,000 is a bit too much to trust to their platform.

There are enough other exchange options out there where you should probably split that money up some. I would look at removing some of your funds from Poloniex when you get access to the site again and only trade with what you would be comfortable losing if the exchange suddenly closed down. This advice is recommended with any exchange but even more so with ones that are exhibiting ongoing problems such as the issues Poloniex is currently experiencing.

I have used Poloniex for over 2 years but have recently pared down my exposure to them, not because I experienced any issues (except one delayed ETC deposit) but more so to all the reports I keep hearing.

Actually my thoughts on this whole thing is it was a well timed tweet in an already uncertain environment (China) to drop down the price. It is not unthinkable to believe he or his bank is not doing to this try and buy in cheap before a big run-up.

There have been other instances in the past where big names (Mark Cuban) have been against Bitcoin only for it to be revealed later they are now big proponents. No one wants to buy in at such a high price and if you have the means to manipulate or at least influence price, why wouldn't you use it to your advantage.

It was already admitted that his daughter is into Bitcoin, it is not beyond the realm of possibility than if he is simply funneling a bunch of money through her to position himself while at the same time saying Bitcoin is a fraud, blah, blah to drive the price down. You wouldn't be able to accuse him of anything since it is his daughter and not him doing the investing.

I agree that the current dip probably has more to due around the uncertainty of the China exchange ban situation that it does with Dimon's comments, but everything does have an impact.

I attribute the drop to something like:

China Uncertainty (50%+)
Recent highs that needed correcting (30%)
Dimon comments (10%)
Other factors (10%)

I agree this would be a fair move and a good compromise. With ETH mining becoming more and more competitive many of us are turning to other coins to mine. With the DAG recreation delay, the 1% fee often turns into 2-3% lost revenue as the biggest loss in mining time is because of the switch to a new DAG and back every time the DEV fee kicks in.

Another idea is maybe a longer DEV mining period but less often, say once every 2 hours instead of once per hour. I know it is a balance between earning a fair fee and trying to minimize those who use tricks (miner restarts) to avoid paying it, but this would also help out with the interruptions.

Well, the high price points are starting to ever-so-slightly crack. I do now see a MSI Armor RX580 4 GB "on sale" (lol) at NewEgg for $289 (limit one).

We do have a long way to go as even with the recent plunge in difficulty as I still see many posts along the lines of "just have patience and wait it out a bit and profits will come roaring back". I think too many people are expecting a miracle recovery yet and will continue to overpay (just not quite as much) on hardware in anticipation of this.

The way I see it is we will need a solid month or two of downturn before any real ground starts to give way. Once people realize that the $300 they just spent on a new GPU is going to take 3 years (if ever) to ROI and they are giving almost all of their profits to the utility company in the meantime, will we start to see people quit mining and a real price reduction occur. But the way things look right now, even if the prices were to return to normal, it might be best to wait a bit to buy a lot of new hardware.

Of course everything I just wrote could turn out to be wrong if ETH shoots up past $1,000, and/or BTC shoots past $10,000 in the next month or two. In that case mine on...

As long as the increase is due to new and different miners and not just the result of a couple people adding more rigs, you are correct it is good. What is bad is just a handful of people thinking it is better to get all the coins to themselves rather than distributing them to a larger audience. The only thing that will make the coin successful in the long run is a wide distribution.

There is no price drop as of yet, at least compared to normal (meaning no or low miner demand). Also, you could buy the MSI Armor RX580 8GB version for under $230 before the price surge. I believe the 4GB version of the same card could be found for $199 back then, so current prices are closer to a 83% premium even now if they are selling for $365.

I have some IRD coins too, but I also have wallets filled with other coins that have never seen the light of day as far as gaining traction and trading on a real exchange. So the question is is this going to be one of the 100's of copy/paste coins looking for a quick payout? If so, I will be ready along with everyone else if/when it hits an exchange. However, if the developer has any real plans for the coin other than a pump/dump attempt, I would be interested in hearing about it as it would make me reconsider my plan of selling everything at the first change I get. There are dozens of coins and ICO's being launched each and every week, I try to accumulate a little bit of many of them, but I do realize probably 95% of them will never really go anywhere.

Bittrex is the only legitimate exchange out of several mentioned. Poloniex and Kraken are OK too, but good luck getting listed on them at such an early stage.

I believe Cryptopia and the some of the other questionable exchanges will list you if you pay a fee, but again it depends on what you ultimately want for the coin. Most of the people here seem to want it on any exchange so they can insta-dump their holdings and be off to the next pump and dump coin.

A very small minority of the users have stated what I also think you should be pursuing, that of further developing a website, a better implementation of the wallets, work on improving the block explorer, and generally growing the community. You also should be developing a road-map with key milestones so that people can see when progress is being made. The current road-map, if you even should call it that, is more of a coin launch checklist with only the very essentials included. What happens a month, 6 months, or a year from now?

I also have seen no mention of why we even need this coin and what unique benefits it provides the community other than simply another coin to mine and speculate on. A whitepaper or at least some type of vision statement for the coin and its future would probably go a long way, as long as it is legitimate and not just some BS statement. The only difference I see now is that is offers a lower coin supply than other Cryptonote coins. Really? Is that the ultimate vision for this project?

Since you didn't really pre-mine many coins to sustain bounty's to fund promotions and other advertising you are already at a disadvantage. You can try to solicit donations from early miners, but I suspect you will have limited success as I have already indicated I feel most of the miners are mainly interested in looking for the first exchange to quickly exit.

Interesting, although it looks like it still needs a lot of work it is nice to see some early community involvement. I moved one rig over this morning and started mining for a few days. Will maybe mine a few thousand to hold on to and see how this pans out.

You wouldn't have fared very well in the early cryptocurrency days then. This launch is about as old school as it gets, no working (Windows) wallets, no pools, it reminds me of early the Litecoin (scrypt) mining days when it was standard for new coins to launch similar to this.