Selling this domain btcportal.net including @BTCPortal Twitter handle joined in 2011.

PM me with offers.

Hawkix

I'm trying to test mine solo some testnet bitcoins, using external miner (USB Erupter). The difficulty is pretty high - 28.6K as of now. Moreover, I found a discrepancy between target in getwork RPC call and difficulty in e.g. getmininginfo RPC call.

I know that when there is no block in 20 minutes on testnet, the difficulty should lower temporarily to 1.0. However, the target remains high (now "target" : "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001d4b020000000000"). This causes problems when using external miner as it does not report difficulty 1 shares, but wait for share satisfying target.

Is this a bug in bitcoind or did I miss something?

What if miners announced on the network the best PoW reached prior to finding the mined block?

This could kind of close the gap between "0 confirmation" and "1 confirmation". Anyone can check if his transaction is being worked on, because e.g. 50% of difficulty target reached indicate that some work was already spent on that.

For given TXID, the network would return a block containing that TX together with best target reached, so anyone can verify it.

The only problem with this is how to prevent overloading the network/miners with bogus requests/DoS.

Currently, there is a network flood of very small transactions of 0.0000025 BTC being sent to new created addresses - thousands of them so far - from 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T address.

To me, it seems like these transactions will not have enough fee and will not be mined, thus not increasing the blockchain size. However, how about the size of miners pool - will it affect them somehow?

Or is this a promotional act for the "bigger than 5400 satoshi" upcoming change? ;-)

[btcsafe.net]

The domain btcsafe.net is offered for sale. Originally I intended to start there The Bitcoin Safe - online wallet with all private keys stored locally, but currently I focus on different project and unfortunately have no additional time to take care of this.

There is a corresponding @BTCSafe Twitter account to this domain.

For the summer, I plan to move my rigs out of my flat to a basement. I had to run on mobile internet there. Unfortunately, only a slow GPRS connection is available with a limited FUP (fair use policy), so I will have to minimise the network traffic as much as possible. I test this and it seems that mining consumes about 1-2kB of data for each found share.

Not too much, but .. Are there any options how to lower this impact even more? I use Phoenix mining client. Any tips?

The link for FORUM subsection on the main page of bitcoin.org goes to a Google search. Probably not intended, right?

Some pools (hey, Slush, do you listen?) still do not implement LONG POLLING. My idea is that what if user installs a small mining proxy which will connect also to bitcoind (or some web service) and will provide client side LONG POLL notification on the other side. Rest of the traffic will pass directly to the pool.

Is it feasible idea?
Isn't it already implemented somewhere?

A few moments ago I just saw this (using websocket on http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/time-sales/):



I cannot explain the trades at 15.53009 - I checked the depth and it was filled all over 15!

Hi!

Please, is there a way how to overclock the GPU clock above the BIOS limit of the card, without flashing the card?

I know I can used AMDOverdriveCtrl to lower memory clocks, but my 5830 cards cannot get GPU clock above 900 MHz.

Under Windows XP using MSI AfterBurner I was able to run the cards at 1030 MHz.

How is it possible that there is a software way in Windows, but not in the Linux? Why AMDOverdriveCtrl does not go up the 900 MHz?

If the BIOS flashing is the only way to go, is there some nice tutorial how to perform it? What are the risks?

Thanks for reply.

I think that instead of going a rather expensive FPGA or custom ASIC path, the future mining machine could be built as custom designed "graphics" card. Using a several RV870 ATI GPU chips in single box.



Of course, designing and later manufacturing a GPU card is not something one could do in a garage, but I think that standard PCIe card producer could do that. For example, there is a lot of very small companies manufacturing 1x PCIe cards for CAN bus, I/O switching, GHz analog sampling, etc. Compared to motherboards, these Radeon 5870 cards have much simpler design with less layers.

My idea is that 4 or 8 GPU chips would be wrapped into large water-cooled copper block.  All these would share a 1x PCIe card slot (using extender cable). And eat a lot of Watts, of course. Probably using industrial strength power supply (e.g. 200 Amps at 12V). Also, there will be needed a custom, special built of OpenCL drivers for this beast.

You could combine several blocks in paralel and let the water pump through it. That warm water could be used in house for showers, heating in cold days or even to regain some energy back.

Is there an JSON web API somewhere I can get current total network hashrate (like it is shown on bitcoinwatch.com or bitcoincharts.com)?

Optionally, also with the current blockspeed and block number?

I wanted to monitor several mining variables during the time. After trying, I went the Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/) way. This tools generates a very nice graphs with various scaling of time. The software is a bit complex and hard for newbie, but after trying few data inputs, templates, graphs, etc. you get accustomed to it and can fine-tune the output.

Here is sample of today's output of some graphs. Note that one of cards crashed due to overheating (getting hotter here each day, have to increase fan speeds), later the other gave up too. Lost about 0.4 BTC, DAMN.



For getting the data, simple PHP script parsing the JSON from web services will do its work. For example, to get your current deepbit hashrate, use:

Code:

<?php

$text = file_get_contents("http://deepbit.net/api/<YOURAPICODEHERE>");
$json = json_decode($text);
print $json->hashrate;

?>

For fetching GPU temperatures, I had to write a simple console program which works like http server returning JSON data about temperature. Used ATI ADL SDK to access card temperatures. I had to write this myself because on Windows there is no such software. In Linux, you can probably run aticonfig and grep/sed/awk for the temperatures. On the Linux, where the cacti runs, the poller uses similar PHP script to fetch the JSON data and print them.