So is this thread being closed and both Isis and Aido are closing down?

Comparing his pic and the pic from the BlockEruptor announcement... I'd say that's the bottom side, the side opposite the heatsink. As to if they have actual casings to protect the PCB, don't know.

I just set up mining rigs on a planet named Alderaan, and a moon named Praxis. Surely nothing could go wrong.

So, I ordered a couple 1x-16x riser cables from Cablesaurus for connecting my 7950's an an old motherboard... it has a 16x which I plug the card into fine, and has two PCIe 1x which are the ones I'd need for the 7950s. He sent along a 1x-16x powered, and was out of anymore and sent a 1x-1x unpowered instead. I'm using the 1x-16x just fine.

Can I use the 1x-1x riser (which does have the open end, so I don't need to dremel it open), even through the card is a 16x card? Or am I going to see some issues? BTCe trollbox seems to have different opinions on this, with
-some people telling me it will work
-Some telling me I need to solder a cable between a pin on the far end of the card and a pin inside the riser (I'm not doing that)
-Some telling me I need to dremel cut off the extra pins (sheer lunacy)
-some telling me that its just not possible.

Want to find out from someone the correct answer, before I go frying a 300 buck 7950.

(and please, no "here's a quarter, go buy a clue" answers... tired of that cop out toward people who honestly don't know.)

Someone keeps saying that if you wait a while, that Litecoin transaction fees on small deposits will go away. Now, its a mixed message, because there's two responses:
-a new Litecoin client will come out in "early May" that will make the client more tolerant to "dust" transactions from p2pool (Litecoin forums).
-If you wait X days (some say 3, some say 7, some say a couple weeks) the fees go away.

I've never bothered to test it to see what the actual number of days was, if that second item was even true. If I was to test, I'd make a second wallet (on a virtual machine), and just have that wallet for P2pool while keeping my MAIN wallet for my actual usage.

The crappy thing is this STILL makes your P2pool LTC transactions unusable for (3, 7, or 14) days, so you can't go out trading them or even USING them in any sense without paying a fee (closest analogy is an early withdrawal fee), and meanwhile, you just keep piling more p2pool dust transactions on that wallet. So, the transaction fee will never go away if you tried to withdraw your whole wallet. At the moment, its much easier to mine to a 1pct, 2 pct, etcetera pool and use auto-withdraw to use your coins immediately, than to pay a transaction fee that ends up being anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of your income. 2 percent vs 10 percent... big decision.

Does BBQcoin have proof of steak?

Admin, The best possible categorization for this is Market subforum, not Alt Cryptocurrencies... but not sure if this breaks site rules to advertise this substance on this site.

This item is something that would be sold on Silk Road. Google "Nootropic" for more info.

Python 3.3.1 ... The most current from Python's site over the weekend.

Its throwing an error when I try to run against my miner machine remotely... same when I try to run against it locally.

C:\temp\virtual currencies\CGMinerTuner-master>python CGMinerTuner.py -i 192.168.1.111 -d 0 -c 800-1100 -m 1100-1500 -r 0.5-0.7 -t 82 --showtop 10
  File "CGMinerTuner.py", line 154
    except Exception, e:
                    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Signed up under one above me, here is my referral ID:
https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=669-24589

I deposited 0.11 BTC of my first mining stuff from late March into here, beginning of April. Here are the facts:

You have to deposit at least 0.1BTC. They payout reward only in multiples of 1 BTC. The profit you get on a regular basis (daily) is not DRIP (dividend reinvestment plan) lumped back in with your deposit, to make you able to earn back slightly faster... its held aside in a separate, not "invested" line item. So, you only make profit on your initial investment, not on the funds which you receive as profit from the investment while waiting for them to hit the payout marker.

You can not withdraw your original investment. Once its there, its sunk in.

The time to payback on 0.11 BTC, without anyone signing up under you, is 52 months (4 years, 4 months). However, what that means is that after 52 months, you will get 0.11 in your "reward" line item. 0.11 BTC is not enough to trigger the automatic withdrawl after 1.0 BTC, so... you're stuck waiting longer until it accumulates to 1.0 BTC... about 9 times longer, so about 39 years to get 1 BTC off of a deposit of 0.11 BTC.

