Luck always evens out, we were all happy when the luck was good, but this is the price you pay. Hold tight things will improve. I promise 

I think that people see the luck growing with Slush and point there hardware here, the problem is that by the time they identify that we are being lucky the luck is probably running out so then block times grow and our rewards drop. This is the downside of luck, it can be good or bad and no one can ever tell how long it will last.

The big problem is that many miners are both greedy and stupid (present company excepted, obviously) and therefore they move their hashing power around thinking they will make a fast buck, instead they probably actually do worse because of it, and don't even realise.

The other explanation is that all minders are neither greedy nor stupid but instead a pool has failed and many miners have failed over to slush, its just a coincidence that this always seems to happen whenever Slush is experiencing a run of good luck.

It is what it is and frankly I welcome the new hashing power, I only wish they would stay and make Slush even bigger. Personally I think Slush deserves to be at least 20PH/s.

Last night I upgraded my Antminer S1's to S3's but left the firmware the same. Later on I upgraded the firmware and set about setting the clock speeds to see what hashing rate I could get.

After nearly 24 hours I have a stable S3 hashing at 499GH/s and one S3 hashing at 466GH/s if I try and push the second one to 499GH/s it starts to show errors so i guess that 466 is its limit.

Anyway that two successful upgrades and here's hoping that they will generate enough to pay for themselves and maybe even make a little on top.

It's great to see that luck is currently on our side but remember every bit of good luck will one day be matched with a similur bit of bad luck. I love mining with Slush and will keep going as long as I can, I have tried GHash and others but Slush is just more fun, I do however keep GHash as my backup just in case Slush goes down, although to date I have never needed to use it.

I am happy to keep mining even though the Bitcoin price is dropping as I am quietly hopeful that one day it will bounce back and when that happens my Bitcoins will be worth something substantial, until then I guess i will just keep swapping electricity for Bitcoins.

In an attempt to help with the electricity costs I have recently invested in some solar panels so as soon as they are fitted to the roof they will pay for about half of my bitcoin energy usage, and i hope to upgrade the solar system later on next year to cover the other half (Happy days!).

Just got my S1 upgrades done (finally, the kit has been here for about a week). Great news two of my S1's are now hashing at 478GH/s each at the first attempt.

I haven't upgraded the firmware yet as the Bitmain site seems to be offline but just changing the values in asic-freq to the default level for S3's has got me hashing at a much higher rate, and using less electricity!

I am sure my natural exuberance will be tempered by an increase in difficulty and global hashing rate, but just let me have my few minutes of enjoyment as i watch my hash rate grow.

I found it very easy to strip down the S1 and install the upgrade, but I think Bitmain went over the top when they put the thermal grease on the S1's as there was loads, and it was quite uneven. In my experience its always best to have a smooth even coating to get the heat away from the board.

I hope that the firmware upgrade will be simple and i intent to do it ion the next few days.

Hello and welcome to mining.

Mining Bitcoin with a graphics card is not cost effective, it was the case some time ago that you could get good returns on a graphics card but that time has now passed. As you have found out you can earn about £0.01 a day with your graphics card but it will use about £1.00 a day in electricity meaning you will lose about £30 a month.

That said mining is great fun and if you want to really join in you need to be mining with an ASIC, with your $50 budget there isn't much you can do, but if the cost of electricity doesn't phase you then your next step could be to buy a cheap 2GH/s USB ASIC miner, however I would recommend checking out eBay for an Antminer S1 which are dropping in price all the time, you won't make any money unless the price of Bitcoin goes through the roof but if you underclock it there are still some months useful mining available.

As things stand the only way to make money is to spend money, and even then you may just lose everything so be careful, read the posts in this forum and in the hardware forum before spending any money and then you will be able to make an informed decision. Please heed this warning and don't rush out and buy anything, hardware prices will always come down so you have plenty of time to decide your next move.

Finally, be careful with your graphics card, overclocking it will make almost no difference to your hashing rate but it will eventually break your card, mining with your graphics card 24/7 will eventually break it. You don't want to end up with a huge electricity bill and no gaming machine, that really would be the worst of all worlds.

