Because choosing 9 hours before a difficulty change as your starting BTC value really makes sense as a timeline?

The start of the 1.39 BTC cycle was 5/26, so that was more or less a month. That aside though, this was a big and painful growth period for miners to be sure. Pity the foos who were buying rigs in the middle.

With the steadying of difficulty however it's possible if they stick it out they'll recoup though. Keep those fingers crossed lil buddies.

The numbers seem to jibe decently.

@Gameover, how is a slight increase a sign of something being dead? I remember total network power being 2THash not that much more than a month ago, a > 5x increase stabilizing is hardly a death knell. I personally wouldn't mind a retraction in mining power and/or price, but the inertia doesn't seem to be faltering yet. We'll see how bitcoin weathers its current storm. Namecoin seems to be an interesting case study in the possible future of bitcoin, as it saw a huge huge boom due to its profitability, then when difficulty increased to unprofitable levels it saw a sharp retraction in both price and mining power, but it is still alive and kicking, and in about a month I'm guessing you'll see a huge flood into it again, assuming bitcoin doesn't die in that time. So we'll see.

lol best comment I've read in a while

and a good point, why would you be depositing coin when the market rate was plummeting like a rock?

I don't foresee a difficulty decrease, the number of new miners that came online just the last difficulty was huge, and they'll be struggling to see their new huge money pits make them some return. The smartest among them might be considering hashing it out for 2 difficulties then returning the hardware from whence it came, giving them some return for their work, or at least covering restocking fees.

And let's be frank, even at this difficulty mining yields roughly 7x back the cost of electricity in "free money". The impatient amongst us will certainly drop out, but the large portion of business minded individuals who have been ramming the difficulty up will still see the coin to be made.

To be fair to the OP he said he is from a country that does not let him transfer money around online easily to go buying video cards and bitcoins. Namibia doesn't get a lot of traffic for newegg I imagine, if that is where he is from.

5 bitcoins is actually a sizable amount of time/money for most people however, so I'm not sure what to say the OP. Good luck I guess?

That's a fair point, as summer starts to roll in in force, we will definitely see a lot more people struggling with the idea of running a space heater 24/7.

Aw, I thought this thread was serious til I saw the pile of nvidia. Kudos to the guy who could afford that pile of 580s though.

Using poclbm, phoenix, something else?

As mentioned before I recommend jump to 2.4, less fuss, less muss, no real performance difference, less problems.

If you have issue still you can open a command line and see what that yields.

Uhm, what? Topic title and post are kind of confusing.

Generated results meaning what exactly?

 

Anyway, it's been said over and over and over and over. Difficulty follows price. We had a huge huge huge jump in price, followed by tons of people buying tons of mining hardware, after that we had a huge huge huge fall in price, followed by a big jump in difficulty.

Explain why difficulty would continue to rise in that scenario? I'm sick of all the threads "I CALCULATED THAT GIVEN A 50% CONTINUAL INCREASE IN DIFFICULTY MINING WILL NOT BE PROFITABLE OMGOMGOMG" that stupidly kept appearing. Makes absolutely no sense. I want some apology threads, but sadly I'm sure I'll never see those.

Now, there is still room in the profitability cupboard for mining to grow, but I'm guessing that it will grow at a more conservative rate now that people don't see the magical money fountain spitting out as much gold and silver for nothing. Unless there's another price spike or media blitz I guess.

This should be entitled:

Almost no one actually ever becomes rich.

It is just as tiring hearing your side of things. You seem to be implying that you have a grasp on statistics, yet you fail to even consider the fact that a moving average might not be the same as a static average.

Hint: It's not.

For more information on statistics, see the thousands of papers showing you why the argument "A lottery ticket is just 1 dollar and I could win MILLIONS! So it's not a bad investment" is total crap (same argument as yours).

5,923,676,160,960,014 is not an irrelevant number.

Ayn rand was a pile of garbage. An intelligent pile of garbage admittedly, but how much does that really say?

Disadvantage to mining on water -- Expensive, harder to make back money.

