I switched the failover sequence of my merged minings pools to put bitparking's mmpool first instead of my own p2pool, and boom, I am now seeing 3.35 terrahashes on the LCD readout. So somehow p2pool was causing me to lose 2/3 of my hashing power.

I tried removing geistgeld, the fastest block time merged mined coin, such fast blocks that mmpool does not merge them, from my merge but still as soon as I switched back to using the p2pool pool the hash rate shown on the LCD started dropping back down again.

So I guess it must be something about my p2pool, rather than the fact that I merge more coins with it than mmpool does, that is causing such massive losses.

-MarkM-

I have a 1000 watt Cougar CMX powering one cube and the controller, an Aurum AU-1000PRO powering one cube, two Cooler Master 725's each powering one cube, and a Cooler Master ZPG-1200B powering one cube. That is, five power supplies currently to power the five cubes plus one controller. Because one ZPG-1200B died trying to power three cubes and the other didn't seem to really suffice for two cubes (both fresh out of the box new from Newegg).

Network should not be a problem as I have a backup pool configured and both pools use stratum so even though I have more hash power the pools should simply adjust the share-difficulty to keep the net usage much the same. All cables seem fine. Besides if they were not they'd all have to be equally unfine wouldn't they since there seem to be no problem cubes just a general overall unexpectedly low hash rate for the whole kit and kaboodle.

-MarkM-

That last ASIC happened to get snapshotted just when it showed low wattage; the numbers fluctate, so shortly it again looked much like all the others.

-MarkM-

I don't know how to post images, I am familiar with pastebin sites but not sure how people paste pictures.

The page shows wattages usually 265 to 297 or so, but flicks to tiny numbers like 3 or 9 watts from time to time for moments too.

Temperatures of dies in one ASIC range from 77 through 93 degrees. Possibly it is throttling a lot due to temperatures or something like that.

Actually just saw one have a range of 74 through 95.

It doesn't seem to be throttling the 95 either so maybe throttling due to temperature is not what is going on.

-MarkM-

How do you get these "Neptune" things to go up past one terrahash consistently?

After putting overkill amounts of power supplies, now up to a total of four power supplies to power the five cubes plus controller, all five cubes now look about the same, that is, no indication that any particular cube has problems, although the interface does not show how many hashes each cube is getting. They all have about the same voltages, currents, and watts. The grand total hashing shown by the little LCD screen ranges from 750 gigahashes up to sometimes as much as 1.2 terrahashes.

Frequencies and voltages are at factory defaults. I have tried RC6, RC8 and RC9 firmwares.

This is basically as good as it gets using factory settings, so what the heck are people doing to get two or three terrahashes out of these things?

The power supplies thing was because even using 1200 watt supplies many were not able to run two cubes well. I had a couple of coolmax ZPG-1200B for example one of which seems to have given up the ghost completely after trying to power three cubes the other pretended to power two cubes but one of the two always sat at 3 to 9 watts total power usage. So I now have that one powering just one cube and a coolermaster EX2 725 powering the other cube. I had another EX2 725 powering another cube but had not really wanted to use this second one to power the cube that the ZPG-1200B wasn't seeming to work well for because previously when I had been using both EX2 725's to power one cube each one of them had turned itself off, presumably indicating that either that PSU or whichever cube it had been powering when it turned itself off was somehow peaking or something enough to have 725 watts borderline even for just a single cube...

-MarkM-

I don't mean a place to keep your savings, I mean a place to pile your buy side depth if you are trying to uphold the value of a coin by ensuring it always has depth.

Of course I would prefer to have them all on my own exchange, but if I must have them on someone else's then I prefer Vircurex because their payment system means I can afford to have offers in place that I don't expect anyone to ever actually take me up on. I can afford to have them there "just in case" and in order to have offers at every possible number of satoshis of price because the bitcoins earn while they sit there providing depth.

Also obvious of course is to try to only use "profit coins", as soon as possible, that is, get your initial capital back to your own wallet as soon as possible, plus some profits too, so that the only coins you have on any third party site are "pure profit" coins the site already earned you.

I left my coins on Vircurex knowing the freeze was coming because I figured it would be nastily ironic to evacuate them to some scam exchange and have them stolen. What I left was leftover profit after taking take-home profit, and I figured if they do get stolen its maybe better to let Vircurex, who made/earned them for me in the first place, steal them than ship them off to some other thief. Almost all other exchanges were obviously scammers, their entire exchanges existed purely for the purpose of perpetuating endless numbers of scam of the day scamcoin scams, they were all about proliferating as many scams per day as possible, jumping on as many new scams as possible, anyone whose entire business is based on profiting from scams it seems stupid to imagine is not planning to scam you so I avoid them.

