Username: erpbridge
Balance: BTC 0.07722583

Unable to post transactions, continual 2nd stage server errors. Unable to generate a transaction ID to withdraw.

TAT,

Seeing as Bitfunder will be freezing out all US-based customers from exiting positions starting Nov 1, is there any thought into a process for moving our TAT.VIRTUALMINE shares over to Havelock (similar to the process that happened for TAT securities over on BTCT?)

Using the following resources:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc#gid=0
(linked from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty)

Its obvious that using static difficulty to predict out future diff is also not accurate. We've seen posts from this time last year predicting rises of 14 pct with a diff of 40 mil by now.

Its also pretty obvious the days per difficulty adjustment are becoming fewer as new equipment is rolling out. The 65nm rollouts seem to be coming off the lines faster than before, and 28nm is around the corner in Q1 or possibly Q2 2014. Where it used to be 13-14 days between diff increases at end of year 2012, its now 10-11 days now.

I took the average of the last 10 rounds of Days (delta), and it comes out to -.208 days trend.

Now for the actual difficulty value... it would be silly to try to extrapolate today's 29-30 pct average difficulty change forward, just as it was silly to extrapolate 14 percent a while back. Its rising, steadily. I ended up looking at what the average difference between percentage increases was for the last 10 changes (2.09 percent increase), and adding that plus .1 percent each week to show some growth (just as it wasn't a steady flat percentage at any time in the last year, and as new inventory is being added to the network all the time.) I threw in a minus 20 percent about once every 8 weeks and recover almost the lost amount the next week, as that's what the trend seems to show also (a point in time when people pull back for a bit and cut miners, like a bear market week when price plumments far below profitable... then a bear market rally back to status quo pricing the next week.)

(I personally think even these numbers in both cases are quite low and quite conservative... I think the days will increase even faster as time goes on, rather than a steady change... to the point where by Feb or March we'll probably have 3 rounds of 5 days each, and by end of 2014 have diff changing every day or every other day. I also don't quite subscribe to the steady change in difference, as the past few months showed us close to a double in difference percent, as did the few before that. However, calculating something like that out put us at 60 pct difference increase per round in January, and over 100 percent difference increase... aka doubling difference... by about April. I honestly still think that could quite possibly become a possibility.)

Time will show how true THESE predictions are, compared to the ones of a year ago. The criticisms most likely to come up below will be "will price hold, or will people shut off even smaller items Jalapeno miners before X point", and "this won't happen, 65nm will level out in late Q4 2013 and 28nm is a pipe dream until late Q2 2013, so diff will level out." Another criticism will point to how rapidly the transition from 1B to 10B to 100B takes place. I'll just ask you look at historical numbers, try to continue trends out, and judge for yourself. They are right there on that Google doc I linked above, and that's not made by me.

One more thing: I really hate to say this, but these numbers make even GenesisBlock look tame with its current projection of _monthly_ increases of 80-120 percent. With this... we're looking at those monthly numbers climbing to 200, 250, 300 percent. Then again, if GenesisBlock had been a big name back in Sept 2012, it would have been forecasting monthly increases of 25 percent for every month up to current.

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My numbers, along with a snippet of current info.

Done 1GjgVNHKhwhL4Lk66yjMcrL279ictZ7vCE

I was always told that for a 7950, you need to use 21712.

For a Radeon 7950, that's the best price I can also find among the different sites.

If you're doing one pool, you only need one instance of cgminer running. Period. Doesn't matter if you're running 1 card, 3 cards, or 7 cards. The only real difference is if the cards themselves are disparate models and require different engine settings, memory settings, intensity settings (which, BTW, you can STILL get around by running one instance of CGminer and using comma commands.)

There are only a couple cases in which I can think of you might need multiple cgminers running on the same computer:
-You want each card to mine a different pool
-You want one card to mine scrypt, another to mine SHA256 (which is a variant of the "different pool" item)
-You want cards 2 and 3 to mine full out, and card 1 to mine desktop mode speed (essentially, intensity 9 instead of intensity 18 or 19)... and want to be able to just flat out stop card 1's mining when you REALLY need the power on a desktop app.

