"I plugged the HDD and DVD drive into the 12V PCI-E power ports rather than the 5V ones" I call bullshit. I hate to do it, but I call it. Unless there is a picture of the aftermath, I'm not going to believe it. Even if you assume he wired up his own connector, somehow ignored the fact that the red wire was connected to a yellow one, and got it to spin up: You have to remember that a HDD is encased in metal. The platters are NOT going to blow through it. This story is less believable than the heat stroke one. They are funny anecdotes, but don't have a shred of truth in them. I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.
Output of the flyback transformer...very high voltage. No explosions or being blown back 20+ feet as you would imagine. Just a very large, and very bright spark and the screwdriver ended up flying out of my hand (still not sure if I threw it instinctively or if it was forcibly ejected) Haha, a techie friend of mine, who also happens to be 400lbs or so, said he was thrown back across the room after touching the wrong part of a monitor. Incredible power stored up in those things... Mechanical failure of a PSU fan blade, on a Corsair AX1200, after barely 700h of operation. Aah, the joy of running a mining cluster large enough to make improbable failures actually occur once in a while... After the blade broke, the imbalanced fan was making the whole computer chassis vibrate quite hard.
That's when you just break one off on the other side and call it good.  |
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Not sure if this in inappropriate to post, but I am just curious how many people visiting these forums actually use the site. I don't know of anyone personally that uses it, yet some are claiming it has a major effect on the price of BTC. For it to have a major effect, I would expect that a lot of people who are using bitcoins are also using the site.
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Holy crap, you spend 11 grand and are only netting 3.6 ghash?
Still, if your electrical costs are $0.15/kwh, you should be profitable as long as coins don't dip below $4. And then, increase that number proportional to however difficulty increases from here on out. Seems a bit premature to call it now... but with deadlines for returning stuff approaching, I can see why you'd want to stop now.
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Lol, playing the lottery... what can I say?
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Currently solo mining with 170MH/s. We'll see how it goes.
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No, but huge things are ahead.  |
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As long as price > $2.66, I am profitable to mine.
You are a lucky one then who must have a huge amount of rigs and free access to power. This is not intended a an offensive statement. Excuse my ignorance, but if the price continues to drop will the difficulty to mine BTC drop as well? I mean if the the difficulty is increased next week, how on earth could anyone make any money on mining vs. electricity cost? CPU mining has been rendered obsolete and soon it will be uneconomical to mine with GPU's. It seems soon that only the rich will be able to profit from BTC mining. I have some of the more efficient GPU's, yes. 5830's, 5850's, and 5870's. Only 1950MH/s total though. But my electricity is cheap here... $0.10/kwh at the highest tier, and I don't think I'm there yet. |
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Ever dropped a ball from a roof and noticed what happens when it hits the ground?
It depends... what material is the ball and the ground made of? |
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Thanks - I will consider making an investment.
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There's a lot of confusion in this thread.
A Merchant subforum is a good idea.
But, ultimately, these are the facts. Bitcoin has enough innate advantages to grow slowly and surely even without catering to established merchants. Turning it into just another Paypal alternative, however, will kill the project dead in it's tracks.
The Politics subforum isn't highly-trafficked anyways. I question the narrative that is being presented here, that merchants were turned off by it. The political implications of Bitcoin are fairly obvious. This just sounds more like an excuse frankly. And the proposed solution, quelling political speech, wouldn't really solve that problem.
Really we should also consider the possibility that anyone who can't handle the political implications of distributed digital currency is more of a liability than an asset.
Then you're vastly limiting the potential of Bitcoins. Many of the people I know wouldn't touch Bitcoins with a 10 foot pole because of how it has been associated in the media with Silk Road and other underground activities. If they were able to brush past that, but in trying to learn more about bitcoins ended up here, and started reading about all the "down with the government" posts, I can guarantee you that they would be out of here faster than... something fast. You can call them a liability all you want. But a very high majority of people will not get involved in something that is so fringe as to call for the abolition of governments. And unless we figure out a way to cater to the majority, Bitcoin will never last as anything but a fringe project. |
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Another question.
You mentioned a "team" of people. Who comprises this team, and what sort of experience do they have? Also, how are they being compensated?
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What is your plan for reinvestment of profits into new equipment?
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In the name of decentralization, I demand you join this forum!
Ok, just kidding, but seriously, more posts would be appreciated to help the forum grow.
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I missed the part on what this foundation will accomplish besides destroying any fringe discussion on the forums.