Now, you can deposit, following their rules, into the ASIC miner fund (something that is 8 digits long and ends in 1111.) You will not get any return off it yet, as they are still waiting to purchase ASIC miners ["ASIC infrastructure is not available right now", FAQ page].) That will theoretically make return on investment faster, but will still be many months of not being able to touch your original funds OR the reward funds.

If you have to wait 52 months to make a 100 percent return, with no compounding, thats a return of a little less than 2 percent per month. Its made worse by not being able to even withdraw your original deposit during that whole time. If you deposit that same money in a dividend fund on BTCT, or trade it smartly on exchanges, or follow Goomba's 10/21 trading listed here on forums, not only can you get a better return than 2 percent a month, but you can actually pull out your money whenever. With Pyramining, its locked up for 5 years.

Frizz23-
I was honestly trying to ask a sincere question, just trying to understand what the real technical reasons are. You can see from my comment history I was away during the whole FPGA revolution. I know that's not your fault, it was my own.

I was trying to ask a question to learn, trying to apply the bits and pieces of current posts (scrypt needs fast access to memory... FPGAs can't mine scrypt because they need memory), and "Here's a quarter, go get a clue" doesn't really answer the question or help me learn. If you wish to point me articles, discussions... that would be appreciated. If you wish to tell me yourself, even better. I'm honestly trying to learn, and not trying to troll.

I'm really trying to creatively think, in an abstract way, if there would be any way to extend the income lifespan as it were of an FPGA, whether through some creative addition of an addon board through some fashion, or even a service where boards are submitted for retrofitting their FPGA processor chips onto a new board with memory cache chips. (With this, you can see why I was asking if access to DRAM, or to onboard cache, was the limitation.)

I really am not confident that the market will ramp up the fiat amount of a bitcoin, as fast as the difficulty increase created by the addition of ASICs (The Avalon ASICs already in the field and due to ship... the Avalon DIY chips coming to the field by mid-late summer... and, maybe, the BFL ASICs... in addition to whatever newcomer comes around that is reliable). I think that the combination of increased difficulty against a market that does not adjust as agile as that increase, will ramp down the profitability of a given FPGA or farm of FPGA's. I know this particular side of the forum does not have a favorable view toward any minable cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, and is skeptical of the lifespan of any given currency. However, if you do look at exchanges other than MtGox, it remains that there is a viable daily volume in many of the other currencies, at least one of which is double-tradable to both bitcoin and fiat. It is my thinking that the profitability of an FPGA will not vanish... but it will drop very much down across all SHA-256 currencies, possibly even to a negative profitability until the market corrects for the additional weight of ASIC mining.

I am trying to creatively think of a way that an FPGA might be able to mine multiple types of computations, if its even possible (thus my question asking HOW they worked and WHAT the limitation actually was), to try to extend the profitability lifetime. If its not possible, just let me know what the real issue was, in a real, person to person way so I can learn. Like I asked... Is it a L2-style cache issue, or is it a DRAM addressibility issue, or is it just a rigid limitation in the design of the chip themselves.

Not "Here's a quarter, go buy a clue." I'm trying to get a constructive comment.

We have four major types of mining hardware (which, with the exception of ASICs, have multiple generations of hardware providing different results.)

-CPU
-GPU
-FPGA
-ASIC

I know FPGA devices were written for the express purpose of mining SHA256, namely designed just for Bitcoin. I also know they were repurposed for solving on other SHA256 coins as well (namely, all other coins except Litecoin and Novacoin.... we're talking about items like Namecoin, PPcoin, Terracoin, Bytecoin, Feathercoin, etc.) ASIC is just an expansion of this.

The easy answer to tell new users is "FPGA and ASIC can't mine anything else. End of Line." The slightly advanced answer is "FPGA and ASIC can't mine Scrypt, or anything else that's non-SHA256 that will ever be made, because it doesn't have high memory to access."

So, I'm slightly curious. What are the actual higher level reasons? With an FPGA that exists today, what are the actual results if you were able to port or point a client (such as CGminer) at it, type in --scrypt, and watch it try to hash away?

Is the structure in the chip LITERALLY unable to complete the calculation, or is it just because the chip is optomized to handle only SHA256 and all other calculations are going to be less efficient?

