Aloha all! OneMadSquid here. I'm a newbie to Bitcoin mining, but I think I am getting the gist of it. I am currently running a very weak rig, but again I'm new so I am only operating with what I had around the house at the moment. I am hooked now though, and have just ordered my very first ASIC unit. It's not a behemoth either, but it will multiply my hash rate by 3-4 times. Right now, with just my old GPU, I am getting ~130Mhps. Nothing to get excited about, but way better than I was expecting. I have a MacbookPro 13" as well, and it's newer than m y GPU by several years, but it registers way down in the Thps range and seems like a waste of time to mine with.

None of that is likely to surprise any of you though. Sorry. Again, I'm a very green newbie here. I can say for sure that I am very happy to have joined the BitMinter pool because the entire process seems very streamlined, the software works perfectly (near as I can tell), and the website is easy enough to navigate and operate. In a strange way it feels good not just to be earning my first BTC ever, but to be contributing to something larger, something that has meaning to other people.

Anyhow, I don't mean to opine at great length. I'm actually here to ask a favor from my fellow pool members. I am currently one of ten entrants in the Alienware Arena Patterns Image Contest, meaning that I have a decent shot at winning. The contest is a picture contest where entrants submit a screenshot of their best creation in Linden Lab's Patterns game. The prize for this contest is an Alienware X51. Now, I am indeed a gamer, but being a new convert to Bitcoin mining, I instantly locked onto an even more important reason for me to win: My hash rate will go up!

Now, I realize that the X51 has an NVIDIA card, not the preferable type. Still, I found a site that says I should be able to get a cool 60Mhps out of it, taking me from my current 130 and putting me much closer to 200. Add my new ASIC, which should be here very soon now, and I'll be floating in the 500Mhps area. Because we benefit together as pool members from any increase in hash rate, I was hoping to garner a few simple, totally free votes to help me win this contest. Most of the others have zero votes. The highest rated entrant now has 7 votes (and his build is a smaller version of mine, essentially). That means that if as few as, oh, I don't know, 10 of my fellow miners can hop over to this link and simply vote for my entry, called Obsidian Castle Glows and submitted by onemadsquid, we can all benefit!

Here is the voting page: http://na.alienwarearena.com/contest/entries/patterns

For the sake of clarity, this is my entry: http://na.alienwarearena.com/galleries/photo/4473

Thank you in advance!