I have been mining about 40%? of the time for 11 days. Received .76 bitcoins so far.
I pool with mining.bitcoin.cz as it's not practical for hobby miners to mine solo.

My setup is a single GTX460 that mines when im not playing vidya games

I have spare boards and psu's, as well as a 8800gtx and a hd3850 from older computers that I have started to rebuild to mine.



Also, I mine (process transactions) to contribute to the bitcoin community. It's a win/win

Short answer: Economics, people sold bitcoins thus the price dropped

For those interested in speculation and the risks involved check out the event known as Silver Thursday in 1980.

The Hunt brothers (very wealthy) had the idea to hoard as much of the silver on planet earth as possible. Basically they ended up owning 30/100 of silver on the market... of planet earth.

This drove silver prices through the roof. For the scheme to work people would have to invest in silver at those prices (believing it would continue to become more valuable / more scarce) so that the Hunt brothers could progressively sell off their silver at the inflated prices.

Everyone called them on their bullshit and the price of silver normalized. They pledged collateral in their various investments to back this gamble, they lost an estimated $4 billion when everything was said and done.



Mans disposition towards greed is neato.

Aha! It's all coming together now.

The Bilderberg Group left a window open and some passerby overheard that they were interested in the bitcoin market.

... but no journalists would dare to report on a tinfoil hat theory such serious business

The Bilderberg Group definitely exists and they make policy and decisions on all sorts of important stuffs.
They might have even discussed bitcoins, who knows.

The people who attempt to control world markets probably aren't yet worried about a nerd currency that you can't use to buy a Slurpee. They are too busy manipulating global economies, gossiping on who has more gold bullion, and trading sex slaves.

Or perhaps they are people of similar status gathering for a club meeting and everyone is scared of them because they have more money.

If it is for smuggling operations, I recommend you swallow a micro-SD card (triple bagged in latex of course).

When you arrive at your destination, find spicy foods and prepare for recovery of wallet.dat

If you have a NVIDIA card and want to mine while using the compy the best is the rpcminer-cuda.exe

I am able to mine @ 62 Mhash/s average on 1 GTX 460
I know its not maxing out the card with the standard settings. This is good for my non-dedicated miner.

The cool thing is with standard settings on rpcminer-cuda it has had no noticeable effect on desktop activities (Win7)

I disable when playing intensive vidya games.

When using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (by far the best movie player for windows ) if I watch the statistics on a full 1080p movie (.mkv) it drops frames occasionally. Its has no effect on less intensive video files (720p, 480i).

From what I gather the ATI cards are much superior at mining due to their totally different architecture.

I wouldn't CPU mine, with my overclocked AMD Phenom X6 1090T cpu mining resulted in like 50khash/s
it used 100% of my cpu processing and barely did sh*t.

Tips:
-Use ATI cards
-Don't Crossfire, it slows down mining
-Phoenix or Diablominer look like the best for ATI cards
-Experiment with different miners and settings, do it for Science!

Status: erection confirmed

-Ansel

"Furthermore, I have to imagine the only serious markets propping up actual value are the drug/sex markets. If those should ever disappear or suffer a major 'blow,' then what the heck will prop up the value? Nothing. Who will want to buy into it then?"

I don't think you are thinking this through. History repeats itself. The economies of DOZENS of countries in the 20th century totally collapsed to the point where it was more economical to burn paper money in stoves than use firewood.

Hungary 1946:


Germany 1923: Bank notes became so worthless they were used as wallpaper. (and not in a joking way)


Gold vs Deutchmark During Germanys Hyperinflation:


 I am in no way advocating such activity, but at least do some research before you ignore/downplay the ENORMOUS markets of "drugs" and "sex".

Examples: Las Vegas, the CIA trading cocaine for arms to the contras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US

I understand the ideas you have, and appreciate them. You should create your own system of currency and if it is better than bitcoins I will invest in it.

-Ansel

As I was refreshing the site, waiting for a price flux I got a page that said
(Dont remember exact wording)

Site down due to DDOS attack, something something something


The next refresh I tried resulted in a timed out web page.

"Radeon HD 5830

    The card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 35~40 Amps available on the +12 volts rails.

Radeon HD 5830 CrossfireX

    A second card requires you to add another 170 Watts. You need a 650+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 45~50 Amps available on the +12 volts rails. 

For each card that you add, add another 200 Watts as a safety margin." - Guru3D.com

Options:

1 Board w/ 4 Cards - 1000W PSU
2 Boards w/ 2 Cards - 2 x 650W PSU

My mobo recommendations


Other recommendations
you DONT need computer cases (they will run cooler without cases and you save monies), just keep the rigs somewhere safe from static (not on your carpet or tesla coil) ie. a tabletop

Advantage definately goes to the boards with 4 PCIEx16 slots, as they require less extra equipment (mouse keyboard lcd hdd's ram etc)

Feel free to donate any amount of bitcoin
Also, if you need help spec-ing out a setup pm me. I do computers for a living lol.

Hi!

I do website design and graphics.

http://www.gaddywebdesign.com/gaddy-web-design-portfolio.html

Do you have any ideas for your graphics?

I can send you a few ideas I have if you are interested

Thanks,
-Ansel
aegaddy@gmail.com