It's like the government... it expands to raise funds, so it can expand to raise more funds. |
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The amount of fail at math here is pretty awesome. You guys can't even come up with a number resembling anything remotely close to what this gear actually cost, and you think you can predict future profitability for this guy? Hint: newegg gives distributor pricing to large accounts. Hell, 10 seconds of google and you'd figure this out. You are not likely to get much better pricing unless you are buying in lot-sized quantities directly from AMD (which you can't, because you're a hater posting on the bitcoin forums  Having made buys similar to this from both Newegg, their competitors, and directly from distributors like MALabs, Ingram, etc. I can say the discount off of most high-volume items is negligible at best. This also is pocket change for many folks who run tech/R&D consulting groups - an interesting investment from the geek side, hire a couple high-schoolers to put it together for you, spend a night or two scripting your installs/pool/whatever and then let it run for a few months without ever having to touch it. Pay said high-schoolers to come by once a day and swap out any dead gear. Free money, or not - but very little effort or work required to start a relatively risk-free investment. It fails and you lose every single dollar you put into it (not likely)? Guess what, you just reduced your tax base for 2011 with a nice sized write off. Many folks also have blank lab space - just like this - to do projects a lot like these (I have one, but not quite this size). Given some personal knowledge of this specific situation, I'd say this is some guy with disposable income who finds this sort of thing fun, and happened to have most of the infrastructure handy and unused so it was convenient. Basically I'm saying more is spent on a fun weekend in Vegas quite regularly, and this has hell of a lot better chance of payback than that does! Plus, it's a lot more fun to some people  Edit: spelling You're absolutely right about the fail math. I really have no idea about the actual value. I glanced at the pic and took a wildly inaccurate assumption at the lowest possible price for the pile of shit I saw. Still doesn't invalidate the point I was trying to make. With the timing of this cutesy little "Just some casual mining" post, it's pretty safe to assume this was an impulse buy based on the astronomical $30 high. I'd really like to be able to ask this guy how he feels about his purchase with Mt Gox going practically flaccid. And it's not a bunch of insane trading driving the price down right now...it's people pulling out massive amounts of USD value from the market over the past 72 hours. It looks like people are scared, and rightfully so. The guy who bought this gear is probably pretty scared too. Even at $14, he'll still be INSANELY profitable. At current difficulty levels, I'm profitable above $2.66/coin, and he'll probably even slightly better than that, as I don't have the most efficient setups. At $14/coin, he's making more than 5 times his cost of electricity (assuming he doesn't live in someplace with insane energy prices, like California). He has no reason to be scared. Mining is, by far, the safest way to invest in Bitcoins. If I had $10k available to me, I would be doing exactly what he is doing. |
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As long as price > $2.66, I am profitable to mine.
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It did take me 12 hours to download all the blocks though. Isn't this going to become a huge issue for new users a couple of years from now when it takes days to download all the blocks? What if BTC is still around 100 years from now? How long will it take then?
There are other option available in the future. Including, but not limited to, simply including a recent copy of the blockchain in each new client release to be downloaded directly rather than over the p2p network and verified by each client upon first start. It's the verification process that takes most of the time, not the actual downloading. Does that not introduce centralization? Not really, because at this point the client will still verify all the blocks upon first start, regardless of where the blockchain came from. In the future, there are likely to be clients that come with a blockchain already in it and trust this included blockchain, but that would require trust in the client developers. In the future, only a few pool owners, heavy miners, and people with a high number of bitcoins will actually store the blockchain, because it will reach into the TB's of size quite quickly. Most other users will connect to one or more of these blockchain holders to verify account balances using a lite client (chainless client). At least, this is what I see happening if there is wider acceptance and use of bitcoins. This needs to happen within 1 year given current transaction rates. Blocks have increased in size now that real transactions are being done and a small fraction of blocks (the new blocks) are taking up increasingly larger percentages of the total block size. Unless bitcoin is deserted, in 1 year it will take over 1 GB to download all of the blocks. No new users will participate if it takes 1 GB download just to start. The clock is ticking and what you describe needs to happen now. It is already in progress. Most of the code is there to allow a lite client, and the pressure will be on to complete it so Bitcoin can be used from mobile devices. |
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I've got an encrypted backup on a thumbdrive, just in case... probably not going to bother with more than that unless I get a lot more BTC than I have now.
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The first ASICs would probably be GPUs modeled after the 5970 with the unneeded modules stripped out and extra SPs packed into the freed up area. Also, going down to a 20 nm process would allow for more transistors and less power. I could see a small US-based startup company with 2-3 million USD funding, 2 chip designers, 1 board designer and a couple of lab techs. coming up with this optimized GPU/ASIC in about 9 months. You basically need to figure out how to do all the brain work yourself and outsource the fab and packaging as efficiently/cheaply as you can.
An end product with 4 times the hashing rate of a 5970 and consuming 25% the power is very conceivable. That would just be the first cut.
The barrier to entry is not so high so you would probably see more than one company do this.
If such a point does come along that it is actually profitable and reasonable for a company to do this, we'll all be so rich it wouldn't matter for us. |
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