If you don't specifically tell cgminer to use device flags, like -d 1 (to use card 1)... it will use all devices available (1,2, and 3).

Bottom line though: To me, it makes no sense trying to split apart cards unless you have a REALLY REALLY good reason... it just adds complication. Remember the KISS principle.
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I'm still going to say 4GB RAM is VERY low for 3 7950s, and I'm still going to suggest 8GB RAM (meaning you will need a 64bit operating system... not that hard to get nowadays). I'm also going to say 750W for 3 7950s is asking for trouble, since a 7950's max TDP is 200W, your core component's power usage is about 110W in practice... meaning you are already at 710w. First hand experience with a Kill-a-watt and also seeing forums suggests that the cards actually exceed that TDP, and some forum claims say they can go as high as 250W... each. Getting an 850 is going to give you a system that has no expansion as a miner... which is ok for a first miner, but not good if you wanted to add a fourth card.

First hand experience with 7950's is that if you don't have them tuned right but use some of the suggestions off the litecoin mining hardware comparison, you get about 500-550... but many people say if you tune them right, you get 600+. I'm trying to tune my multiple Gigabyte 7950's rig with three of the same card, but purchased a month apart, and running into compatibility issues where they aren't stable above the 550 mark.

BTW, people have suggested you don't want to mix different manufacturer's of cards, nor do you mix different model numbers (eg 7950s and 7990's in same rig) or different generations (7950s and 6970's) in the same rig.

As to who to buy from... I've usually found tigerdirect to be overpriced more often than not compared to Newegg... and even Amazon sometime beats Newegg on prices at times... all while looking at the same exact item.

I'm sorry, I'm laughing at the power supply, partly out of personal experience. Back in early July, I ran the numbers, figured my spare 550w PSU would be enough to run a 7950 plus the rest of the system components. I ended up "releasing the magic smoke" from the PSU. Toast.

I think you REALLY need to go look at Bitcoin Hardware comparison and Litecoin Hardware comparison, and run your own numbers. In general, I wouldn't even blindly suggest someone start mining unless they had a 650w minimum PSU... and at that, only one card on that weak of a PSU.  Just blindly guessing for 7750s, I'm going to blind guess they need 200w each... then you also figure the core components of the system take 100-115, and you always want an additional 10-20 pct of your power supply's power to be spare, just in case something pulls a ton of extra power.

Your RAM is EXTREMELY low for ANY purpose. Sure, its moderately adequate for a desktop computer that will run office applications and browse websites. Whoever is selling that to you is selling you the bare minimum for running Windows... I can't fault them, because you probably didn't tell them your needs. You are essentially doing high-end intensity gaming, or high end video editing and 3D rendering. THAT is what they should be developing the system around, RAM wise. 8GB RAM. Someone told me have as much RAM on your motherboard as your cards have... others tell me 8GB is enough.

You need a current gen or gen-1 processor. You DO NOT need a top end processor, mining is not as processor intensive as you might think... unless you're mining scrypt-jane CPU-only coins. I don't know AMD, but I'll tell you the equivalent from the Intel side. The newest generation that came out in July is Haswell (Core i5 and Core i7 4xxx numbers. People were mining before July. You don't need Haswell. Before July, processors existed in the following order, from weakest to strongest: Celeron, i3, i5, i7. You don't need an i7 to mine, its overkill... I use my i7 for server farm stuff and teaching myself vmWare ESX virtualization, and running about 10 virtual servers... like I said, overkill. You can mine on the weakest of that generation, a Celeron, which is what the Tacotime crate build said that I recommended you to go look at.

Again, I think you REALLY need to go look the Tacotime crate build at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=163306.0 for suggestions on hardware. I don't think you did.

