Gah, this is when having a gf is bothersome, missed out on some amazing happening apparently?

I don't think you read the conversation:

This scenario was a prompted response to someone who said "I would have made 3x as much money if I had bought coins instead of mining them! "

Implying because of the price rise buying coins would have been more profitable. That statement already has the idea of perfect knowledge built into it. I merely created a parity situation between mining and buying, nothing additional on top of that. How people ACTUALLY act when they buy coin or mine coin is entirely up to them of course.

Well again, water cooling is awful if you plan to make money. If this is your gaming rig that you're just mining casually then it might be ok.

Replacing the stock cooling is simple, just unscrew the fan shroud, pop it off, and pop off the heatsinks/fan like you would a normal chip. Clean off any crap with high grade isopropryl alcohol and you're ready to go. A little force may be necessary, but if you are really straining you are doing it wrong.

The 'best system' is a misnomer, there's the best for your needs which you can decide. The waterblock will need to be custom designed for whatever graphics card you own (the layout is different for lots of card types). The BlackICE GTX rads are amazing, but expensive, XSPC Rasa makes decent rads that are cheaper. Just make sure you have a large enough radiator setup to handle the power you are putting into it. A reservoir helps stabilize temps, fans are your choice but obviously the bigger the better. Pump will depend on your setup, need enough power to push through your entire loop with steady flow. That's pretty much all you need other than barbs/fittings and kill coils and liquid and whatnot.

It's nice to see a new 35 post count user that wasn't created just to post about the doom of bitcoin. I don't want to call him an anti-troll because it still seems to have created a lot of friction, but this is as close as it gets. I'm not a fan of the topic title, but my favorite part is what I've been trying to tell people


Yes. A million times yes. We obviously make our little personal models and try to fit them as well as we think we can so that they'll be useful, but who the crap knows what will happen. A huge solar flare might erupt sending an EMP down that surges the power grid, blowing up tens of thousands of mining rigs. Or a news report might come out on CNN saying "bitcoin is a way to make free money forever! Roll over to cnn.com/bitcoin_moniez to see how!"

Or something more reasonable in between those extremes. Bitcoin is small enough that external events can have a huge huge huge impact on it. For good or ill.

He only has 72 posts, you can skim through them all fairly quickly with a high reading rate. Or take a stastical sampling, for example, I'll take 1 at random off every page of his profile:






Yadda yadda. Obviously this is a poor sampling, but I'm just using it to show you can get a flavor for someones posts quickly and easily while still having "a life".

Not to be a jerk but those things are really not very stackable. I mean they are in theory, but I own 2 and the stacking dealie, the support bracket literally does not fit into the support bracket holes (on either piece). And since it is a THICK piece of acryllic I'm not very happy about my options for shaving it down. You will DEFINITELY need this piece to support the weight of 3+ videocards + HDD (if you use one) + PSU + mobo as the remaining supports are simply screwed into the corners of the somewhat thin flimsy acryllic base. Perhaps I was just unlucky, but if you cannot rig up your own supports and/or get the provided support to work, this will not stack without breaking.

Glad someone made this topic, for the responses it has gotten. I mean, really, "lets all wait for the weekend price dip!" makes no sense. This is more or less a zero sum game, not everyone can be a winner, so no known trends can be sustained.

My point is that the situation is completely artificial and this is why bitcoin price is not dependent on mining. It's like saying the price of gold is related to oranges because:

If you could buy 1oz of gold for $500 in a week, or choose between giving someone $500 worth of oranges for 100ounces of gold in a week, which would you choose? Ah-ha, therefore oranges effect the price of gold!

If the situation would never reasonably occur it is invalid as an argument. (p.s. oranges are a commodity so it's not as totally ridiculous as it sounds).

All discussion as to the usability of namecoin aside, difficulty at parity actually means taking a loss mining namecoin.

Mining in a pool has a pool fee off the top, then there is a fee to transfer the namecoins from the pool to you, then a fee to transfer the namecoins to the exchange, the exchange charges a fee to exchange namecoins to bitcoins, then there is a fee to withdraw the bitcoins. This is all before the regular fees of bitcoin, 5 fees. They may be small individually but as you use it they add up. So if you generate the same number of bitcoin-valued namecoins you are taking a loss over directly generating bitcoins.