If you are going to mine at the low end then please just do it for fun, as doing it for money is a huge risk.

Woohoo the luck seems to be with us today.

I could cynically suggest that the case cover has cosmetic value only.

The omission of the second fan either demonstrates that the second fan is not really essential, or that Bitmain think that anyone upgrading would have previously overclocked their S1 and would therefore have fitted a second fan already. My vote goes for it being superfluous unless you overclock.

I think this is a great upgrade kit and have ordered 2 already, my S1's will have a new lease of life and my hash rate will go up, I just wish they would be available sooner.

I tend not to look at the ROI charts as mining is a very speculative venture and no one knows whet Bitcoins will be worth in the future. I am just content that I am supporting the network and that in the future I may see some rewards for this.

My initial investment in mining hardware for in FIAT currency, but all upgrades are in Bitcoin so I have effectively written off my initial FIAT investment and will keep churning Bitcoin for hardware until I build up a substantial reserve of bitcoins.

I will only know if this strategy is good in a few years time, but I am confident that eventually my investment will come good. Anyone looking for a fast buck from mining will be disappointed, today mining is a long term and speculative investment.

As an aside, it is also great fun to watch your miners racking up Bitcoins, certainly this is worth something in entertainment value alone.

I see that S1 upgrade kits are now available from Bitmain, I have just ordered 2 so I can increase my hashing rate sadly they won't be ready for over a month, by then my S1's will be nearly useless with the current difficulty increases.

Just placed my order for the S1 upgrade kit, by the time the upgrade arrives the S1's will be well past their best so this will give them a new lease of life.

Can't wait to get them upgraded.

Your output seems to be similar to mine, At the top the Diff is set to 19.7G this is the current difficulty, then each item in the list shows a different Diff such as 15/10 (I have no idea what this means), the difficulty changed to 1024 is I think a message showing that for some reason the difficulty of the work sent to you has been reset, this does not happen very often for me but it may be a sign that your internet connection is not responding quickly enough so the pool is sending you easier work so you can catch up (but this is just a guess).

Hopefully someone with more experience will confirm the reason for this.

I think you will find a reasonable explanation here http://www.coindesk.com/information/how-bitcoin-mining-works/ . However the short answer is that we are coding a block into a hash (a string of letters and numbers), once we have coded the entire block into a hash the pool gets a reward and we get a share of that reward. A block is a list of bitcoin transactions over a period of time.

So in a sense we are not looking for anything (as we are just coding); but you could say we are looking for unsolved blocks and as these unsolved blocks represent 25 bitcoins you could say we are looking for bitcoins.

Unless you want to get really technical I would suggest that you consider that we are digging in the earth looking for little clumps of bitcoins, in just the same way as some people dig in the earth and pan for gold. This isn't at all accurate but it does paint a nice picture in your mind, just imagine all your little asics with pick axes digging through the ground.

I am note sure I follow your logic here, Slush is not an investment fund it is a mining outfit, therefore the only sh*t that happens comes within the rules of probability. Slush does hold our bitcoins so there is a potential that he could shut up shop and run away with all the unpaid bitcoins, however setting your payment level at the minimum allowed and switching pools if a payment is late can go some way towards mitigating such a risk.

I would guess that as an investment fund you probably invest in shares, and by the sounds of things in shares with a high risk/return potential so you shouldn't be surprised when sh*t happens, in fact it should be a part of your investment strategy. If you are investing in shares then you should realise that a funds value is just virtual until it is crystallised by a sale of the shares. This means that if you invest say £10M in Google and it doubles to £20M then you have on paper a £10M profit but that £10M profit only really exists if you sell the shares. If before you sell those shares they drop back to £10M then you could say that you have made a £10M loss, but in reality you never realised the 10M profit so you have just broken even, in such an example the £10M never really existed so it isn't true that "somebody else has it", it really did never exist.

It is not the case that I "go blindly through life like a clown on a minefield" (although I do struggle to understand your analogy), I take the time to understand the risks and rather that trusting Slush not to do me out of bitcoins, I use statistics to ensure that the returns from Slush are within a margin of acceptability.