Cgminer, to your question, runs however many cards you let it. Don't crossfire them. If you leave defaults, it picks up all the cards. If you provide specific arguments, it runs specific cards. If you tell it to run one card in desktop mode at a low load and the other card at a high load, it'll do that. You CAN tell it to mine on card 2 while you run Skyrim on card 1... but you'll notice both will take a hit in total performance.

As to what coin to mine: Again, I suggest you go look at coinchoose ... and look at it a few different times during the day, over a few days. There are times certain coins are higher than others, and then there are times a coin will surge to the top, then after a little while drop way down to the bottom. I can't tell you a certain coin to mine... neither can many others. Those who DO tell you a coin, are either A) Shilling that specific coin; B) repeating what someone else told them; or C) giving you advice that is only good for a couple weeks.

This hobby (and that's how you should treat it, as a hobby) changes WAY too fast to give you advice on any one coin. I think with some of these questions you are asking, maybe you should just use the card you have in the computer in front of you, download CGminer and cgwatcher, point at a pool like multipool.us, and browse the posts on the first couple pages of each section of this forum and the forums on litecoin org.

DO NOT expect to get a 100 percent ROI in your first 90 days. That's one of the bigger fallacies out there, especially for a newbie who farms at anything less than fully optimized and tested settings, 24/7. That fallacy also doesn't take into account your support hardware, it assumes you already have a motherboard/ram/cpu/hdd. Treat this as a hobby, that whatever money you put in, you probably won't get out... and just be happy when you get that extra little gift back.

And again, go look at the tacotime crate build for hardware suggestions. He's one of the higher-tier people on the hardware side of the forum.

I'm running a machine with 3 GPUs on the motherboard, in a milk-crate, with 16x-16x cables to raise them up and let the air flow through. Its more dependent on how much power supply you have, how well you can control your airflow.

I have another case where the motherboard is older, and has two PCIe 1x, and one PCIe16x... and I have 3 cards running off that. So, taking that example, and translating it to the other one I just described... it has three 1x and three 16x ports on it, and two PCI ports on it. If I REALLY wanted to, and REALLY had enough of a power supply, I could run a card off each of the PCIe ports with respective risers... and could also maybe pull out my Startech PCI-PCIe 1x card and do that as well (not reccomended.) From these same forum boards, there are some issues that arise with drivers, and once thats resolved, with Windows itself, when you get above a certain number of cards.

But yes, plenty of people safely run 3-4 cards off a single motherboard. You're going to run the difference of choice... do you want to have multiple systems with one card each off different outlets (and different circuits) around the house, so you don't pop the breaker accidentally and down all your miners? This also spreads out the heat, too... so that each card is not directly influenced by the heat of the card next to it. (With proper airflow ventilation and room ventilation, that last point is kinda canceled out.) My next miner, I'm probably going to put across the basement... partially because that's where another circuit is and I'm afraid I'll max my 15A breaker soon with stuff already on it (a 3x6970 miner on a first gen quad core, an ESX server, a Drobo, my Internet equipment), and partially because I have a heat buildup already and putting this other miner over there will spread the heat in a general area.

Or do you want to put 3 cards in, so you can lower the average overhead per card? A motherboard runs about 110w, unless you're CPU mining a coin like a Scrypt-Jane coin. That's the overhead. Say your GPU pulls 250W. You could either run 3 GPUs on 3 systems (3x250 + 3x110)... or 3 GPUs on one system (3x250 + 1x110). Simple math tells you that the latter is a better choice.... and when you figure in cost to operate impacting your overhead, it comes in real easy to figure out.

I also suggest you not get yourself stuck in the mindset of mining any one particular coin. You can, its your perogative... but I'm just suggesting you look at coinchoose.com or Dustcoin and see the proof there. Also, suggest you look into CGWatcher, expecially its scheduling feature and profitability tie ins to coinchoose.

