Same here; I hadn't followed Syscoin before the launch but heard that things weren't going so well and took a punt at below the ICO price (followed by a bit of churning). As a software engineer myself, it was clear to me that that the problems stemmed from lack of production-scale testing and that they'd have fixes within a few days.

The coin has some excellent features and gives us hints of the DACs (distributed autonomous corporations) that are surely in our economic future. I'm going to hold for a bit.

Some SSDs are better than others. I've been running highly-loaded Oracle DBs on pairs of Plextor 256GB SSDs in a Linux/MD RAID1 for over a year - no problems at all (these are automatically SMART-checked every 5 minutes).

I did the math:

13300 x 581 = 7,727,300 (not 6,650,000)

BTW, would you like to buy some bitcoins at the super-discounted price of $580?

This gets mentioned pretty much every time there's a difficulty change. Estimates of the next difficulty are always unreliable just after a change because the calculation is being done over just a few blocks and variance can cause wild swings. It'll settle down in a few days.

As for the OP's question: the rise is good because it secures the network just that little bit more.

They're normally totally reliable. I run several for all sorts of things; one runs cgminer and hasn't rebooted for months.

Two things that maybe causing problems (and I've experienced both of these):

- You power supply may be inadequate (make sure it can supply more than 1A). Try swapping your current one out and see how it goes.

- The pi may be running out of swap space if the program has high memory requirements. (I don't get a problem with cgminer and the default swap space, but I don't know what bfgminer needs). You can google for information on how to change this if necessary.

More specifically, using Grover's Algorithm, the time taken to find a preimage of a hash (i.e. a reverse hash) is the square-root of the time for a classical attack. e.g. a 256-bit hash becomes like a 128-bit hash. It's not considered a big problem since the times are still very long.

Day traders most certainly do help bitcoin in general by reducing volatility and aiding price discovery. They do this by trading arbitrage opportunities (arbitrage being any case in which a price is out of sync with its true value) and help drive the price closer to its correct value.

Funny thing is...


You're doing exactly the same thing. You're arbitraging your electricity costs (i.e. it's under its true value in your situation). This probably won't have any affect because the rent market is inefficient in this case, but if enough people did this, your rent would rise to its 'true' cost.

0.001 BTC = 1 mib

Mib.

Given that ASIC development will lead to the point where electricity consumption is essentially the only cost of mining and if Bitcoin gets to the point where it's a (or the) major global currency, then mining will have to use a significant
fraction (up to half) of the world's energy output. Using any less will open it up to a 51% attack.

You'll get about 0.06 per day with that. (For the next two days, then it will drop by 40%).

I think that looks pretty neat. Each CMA is sitting right behind its PE1950 and just takes 1U (although the power sockets on the left are a bit tight). A Sierra would just be a 4U hole in that. I'd surprised if that mix actually occurred in the real world though!

I think though, if you've got the miner in a DC and it need a hardware power cycle you've got more problems than just reaching into the back of the rack (you've actually got to go to the DC or pay some dude to do it! And it raises concerns over the equipment's reliability). And anyway, DC costs are going to bite into the miserable ROI. Who would even think of doing that unless they had some free space?

My racks are very neat and tidy at the back. But you do have a point if you're somewhere like this: 

I spend quite a lot of time in a datacenter, and the back of a rack is most certainly accessible by opening the door in the warm corridor. (Otherwise how would you attach power and network cables to the servers?) I must admit, though, that nothing else about the design of these units makes any sense. Apart from the power supplies, I don't see any screw holes for the rack slides; these seem pretty heavy cases to be mounted purely on the ears.

I sense that's there's a little bit of confusion about how your earnings can be independent of the pool's hashing rate and perhaps I haven't explained it very well. Best thing is to give a few examples.

First a definition: by earnings I mean the rate of income per difficulty round. This could be expressed as the average number of bitcoins earned per day over the difficulty round.

Let's assume the network hash rate is 2000 TH/s (it's higher now, but was at that a couple of weeks ago) and the difficulty round has just begun. Let's also assume that the hash rate of the Slush pool is 200 TH/s (1/10 of the total network hash rate) and you're a miner in Slush with 200 GH/s (1/1000 of Slush's hash rate).

Let's look at three scenarios:

1. The network hash rate is stable (maybe there's a world shortage of solder and nobody's shipping miners...), Slush's daily earnings are 360 bitcoins (2016 * 25 / 14 * 0.1). Your daily earnings are 0.36 bitcoins (360 / 1000). This rate continues for 14 days at which point there's a new difficulty round with the same difficulty (earnings don't change).

2. The network hash rate is stable but 200 TH/s moves from BTCGuild to Slush (for some reason). Slush now has 400 TH/s and earns 720 bitcoins per day (Slush's block rate has doubled). Your earnings are still 0.36 per day - while there are twice as many blocks now for Slush, your share of each of them has halved. Again, this difficulty round lasts for 14 days and the next one has the same difficulty (earnings don't change).

3. EvilASIC(TM) company dumps an extra 2000 TH/s on the network right at the start of the difficulty round and mines into EvilASIC pool. Network hash rate is now 4000 TH/s and there's a block every 5 minutes instead of every 10 minutes with half of the blocks going to EvilASIC. Slush's daily earnings stay the same (360 bitcoins) and so do yours, but this difficulty round will only last for 7 days instead of 14. When the new difficulty round starts, Slush's and your earnings will be halved (180 and 0.18 respectively).

And that is what's happening. Currently blocks are being solved every 7 minutes or so rather than the normal 10. At the next difficulty change, difficulty will be set to try to bring the rate to once per 10 minutes again.


That's right per block, but not overall (per difficulty round). If the 2TH/s miner increases to 6TH/s, then the pool will find blocks at a higher rate. The 1MH/s miner will get less per block, but will see more blocks; this balances out so earnings are unchanged for the small miner. (The big miner, of course, will see higher earnings since he increased his hash rate).

They're going to other pools (BTCGuild, ghash.io, etc). Watch http://blockchain.info to see the blocks being solved in real time. Remember that once every ten minutes is only on average and there may well be less or more time between blocks. Since the network hash rate is still increasing, blocks are being solved about once every seven minutes (on average) currently. See http://blockchain.info/pools to see the percentage breakdown between pools.

Since bitcoin was invented. Your earnings (whether you're mining solo or in a pool) depend only on your hash rate compared to the current difficulty. If during a difficulty round your pool's hash rate increases, then blocks will be found more quickly but you get a smaller share of each one so your average earnings will stay the same until the next difficulty change.

Indeed, but in the case of two users, you would win blocks twice as quickly since the pool's hash is doubled so the overall earnings would be the same.