Yep, that's just a shadow.  All you need is the green wire plus any black wire.

+1, it's all good if you use that kind of cable.  Just don't use one that connects all the pins.

Not at all, better safe than sorry. 

But in this case it's OK.  The black wire is ground, the green wire is an input.  So the paperclip is completely grounded already and nothing will happen if it brushes the case or something.  Just don't let it touch any live wires (the same as you shouldn't let live wires touch the case).

On my test bench power supply I just wrap a piece of blue masking tape over it.

You can turn the power supply on for testing by putting a paper clip between the green wire and any black wire on the motherboard connector.

Bitcoins are created for "free" by mining.  It's not really free because it requires a lot of electricity to run the computation.  There was no initial "IPO" like for a stock - it's all gradually generated by mining.

More info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_are_new_Bitcoins_created.3F

The green line is daily profit per 100MH - the scale is arbitrary.  If I drew a graph of daily profit per 1MH, would you still draw your black line the same?  Shouldn't the scale also change when GPU mining took over and megahashes became an order or two cheaper?

ROI (dollars mined per dollar invested in electricity) would be a more interesting metric, but it's a lot harder to measure since there are so many variables.

Also, I don't really agree with the premise.  In the long run, the ROI will trend toward 1:1, but it will always lag changes to its fundamentals (mainly power efficiency of mining hardware and BTCUSD).  Assuming no disruptive technology (ASICs) comes along for mining, power efficiency will gradually improve as GPUs are upgraded.  So the ROI will just measure the rate of change of BTCUSD - when the price is rising, profitability will rise.  When the price is falling, profitability will fall.  When the price is steady, profit will trend toward 1:1.  In other words, it's just a goofy lagging indicator of price.

I'd like to fill in any other major events on this chart.  Does anyone know if something interesting happened on Jul 4 or Aug 25?

I'm not a technical analyst, so I won't speculate on the future.  This chart was just for my own education while considering the events of the last few months.

I'm comfortable calling Aug 6-9 a false break.  I think it was just MyBitcoin wallets getting dumped (and perhaps the stolen coins getting dumped; what ever happened to those?).  Then the trend resumes.

The resistance line is drawn in a bit optimistic.  I'd fix it but it doesn't really matter.  Just imagine it a few pixels down.

Aug 3-4 is interesting.  Was the memo released earlier than I have it marked?

Verifying history just takes a lot of CPU.  The fix people are discussing is to download some pre-verified chunks to seed it to 98% and then just process the last 2%, but that's not ready yet.

It's removed from the settings dialog but you can still enable it in the config file or command line.

What block number does it report in the lower right?  It's normal for it to use a lot of CPU and IO until it's finished downloading and verifying the block chain.

The normal bitcoin client doesn't support doing this and there's no reason you'd really need to; you just spend the coins after they're delivered to your wallet.  It's only something you'd want to do on a pool server.

There are a couple species of goldbug:

The common variety is what you see here: people seeking a stable value store with a predictable supply when the central banks are making unsettling moves.  Some see intrinsic value as a source of stability.  I see it as a floor with little relevance at current prices; as such I prefer to think of it as a fixed-supply decentralized currency rather than a commodity.

The second type is the sort who are planning for post-apocalypse scenarios where fiat is dead and day-to-day trade is done in gold.  "You can't eat gold" points out that rice, .223, bleach, and antibiotics will be much more reliable commodities.

Nope, they decide who needs to get paid, and then the pool goes to work mining a block that will pay those people.  You can't change who gets paid after the block is generated.  That would defeat the security of the system.

As for send multiple: any transaction can take in any number of coins, and then has to output the same number of coins.  It can come from any number of addresses, and go to any number of addresses.  It pulls whatever coins are available in your wallet, and pays out to the list of addresses you want including your "change" which goes to a new address in your wallet.  (Normally that's 2 addresses: the person you pay, plus yourself for the change; but it can just as easily be 3 or more.)  Any imbalance is paid as a transaction fee to the miner.

That's a little different from the generated coins, since those don't have a "From" address.  It's just 50 coins that come from nowhere and pay out to wherever you want (often all one address, but Eligius just splits it out to everyone they're paying).

Nope.  Power fed back will just be consumed by other devices in your house, thus reducing the amount pulled through your meter.  It's not wasted.  In the unlikely case that you have a huge inductive load (very large motors), your power meter subtracts the amount you kick back.  People with solar arrays see this all the time: if they generate more than they use, the meter literally runs backwards.

Anyway, in the case of crappy power supplies, they just switch between using a burst and then nothing.  They don't kick back to the grid.

Sorry, multiply by 0.8.  I was going the wrong way.  But 1.25 is the correct factor going the other way:

100 watts AC * 0.80 efficiency = 80 watts DC
80 watts DC * 1.25 efficiency = 100 watts AC


That's the part that matters for your power bill.  However, if you want to know if you're exceeding the power supply's rating, you have to take efficiency into account to estimate how much power is being drawn on the DC side, which is what the PS is rated for.


Power Factor is not efficiency at all.  It's a measure of how bursty the power usage is.

An incandescent lamp has a PF of 1.00, since it draws current in a perfect sine wave with the voltage.  Induction motors pull current out of phase with the voltage, so they have a low PF.  Old power supplies draw power in bursts around the peak voltage, so they have a low PF.

Those bursts mean you need heavier wiring than your average current requirement suggests, since the peak current goes much higher.  It also means the power company needs bigger transformers because they're rated in volt-amps (IE, limited by the peaks), not watts.  As far as your power bill goes it doesn't matter since they're only measuring average watts, not peak volt-amps.


Agreed it tells it how the power company sees it, and there are no conversions necessary to understand how you'll be billed.

However you do need to convert if you want to estimate how much power is being pulled on the DC side.  The Kill-A-Watt has no way to know how much power is being wasted as heat inside the power supply.

I definitely recommend getting a Kill-A-Watt to measure how much you're really pulling.  Remember to multiply the measurements by 1.25 (the PS is only 80% efficient).  You may find that the estimates of what the cards pull at stock clock vs overclock are wrong.

90% chance you're hitting the thermal limit, not overcurrent or undervolt limits.  Put the PS into free air and use another fan to pump some more air into it.  You're probably right on the edge and it just trips whenever the room's a little too warm.

Why not pull a PS from another computer to run one of the cards and see if that helps?

There's no point underclocking the CPU.  It made sense on fixed frequency CPUs years ago, but all the current ones have frequency scaling.  At the most, just lock the scaling at the slowest value to prevent power surges.

What brand of HD is it?  I'll link you to an .iso you can burn to test it.

It only protects to the degree of its intrinsic value.  Is there really $10 trillion of intrinsic value in gold?  If not then what's supporting it other than speculation and CBs manipulating their currencies?

Funny you should mention the pink sheets.  I've been comparing BTC's behavior to the pinks for some time.  The comparison will hold as long as BTC's price is driven mainly by speculation.

There is a difference between BTC and MTLQQ.  After you strip all the speculation away, BTC actually has a small fundamental value that will support a nonzero price as long as people continue to use it as a currency.  The thing is that price is well under a buck.  I estimate it generously at about $0.001 to $0.01.  Due to a large number of coins out of circulation (hoarding, deleted wallets), and ongoing speculation, we'll hit bottom well above that price.

So don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's going down forever.  I just don't think that it's valid to look at a linear chart and extrapolate a line down until it crashes into the ground in a month and a half.

I agree that you're a problem.