Pi's are really only good for mining if the device actually doing the mining is connected in over USB. I know I've seen setups of BFL Jalapenos and a Pi. I don't know if an FPGA can be hosted on a PI, but if a Jalapeno could be, shouldn't be any reason why an FPGA would have issues.

But the above, those are for SHA256 coins. Add in also USB Block Eruptors to that mix.

As to Scrypt coins (such as LTC and the many others that are looked upon with scorn by many on this board outside "Alternative Cryptocurrency"), you need to mine those with either a CPU or GPU. A Pi's CPU is VERY minimal, to the point that its probably not worthwhile. A Pi can't support the large amounts of RAM that a Scrypt system needs (4GB+, 8GB for anything really worthwhile), and does not have the PCIe bus or ports to host a PCIe GPU.

As to Scrypt-Jane style coins, the ones engineered to only be solved by CPU and not GPU... Pi can't do these either.

As was said above me, there are sites that say parts. I suggest you maybe look here on this site at TacoTime's crate build for a suggestion. As to video cards, do research in this forum you posted in, and also at the Litecoin Mining Hardware Comparison. Most of the time, the answer of which video card will be very similar regardless of SHA256 or Scrypt.

To answer your question as to if you need parts (without suggesting to you exact parts)... you DO need the following parts, and you need them for EACH rig. They're a full computer:

-Something to hold all your components, but which still provides an adequate air supply to the base of the cards (unless you are using a liquid cooling system). A typical computer case would seem the logical answer... but its often NOT the best answer in this particular case. Again, look at the crate build.

Core components:
-Motherboard
-CPU (and its cooler that usually comes with it)
-RAM
-Power Supply (adequately sized to your needs... don't skimp!)
-Storage (Some people say hard drive... some say USB drive. I personally do hard drives because they are also usable in other situations after I finish mining (Drobo, for instance), and to me a USB drive will take a little longer to boot from. Don't try to leap ahead by getting an SSD... that's a little overkill in this scenario.) PS: I've heard Linux mining systems won't run from USB... doesn't make sense to me, but thats what a few on the forum have said.

Hashing Power/accessories
-GPU - You have LOTS of choices... and the biggest hint is choose AMD, not Nvidia. Do your research very well before choosing. Keep in mind some cards have voltage locks on them, and may not be able to be as easily adjusted as others.
-Accessories - If at all possible, you want to try NOT to jam the cards up next to each other, so not plugging direct into the ports available on the motherboard. If you choose an alternative case like a milk/storage crate, you probably need to get riser cables (1-16, or 16-16)... and you probably also need to get something to attach the card to the crate (screws) and something to support the end of the card that's hovering in the middle of the case (I use a wooden paint stirrer stick.)

-Cooling System: Unless you're using a liquid cooling system to transfer the heat outside the box then dissipate a distance away (which is also a bit overkill), you'll be wanting fans. Not just fans to blow over your rigs to provide fresh air to the bottom of the cards and move hot air away from the top of the cards... but also something to ventilate the heat out of the top of the room to a location the heat is NOT... the rest of the house, a window, etc. Your room has a given amount of heat it can hold... if you don't move the heat out and let new air come in, the room will become warm, the cards will not be able to get rid of excess heat, and will cut off until the heat has dropped below a set level.

-You don't need an optical media drive. If you do, you really only need it for the initial setup. If you have your Windows install as an ISO, you can use Rufus and put it on an 8GB USB easy.
-If you're going for the crate setup... get zipties to hold things in place. You MIGHT also consider buying a momentary power switch, or you can set your computer to "On Power loss, restore power to ON."
-You're probably going to need a network switch, and network cables. (If you know how to make your own network cables, and have access to tools or are willing to put down money for tools... much better.)

For your whole setup, you'll probably want a single setup of monitor, keyboard, mouse too. You'll probably only use it now and then, but its useful to have it rather than moving your personal desktop one around.

