Indeed. Thermalpaper isn't very durable. Keeping it in you pocket or wallet is already too warm.
I'd prefer a small laserprinter and some fairly heavy paper (something heavier than the normal 80gr/m² stuff)
Laser prints are pretty much as waterproof as the paper they are on. It'll stay on the paper even when wet, unlike regular ink. And as long as the paper doesn't tear and you let it dry after it got wet, it'll be in usable condition. So if you put it on heavy paper (120gr/m² or so) it should last for a few decades at least.

This.

AMD has it's own driver cleanup tool too, wich works like a charm.
When there's junk left from older drivers, they interfere with the newer ones and will cause BSOD's.

Catalyst Uninstall Utility: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/catalyst-uninstall-utility.aspx

After uninstall, reboot and install new drivers.

Nice

Would you mind to fill my request earlier in this thread and confirm that you actually recieved your order?
Just put the ordered items on a table and put the box with the shipping label clearly visible next to it, photograph it and post it here. Ofcourse, you are allowed to smudge out your own address.
The more textured the background and more well-lit (not washed out and unreadable ofcourse) the photo, the better.

Ofcourse! Just turn the 51% Attack cheat on!

Thanks guys

Moral of the story: If you are in it to get at least a return-of-investment ratio of 1 (make everything back, including electricity) just forget about USB Eruptors at their current price.
If you are doing it as a hobby, by all means, do it. It's a fairly inexpensive hobby and a good low-cost way to support bitcoin for the coming 6 months or so.

If prices drop below, lets say 0.3BTC it would be rather interesting and should provide a ROI-ratio of close to 1.

Well, that depends on what you pay for them, what the actual difficulty increase will be and how that affects mining income.
It's been said that difficulty goes up every two weeks and they speculate that it increases 10 to 20%.

Lets just assume mining income goes down as much as the difficulty goes up. +20% diff = -20% income.
Currently, a USB Eruptor will generate 0.004BTC per day.
When difficulty goes up 20% every two weeks, you need 2 whole years of 24/7 mining to make 0,279997442372135BTC. At the 58week mark, the two-weeks income will have dropped below 0.0001BTC (thats less than 1 cent USD if 1BTC = $100). By this time, you'd be at around 0.25BTC total. The total increases so little by this time, it's not worth it anymore.

However, if the difficulty only increases 10% per two weeks, you'd have 0,55766224756596BTC after two years. Two-weeks income will drop below 0.0001BTC after 72weeks (approx 1,25yr) and by that time, you would have made about 0.52BTC

So yes, it'll make you a little BTC, and depending on what you payed for them, it may slightly be profitable, purely on the hardware cost. I Haven't factored in electricity, but these things hardly use any so thats almost negligible. ($1 to 2$ per year per Erupter would be about right)

Edit: Ofcourse, this is purely in BTC.
If you buy Eruptors using regular cash (either exchanging it or buying them with cash), you're depending more on the exchangerate. If the exchangerate goes up by the time you discard the Eruptors, it'll have been profitable. If the exchangerate stays roughly the same it really depends on what the difficulty does to income.

Edit2:
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that you can use an Eruptor for other coins than Bitcoin. As long as it's an SHA256d coin you can mine it with an Eruptor.
This may extend the life and increase your returns.

Yes, you could have done this with Windows
That machine will be perfectly happy running any NT5.1 kernel based version of Windows, like Windows XP or Windows 2000.
By modern standards, that's going to be too slow for everyday work, but XP started out on such machines.
Erupters are only equipped with a USB->Serial converter (thats why they display as being on port COMx) and they will happily work under such conditions.

On the other hand, Linux is free, old hardware is usually free, so it is a great purchasefree option. It will draw far more power than an RPi tho.
But you could combat that by installing as little hardware as possible, using a USB Flashdrive or IDE->Memorycard adapter, installing as little add-in cards as possible (Linux will run without graphicscard and operated through Telnet or SSH, called "headless") and underclocking and undervolting the CPU.

