I noticed a pretty serious uptick in namecoin mining, enough to jump the expected difficulty drop date from august to mid july. What is causing the sudden interest in namecoin mining all of a sudden? Still seems like a losing proposition at the current price / difficulty, or are people just eager to get the difficulty down so they can get it up again? hah.

Again, I said it's not a GUESS if you are using the proper data, which I only had approximately. The OP suggested 1.9 mil, which was way out of boundaries. If you want to guess at a fraction of a percent that's fine, though the applicable difference is nil. My numbers were not way off, show in what way they were? In most real world applications 10% is considered inconsequential, 4% even more so. I suggested how sloppy my own numbers were, and how I was going to be close despite that, and I was.

1.6mil vs 1.564 is 2.3% difference. Wowsers trowsers I was WAY OFF. Or not...?

lots of crap happening, btcguild got ddos'd, deepbit went down, I think bitcoinwatch will be a bit hectic for a little bit.

As I said, I didn't really keep proper track of the exact times for retargets. 13% = 14/12.39; so you can see how there is a margin for error when one does not keep decimal places. The difference between 13% and 17% is marginal, 1.55mil vs 1.6mil, and it will likely fall somewhere in between. The point is that if you do have the available data you don't need to guess.

I guess people are still head hunting these cards, specially since they go for ~$100 more on ebay, used.

Good find, lucky guy. Free game coupon too, though I don't know if people still play that game anymore heh.

You got my hopes up, that was just mean.

Why do you need to guess what the value is? The value is not some magical genie. It's mathematically calculated. It's been something along the lines of 12 days since the last retarget, 14/12 = ~1.17, so a 17% increase.


1379223*1.17 = ~1.6mil.

If I had been keeping track more efficiently of the times I'd have a better estimate, but that will be very close.

Now what there IS to wonder about is if we'll ever see retractions from all the doom and gloom crowd that have been predicting dire death and doom to us all, 50% difficulty increases every difficulty change every time without fail no matter what! I mean, the last few times it was 50% so obviously it will keep going forever.
As well as the dire price death of bitcoin, it dropped down to $11! So obviously it will never go back up again.

Uhm, every couple of days? Not sure where you are getting that from, search the forums for the last time that the $110 sapphires went in stock. Was weeks ago. And I'd be willing to bet you will basically never see them in stock again. The $130s are here, they will be in stock for a while, when they are gone they will likely be near to the end of the 58xx retail batches. That's why I don't care about the 5850s you linked, because they're not ever coming back. Same with the sapphire 5850 extremes, they were good buys, but they're gone, so they're irrelevant.

I'm not actually advocating buying these, because with the increase in difficulty, the decrease in price per bitcoin, and the lack of resalability once the bitcoin craze dies down, these cards will likely be big losers, BUT if you are looking to buy a card, they are near to the top of the heap for mining, so there's really no reason not to grab them.

no difference

I'm amazed by how inefficient a lot of these builds are that seem to be the norm. I'm curious, how many of you guys at the 1Mhash/$ or below level are near having your setups repaying themselves?

You realize the 5850 you linked isn't in stock right? So... not exactly a comparison with an instock card.

Not to mention you're linking ONE card that is labelled "5800". The usual run of the mill 5850 gets nowhere near 400MHash/sec, even on water that's hard. To say you can consistently get 380 out of 5850s would be a stretch.

The 5830s are available, and they're close to the top in terms of $/MHash, so if you're going to get a card, this would probably be it (though the power consumption is an issue of course). If you argue against getting a 5830 then you argue against getting any other card basically.

Not to make you feel bad, but you'll almost definitely not ever see that back. $1.14 / Mhash is way too much.

Admittedly I bought in the heyday and got lucky in many ways, but my Price was about $2.41 / MHash, or $0.41 / MHash, buying in about 101000 difficulty, and it took me roughly 45 days to cover costs.

The difficulty is now > 10x higher than that, and you're paying almost triple per mhash. It will be rough for you my friend. Admittedly price is higher now but it also varies quite a bit and is not on the up up up that it once was. Best of luck to you though.

It will also create pressure for significantly higher fees. If people aren't willing to pay them a lot of miners will stop mining, and the network will get much less secure.
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Right now something like 95% of miners mine on pools, and none of the pools payout from tx fees. Unless this changes, there is no pressure for fees to do anything.
I tend to agree, I don't really feel like there is much need for a magic number. Work out how much profit you are comfortable making and decide that way.

I'm personally considering dropping out already even though I'm way above/below a magic number, and I'm still making more than electricity costs, simply because electricity costs an arm and a leg here, and the hassle and noise and heat of running mining is approaching a level of not being worth it for me when half the money made pays for electricity, even though techincally I'm still getting a fair amount of "free money".

