Hi all, yesterday it occurred to me that we are all wasting a lot of resources on mining bitcoins, in a way that shows more than a little similarity to the prisoner's dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma).

I wrote about it here: http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2011/05/31/resources-are-being-utterly-and-completely-wasted-on-mining-bitcoins/
Would love to hear your thoughts.

My internet broke today so my miners did nothing for several hours. Would it be possible to modify poclbm so that it continues to work on the last received task when no connection is available?

I tried running two 6870s in Crossfire for a while. Any game that I throw at it runs just fine, although GTA IV does get the fans turning a bit. Running a gpu client on each card at the same time though, is extremely painful. The top card overheats and reaches temps of ~108C before it clocks itself down. The downclocking then decreases temperature, which lowers the fan speed from 100% to 67%, which increases the temperature, which increases the fan speed, which clocks the card down again. It's horrible and definitely not healthy for the card.

Ok, a bit of rant. Anyway, any single card should be stable. Be careful when you run more than one.

Back on-topic: I had an interesting run-in with MtGox today. I transferred $1000 to Liberty Reserve a couple days ago, yet it never arrived. The transaction history on MtGox showed the transfer though, and the $1000 were neither on MtGox nor on Liberty Reserve. When I found this out I was pretty paranoid, thinking MtGox stole my money etc. etc. I e-mailed MtGox for clarification, and within the hour I got an e-mail back, saying that LR rejected the transaction for some reason, and that they transferred it to my account. Which they did, so all's well that ends well.

Things I will keep to heart from this encounter:

• MtGox / LR software is not perfect. Things can and will go wrong.
• There is definitely potential to lose money either by human or technological error.
• Despite the previous comments, the human(s) behind MtGox replied very quickly and have been extremely professional in their handling of these cases. As long as no change occurs in people managing the site or the bitcoin economy, I trust MtGox.

Being confronted with not finding any coins for days, I can't help but think about reasons why I haven't found them. I keep thinking that perhaps if I restart the client more often, or restart my PC, or erase my entire Bitcoin folder and start from scratch, that I'll find as much coins as I did in the beginning.

I know that all of that does not make any sense based on the things I know about bitcoins. The system simply doesn't (shouldn't?) work that way, technically. But has anyone actually tried this? I wonder if people have their own 'good luck charms' - eg. actions that you perform that makes you think that you'll find bitcoins faster. Thoughts?

Also, one more question. The wiki here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target) says that 'the network' decides the next target for each round. Who is 'the network'? Am I correct in understanding that each client analyzes the past block chain and then decides for itself what the next target will be? I feel there's still a gap in my understanding between the network acknowledging what constitutes a 'winning' hash and that hash actually being converted into tangible (well..) bitcoins.

Thanks. I added a note about it.

That's pretty interesting. So I'm less lucky than I thought, and the calculation was correct. That's good news then, since it's not entirely unlikely for me to expect a similar result in the future

I tried to summarize what I know about bitcoins and bitcoin mining on my blog. Would welcome some feedback: http://rheide.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/thoughts-on-bitcoin-mining/

Since we're on the topic, another question: how is the difficulty level managed? Is it just coded into the clients so they know to increase the difficulty level by themselves? What if a client doesn't increase their difficulty and calculates an easy block instead? Will the network reject it?

Also, I'm wondering just how lucky I was, since that's basically 3 blocks after another being generated in less than average time. If the chance of finding a block with my calculation rate in 2days were 10%, then the chance of finding 3 blocks this quickly would be less than 0.1%. Quite strange if you ask me.

Hi guys, I'm new here. I just started mining with HD6870 using the OpenCL miner. I'm doing about 210Mhash/sec, which according to the probability calculator (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) means that on average I should generate a block about every 8 days.

Instead, I have generated 3 blocks in about 4 days. This can mean two things: 1. I'm extremely lucky, or 2. the rate calculator is not quite right.

This discovery has got me thinking, if Bitcoins can be generated this quickly by just a single PC, doesn't that make the bitcoin market very unstable and likely to collapse? The more people learn about bitcoins, the more will be generated. Supply will increase, the value will go down. I'm talking about the bitcoin/USD exchange rate here, which seems rather volatile. I've read a lot of posts here on the forum by people who support bitcoin with all their heart (as do I!), who are predicting the exchange rate to soar the coming year. That seems rather impossible to me, considering how fast the coins are going to be generated from now on. I realize the system balances itself by increasing the difficulty factor, but the next devaluation is still 90000 blocks away, and who knows what that will do to the market.

Any thoughts?