Hi all I'm fairly new around here.

I recently completed my first bitcoin through mining and it has been pretty fun to monitor my mining pool and try to keep my humble mining machine (a single Radeon 5870) running as much as I can. I have it overclocked using the CCC, currently running at 900/900, the best settings available in the built in CCC settings. The card itself usually runs between 69 celcius and 75 celcius at 49% fan speed depending on the temperature of the room.

I am part of one of the larger mining pools and my pool is having a pretty good night tonight. I like the idea of pools but there do seem to be a few inefficiencies with them. I'm curious how many people actually solo mine. The benefits of winning that big jackpot and not having to share it sound pretty great, but obviously you could go many months without a hit on lower hashing setups.

The difficulty increases are my main concern with the future of mining. Once thing become too difficult, it won't be worth it to mine anymore, but for now it seems to be profitable and I don't actually have any current expenses to worry about with my machine since it's paid off, which is a plus, so energy and possible machine depreciation from extensive use is really the only concern for now.