If you do have some spare cash, an Intel Atom based board will also be a great idea. They will use around 10watt.

You'll probably break even within the year. Some expect several months, others claim over a year.
Assuming .004BTC per day as raw income, you'd break even in 150 days at the current difficulty, which is about 5months.
Scratch that, I've done the math... read on below.

However, people seem to expect a 20% increase in difficulty every two weeks, so income drops 20% every two weeks.
So here's a table, assuming perfect 24/7 availability (no pool downtime, no computer downtime)

2w period	BTC/day	2w Total BTC	All-time Total
1st	0.004BTC	0.056BTC	0.056BTC
2nd	0.0032BTC	0.0448BTC	0.1008BTC
3rd	0.00256BTC	0.03584BTC	0.13664BTC
4th	0.002048BTC	0.028672BTC	0.165312BTC
5th	0.0016384BTC	0.0229376BTC	0.1882496BTC
6th	0.00131072BTC	0.01835008BTC	0.20659968BTC
7th	0.001048576BTC	0.014680064BTC	0.221279744BTC
8th	0.0008388608BTC	0.0117440512BTC	0.2330237952BTC
9th	0.00067108864BTC	0.00939524096BTC	0.24241903616BTC
10th	0.000536870912BTC	0.007516192768BTC	0.249935228928BTC

So that's 140 days, and not even close to 0.6BTC.
Depending on how much electricity costs, it may not even pay for itself.
However, the price for these things is just simply affordable now, and electrical usage is near nothing. Rule of thumb here is that a 1watt device, running 24/7, will cost €2,- (or $2,50) per year in electricity. It's a little high to allow for price fluctuation.
So an Eruptor, 2,5watt each (5V x 0,5A = 2.5W), will cost €5,- per year to run. And just extrapolating the above table will tell you it will make more than it will cost in electricity for a long time to come.
I believe that electricity in the USA costs less than half what it costs here, so it'll be profitable for far longer.
When your investment has returned completely? Not within 6 months.

Ofcourse, this does not account for overhead powercosts. A PC, RaspberryPi, etc is not included.


Edit: I've extrapolated it in MS Excel. 52blocks of 2 weeks (so 2 years), will yield 0,279997442372135 BTC
After 29 two-week periods (or 58weeks, a little over a year) the 2week income will drop below 0.0001BTC  that would be less than a single cent per 2 weeks (at 1BTC = $100 exchange).
Daily income will drop below 0.0001BTC after 17blocks (or 34weeks)

Ofcourse, this is purely based on speculation that difficulty will rise 20% per two weeks and that your mining income will drop by the same amount.

Edit2: Extrapolated through to 4 years (104 2week blocks), income total will be 0,279999999976638BTC
If the difficulty only rises by 10% per 2weeks:
after 2 years, income total would be 0,55766224756596BTC, drop below 0.0001BTC/day would occur after 72weeks
after 4 years, income total would be 0,559990240917066BTC

Edit3:
Factoring in power at €5 per year and 1BTC = €100,-, it would become unprofitable after 66weeks @ 10% diff increase per 2weeks.
At 20% diff increase per 2 weeks, it would become unprofitable after 54weeks.

Block Eruptors are USB connected and powered devices that are designed to do just one thing: create hashes based on the SHA256 algorithm.
They can do anything that uses the specific subset of SHA256 (SHA256d specifically) that this thing can calculate.

We, as miners, use them to mine coins. Any coin based on SHA256d will work, but you could use them for other SHA256d cryptographic purposes, like password hashing, brute-force password cracking, creating an encrypted data tunnel (VPN), SSL-like certificates, encrypting Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, etc.
You just need to develop a piece of software that will send any encryption commands to the Block Eruptor. For a VPN, you'd need to create a piece of VPN software that will push all transfers through the Block Erupter before sending it off through internet.

So yeah, they can be used for any purpose that requires SHA256d hashing. However, software to support that is yet to be developed.
As soon as Block Eruptors become obsolete, it'll be more likely that someone actually will develop software like that.

