Currently exchange is roughly .02BTC/NMC and falling. Difficulty is roughly .015NMC/BTC. Obviously if the two numbers meet then profitability is equalized. If exchange goes below difficulty than namecoin will no longer be profitable. Something to consider.

A shame that pornography, drugs and gambling are the best bets to gaining any traction for something like bitcoin, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth eh?

I'm still waiting for pokerstars.net or someone big to start accepting bitcoin, that would certianly be a boon for the currency

Since when? I had to return a defective item and they made me pay return shipping. They didn't make me pay shipping back to me again I guess.

Looks like about 12blocks/hr right now. So 1 week. Until more people realize that difficulty dropped today instead of tomorrow, then it'll probably be halved again to like 4 days. That's my guesstimate, 4-5 days until difficulty change.

Seems we have a lot of gambling sharks in here :p

Namecoins were discovered by many people as much more profitable than bitcoins. As an expected result it was mined to the point where it was no longer more profitable than bitcoins, and so many people left to return to bitcoin. On 7/21 is will be about 2x as profitable to mine namecoin as bitcoin if the exchange holds steady, and we will see a repeat. Short burst of high hashpower leading to a huge jump in difficulty followed by a pulling out of hash power leaving namecoin to suffer for a month or two.

Thanks for reminding me though, that I need to start preparing for the namecoin burst.

I consider you the exception, not the norm. However I honestly would love to have done what you did, but I'm not in a location or position to do so right at the moment. Timing can be a bish sometimes. Kudos to you though for jumping in head first. If it pays off you will have a nice little cash cow on your hands

Stale shares, variance in rate of share submission, variance for pool, pool fees, all these things can and/or will drag down your BTC earned. If you're close to the theoretical return rate, you're doing well.

Well, I suppose that I agree with the idea of prime time delay, but it takes basically no infrastructure for a shop to at least open up the doors to accepting bitcoin (unlike the billions of dollars required to enable the smart phone CC readers which are coming out), so I see no reason why a shop couldn't at least potentially accept bitcoin as payment (especially online stores). Doesn't have to be an overnight thing, but the more places that are at least willing to accept the coin the better it is for bitcoin, and the faster you will see developments like enhanced security features.

I agree on the difficulty calls, I've been arguing with people for weeks who claimed that because between may and june there were huge increases that would always be so, even to the point of creating spreadsheets with future difficulty predictions > 1 BILLION. I had to hold myself back from actively calling these people out as things started to smooth over. I don't know the future though so I may end up just as wrong, so for now, I'm just enjoying the current state of affairs.

I think he means your particular card was crap, not the brand. There are bad releases of any component, you were just unlucky enough to get one. But it can happen to anyone, for example when setting up my 3rd mining rig, I put in a Seasonic X750 PSU, one of the highest quality PSUs you can get. Within about 30 minutes I smelled something funny, and about 5 minutes later I heard a loud *POP* and my computer shutdown. PSU was all kinds of dead. Not my fault, not seasonics fault, just a bad psu. RMA'd it and the replacement PSU ran an 800W load for a week before I got my 850W PSU to replace it, and could drop it into a more reasonable load.

Well, at current bitcoin prices, mining profitability is quite high. So if what you say is true either people are betting on big price drops (in which case they're also betting on bitcoin failing) or this is a retraction as people feel the sting of their gold-rush calculations biting them in the butt after the drop from $32 to $14. Those aren't really well thought out analyses though.

I'm guessing people are just adding more cautiously now, instead of sinking $10,000 - $40,000 at a time, as fast as possible, as recklessly as possible, expecting to have money rain down on you, people are looking for efficient building and taking it slow so as not to lose their families if things turn sour. This is prudent.

It's way too early to tell, and if we're really averaging 6.13blocks / hr then it will not likely decrease. This turn of events is not at all unexpected though, a huge boost in price lead a huge boost in hashing power. A huge drop in price effectively curtailed such a continued expansion, but it's much harder to get out of mining than it is to get in. So we see a bit of stabilization.

My worry about the current stabilization is that concept known as stagflation. Interest and demand taper off, while bitcoins continue to be pumped into the system. Hopefully the new stabilization in both hashing power and price ("stabilization" obviously) will attract more businesses to accept bitcoins as payment. Without the dreaded price swings, it should be more business friendly for those looking at balancing the books.