The thing I like least about Vircurex actually is they seemed to get so desperate they started to jump on scams too, I think for example if supporting DOGE was at all justifiable the same facts that justify accepting DOGE ought to have caused them to drop the scrypt coins that had even less hashing power than DOGE, since the main thing DOGE did for the world was prove how patheticaly weak even litecoin's hashpower was, making it clear that even litecoin, and certainly all the crappy scrypt coins with even less hashpower than litecoin, are ridiculously insecure.

I wish they would add GRouPcoin though, since it has quite a bit of hashpower and would help make Vircurex the place to go for dealing in merged mined coins.

-MarkM-

Remember way back when CDN, GMC, GRF, MBC, NKL, UKB, UNS and such were skyrocketing so much that there were concerns that debts denominated in such units might never be able to be paid off, so that there was a big move to denominating debts in DeVCoins (DVC) instead because DVC seemed much less prone to endless skyrocketing of price?

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotdvc.html now... Those previously skyrocketing currencies have been dropping steadily, down below the lows recorded since those tables and plots started being accumulated. Maybe that large scale movement could have something to do with it?

-MarkM-

I think momentum got involved, people see it listed as one of the fastest rising coins on the sites that show market caps and such, so more people flood in.

How does the Vircurex buy price compare to the buy side on other exchanges now, we have the buy side filled up through 35 satoshis now on Vircurex.

-MarkM-

Vircurex is probably the best exchange to sit your bitcoins on, so maybe someone is doing pumps on their selected coins and doing it on Vircurex so that they will make "interest" on their buy offers when they end up piling up buy offers on those coins eventually to keep their price floor up as well as they can following their pump?

I know this climb in DeVCoin is letting me start doing a lot of building up of the buy side of DeVCoin, which had been pathetic ever since the 35 bitcoins I had been supporting my chosen coins with got frozen.

Vircurex seems the best place to use for building massive price floor depth on the buy side because even though my lowball offers may never be taken I will in any case earn "interest" on the bitcoins while they sit there providing lots of buy depth.

I had been usually managing to uphold the price floor of DeVCoins near 30 satoshis back before the freeze, now that I am again starting to accumulate bitcoins on Vircurex hopefully it will not take long to get the price floor back there again then hopefully continue to build up from there.

-MarkM-

Huh? Bitcoin that is not frozen can be withdrawn can't it?

What is frozen cannot be traded nor withdrawn, but all withdraws work don't they for non-frozen coins?

Earlier today though many coins had the same volume, so it looked like someone decided to invest a certain amount in each coin, and in the process started some buying mania.

-MarkM-

Fees are only collected by solving blocks. Basically the black reward in total is not just the plain reward but also all the fees for that block.

So variance is exactly the same for fees as for blocks, if you mean variance in how long getween the times when you get lucky and actually get something.

So as someone wrote above. fees are the block reward once the "subsidy" part of the reward falls to zero.

Merging a coin s damn near free, you merely have to run the coin's daemon along with the other daemons, so it is dirt cheap, just basically costs a little bit of RAM and a little bit of disk space and a tiny amount of processing power. Each time you solve a block of any chain though, your miners need to be told to start work on a new block, so some miners didn't like the ten second or fifteen second or twelve second or whatever fast blocks of GeistGeld because that meant every few seconds al their mining rigs needed to be told to start fresh on a new block, whereas with ten minute block time chains such interuptions were only needed each ten minutes or so. Thus basically the faster the blocks the more of a tiny little fractional dent a chain makes in your overall mining efficiency.

Hardly anyone merges GeistGeld, probably mostly for that reason, but the next-fastest is I0Coin at one point five minutes per block, which is way less impact than GeistGeld and such tiny impact there is really no reason NOT to mine them unless you are some puny amateur at home with a tiny machine that does not have enough RAM and disk to run 6 or 7 or whatever coin daemons along with p2pool (the easiest mining pool system to do your home merge with).

So for professional pools, it really makes little sense NOT to mine at least 7 of the 8 merged coins, even if they decide not to bother with the 8th, GeistGeld, due to its speed.

But consider also how many many many crapcoins go on about how important it is to have fast blocks. If they are right, that fast blocks are a great feature, then it probably also makes no sense not to include GeistGeld in your merge, due to fast blocks being such a great feature and the cost of merged mining being basically trivial.

-MarkM-

If you are serious, then hash power. If the blockchain is not secure, nothing else really matters.

If your treasure is not secure then the more valuable the treasure is the worse, as greater value simply means more chance someone will try to take it from you.

So security is paramount.

Unfortunately the scrypt space has been fragmented grossly since DOGE came along and showed how pathetic the puny amount of hash power litecoin had really was, since just some stupid meme could whip up more hash power almost overnight thus demonstrating that even litecoin had pathetically puny hashpower.