It's easy to through about inaccurate analogies, or to imply some wrongdoing this is why there are so many conspiracy theories in the world; considering the existence of a conspiracy or of pure evil without first ruling out the alternatives is a sign of a weak mind, or poor cognitive ability.

As luck seems to be back with us now we could deduce that the rules of probability are just demonstrating their usual variance, although some may say that this is evidence of some higher force reacting top the negative comments posted here, personally I like the rain dance theory and look forward to seeing the video.

I would expect to see them as soon as the demand for S3's reduces. At the moment Bitmain are putting all their boards into the S3's but as soon as the demand drops they will have spare boards that will no doubt be offered as an upgrade kit for S1's.

I am just guessing here but would expect to have to replace the boards and move the heatsink across so you will probably need some new thermal paste, the S3 probably uses the same controller so just a firmware upgrade should fix that.

I have no idea how many batches of S3's there will be but maybe someone could help out by letting us know how many batches of S1's were made, this would give some rough guidance as to when the S3's will slow down and therefore when the S1 upgrade kit will be available.

Pool luck is not really a measure of luck at all. Pool luck is a statistical calculation, like a probability; so for any given amount of hashing speed at a given difficulty level you should expect a certain return. This is like tossing a coin, if you toss it 50 times you should expect 25 heads and 25 tails, although you may not get exactly these proportions.

That's it plain and simple pool luck is a measure of probability and as we know from tossing coins (or probability studies at school) the more times you toss the coin the more chance you have of getting an equal number of heads and tails. Probability tells us that if we toss a coin twice we should expect 1 head and 1 tail, if this works out then our luck is 100%. Lets toss a coin 100 times, imagine we get 50 heads and 50 tails, again our luck is 100%, because we are getting the result that probability says we should get.

If the pool probability calculation says we should expect say 5 blocks in a day, then if we get 5 blocks out luck is 100%, if we solve 10 blocks a day then our luck is 200% and if we solve only 1 block a day then our luck is just 20%, but as with tossing a coin the more times we try the closer the overall result comes to 100%.

It is not surprising that Slush runs at about 100% luck over a long period of time as that is what you should expect from every pool, in fact any pool running significantly below 100% in the long term is probably cheating you as probability says that all pool should run at about 100% in the same way that you should get an even number of heads and tails.

for the noobs out there I will say that there will always be a variance in probability, in just the same way that you can maybe sometimes throw 5 heads in a row; this is normal and unpredictable, you could try chasing the variance by switching between pools in an attempt to only mine in a pool that is experiencing good luck but the chances are that you will be using pure guesswork to base your decisions on, and even though in the short term you may make some gains eventually the rules of probability will hit you and you will have a run of bad luck which will even your luck out to about 100%. The only real option is to choose your pool (or pools if that is what you want) and stick with it, you can console yourself with the thought that whenever you see a run of bad luck it is just getting you closer to your next run of good luck.

I hope this will make sense to everyone and stop people seeing conspiracies whenever the pool luck drops.

I see the luck is back in our favour, without any action from anyone. Luck is luck, variance is another matter but playing the varience of pools is as risky as playing the stockmarket.

.003 isn't really worth a lot so don't expect a reply. The best you could do is to give your account to someone to mine it up to .02 so it can be withdrawn, then hope they send you the .003.

If you understood the concept of luck you would realise the futility of your comments. Don't panic!

Is it me or did slush just crash for a few minutes? 

I think we are all guilty from time to time of changing our email accounts without fully considering the implications. Crypto currency is extremely vulnerable and like cash all precautions should be taken, in the future we will all be a little more careful when we change our email addresses.

We should all really have a paper copy of email addresses, passwords and encryption keys kept in a very safe place, and when changing email addresses we should all ensure that our email address is updated and all changes are confirmed before allowing the address to lapse.

On a slightly related note I assume that all pools must have thousands of accounts created on them that have balances below the payout limit where the account holder has either lost access to the account or has given up mining. What happens to these BTC do they just sit in the pool wallet forever?