 

Because bitcoin @ launch and bitcoin today are exactly the same right? We had GPU miners, nicely set up exchanges, media blitzes about bitcoin making money and silkroad exchanging bitcoin for drugs, tens of thousands of miners and potentially more speculators back in 2009 right?

But regardless, as an answer, the price was essentially null at launch, and the difficulty remained around 1, the lowest possible value. So your trite little question finds its answer there. Bitcoin was worth nothing, and we had almost no one mining. No violations there.

Hope they don't do that stuff here. My latest electric bill jumped by 1000% lol.

I guess I should apologize, I don't mean to be arguing for botnets dominating bitcoin. I actually do not expect them to make much of an impact. Most botnets are used to run spam-mail or DDoS or whatnot, they are very difficult to shutdown, fairly secure business, and very profitable.

Bitcoin on the otherhand is a new, difficult to implement program, that is risky for the operator in terms of losing machines as well as introduces a lot of hurdles and hassles in terms of "cashing out" (collecting bitcoins, turning bitcoins into moolah, pulling that moolah out somewhere), as well as being a somewhat unstable platform for making money (variable pricing, variable difficulty, etc.)

For now botnet operators trying to get into bitcoin are rare, and likely they will be blocked from pools because they are small, and somewhat risky to allow to operate. I don't foresee them becoming a huge problem, but they COULD in theory, and in that scenario people will bow to the dollar. That was my only point.

For the near-term future GPU miners will dominate bitcoin. In the future ASICs and botnets could step in and mess things up, but that is a ways away in the future, and we'll have to see where bitcoin stands at that point anyway.

Yes, it was indeed. And I'm not talking about running botnets, that's clearly illegal, and not a gray area. Having a server which is running a program serving thousands of people, that a botnet chooses to pick up on and contribute to, completely without solicitation, contact or connection with the operator of the botnet is not clearly illegal. Hence it is a gray area. Not that hard to understand.

And if it means the difference between gaining or losing hundreds, or even thousands of dollars PER DAY there is a hell of a lot of incentive for a pool operator to bet on gray.

If you set up an operation solely to profit from a botnet, that certainly would be a problem, if you have an established pool serving tens of thousands of users and a botnet happens to drop in, how are you culpable? If there are 2 websites serving popular widgets, and a botnet happens to DDoS the crap out of 1, leaving the other to solely profit from the misfortune of the first, by your logic that person will be part of the botnet, because they are "profiting from botnet operation."

Again, cite some precedent or stop just filling up the space with your rampant fears with no basis. Authorities don't just kick down the door of anyone that's been touched by a botnet data packet. If they did botnets would be a lot less problematic.

Yeah? Cite some precedent for that other than "being sure". If the pool owner receives a request from law enforcement to crackdown I'm sure they will do so, but until then money talks.

You are saying I am comparing apples and oranges but I'm not. Being the recipient of data packets sent by a zombie computer is hardly being part of a botnet operation. It is a gray area. Hence apples to apples. You're the one comparing apples and oranges by suggesting anyone with any contact to a botnet, knowing or unknowing is somehow a criminal.

Don't be juvenile. Bitcoin itself is a nebulous gray area of legality. By your logic pool operators would not want to be associated with bitcoin at all. A reasonably large pool has a pretty easy claim to deniability in terms of botnet association. They have thousands of clients pummelling their servers with getwork reqs and submitted shares, if they would like to keep a lax watch on their ip tables and gain a very tidy sum of money, why do you think they wouldn't?

Let us imagine some nightmare scenario like the OP suggests. A million zombie computers come online operated by a few botnet owners, they average 100MHash/sec each, running about 100 THash/sec total. The network has grown by roughly 10x in size, normal miners are essentially squeezed out of the network. You are saying that all the pool operators who have been RAKING IN money off bitcoin are suddenly going to say "oh dear, botnets are illegal, I guess we'll all have to shutdown our magical money fountains?"

That's in a worst and most obvious case scenario as well. Say only 4THash came online of botnets, comprising 1/4 the total hashrate of the network, and therefore whatever pool operator welcomed botnets now has easily gobbled up 1/4 of the hashrate, no pool would happily accept that? Not to mention the pools that DONT accept botnets see their own slice of the pie shrink considerably, diminishing their returns by a lot. Enjoy living in fantasy land.


You could of course, but it's a hassle to run a large pool, have it able to have the capacity to handle such a flood of requests, and also sets up a single nodepoint to be shutdown if authorities want to crackdown on you. A pool is easier, just point at it and everything is set up for you. Also makes a nice source for laundering bitcoin.