In my case... for the fan nearest the computers, I didn't go super powerful... just enough to get a steady air supply moving. I'm mining in my unfinished fieldstone basement which also has a dehumidifier contributing to the heat, and needed to force the hot air upstairs to exhaust outdoors... so I got a powerful Vornado fan that can push a distance, for my exhaust fan. In the winter, though... I'll be sucking in enough cold air from the fieldstone walls that I probably won't need the exhaust fan, and if I do... its extra heat for the rest of my house.

The one issue I can think of that you might have it that the motherboard, being of an age that it won't have PCI3 slots on it... may not be able to supply the operating power over the PCIe slots for all the cards you use. (Difference between the communications power over the pins, and the actual hashing power supplied by the 6/8 pin connectors.) You MIGHT need to get powered riser cables if you run into problems of the system crashing under what otherwise should be valid working conditions.

-He does NOT support SHA-256 based coins. Only scrypt coins. Now, getting more specific...


http://middlecoin.com/faq.html: What currencies do you mine?

I can't make that information public either. But I consistently check the profitability of coins that are put on exchanges. So the basic answer is "the most profitable ones".



https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=259649.msg2854693#msg2854693 - 02-Aug-2013: We are now trading on three exchanges. And we have 26 coins in the rotation.

As to more specific than that, you can peruse posts by h2odysee to get hints as to which coins have been mined at some point. He won't give us a list, its in the FAQ (as listed above), but some that he has either directly or indirectly confirmed are: FTC, CAP, LTC, CGB, NVC, LKY, FST, and perhaps CHN. Note that all these hints were gathered from past posts by him here on Bitcoin Forum, and are only indicative of what may have been mined at that point in time, and may have been suspended from active use... or may still be a possible option if his script picks them.

The official answer, as the FAQ says, is that he won't reveal it.



H20 is mining with 2x 7970s, which is about 1.2MH. I've personally got three 6970s pointed there, about 1.4MH, and as soon as I get a new power supply on Tuesday, will setup my three 7950s for another 1.7MH.

You don't have to have a ton of processing power to mine on pools... in fact pool mining is preferable for smaller farms like yours or mine, because most coins, solo mining with a small farm is unfeasible with regards to the price of power to the rarity of block reward. The question is if a profitability switching pool like this (much like the pool hopping clients of old) is more profitable than just pointing at a consistently profitable coin  (averaged over time... see also coinchoose, sort by the 7-day column) and staying the course for a long run. Some people are running those checks, but it still will take some time.

As for me, even though I only have 2-3MH invested (which is a lot of money for me, between buying cards, motherboards, PSUs, and the power itself used), mining on a switcher site is easier in the short run. I've been mining on multipool for about 3 or 4 weeks until I decided to get a baseline over the past week, and now I'll check how I far on this site with the same machine. Judging by an average of the 5 people above and below my hash rate, at very worst... I'll make slightly better than I was at Multipool. At best... I'll make a HELL of a lot better than I was at Multipool. One upside is I don't have to worry about selling off my coins manually, I'll just get them off the bat.

With the number you said... I'd guess you are bringing a 6870 to the table... thats what my first mining card was in my desktop, and I still mine with it from time to time.

A premine is understandably biased on a coin that has a quickly sliding diff scale, static reward, and fixed coin quantity cap and starts with a low diff. It can even be biased in some aspects if the coin quantity cap isn't as fixed. If someone can premine to a point where they have a significant percentage of the entire fluid value of the coin to date at any early time, then... well, its just not as valuable to the rest who hold the coin to know that their holdings can be quickly devalued at any one time by a mass selloff.

Now, perhaps, there may be a fair premine. I'm not really good on coin theory, so I'm sure whatever I say will be loaded with holes.

Maybe a coin where the initial diff and reward are fixed for a number of months, rather than effectively a number of hours based on load... and the premine is limited for the amount of time it is premined. After the initial time after premine, and after launch, then switching to a more sliding scale based on load. This theory obviously lets the persons with the largest hashing power acquire the most coins, but doesn't immediately mean that miner zero has accumulated 10 percent of the total coins on a lower diff before the first public diff.