What is the basis of this question? Obviously if I could choose between 1 widget or 100 widgets for the same price I'll go with 100. But consider this, if 10 bitcoins are worth $500, why would anyone sell a mining contract to deliver 200 bitcoins for $500? If they mined 200 bitcoins themselves, they could sell them for $10,000. Would be mildly retarded to make that contract and lose 20x value. The only feasible mining contracts are ones whereby the miner is paid the equivalent amount to the hardware costs to generate the amount of BTC/Hashrate they promise (or perhaps with a small discount) for a limited duration. This again will not relate BTC price to mining, but rather mining to BC price.

solar / wind have H-U-G-E setup costs to them. In fact solar energy is considered more expensive than traditional forms of energy production for this reason. With government incentives home panels are priced to pay for themselves over the course of ~20 years. If bitcoin mining profitability went to parity with traditional energy costs, that would represent a loss for a solar panel user.

As for illegal activity, I don't really see that being the real takeover step. A cpu miner can get something like 1/100th the hash rate of a similarly priced gpu. So a 100,000 person parasite botnet is the equivalent to about 1000 gpus. It is estimated that there are about 30,000 GPUs mining currently, that would require 3,000,000 compromised computers to reach parity while cpu mining. I'm guessing that 24/7 100% CPU load would attract even the noobiest trojan infected noob to wonder what is up, thus risking the botnet owner lotso f ocmpromised computers. These computers themselves have value (for illegal activities, such as ddos or what have you) and losing them because of mining might be a net loss. Hence I don't really see much incentive for people to take over bitcoin with zombie comps. More profitable to infect people and steal their wallets or ddos rival pools for pay or something.

Yay! Another difficulty bet! The last one was awesome, I think Cyde came out by like 1000 difficulty which was amazing. I don't expect this one to be as interesting, but I enjoy watching these nonetheless

I don't understand why people seem so keen to continually make this same thread over and over. In the beginners guide stickied at the top of this forum there is a link to a thread 2 months ago that says the same thing, and another one like a month ago with a "spreadsheet that is legit showing mining will never pay off". There have been have been a few in between then that I haven't kept track of as well, all with "spreadsheets". Why is spreadsheet some magical word to people that lends their predictions based on nothing some validity?


Will bitcoin never pay off? Who knows, it's getting increasing difficult, and if you build a < 1.2Mhash/$ rig like most people are, yeah it's unlikely you're going to do very well in the current market as people are still jumping on board with you. Things can change though, summer heat and prices may cause people to drop out, casuals will be annoyed with paltry returns, people "making spreadsheets" may up and sell off their rigs, bitcoin price may rise again, who knows.

Basically no one knows the future as I've said at least a dozen times. Be PRUDENT like you should with any investment. Do not get into a gold rush mindset, that's what kills people. A very few people strike it big by making quick decisions, but most people that do well do it slowly, carefully and intelligently.

Your statement reads to me as confusing. If the OP had bought in @ $30 and watched the coins plumet to $15 he'd have $5000 worth of coins now. Bitcoin prices can go... anywhere. Back to 30, up to 10000, or down below 1. OP doesn't sound like the patient optimistic type with $10,000 he can have lying around without regards for months or whatever potential time it would take to get back above $30.

Perhaps you bought in around march? In what way would you have made triple? In march prices were about $1 per coin? Let's say that. And prices were $30 per coin around Jun7th right? Difficulty was around 70,000 I believe.

So lets say you bought a mining rig on whenever and got it running march 7th, and you bought some coins on whenever around march 7th as prices were pretty flat until around april.

You could build mining rigs for about 1.7Mhash/$ pretty easily back in march, so let's compare a $10,000 buy:

$10,000 -- 10,000 coins vs 15GHash (bein generous with overheads other than rigs to compare to OPs costs), and use 15¢/kWh like OP, $26.64/day costs.

March 7th: Miner 0BTC $10000Debt , Buyer 10,000BTC $10000 Debt.

2 difficulty changes, both minor, avging to 80k difficulty generates 5,733 bitcoins in a month

April 7th: Miner 5,733BTC $10799Debt, Buyer10,000BTC $10000 Debt.

2 difficulty changes, both reasonable, averaging 90k difficulty generates 5,096 bitcoins in a month

May 7th: Miner 10,829BTC $11598Debt, Buyer10,000BTC $10000 Debt.

Here is where things got crazy, 4 difficulty changes, ending at 400k difficulty. for ease of my lazy brain will calculate whole month at 300k to be generous again.  Generating 1528 coins in a month.

June 7th: Miner 12357BTC $12397Debt, Buyer10,000BTC $10000Debt

If the buyer cashes out on June 7th smartly surmising the $30 bubble line, he is still $70,000 behind the miner. If you assume the miner cashed out to cover his costs each month the miner still has 11292 coins on june 7th, putting him $40,000 ahead of the buyer. This is a far cry from making 1/3rd as much. Not to mention even at todays difficulty rate a 15GHash machine produces 125BTC/wk

Your scenario is only true if you assume a miner must cash out immediately the moment he has generated coin all the time. Which doesn't make sense. If you have $ you can just let sit in the market, why couldn't you let your $ sit in easily resalable machines? If you were so finnicky about money that you need to see it recovered INSTANTLY would you really have been able to see bitcoin prices surge up, then make huge drops and not sell off? In the optimum scenario of a terrified miner vs a super bold coin investor maybe your statement makes sense, but otherwise not.

namecoin is really just a renamed bitcoin for the most part. The client/server returns the hashrate it is generating (CPU mining). It does not have a report for the cumulative hashrate of connected clients.