If the chip is equally able to solve an SHA256 as anything else, and its just a matter of pointing a calculation at it and needing memory... Are we talking about needing rapid access to a high amount on-die L1/L2 cache? If this is the case, could it be the possibility of perhaps co-locating a L2 cache chip onboard (as was done for processors up till just prior to Pentium 2, where prior to that L2 was a separate cache chip, but with P2 was moved on-die and an L3 was introduced as the separate cache chip)? Or are we talking about the need to (relatively) rapidly access an amount of DRAM?

Where I'm trying to think is this... there's an existing deployment of FPGA hardware in the field, and a small amount still being sold. With the rising deployment of ASICs by EOY 2013, this hardware will be about as profitable as GPUs are in Spring 2013, unless the market price of SHA coins rises in correlation to the difficulty. What are the technical reasons which would hold back a current FPGA from switching to another type of blockchain (Scrypt, or whatever rises to become the next widely supported blockchain format)?

I realize that if we're talking about something like adding an onboard cache, that is going to be fundamentally unsupportable because we're talking about the need to etch memory traces and have the cache chip be physically nearby for rapid access. If we're talking, however, about the need for rapid memory from something like a DRAM, perhaps there might be some other way around this than just junking FPGA's. (And then the question would then extend to ASIC as well.)

If we're just talking that the chips were purpose created in their core logic to only be capable of solving SHA256 and never capable of solving any other calculation, then this whole question is answered there, and we'll just change the focus (as has been suggested in other forums) to specifically creating chips for solving those other calculations.

Well, Jessica, 0.11 BTC is currently showing as 1.2MH/s. So, a little math shows that to be 10.9 MH/S for 1 BTC.

(Don't know how that would fare though if you did the ASIC 8 digits ending in 1111 when it comes online.)

http://pyramining.com/referral/4gebc396q   
http://pyramining.com/referral/zx87p39bq   

Zargon,

Thanks for posting the killawatt info. That's the point at which I didn't want to speak to, because I don't have a killawatt (yet) to measure actual load.

Don't skimp on your PSU. I tried running an older system, a CoreQuad with a PCIe 16x and 2 PCIe 1x, on a 500w PSU. Oh, it ran just fine at idle with a single 7950... but when I started Scrypt OR SHA256 mining, the system ended up powering down. 500W was just not enough to run motherboard, processor, RAM (which is a minimal load), and video card. (And I wasn't even trying CPU mining yet.)

Now if 500W wasn't enough, 660W? Well, I'm PRETTY certain it will run the one 7950 just fine. Two, though? You might end up hitting the same wall I did, might not. My two 7950 rig is running on a 720W PSU just fine, and the one thing that might sway my opinion one way or the other is I'm ALSO CPU mining with the QX6700 processor in it, increasing it from whatever idle workload running Windows, up to 130W TDP. So, we're talking that a CoolerMaster 80Plus Bronze 720W PSU can stable support 200+200 (the video cards) + 130 (processor) +8.7 (hard drive at max load, see below)+ 30W (approx load for a bare motherboard)=568.7.

Sure, sounds like a 660W could work out... But I still wonder.

But I'll let someone else who has more experience speak to this... I personally think, just through experience, that you might be ever so slightly tempting fate trying to run two 7950's, full load, on a 660W PSU.

If its brand new, within warranty with receipt and everything, you could just try to do it. If you run for a day without crashing or spontaneous rebooting, great. If you overload and burn out the PSU and release the magic smoke, RMA it saying you "were playing games and all of a sudden system shut down", and now you found out that you can't run both the cards on that size PSU. Worst you can do, if you have the protection of the warranty behind you, is try.

------------
As to cutting your HDD out of the mix to save power, and switching to an SSD or USB:

These posts gives some numbers on hard drive and SSD power usage.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/267776-32-hard-drive-power-consumption
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269-7.html

Your typical IDE hard drive (which in today's terms is OLD, but to be honest, is what I have in my mining rig) is 8.7W. A SATA drive, 6.8W-8.7W. (Those are at full load... your drive won't be idle, but it won't be fully thrashing either.) Now, switching to a USB drive WILL indeed reduce that down to about 2.5W, and an SSD is near the same power usage as a USB drive (0.6W-2.6W).

However, in the scope of things... Saving 5 or 6W when comparing it to the 200W load of a 7950 is SMALL in the scope of things. If 5 or 6W is the tipping point between if your system running two cards at 200W each will be stable, or will crash... then you've got too small a margin. Its always better to over-size your power supply for these, than to risk stability issues.