The big thing about the whole blockchain concept is ultimately its security rests upon the fact that all the computing power in the whole world that is not actively defending the blockchain is not enough to effectively attack the blockchain. Any chain that has less than half the world's computing power securing it is weak.

If it were not for merged mining this would make alternate chains pretty much pointless and useless, but thanks to merged mining it might be possible to actually secure more than just one chain, if the majority of the world's hashpower all agrees to co-operate in securing more than one chain at once.

Compare for example the hashpower of namecoin or even devcoin, or ixcoin, heck maybe even i0coin and groupcoin, to other coins...

-MarkM-

If you have not heard of such a thing as a firewall maybe looking up how they work could help?

Sorry if imagining you don't know all about firewalls and have yours all set up right seems insulting but over the decades I have noticed that not all users of Windows really have much system-admistration knowledge...

-MarkM-

I don't think I have the domain. if I did I would have gotten a renewal notice from the registrar.

Presumably who-ever does have it would have received such a notice yet for some reason or lack of reason chose not to renew it.

I renewed a lot of domains recently that were expiring, but that was not one of them. Those I just recently renewed are now renewed for two years. Most were ones we have been holding in readiness for future planned sites we want to create when market capi justifies doing so, not domains currently in use.

-MarkM-

Scrypt coins are going to remain ridiculously insecure unless they team up to be merged mined together.

Without merged mining BBQcoin and all other non-merged-mined scrypt coins other than whichever of litecoin or DOGE everyone ends up using as primary coin in their merge are just train wrecks waiting to happen, and since it does not look like litecoin nor DOGE plan to enable themselves to be merged with each other both seem determined to destroy the while scrypt field rather than work together to try to make scrypt a reasonable option.

-MarkM-

GRP is GRouPcoin, has been for years. A new different ticker is needed for graphene...

-MarkM-

Just because worthless crap hasn' yet been stolen doesn't at all mean that the worthless crap is secure, it just means it is not worth stealing.

As long as PoS coins remain pathetically worthless who cares, they aren't important, why even bother attacking them.

The point is they cannot be used safely for real serious money. Sure if you just want pennies fine use sugar cubes or lumps of mud or whatever, its not important. But for serious stuff you need serious stuff. PoS is not serious. Especially PPCoin which is basically just another Solidcoin type con job, that is, centralised, vulnerable to one guy who can trash it at will.

-MarkM-

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-

They are some of the eight merged mined coins that are all mined at once using the same hashing power and thus are all able to have high hashing power without detracting from each others' hashing power.

The eight coins are BiTCoin, NaMeCoin, GRouPcoin, DeVCoin, I0Coin, IXCoin, CoiLedCoin and GestGeld (XGG).

One or two other coins recently apparently inted to enable such merged mining but evidently did not do it right, for example that game-in-a-blockchain whatever it was called claimed it could be merged mined but tests failed to find any blocks of it when merging it. So as far as I know there are so far only these eight coins that actually work.

Of them, all except CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld are already mined by at least one fairly well known public pool so already have somehwat high hashrates and a bunch of miners who are raking them in and possibly, not realising their value, dumping them; of those only GRouPcoin is not as far as I know on any well known exchange thus is probably hard to dump for most who are mining it.

Only two, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, remain "under the radar", nice low difficulty thus still easy to mine, and of course at any moment they could get picked up by one or more large merged mining pools so how long they will stay nice and esy to mine is unknown. Even when they do get picked up by pols though they might still remain somewhat low profile like GRouPcoin currently is, until they get listed on some well known exchange.

Despite I0Coin and IXCoin already being on known public pools and already on exchanges though they both are still rather nice prospects because they are so insanely low in price. I0Coin for example people were buying to 3500 satishis not so long ago but now it has been weeks since any of my sell offers at 3500 satishis and up have been touched, and similarly all my IXCoin sell offers have not been touched for weeks. Yet all those offers anre only of coins I picked up cheaper on the same exchange, I would not sell any of my real hoards so cheap, I am offering at such cheap prices only to provide liquidity, offering for sale coins I picked up at even more insanely cheap prices as the gap between buy side and sell side tends to be vast.

-MarkM-

It seems pretty much the best potential profit percentage-wise of any coin currently, being somewhat akin to IXCoin but without the looming cold turkey loss of block rewards that IXCoin is facing. Maybe less of a team pushing it than IXCoin though so if the cold turkey loss of block rewards does not harm IXCoin maybe IXCoin will do even better than I0Coin.

Both seem extremely good prospects. Though of course there is also GRouPcoin too, which does not even seem to be on an exchange yet so might jump a lot in value when it does go on an exchange, or maybe go down if people aren't managing to get rid of unwanted GRouPcoins in private sales.

-MarkM-