Edit: it really does nothing more than hashing in SHA256d.
Think of it like Ceasar Cypher. You take the alphabet and assign a number to every letter. When you send a message, you change all letters to numbers and the reciever has a conversion table.
Anyone in between cannot read the message without the conversion table. If the mailman opens your envelope, he cannot read what's inside unless he is in posession of the conversiontable or spends hours (or even days/weeks) trying to decypher the message.
So the Block Eruptor is essentially nothing more than a sort of automated conversion table device. It will encrypt and decrypt a message.

Everybody knows electronics work on smoke.
When the smoke leaks out, they stop working.

I understand you want to help us to get a good deal and I really appreciate the effort.
However, in the Bitcoin world there are a lot of scammers. Since this shop is just very new, it's nearly impossible to tell if it is a scammer or not.
We, as forum users and potential buyers, just want to know wether this site can be trusted. That's why we, or at least I am, try to confirm it.

This, No.
Yes, we are sure.
And yeah, Everyone that says something believes in what they say and says they are honest.

ASIC's cannot be reprogrammed. They are pure hardware that are designed to do task X. In the case of Bitcoin and some other alt-coins that would be SHA256 hashing.
There's no software inside those things, so there is nothing to reprogram so there's also no way to increase performance with software.
However, you can modify the hardware. Specifically the clock crystal. Stock it should be 10 or 12Mhz, but there are people upgrading the clock crystal to a 16Mhz one and increase the input voltage of the ASIC by swapping some other components out. This does require external power, since a USB port will not be able to provide that amount of power, and ofcourse, more power in means more heat out so it will need better cooling.

Just think of these things as hammers. They can only be used to hit things. They cannot cut, since they are not a knife. And there is no way to turn a hammer into a knife by just reprogramming it.
That's more like it, however, still no forum name written on
Please, just put the phone on a table, put the shipping label next to it and write your forumname on the shippinglabel. Then take a photo of it and post it.
Handwriting is extremely hard to photoshop and having some textured surroundings and light influence makes it even harder. That's why that would be considered good proof.

That seller hasn't been confirmed on the forums yet.
Only a few people that claim to have recieved something they ordered, but no quality proof as of yet.
Just take a look here and keep following this for the next couple days or so
 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266787.20

If anyone responds to my requests, we should have a fairly good confirmation of this shop.

Ok, thats a step in the right direction.
However, I'd like to see a paper version of it, or even better, the shipping label that was on the box with your forum name written on it and the phone next to it on the table.

A screenshot is fairly easy to photoshop, and a real photo is at least hard enough to provide some degree of confirmation.

I'd love to believe that everyone has recieved their order, however, I don't think you can ship and deliver within 24hours.
I've been watching your website, specifically the block erupters and since yesterday the stock has gone down from 40 to 36 34 already.

Can you tell us what the ordernumbers from the last 24hours are and wether those are already shipped?
Do you have tracking codes on your shipments, so people that have ordered the last 24hours can track their shipments and confirm it here?
Just send the tracking number to the email adress they provided when ordering. I see that it's required on your site, so you should be able to do this.

Just install your mining distro first, then do your Win7 install.
Win7 is smart enough to understand that there is another boot-drive and will set-up multiboot automatically.

It's been online for a little longer, according to the person that started that topic.
So that does explains the ordernumbers that have been quoted in this topic and the fact that people claim to have recieved ordered items.


I'm not gonna say it's not a scam because there is no way to check wether these people are actually speaking the truth, but it does supply a viable explanation.

Does anyone that has recieved his/her order still have the packaging? Specifically the shipping label?
If anyone would be so kind as to make a photo of the item and a photo of the shipping with his/her forum username written on (and personal address blurred out ofcourse), it would definately add to the credibility of this new shop.

That way, we can confirm the address in the contact details of the page and have (to some degree) confirmation that orders are actually shipped.

Oh, and could a moderator maybe take a look the IP adresses of the people that claim to have recieved their order, and crosscheck that against GeoIP to see if they have a high probablility of not being affiliated?

