With all the upheaval the past few days, I've been surprised at the stability of BTC on the markets. And even more impressive was the resilience of the market when someone(s) just unloaded 13K BTC and the price dropped less than $1. You'd expect a bigger drop than that.

Lets see how things settle out over the next few hours

Anyone think Mt Gox will surpass Tradehills 30d Volume in the first 24 hours and if so, how quickly? Already at almost 3K BTC volume... Tradehill's 30d volume is about 48K.

[edit duh meant Tradehill not B7]

Its the speed. The difference in hash rate from 840 to 950 is substantial. I saw close to that variance when I was messing with my 6950s. I've got mine running at 900MHz and am seeing 355MH/s At 840, I was below 300. It is odd that you aren't at 100% though on your cores, regardless of the speed. Are your cards getting too hot? In multi card rigs, even with two cards, the PCIe slots are WAY too close together and the cards starve for airflow, causing overheating. That's why you see so many custom built rigs with cards 4+ inches apart or if the cards are next to each other, with dual fans sitting on top trying to force air into that slender airspace. The fact that you are talking about crossfire tells me the cards are right next to each other.

So my guess is the cards are too hot and are throttling down. Since it's clear you've unlocked, throttle your memory speed way down and see if that helps your temps. I'm having trouble unlocking the 6950s I have, so instead am looking to move them apart with PCIe ribbon cables so I can ramp up my interior cards, which right now run below max speed to keep the temps realistic.

The problem I see in all of this analysis of bitcoin mining is that you cannot predict the price of BTC that you need to sell to pay for your mining costs. I'm mining with 6950s (stock because I ended up with cards I can't unlock the shaders on - oh well ) I'm getting around 355MHash/s each (900MHz which is as high as I can go locked)

Right now at ~$15/BTC and paying .1/kwh in electricity, mining ceases to be profitable at a difficulty of 10000000 for a single stock 6950. That's over 7 times the current difficulty! Are we headed there? Yes we are. Will BTC stay at $15, crash to $1 or go up to $100? Nobody knows. But right now? I'm earning $$$ to pay off my rigs, and at the very least should be able to recoup enough to break even if I sell my stuff used. But if I pay the rigs off, then it becomes a pure equation of power costs.

So will I pay off my rigs? Only time will tell and it all depends on the market and $/BTC.

But lets say difficulty skyrockets in a month's time and profits vaporize. We actually see a drop in network processing. Then BTC jumps to, say $50/BTC. Miners will pile back in.

Bottom line is NOBODY can predict difficulty, GPU advances, or $/BTC. Just like the day traders, mining has risk. As it should be.

While an open source codebase might result in safer code because of the crowd sourced review, it also would mean more vulnerabilities got taken advantage of (since the hackers can see the code)

Egg on the face of Mt Gox? Sure. End of the world? No. They're doing the right thing - rolling back to right before the fraudulent transactions, and life will go on. They reacted quickly and are clearly trying to do the right thing. Many of those screaming that the sky is falling either have a vested interest in another market or don't understand how markets work. Markets 'rolling back' are not common, but also has happened elsewhere.

I believe BitCoin will be fine - but it's entertaining reading the frenzied panicked posts like it's the end of thw world. Hackers are a fact of life and hopefully when things are back to normal AND secured, Mt Gox will publish an overview of what happened and what they've done to improve things. Otherwise, folks will vote with their feet