Ah thanks for the reply. So I could essentially create my own pool with some friends by simply having them connect to my server... then keep all the coins!  .... 

Well I found out that the modified version of poclbm has been discontinued as a high-efficiency miner for bitcoinpool. So that answers that question. They recommend using Phoenix now (which I have already switched to).

But my earlier question about solo mining still remains. If I connect multiple miners to my "bitcoin.exe -server", does it effectively sum up all the hash-rates of the mining computers? Obviously this is how a pool works, but these pools have complex job-assigning and tracking software above and beyond the simple "bitcoin.exe -server".

One more question (I feel like this may be getting a little advanced ):

I managed to run some solo mining with the new version 0.3.23 on a single machine. Then I looked into connecting my secondary machine to it. By adding the line "rpcallowip=10.0.0.*" to my "bitcoin.conf" file, I can connect any computer on my local network to mine solo along with the machine that is running "bitcoin.exe -server".

My questions is: Does this mean that I am effectively mining solo at a hash rate equal to the sum of all the computers connected? Or is this somehow less effective than running one super-powerful local miner?

Still curious if anyone has experience mining for bitcoin-pool. They claim to have 5 times more efficiency based on better work allocation. Can anyone speak for this?

I have increased my hash rate yet again. I noticed there is a new version of GUIMiner that includes the Phoenix miner, which works better on my ATI cards. But again, I can't find info on what all the parameters do. Particularly the AGGRESSION parameter

EDIT: Ah, I found what I was looking for. It is within the link bellow, and the recommended settings for my card models works great.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6458.0


Now my only question remaining is:
Does anyone recommend a pool that is better than DeepBit? I was reading that there is a high-efficiency mining setup for bitcoin-pool. Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks for those hardware links, those are super helpful

Also, I managed to increase my hash rates! Using the recommended flags "-v -w 128" on my ATI cards increased my hash rates by about 20%, and there is a momentary spike into the 200s if I add the flag "-f 0".

Speaking of parameters, I can't seem to find a list of possible parameters that are used with this poclbm miner. Does anyone know if they are listed and explained somewhere? I seem to see "-k" in some of those hardware reports, but have no idea what it is or if that's on modded version of the miner.

For the solo'ing, I was thinking about running it on one computer overnight sometimes as a pure gamble. I am already mining for a pool. But again, it seems that there is a problem with solo atm? Are people resorting to a miner other than poclbm to solo for now?

Thanks a lot for the answers so far!

I went back to the stickies but can't find what you are referring to. If it's like a database of card hash rates I'd love to see it, do you think you could link it to me?

I will play around with the solo mining, but the guide I found on setting it up says there is a problem with the latest version. Can anyone confirm this? Should I just wait until the guide is updated?

EDIT: Also, I'm curious if GUIMiner can produce the same hash rate as using poclbm.exe in a command window.

As I am a newbie, I have a few basic questions that I have been searching to understand better. Some of them I have found partial answers for and am just looking for confirmations that I do in fact understand them. They may be painfully newbish but I'd greatly appreciate some help, thanks!

Here we go:

1. Do I understand this correctly?: BitCoins that you currently have in your wallet can be backed up by making a copy of the "wallet.dat" file. If I were to re-install BitCoin on a formatted machine (or a different machine all together) I would simply place my backed-up "wallet.dat" file in the appropriate place and my balance would be restored.

2. I started mining for a pool. The pool is set to automatically send me bitcoins when my pool account reaches a certain balance. If my machine is off and BitCoin is not running, what will happen to the transaction? It is trying to send the BTC to my receiving address, but does BitCoin.exe have to be running for the transaction to complete? Will it fail? Does it get queued? This would apply to any situation where a sender is sending to an address where the receiver was not running their client.

3. I have a few different GPUs mining and am getting the hash rates found bellow this paragraph. I started simple with GUIMiner (v2011-05-21) and, again, I am mining for a pool. I am running W7 64-bit. Can anyone tell me if these numbers are what I should expect? Or are there some "Extra flags" or parameters that are optimized for ATI cards, that are a simple tweak for me? I'm trying to avoid geting TOO deep into this, but I'm willing to tinker a bit if I can get a better hash rate. And the reason I suspect that it's not optimal is that my 5770 is nearly the same rate as my 6850, but when it comes to gaming benchmarks, the 6850 is something like 70% better. Anyway, here are the results:

ATI 6850: 160 Mhash/s
ATI 5770: 150 Mhash/s
Nvidia 8800: 26 Mhash/s
Nvidia 8600: 6 Mhash/s

4. I was thinking about running a solo miner sometimes for the chance to get a whole block (since it is all chance based). The GUIMiner seems to have a simple-enough function to start the process but according to this article: http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows it is not possible to run local mining with BitCoin v0.3.22 (which is the current). Is this the case? Or is there a simple way I can sun a solo miner?

Thanks ahead of time if anyone can help me out!

I'm Jake, I just started mining bitcoins casually with some computers I have kicking around, and joined the forums to get some tips to optimize my mining at least a small amount.