Posted this on the scam-thread as well:

Just got an e-mail from them ( <sales@asic-technologies.com> ), which promptly got sent to SPAM folder by GMail. They either got my e-mail off the forum profile or they are mass-sending, hoping to hit active miners. In the e-mail they state the price in BTC, while the web-site states it in dollars. Still, $3000 for ~9GHs is a bit steep. BFL offers 50GHs for "just" $2500 

Just got an e-mail from them ( <sales@asic-technologies.com> ), which promptly got sent to SPAM folder by GMail. They either got my e-mail off the forum profile or they are mass-sending, hoping to hit active miners. In the e-mail they state the price in BTC, while the web-site states it in dollars. Still, $3000 for ~9GHs is a bit steep. BFL offers 50GHs for "just" $2500  

I remember the scrypt readme saying that higher memclock does not imply higher hashrate. The relation between memclock and gpuclock are more important.

To answer your edited question
100,000,000 in difficulty. At that point I will be mining at a loss electricity cost-wise, but gambling on BTC/USD price increase. After 160,000,000 and once the winter 2013/2014 is over I will switch off my GPU rigs.

As for LTC switch, keep an eye on this chart/calculator:
http://dustcoin.com/mining
As long as LTC/BTC ratio is below 100, you are better off mining BTC, if you plan to sell your mined LTCs immediately at the current price level. You might, of course, gamble for the ratio to increase in the future and mine-and-hold LTC.

EDIT: 3x7970, 3x6770, 1x6570 = 2.5GH/s [winter] or 2.2GH/s [summer] (+ some CPUs mining LTC @ 180KH/s).

You have to calculate it for yourself, based on electricity cost, BTC/USD price and BTC/LTC price.
Here are a couple of calculators to help you:
http://www.coinish.com/calc/#
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

Mine is 100,000,000 @ 0.0651$/kWt and BTC costing $120.

Yes. Currently the difficulty goes up approx every 10 days at an ever increasing rate due to more and more ASICs coming on-line. Next projected difficulty is 13.930.881 in 7.5 days.

EDIT: Just noticed a typo: I meant you can subtract BTC0.01 Sorry for the scare  

Sounds about right. In about 8 days you can subtract another BTC0.01 from your daily earnings.

Yes, there are. GPU mining profitability depends on your power cost, BTC price and the difficulty. Avalon chips are factored in there.
For me, GPU mining will be marginally profitable until the difficulty hits 110.000.000 at today's BTC price.

There will be a further price fall, if only because the supply will increase (yes, I know it's mined at a constant rate, but there will potentially be more miners who would sell immediately rather than hold).

Everything depends on the market and if LTC can be spent for something meaningful (and not shady). The same applies to BTC, btw.

A small digression: shady is fine, up to a certain proportion. For that matter, dollars is the currency for shady dealings. Drugs, weapons, trafficking, removal of legitimate middle-eastern governments are all financed by dollars (and, to a lesser extent, by Euros).

So, if LTC price was falling, I would not be too alarmed, if the LTC-based market gets a chance to establish itself. If not, then yes, this is the end of LTC.

PS: Currently its mining profitability is 94% of BTC.

That happens from time to time. Check that your balance increases at the expected rate. The worker stats and graphs should come back on track after a while.

This.

Test-posted my TRC address a week ago. Nothing was transferred.

Can an admin lock this thread or the owner state that the faucet is still operational?

I don't think that it will be profitable once the majority of GPU owners do it, trying to squeeze the last juice from their cards. The switch-over to (mainly) LTC will happen fast and the difficulty will sky-rocket. As more miners have LTC for sale, converting to BTC, LTC price will go further down. No, I have a gloomy outlook on alt-coin GPU mining after ASICs. Time will tell.

Disclaimer: I still CPU-mine LTC @ 150kh/s spread over 4 CPUs, with a top-tier i7 standing for 82kh/s

$0.20/kWH - that's high! I pay around $0.0651 so my zero-returns point is at about 100.000.000 difficulty (+/- 10.000.000, depending on BTC price) After that I may mine for heating during the winter 2013/2014.

Wait for 24 hours to see how the change impacts performance long-term. In the meantime, the 60-minute shares should give a fair indication if the change helped.

EDIT: I would treat each board as a separate miner, follow this table

Worker's speed           Difficulty
<500 Mhash/s                 1
500- 1000Mhash/s             2
1000-2000Mhash/s             4
2000-4000Mhash/s             8
4000-10000Mhash/s           16
10000-40000Mhash/s          32
>40000Mhash/s               64

and would keep the difficulty at 2, even though they are all behind the same proxy. Work shares get distributed between the boards, and it might be so that they do not manage to process higher-difficulty shares in time, turning up a large number of invalids...

It is my guess, though. It would be nice if a pool admin elaborated on share difficulty in multi-card/multi-board scenarios.

Does your farm consist of 1 unit á 9GH/s or 18 units (cards) á 500MH/s?

One of my machines has 2x7970 churning out 1.3GH/s, yet I still treat it as 2 units, producing ~600MH/s + ~700MH/s, assigned to two different workers on the pool, each set to diff. 1 shares.

I now restarted cgminer, associated with that card which started to spike with invalids (cgminer also reported an increasing number of R's), and it is back to normal - the increase stopped. I guess I will slightly reduce the restartEvery setting in my Bitcoin Miners in Tray front-end so that restarts and therefore refreshes of the miners' states would occur more often.


I use cgminer with a front-end of my own writing.

The settings are (this machine has 6670 + 7970, and this setting is for device 0):

-T -l 2 -I d,9 -d 0 --gpu-engine 920,1150 --gpu-memclock 925,1375 --gpu-fan 50,84 -o http://pool.50btc.com:3333 -u username_machine6670 -p password -o http://pool80.50btc.com -u username_machine6670 -p password -o http://eu.ozco.in:3333 -u username.machine6670 -p password

What is your share's difficulty setting?
I tried setting it to 2 for 7970 cards (per their advice for miners with >500MH/s power), but I noticed that it negatively affected my performance, so now I am back to level 1 for all cards.

EDIT: One card had a spike of 33 (and counting) invalids over the last hour, so my  24-hour stats are now 46463 (35) cumulative for all cards.

Meercats (and possibly squirrels) at Durrell salute you! Thank you. Donation received.

Going full throttle. Sure the Web-site may occasionally report a worker as down, but they are actually up and counting towards your total. Only 2 invalids out of 46677 shares for the last 24 hours. Historically I had 13561 invalids out of 1907178 total shares (0.711%).

I have a set-up with 3 backup pools. The first 2 point to 50BTC, while the last one to OzCoin:
pool.50btc.com:3333
pool80.50btc.com
eu.ozco.in:3333

That way, if Stratum is down, I will attempt port 80 connect before abandoning the pool in favour of a reserve.

Fair enough. Pity I bought mine a few months ago at full price... 

I find the ones at blockchain.info quite useful:
http://blockchain.info/en/charts