The savings will come in the heat dissipation of the hard drive not being a factor. The reduction in power usage? I don't think its significant enough to take into account.

I found an old guide from early 2012 about setting up a P2pool server with merged mining for about 5 or 6 different types of coins together.

Say I setup a P2pool server focused just for a specific coin... and a P2pool server with this merged mining of multiple different coins. Am I going to get much in the way of a profitability change with one over the other? Is there a happy medium?

I also want to think I read something in BTC-e chat where someone said that merged mining wasn't worth it because it gets interrupted with a new work request while trying to work on one of the other coins. Taking that with a couple grains of salt, it being from BTC-e's chatbox and all.

lbr: P2pool is an option, in which you won't have to deal with any pool operator except yourself, and only pay whatever fee you decide (and the fee goes to the maker of p2pool). You also get a pretty constant trickle flow of money. HOWEVER...

If you wish to actually use the coins you are issued on a timely basis, be prepared to pay a VERY hefty fee. I wanted to move out some coins for investing, and the fee the Litecoin wallet charges equates to somewhere near 40-50 percent fee to actually use my money.

Some have said that if you hold onto coins for a while, the fee will eventually diminish. To me, this is the same as saying "You can't use your paycheck from work on payday, unless you want to lose 30-50 percent of it immediately. To spend your money, you need to wait a couple months." To me, THIS is the only reason to not use P2pool... and its not even the fault of P2pool itself, but the fault of how Litecoin handles transactions.

Not really, unless you have a fully established render farm on hand. Farming Litecoin now, is about where farming Bitcoin in Summer 2011 was: BARELY profitable, a few difficulties rises and a price drop or two from being unprofitable. With one or two 7950 GPUs, you'll be lucky to make a buck or two a day. In a couple difficulties, that profit margin will drop to pennies a day.

---
CPU mining LTC, and GPU mining Bitcoin, is at that pennies point now, per device. Only by having your hardware fully paid off, and having multiple pieces of hardware across multiple rigs, can you add all those pennies and single dollars together and get something meaningful. By no means is it a replacement for full time employment.

The thing that's really going to hurt Litecoin, and all the other lower cryptocoins, is ASIC mining over in the Bitcoin arena. How so? When the first few hundred people come online with ASICs, its going to drive difficulty sky high within a few weeks to a couple months, almost instantly making GPU mining unprofitable, and FPGA mining will pretty much be dead too. What GPUs are still profitable, will get pennies a day, and as more waves of ASICs come on, even that will peter out.

GPU miners will take all their rigs to what's most profitable and stable, which is Litecoin at the moment... and that will in turn shoot the Litecoin difficulty skyhigh too, turning GPU miners on Litecoin into the same profit margins they get on BTC now. There will then be some who move over to other coins... Before today, I'd have said after looking at Dustcoin.com that PPcoin or Terracoin will be the next in line based on their profitability... but looking at the news about how Terracoin is bouncing offline and back on with at least one exchange being un-synched from the chain, I think its going to kick the bucket soon.

---
Really, what there is to say... is that there's no good answer right now. My personal move, as I'm just getting back in things, is to mine what few Litecoins I can, and spread my bet across a few different other coins, including Bitcoin. Soon, though, it'll probably be time to move to another. I'm already starting to look into setting up a local Linux VM with merged mining in P2pool for a couple of the other coins, to gather some backup options.

June and July will be the turning point, I think, when all will start to change. GPU miners are going to be in a free fall at that point, heads spinning as to which minor coin is the flavor of the week for profitability. I would even guess at that point in time, we'll see at least a half dozen new coins pop up, one of which will probably be to Litecoin what Litecoin is to Bitcoin. It will probably be the next evolution of Litecoin's path... moving even further toward massive amounts of RAM dependence... just a guess, but as miners go, we're pretty much peaked out in the arms race as far as GPUs go, with a very high saturation of GPU power.

Good luck. Dustcoin.com is probably your best point to look at for mining profitability info. Go ahead and mine the coin of your choice... just don't get dreams of hitting it rich, as without a large established buildout, you won't. The miner's story, in all coins, is going to stay the same for years... and the stock market / forex traders story is the place where riches will be made or lost.