Closest (ping) one is good. They're near enough all the same, except for any that try to scam you (cheating the payout) or are just broken.

Users VTC go in to the earlier linked account which shows 500 VTC transfers. There is a 6k float, any balance over this is transferred into cold store. As good as any other theory.

Well, at today's price, even with a good margin for error, it seems there is some upside - this is assuming one buyer is encouraging the price to drop and is able to also encourage it back up. Alternatively, he's just making a speculative buy because to be honest, this isn't a massive investment he's made (with a potential 10x return being quite plausible).

Wikipedia won't list VTC till it's more established and you can provide 2nd source material to back up everything you claim about it. So it needs some press coverage first then it might be worth a go. Trying to get it in too soon is counter productive they'll only start searching for any attempts to re-add it. Much better to start with a VTC hosted wiki for reference material and wait a few weeks.

My CPU gets about 1% of what my GPU does. I've not checked the incremental power cost yet. Agreed, its probably more than 5W so reduces my return.

It feels like it is a long process. I'm new to the game myself (bought the GPU, then thought I could keep it busy in the cold winter months) but I'm a (conventional) ASIC designer so I understand some of the tech.

In trying to explain crypto to a more typical person, the fundamental points of confusion seem to be:

• What is currency fundamentally? How does this fit in with intrinsic asset value
• Why does it make sense to use crypto (from an EU citizen resident in the UK!)
• How is the mining related to generating an asset, what _is_ the asset that is being traded

This even after having explained that I can demonstrate the process of converting electricity into beer (except my BTC are now traded for VTC), and it is cheaper for the pub to accept BTC than GBP.

It feels like the third point is the most difficult and also most important one to address at some level. If I understand it right, we are in effect certifying the public ledger of transactions, and taking a fee for doing this - so simplistically paying in crypto is the same as writing a cheque. The miners verify that the checks won't bounce, and ultimately the currency is bootstrapped by people exchanging fiat for crypto.

Should we be worrying if explaining this is a BTC or VTC task?

Best tip I can offer to anyone struggling with good settings is to try backing off on the engine clock. After setting up my R9 290 card to mine LTC, I switched to VTC and spent about a week struggling with instability and driver crashes (I could either mine at 200kH/s, or 300 for a few hours at most). With version 0.5.3 of vertminer, the fix for crash on quit made it a bit easier to tweak the settings, and I have had 400kH/s steady for a couple of days (less a couple of short breaks for gaming).
I was mining LTC at clocks of 1049/1450, and not great hash rate, but it seemed OK.
Settings:
"thread-concurrency" : "25600",
"gpu-engine" : "896",
"gpu-memclock" : "1498",
"intensity" : "18",

Temps 80* at 85% fan (20* ambient)

There seems to be something odd around I=13 for me, below I get 10s kH/s, the same as after the driver crashes. Also only a cold start seems reliable at getting the effect of new settings al the time.
The process was: Set I=16. Make some guesses for TC, find something that looks good. Adjust engine clock up/down in steps of 30MHz to find the best. Experiment with reducing mem clock, and small changes in value (ideally with also changes in engine clock to look for a peak). Finally push up I to the point when it stops improving (so being backed off a little from the point of generating too much heat, and being too sensitive to hardware errors).
A:605862 R:1142 HW:0

Edit: Just remembered after seeing a post on the main thread, I had a crash early on with VTC where the clocks seemed to get stuck too high (even after a cold boot which was the only way I could even get a stable desktop). Need to go in with a GPU tuner to set them back to near stock (mem clock ended up at 150 MHz once too)
Before my tweaking I was getting HW errors but overall I seemed to win from increasing intensity. All gone now though.

That's me on day 1. I missed out on mining at about 5x todays rate (post tweaking 300->400kH/s) for a weekend, thinking it would be OK to stick with multipool and trade for VTC later when I had time to set things up. I wonder how much of the network these people account for though.

Having seen (and both won/lost) some crazy stock price swings (where there is a real business underneath, with a hint of fundamental value), I don't criticise anyone who sold 50% after making over 200% return. They still believe.

Are we still in if we post a link now? Seems like a fair deal.

The link is legit, the address in comment demonstrates the mechanism for crypto, and also invites further discussion. Fairly certain non of my fb viewers know what crypto is. Its good to avoid asking people to post anywhere other than their own pages, I think the people we want here are likely to be slightly resistant to link spamming.

Unlikely. 1.05x more efficient, I'd believe. I don't know how you come up with 10x-100x...

GPUs are already built mainly for GPU-compute. People use them in supercomputers today. Yes, in theory someone like AMD could spin a GPU with some dedicated generic crypto accelerators, but you always have 2 ways to go. Flexibility to accommodate different workloads, or flat out performance on a pre-determined workload.

I think this misses the reason that mining specific ASIC are efficient. The GPU core is a parallel vector compute engine, in effect a specialised CPU. I'm not sure that there is a big overhead on a graphics card (above a few $$ driver chips) which could be saved. The power benefit of a SHA or SCRYPT ASIC comes from the fact that they are not programmable. The single function that they compute is hard-wired (hence it is impossible to re-target them effectively). The same reasoning is behind ASIC being more efficient than FPGA (although the mechanism is different). Silicon resource that is not used 100% every cycle is a cost - but is needed if you need to support configurable algorithms.
An algorithm which pushes the energy cost almost completely to pushing data through RAM will further reduce the benefit to be made by doing the compute side efficiently.

I think I got them all from the earlier posts. I only see 15 connections here, I'm guessing more nodes will still help.