How are we defining recently? Last few days? Last few weeks? Last few months?

The people who started in the past few days cannot have paid off their machines regardless. Past few weeks, possibly if they just bought a very efficient GPU(s) and no other hardware, but even then, that's a stretch.

Myself, I started 2 months ago, which seems to have been a lucky strike timing for latecomers, and I've paid off my rigs with a few thousands dollars on top to boot. Including paying off my main machine which is ridiculously inefficient, as it is a gaming/workstation as well as mining rig (HAFX, i7 2600k, P8P67 Extreme, SSD, raid HDDs, extra scythe GT15 fans, oversized PSU, basically everything possible to drive up price). But that was a matter of timing, I managed to get in when difficulty was relatively low, buying tons of cheap 5870s before people realized what they were for, and when price began surging upwards, allowing me to hold until plateaus appeared to dump.

So I'm probably close to an ideal case for relatively recent mining. Anyone much later than me probably still has a month or two to go to reach equitability if things remain stable.

Yes, I suppose that could have been done, in a sense. There is a hardcoded x4 change maximum, either up or down. It would make sense for the difficulty to change when that value was reached (that is to say 8weeks), and unfortunately I do not believe that is the case. Perhaps it was done so that every node would know precisely when to calculate/update difficulty rather than relying on a possibly varying time-reference.

That is to say it is easy for every node to check the blockchain and get an update "Block xxx was found, recalculate difficulty", it might be a bit more difficult for them to say "Oh XXX time has passed, let's check in and set the difficulty." Not sure if that is the reason, but it seems logical to me.

70F here today... felt warm to me.

I too mine all 3, although I actually mine all 3 equally, this for me is a way of reducing the already reduced variance even further. The top 3 hold around 80% of the networks total hashing power, therefore it is very unlikely that all 3 will be running a streak of badluck simultaneously. More likely that if any one or two are running badly the other one or two will be running well. And it still functions the same as having backup pools because if one goes down the other two just kick up.

I happen to like all 3 pools, they have nice webUIs and reporting (slush is probably my least favorite though as I can't see my actual hashrate the pool sees, but c'est la vie). I worry a bit about the security of the blockchain, but for now things seem ok, so I'll just keep my eyes open.

The advantages to a per card worker is that you have more granularity in stat reports. You can see how each card is performing on the pool and if any worker goes down you can get an alert and know exactly which card to check (depending on your setup/pool setup). The disadvantage is that it can be a hassle to set up, on the pool, in your client, if you update your client you have to redo every card for every worker, and so on. It's not that big a deal either way.

The per computer is just the flip, easier to just copy and paste for all cards in client and one pool setup, but less stat reporting (you have to remember approximately what rates you are getting and no warning if only one card shuts down).

You realize that's not even proposed to happen until block 24000 right? (Current NMC block is ~17000), if it actually happens.

As for the original point, it's not very unexpected, I and probably others mentioned this a while back. It's certainly possible, but it's more likely to happen as a result of other catastrophic failures for bitcoin spelling its inevitable doom anyway.


Difficulty adjustment is 100% based on difficulty duration, when it occurs/is calculated however is based on block count. Not sure if that's what you were thinking.

I always love a chance to show off my bad fortune.



I don't make a per card worker, I make a per machine worker, I'm pointing abotu 1.5Ghash to slush I believe, and as you can see I've been at it at least a month (I think it's more like 2.5 months total, but anyway) and I've found 0 blocks on any worker. In fact as far as I can tell I've never found a block at all on any pool. For me pools have been a life saver, you might be a luckier duck though and find blocks like nobody's business. That's up to you to decide. For me, the risk isn't worth the potential reward (obviously).

Who is we? Nothing that NVidia is developing will reach consumers, at least not in the foreseeable future. If they succeed with their design, and that's a big if, it will be from a millions dollar grant by the US Govt, and certainly not developed in any way for mass release. Not to mention that double precision floating point operations are not at all used in hashing, so the power is irrelevant for bitcoin.

Not saying that technological progress isn't cool, but let's not conjure up pipe dreams of computing bitcoin to the moon just yet.