Well... that solution might ultimately prove to be the best but it's quite a serious change...
Don't you agree that a couple of purely cosmetic changes to the client could make a difference?

It's you who first raised the issue of the user passing away

It seems to me, the bitcoin client should periodically make a backup copy of the wallet.dat file once it has been user-encrypted.
Encryption should be offered each time an unencrypted wallet is being opened (with a stop-bugging-me checkbox to opt out).
Does the phrase "tyranny of the default values" ring a bell?

Let's grant the most non-technical user access to their wallet file by moving wallet.dat from the normally hidden %appdata% directory to Documents. If thay can't see it, they sure as hell won't back it up. Let's keep the automatically generated backup copies in %appdata%/roaming/bitcoin with everything else the user does not have to be aware of but let's give him the wallet file.

There you go: encryption and propagation for data security.

Yes, I know full well that a hard drive can crap out any time but we can't do EVERYTHING for the uninformed non-techie user, now can we?

As to dying... since Death (andTaxes, hi there ) is unavoidable, doesn't everyone keep a sealed list of passwords to vitally important files/services at their lawyer's? Together with their will? Oh gosh...

How do these ideas strike you, DAT? Worth starting a thread in the /Development subforum?

BTW, the BITCOINS themselves exist in the block chain, NOT in the wallet. The wallet has only the key pairs and addresses required to access your bitcoins.

Take a look at this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56630.0.
If OP there is right, perhaps you should wait a little bit. The HD 7970 launches in four days. 7950 and the 78xx series launches in February.

I would NOT take a glance at the 6950/70 cards. I'm quite disappointed with their hashing speed for all the power draw and heat.
Those cards were supposed to be built in 32nm process but due to manufacturing issues they were redesigned a little bit and released in 40 nm.

I know I'm waiting until February.
...or perhaps I'll just wait "4 to 6 weeks" for the BFL FPGA to come out :>

I already said that somewhere around the forum, the 7970 will kick some serious ass!
And let's wait for GCN optimizations...

81°C at 1125? That's awesome.
Any chance of you measuring the card's power draw? (If you have a kill-a-watt just measure the machine's power draw in idle and during mining. The delta is the 7970's power draw).

What's your point?
Mining cryptocurrencies isn't a get-rich-quick scenario without significant financial investments.
It's hard for me to see any future for the current set of alternative cryptocurrencies as they offer nothing significantly better than the bitcoin chain.
If you're trying to make some money selling the mined coins why don't you try Litecoins? Still, we're talking cents here.

I recommend you stick to Bitcoin, buy a couple of coins if you wish to play with them.

LEARN TO BACKUP VALUABLE DATA :<

Which command wasn't found?
There are a couple steps to the whole procedure and you haven't told us which one failed.

...until you need to hot-swap a hard drive double-quick

Dissipate a few hundred Watts (at best) worth of heat by surface area? Surely you must be joking.


Are we supposed to have a sensible thread here or some goddarned fantasy?

"fryolator", beautifully said P4
Robokhr, you transfer the heat from the rig to the oil tank. Now what? The heat will build up unless you transfer it away.

In pure oil you must mean.
Or in some non-conductive water-cooling liquid. Those are pretty expensive though.
If you actually fancy using water you're on your way to frying the rig.

The whole operation will likely by extremely messy and destroy any resale value of your equipment.
There's a reason liquid cooling isn't done this way, you know.

You shouldn't have to resort to third-party programs for CPU housekeeping. It's just wrong and now you see why.
Can't your mobo take care of CPU power saving? I don't believe I've ever seen one that can't.

Search the BIOS for options like C1E, AMD Cool'n'Quiet, Intel SpeedStep, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST, EISST) and make sure they're on.
Perhaps upgrade your BIOS to the latest version while you're messing with it?



If that machine is your dedicated miner I don't see any advantage in running Windows on it. Linux is where you probably should go.

A prudent policy I wasn't aware of. Thumbs up.
Tripping the limit automatically sends the bitcoins to their rightful place I presume?

I noticed a valid bitcoin address isn't required to start mining at your pool.
Is there an automatic e-mail message to inform the forgetful souls who never provided you with their wallet id?

I always prefer to bolt the wallet id down when I get a chance.
Anyone not doing their wallet backups is just asking for trouble anyhow, so I can't quite agree with Slush.
Also, why on Earth would anyone entrust any pool with a significant amount of bitcoins is beyond me.


ABCPool gives the user a chance to lock their wallet id. I also can't find any way of displaying/changing my saved e-mail address.
Eligius effectively does so in its idiosyncratic way (Trust No One, not even the pool).
BitcoinPool doesn't allow changing the wallet id or e-mail.

EDIT:: for those uninformed, Eligius keeps NO user data at all. You use the wallet ID as your worker username.

Didn't know that, thankee sir.

Do you think you could read the make and model of that PSU?
With that information, we could put the advertised wattage into perspective.

From what you are saying it really sounds like the PSU just shutting off on you.

A failing card would most likely just hang, perhaps hanging the whole PC but it would not power it off.

I would imagine that in the future as you specified it (5+ years) most of these unfortunates will have upgraded their internet, aye?
Anyhow, the download itself doesn't seem to be the bottleneck.

The client will be upgraded by then.
Downloading the blockchain, you only need to suck 891 megs of data from the net.
It's the database housekeeping stuff which ruins the experience.
With those 891 megs of data, the bitcoin client performed 22.7 gigs of hard drive reads/writes.
See this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56126.0

Half an hour ago, this was happening:





What alerted me most was the fact that the forums were down.
Has there been some attack?

Is Bitcoinwatch broken - which I really hope it is - showing VERY low block generation per hour?

Just kidding about torrents

I'll do a test on XP later today, but I can already tell you it's gonna look far worse than my previous test.
Firstly, XP does far less caching using an older algorithm and secondly, this time the testing machine will only have 2 gigs of RAM.

In case it wasn't obvious from my previous post, bitcoin client WANTED to transfer 22.7 gigs on/off the drive and it was only thanks to Windows 7 that this snafu didn't actually happen.

Uhmmm... sure you didn't confuse bitcoin with utorrent there, partner?

Holy heck, almost 160 gigs, that sounds absurd.
In fact, it sounded just crazy enough to make me wanna test what mr Bitcoin-qt 5.1 does while downloading the whole chain:

    It took exactly 4 hours and 17 minutes for the whole blockchain to be downloaded.
    No excessive use of CPU or memory was noticed.
    891 megs of data was downloaded. Combined hard disk reads and writes: 22,7 gigabytes.⁽¹⁾
    Holy sh*t, that's a lot of disk activity... or not:
    the hard drive actually only transfered 15 gigabytes SINCE REBOOT 25 hours ago.
    Thanks to read/write caching most of bitcoin.exe's activity never actually touched the drive.⁽²⁾

The machine I ran the test on is a lowly HP nx7300 laptop with upgraded memory and hard drive (Core2Duo T5500, 3 GB RAM, Kingston SNV-425S2 SSD drive) running Windows 7 x64.


Gavin, in the light of recent wallet.dat failures⁽³⁾ I'd like to ask whether the bitcoin client is using Windows's transactional NTFS file operations in any way?⁽⁴⁾ That would seem to be desirable... Transactional file ops are supported since Windows Vista and boil down to merely calling the transactional counterparts of the old API calls.


References:
(1)



(2)

(3)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56023.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55975.0
(4)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365738%28VS.85%29.aspx