If this is talking about increasing how long shifts last from the current approximately 30m to 60m than I am definitely in favor. This will help even out my time when either A) I have to restart a miner or take it down temporarily for maintenance, and B) when I lose connection to BitMinter and my miner switches over to a backup pool for the next hour or two. This will also help with pool hoppers as they would need to remain in the pool that much longer to pull any significant amount of coins from the regulars.

Count my vote as an "AYE".

Hi. My name's Klober and I'm a mine-aholic.

Hi there!

I would like to request to be whitelisted. I have been Bitcoin mining for well over a year now and am far from a newbie on the subject. I have 2 dedicated mining rigs each running dual 6990s and dual 6850s in my personal machine I use to mine on downtime. Much of my time was spent solo mining and I had decent success (5 blocks) but the difficulty is so high now that I have resorted to pool mining so I don't have to "win the lottery" anymore.

For a reference of my knowledge please check this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114723.msg1243753#msg1243753

The reason for the request is that I would like to vote on the doubling of the difficulty rate on BitMinter.

Thank you!

Klober

If you go with 50BTC.com, or pretty much any other pool there is, then you will also need a mining client. BitMinter has the advantage that you can sign up and just use their mining client which makes things easy. That's not to say that it is necessarily better - it is just easier to get set up when you are new to Bitcoin mining.

If you decide to go with 50BTC.com you can use any mining client you like. Personally I'm a fan of DiabloMiner. I've tried several of them out there (DiabloMiner, CGMiner, BFGMiner, BitMinter) and DiabloMiner has consistently given me the best performance with my 6850s and 6990s. Note that I recommend you do the same and decide for yourself which miner you like best.

Something you will also want to keep in mind is that even the best pools can have downtime and you want to be prepared for that. Most of the latest miners allow you to setup backup pools that your miner will automatically switch over to if it loses communication with your main pool. For this reason you will want to have accounts with at least 2 different pools. This way if your main pool goes down for whatever reason your miner will switch to your backup pool and continue earning you Bitcoins. Much better than losing out on that time waiting however long for your main pool to come back online!

It will definitely be interesting to watch the going price for BTC over the next 3 months. It will give us a good idea of whether BTC will survive and flourish over the long term.