Tons of holes, but one possible thought train... there are many other ways of approaching this.

Another possible way of seeking recompense for developing a coin is maybe something akin to a pay-for-play, although this too is a loaded issue due to a hijacking possibility. Perhaps the coin is developed so that with each trade, a dust portion of the trade fee that is paid is sent toward the dev's wallet address. Like I said, way too easy for that wallet address to be compromised, or perhaps even the protocol changed by a rogue to change the dev reward address.

Well, technically, any coin that you are mining is a GPU killer. The coin itself is not... I have some Litecoins sitting in a wallet, some Bitcoins sitting in a wallet... not actively mining THEM, but mining others.

It all depends on your mining temperature cutoffs. Yes, hot weather will increase the ambient room temperature, making the air in and around your case and card able to have that much less potential to absorb the heat generated by your mining. Air circulation will help with that, but you also need to have an input of fresh air and more importantly an outlet of hot air for the room.

You are responsible, however, for setting the proper temperature cutoffs for your card. You're essentially telling it to process as hard as it can until you tell it otherwise, and to dump the excess heat in the vicinity directly surrounding your card. When that vicinity can't absorb more heat... your card itself can't dump the heat off, and retains heat. YOU need to set responsible temperature throttles and cutoffs for your card, so it will cut its hashrate until its down to a safe temperature, or flat out shut off if it hits an unsafe level. If you don't set temperature cutoffs, and you don't ventilate your location, you have a recipe for destroying a piece of hardware that will cost you months of mining on it to recoup the value spent on a replacement.

Garbage in, Garbage Out.

Scrypt is roughly a similar number in KH as SHA256 is in MH. ROUGHLY. Some people, for a numbers example, can get 1000 MH in SHA256, and get 1200 KH in Scrypt, through tuning of parameters (that's just a number example to get across the concept, not an actual factual number.) For ease in thinking about things, though, you can think that a card that runs 1000 MH mining a SHA256 coin is roughly capable of 1000 KH mining a Scrypt coin.

As to if Scrypt is the same, equivalent, to SHA256... No. The two are totally different engines.

From BigVern on Cryptsy's Chatbox:

BigVern: @erpbridge: whoever made those screenshots prob has a virus then

....so I suggest you guys go get your virus scanners fixed.

Yeah, Coinchoose just dropped over half the coins they were offering since this morning... need to pick a different provider because a lot of the coins that have even been on top the past few days, like Phenixcoin, Argentum, and others were deleted from coinchoose.

Added. 1GjgVNHKhwhL4Lk66yjMcrL279ictZ7vCE
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Well, you wouldn't be using the battery or battery connection cable... instead you'd be using a grid-tie box, and probably be needing to call in a licensed electrician to tie that into an auxiliary panel. You'd also need to get permit from your town to do grid tie, some small towns don't allow it under their code. The DC-USB converter would also go as well... you'd be plugging into normal power outlets.

Depending on your town codes, and power company, you might be selling any excess power generated at a set rate (usually less than the generation rate you pay for receiving generated power), ultimately reducing your bill while giving the power company cheaper power. OR, the electric company might have a pass from the town or state in which they do not have to pay for excess power from your grid tie (some do... which REALLY sucks, because then they're getting anything you generate in excess for free.)

Overall, the initial hardware outlay would be cheaper because of the lack of battery. Your maintenance over time would be less too, also because you wouldn't have to change the battery at end of life (approx 8-10 years.) However, your TOTAL cost over time using panel+battery would be less than using panel+grid tie, and that would be less than grid-only. The break even point between each is usually about 2-3 years. (Longer time to pay off if you live in an area that has a lower solar efficiency, and less amount of hours of sun in a day. Las Vegas gets more hours per day and more direct solar than Chicago, which gets more hours and more direct solar than Finland. Google Photovoltaic Map)

The bill SAYS 0.07 here in CT... but once you take in all the fees, and average that over a few bills... slightly under $0.16.