Not true. It doesnt matter. Think of it this way, with your one card, granted,  you may miss some small blocks, but OTOH its also possibly you will get 5x more than average on that short block. heck, theoretically you could make 50BTC on a single share block. The larger the hashrate, the more improbable such luck becomes (per MH!), just as the more improbable bad luck becomes. But good and bad luck even out, really, there is no difference  in revenue per MH for small miners or huge farms. For every short block you got unlucky on, there will be one where you got lucky.

If you want to improve your revenue per MH, simply go mine somewhere where fees are lower. That really does make a difference .

I think deepbit is mostly wrong. You have to get the getwork of course, but in a round that takes 1 minute, you should get it. Processing and submitting a valid share based on it within 1 minute is something else entirely, and the higher your hashrate, obviously, the better your odds. So hashrate does matter. 

What I think he means, is that for overall profits it doesnt matter, and then he is right. Higher hashrate will mean (slightly) lower variability, but your overall expected revenue per MH is the same. Its just like mining solo, the bigger your hashrate, the lower the variance, but it has no impact on your expected overall btc/MH.

No, Im not. But you can only decrease one at the expense of the other with a given hashrate.

To look at the extreme ends of the spectrum, you can eliminate the "share per small block variance" completely only by mining solo, then you will always have 100%. You can eliminate the the block length variance only by going PPS. You can can have almost anything inbetween, but you cant have both. Deepbit prop is as close to PPS as you will get on a proportional payout scheme, its therefore logical the per share in short block variance is as high as it gets, because your % of the overall hashrate is minimal.  Deepbit will sometimes find blocks in the time it takes you to find a single share. There is no way around that. That can work out both ways though, as either very lucky or unlucky.

It depends entirely on your share of the pools hash rate, so


No. Join a smaller pool where your % is larger. That will decrease the variability of your % on short blocks, but of course your overall variability will only increase because a smaller pool has a bigger per day or per week variability. 

Why can Project 2 pay only 105% when Clipse can pay 110%, when just passing through to gpumax alone would get you ~120% and other hoppers are getting >130%?

Same answer I guess.

I can understand manually approving purchases.
What I find harder to understand is that queued (ie approved) purchases are still not processed while he is asleep.
Gpumax is what, 5 months old now? Its not criticism or that I dont understand beta status, but I just dont understand whats so different about processing leased shares compared to passthrough.

And its down again.

Can some other BTClot users (if any?) comment on whether this is just bad luck, a once in a blue moon thing, or if I need to look elsewhere to get acceptable uptimes ?

Obviously it will, and its completely logical. The sheer existence of short and long blocks already is what causes variance, and being able to get proportionally more or less shares in to short rounds exacerbates that.

Deepbit has 3.5 GH. A 50K share round takes about 1 minute.  With a single 6970 you get what, 4-5 shares per minute on average? No surprise on some blocks you wont hit any. But on others you might get lucky and get 10 or more shares in. It should average out.

If you dont like variance, go to a PPS pool.

I couldnt get on it. It seems to work fine again now, but its been going on and off for a while.

That said, I did open a  ticket later and got a prompt response that they are already looking in to it.

Ive only signed up a few days ago, so far its too early for me to judge. FWIW, so far support has been helpful and fairly fast, but I prefer not needing support, so I hope this wont happen too often .

This is disappointing. Its so slow I cant even log in right now. Just when I thought I had found a good solution

Whats going on? The first few days, my VPS was blazing fast. Now its slow as molasses. Even loading the VEportal page is barely loading. I was gonna claim my 10%, but Id rather see this fixed.

I guess it depends on your definition of best. There are differences in features and performance and usability, and the performance also depends on the hardware. Different people have different opinions, depending on their hardware and preferences.

For features, go cgminer. For usability and arguably speed, depending on your hardware, you could try bitminter.

For cpuminers, if you mean for bitcoin mining, save yourself the trouble. Even the best miner wouldnt come close to being worth it.

No one has. Unless you can predict future bitcoin value and difficulty. if you can do that, save yourself the trouble of mining and head straight  for bitcoinica.

The only thing you can do, is try to be more efficient than other miners, buy buying more efficient hardware and/or having cheaper electricity and other costs, then hope for the best. But no one knows for sure if mining will become lucrative or loss making in the next 12 months. If thats not something you want to gamble on, dont invest in mining. There is nothing the OP can do about it.

Ah. That explains the percentages. But I guess its completely logical its ordered descending by difficulty so we see 10 month old data first

Since you are fixing minor bugs on that page; when you click a date in the 'stats by date', you get the results for the day preceding the day you clicked.

The difficulty history below that is also either completely fubar, or I dont understand what its showing.

They arent. But ill make you an offer cause Im a nice guy Where are you shipping from?

Innocent until proven guilty..  
So may I suggest a bitcoin legal defense fund for Anders Behring Breivik?  
Hey, no such thing as bad publicity right?

 

The 1TX blocks have gone, but has the mystery miner? I know blockchain.info isnt all that reliable, but have a look at this:
http://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days

"Unknown" used to represent something like 10-15% IIRC. Deepbit and slush combined were close to 50%.
Did Mystery Miner switch to solo mining? Or is this GPUmax thats directing its hashes somewhere than to any of the regular pools?

I suppose a bitcoin asic would be relatively simple to design, and so you might find some hobbyists (or pro's with free time) willing to collaborate on a design; but the one thing that REALLY costs money when making an ASIC, is the mask set, and there is no way around that. Depending on process, you are looking at at least $500.000 to a high multiple of that. Opensource or not wont make that go away. And I imagine someone risking that kind of money on a bitcoin specific chip to not want to inform potential competitors too early.

That said, I think ppl are getting a bit too excited over Vlad's announcement just yet. Ill get excited when I see a demo of working hardware. All I see so far is plans to start a 'HUGE' company doing who knows what using who knows what. If he is planning to build his own chips as he suggested, and particularly if he is new to that field as he seems to be, he might be in for a few very unpleasant surprises.

No, not really, and it wouldnt serve a purpose, unless you mean a new "shared cooler" that uses one large radiator and links all the individual chips with heatpipes. Probably a bit cumbersome and expensive, and pretty much out of the question for DIY. I mean, it can be done, if you are a good plumber, but.. I wouldnt . Watercooling is probably easier and more efficient.

 What would be useful, but depends on the design of the heatsink, is creating a shroud that covers the heatsinks and forces air through all of them. Thats how most high density servers are cooled, there is a row of fans at the front and the air is guided over and through the cpu heatsinks with a simple plastic shroud. Not all that different from gpus actually.

So just remove the individual fans, beef up the back and front fans and force the air through the individual heatsinks. That does require the fins are properly aligned to allow that.