The way I understand it the concept of the reservoir is to stabilize the temperature of the water in the loop. It's not quite the same as air where you blow hot air on to a hot card and out the other side comes even hotter air. The specific heat of water is vastly higher than that of air (about 4x higher in fact, 4 kj / kg DegC), as well as being much denser (roughly 1000x the density, 1000kg / m^3), meaning it is able to absorb much much much more heat without necessarily increasing in temperature as much.

You will still need more than one radiator as I recommended earlier because a single radiator won't be able to dump enough energy from the loop to the environment however.

OP: Some threads are indeed necessary, which is why when not called out I would not have said anything. On another note, "Holding steady" is not the proper term for a time window such as "this morning". I don't disagree that some mtgox folks might be pulling their coins and dropping them on TH, but it's not like TH has been some bastion of price steadiness that gox is now sieging. The price was 16.20 on 6/24/2011 20:20 CST. That's less than 12 hours ago. Must everything be so hysterical?


Last trade on MtGox was over a week ago, the current volume of trade is 0. We'll see when it opens up if that value changes.

Just going to throw this out here, if you've never water cooled before...

WATER COOLING 4 DUAL GPU CARDS IS INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT. Aside from the fact that That 6990s were already terrible MHash/$ cards, the water cooled version is more expensive, and requires a beefy loop to do it (can cost a couple hundred on top). You will need to remove every watt you put into the system via water, and for a healthy system temperature you will need roughly 2 high quality (BlackIce GTX360 level) triple rads for the 4 cards with high performance high rpm fans.

If you don't enjoy the sound of metal slicing your ears you may consider 2 quad rads, or 3 triple rads. Don't cheap out on the rads either. If you go with a Rasa for example you add another radiator.

So anyway, warnings aside, if you want to build a crazy ass setup that will be a pain in the ever loving ass then I believe the only 1500W worth its grain of salt that I know of is the silverstone strider (the ultra x4 is ok but not great afaik). And sadly that is only rated for 1300W on the 12V rails. So I would say that 4 cards would be... a bit scary for 24/7. It might be able to handle it in all truthfulness, but I'd personally be a bit worried abot the whole thing, especially if you dump the watercooling loop on the same PSU.

So if you're going 6990s overclocked + wc loop on a SS ST1500 I'd personally recommend sticking with 3. If you are the type that enjoys throwing money around like you say, you could try 4 as a bit of nailbiter experiment. Please tend your rig though.

Just of note, for mining those cards are terrible MHash/$. If you are getting them for gaming though, more power to ya.

I think you have the "Law of Averages" backwards.
Quite the opposite of what you are suggesting.

Anywho, the cases are not precisely the same. There is a difference in valuing what you already possess against what you can potentially gain, against what you can potentially gain vs. what you can definitely gain.

Furthermore going back to the original point, all statistical probability requires a large sample, in the case of mining bitcoins, this sampling is time.  If I flip a coin one time I have a 50/50 chance of either result. If I flip it twice, same thing. By your logic no matter how many times I flip it, betting on heads will yield the same results, which is completely untrue. Given a large enough pool of flipping it will come out 50/50. But on a small scale betting heads every time can yield profit, or loss. Large numbers and small numbers are not equivalent.

I don't really want to get into the mathematics because while I have a decent handle on it, it's not a current enough aspect of my life that I can whip out equations off the top of my head. But rest assured that while statistically independent events are not the same as mutually exclusive events.  Events that are independent can in theory either never or always occur, so why does this not actually happen given Big samples? Something to think about.

Hmm? As far as I can tell namecoins are definitely not worth it at the moment. .025NMC / BTC means that you need to collect 40Namecoins to equal 1 bitcoin, or in other words, bitcoin difficulty would have to be 40 times greater to justify the switch. Currently difficulty sits at 1379223 /  55882 or 24x only. In 6 weeks or so when the difficulty of namecoin drops it might be potentially profitable again, or if the price jumps to > .042BTC / NMC (and you somehow avoid a lot of fees) then you could look to namecoin mining being superior again. Unless you meant the next jump after 1.37mil to whatever it will be (it would have to be 2.23mil to reach the 40x target).