Definately doable. Many routers these days actually run Linux. Using certain NAS units also would be a great option. I believe there even are some that allow you to install software.
Not in my case. Depends on the ISP. Most ADSL/VDSL/SDSL providers out here do provide a modem-router box, but Cable internet usually doesn't provide a router (or only at additional cost), nor do glassfiber ISP's.
Especially glassfiber is usually only with a glassfiber-to-RJ45 terminationpoint. From that point on is your own responsibility.
So you own a PC for every different task too?


I have no problems with mixing things. It'll only result in a lower electricity bill.
Why not combine a NAS, Miner, Router, unmanaged downloadbox, mediasharing (for those TV boxes), etc into one machine?
Single point of failure? yes. But is that really a problem for most tech-savvy people? It's not like your life depends on it. If internet is really important, you could keep a router just as backup and connect it as soon as you need it.

Definately. The HDD crash also happened when I had to turn the machine off, wich was only a few months ago.
Before that, it was running fine. SMART said it was fine, and I run a drive fitness test every now and then just to see if everything is still OK, and that also checked out fine.
After having it shut off for about 3 hours, the HDD started to degrade fast. Got a couple more weeks out of it, but it started to throw bad sectors, SMART didn't think it was OK, and it started to slow down because of read errors.

Quite simple, really.
It's pretty much as powerfull as a high-end ATI GPU, but at a fraction of the power requirement.
An ATI HD7950 will set you back around $300 (or €260), will consume around 250-300watts of power and give you 360-380Mh/s.

An USB Block Erupter will set you back 0.5BTC (roughly €40 or $50, see forums for groupbuy), consume 2.5watts of power and give you 330Mh/s.

In short: for the price of one 7950 you can get 4 USB-BE's, so thats 4 times cheaper already. Effectively, you get 3,75 times more hashing power for the same amount of money.
Then comes the power requirement. You could virtually power these things from pedaling a bicycle an hour a day. (just put an alternator on, hook up a large battery to store power and control the BE's with a RaspberryPi or a modified router running Linux)
They really won't increase the power bill. A single 7950 will cost you anywhere between $10 and $30 per month to run 24/7 (depending on where you live), wich at the current exchange rate (BTC->USD) will never pay for itself.

Yes, they are the same. The button issues the same command.
For solo mining, yes, that is everything you need to do.
To pool-mine, you should set the server, port, user and password fields.
No, you do not need anything else when the mining is done by your client software.
However, if you are mining coins that can be mined on a GPU, you would probably miss out on 99% of the hashing power of your machine. (asuming you own an ATI graphics card)
This is also the one big reason why there is no mining function in Bitcoin-QT anymore. CPU mining is way too slow and energy-inefficient compared to GPU, FPGA and ASIC mining. Integrating GPU mining would be a way around this, but on the other hand, it also increases variables (worksize settings, vector, etc) and relies heavilly on the user's ability to install good drivers (to enable OpenCL or Cuda) wich would make the client appeal less to newcomers.
As I said at question B. Just fill out the required fields.
Ofcourse, you need to join a pool beforehand. They will provide you with a server and port adress. Username is usually your login name for the pool and a 'worker' name (has to be set at the pool) combined, separated by a dot.

Some additional info:
If you do not have the hardware to produce at least a couple 10's of Gigahashes per second, don't even think about solo mining.
Solo mining relies on you finding a block, wich will pay out 25BTC (reward used to be 50, and will devide by 2 every certain amount of coins that are mined). However, on hardware that isn't fast enough, you need to be lucky enough to find a block before anyone else does. You're boxing against 300Terahash per second (currently, constantly grows), and the odds of you finding a block before anyone else are less than a winning with a lottery ticket.

So the advice is: join a pool, install a good mining client (CGMiner, BGFminer, Bitminter if you want something extremely easy to set up) and have the latest drivers for your GPU installed. This guarantees that you get some BTC. Far less than finding a block, but guaranteed income.

In that case, the next steps would be Pish (Pèta) and Eish (Exa).
Especially the last one would sound weird to me...