If I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
I'd buy you a house
(I would buy you a house)
If I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
I'd buy you furniture for your house
(Maybe a nice chesterfield or an ottoman)
And if I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you a K-Car
(A nice Reliant automobile)
If I had a million dollars I'd buy your love

If I had a million dollars
I'd build a tree fort in our yard
If I had million dollars
You could help, it wouldn't be that hard
If I had million dollars
Maybe we could put like a little tiny fridge in there somewhere
You know, we could just go up there and hang out
Like open the fridge and stuff
There would already be laid out foods for us
Like little pre-wrapped sausages and things

They have pre-wrapped sausages but they don't have pre-wrapped bacon
Well, can you blame 'em
Uh, yeah

If I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you a fur coat
(But not a real fur coat that's cruel)
And if I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you an exotic pet
(Yep, like a llama or an emu)
And if I had a million dollars
(If I had a a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you John Merrick's remains
(Ooh, all them crazy elephant bones)
And If I had a million dollars I'd buy your love

If I had a million dollars
We wouldn't have to walk to the store
If I had a million dollars
Now, we'd take a limousine 'cause it costs more
If I had a million dollars
We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner
But we would eat Kraft Dinner
Of course we would, we’d just eat more
And buy really expensive ketchups with it
That’s right, all the fanciest ke... dijon ketchups!
Mmmmmm, Mmmm-Hmmm

If I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you a green dress
(But not a real green dress, that's cruel)
And if I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you some art
(A Picasso or a Garfunkel)
If I had a million dollars
(If I had a million dollars)
Well, I'd buy you a monkey
(Haven't you always wanted a monkey)

If I had a million dollars
I’d buy your love

If I had a million dollars, If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars, If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars
I'd be rich

Same. I was looking towards 10 buckaroos and it stopped at 13. I make a lousy trader, that's why I'm a miner heh.

Well now I feel bad for yelling at all the people who made those little spreadsheets and proclaimed doom on mining. Some people need to read those things I guess. I also feel bad for laughing a little bit while reading the OP (mostly the bit about flies).

So anywho. Yowza. 10 grand that's an ugly figure. It sounds like you built somewhat inefficiently, but better than most (1.2Mhash/$?) are doing these days (6990s will be < 1Mhash/$, sigh). It's bad to make rash decisions though, as evidenced by where you are now.

Stop, breathe deeply and calmly consider your situation. How much will you eat in terms of return restocking fees and whatnot? How much of your sunk costs are you never going to recuperate unless you mine? As others suggested, can you repurpose some of the things you cannot get a good return on?

I personally wouldn't say mining is dead yet, you might still eek out some returns. I pay 40¢ (yes FORTY) / kWh, and while its true that I built super efficiently and got in months ago, that's still a heavy cost, and I'm still way in the black. And if you can make a modest return (say 50% ROI) and then drop the hardware to cover the rest in a couple months that's not something to panic about just yet. Might even come out ahead.

So stop and calmly analyze the situation and your options. That's my advice.

solo mining on namecoin is a real problem, not only because of the recently exploded difficulty, but because of the concentration of mining power. I was solo mining before the increase, and I had a found block orphaned for almost a whole day (I didn't even realize I had solved one more until I checked tonight and saw a higher balance than before). The pools seem to be set to deliberately be uninterested in blocks not found by them, and they're a supermajority on the small system.

I suppose if you have an extra card to chunk and want to play lottery it's not such a bad idea, might get lucky, who knows?

1) Yes people are still adding capacity at $15. Many using 6870s

2) Just because people ordered their stuff at $30 or $25 or even $20 (it was stable for many days) doesn't mean it would have been completed in a timely manner. Tons of n00bs jumped onboard without any idea of what they were doing. Building a new multi GPU machine was probably harder than they expected (dummy plugs? what are those?) and getting it onto the network probably took a while.

3) Sipa puts computation speed as varying more than 2THash/sec over the past day. Probably casuals coming on and off, newbies failing at getting their rigs stable, pools having issues and so on.

4) And of course difficulty won't go down this time around, it always lags at least 1 cycle behind price changes. If it will go down, or stabilize it will happen the difficulty after next. If things stay as terrible as they are now that is.