Hi all,

I'm working on a hobby project to basically set up a solar powered raspberry pi with a couple of usb miners on it. It'll have a couple of 10w solar panels and a charge controller with a battery pack sufficiently sized to continue operations for an hour or two should a cloud pass overhead ... which it does a lot here in Denmark :-)

Anyway, as far as I can see there are four different Raspberry models. I'm looking at the first generation B+ model because it uses a bit less power than the 2. generation. Downside is that it is single core vs. the quad core 2. gen.

With these self contained usb miners, does it really make a lot of difference how much cpu power you have on the Raspberry? Am I better off saving a few milliamps of power by buying the 1. generation B+ model, or will I be paying for that later on because it mines a bit slower? Will a single core be enough to fully take advantage of one or two or perhaps even ten avalon nano's?

And yes I know that this thing will never pay for itself. It's just a hobby project to give me someting to play with in the weekends ... nothing else :-)

-Michael

Hello all,

Many people will say that buying a block erupter is a bad idea because at the rate the network difficulty is rising, they will never produce enough bitcoints to break even.

I had an opportunity to discuss this with a friend today, and the fact is that you can actually still make money with a low yield device like a block erupter, so long as you pay for it in some form of fiat currency. This is true because of the rise in value of bitcoin against these currencies - a trend which is likely to continue.

For example, take a place like this (randomly picked, no affiliation). Buy a block erupter here for $15 and put it to work today.

According to the profit calculator at bitcoinx, the unit will produce 0.00033 btc/day at the current difficulty level. At $326/btc that's 0.10758 per day, which gives a ROI of 139 days. But, some say, difficulty increases will make the unit unable to ever break even.

Let's say the unit produces the promised 0.00033 btc/day for just one month. The total sum produced would then be 0,0099, or roughly 0.01 BTC. You paid $15 for it, so if the BTC/USD rate just swings up to $1500 you have in fact broken even. These are super conservative numbers, it is realistic to assume the unit will produce 0,03 if you let it run for a year I think. It is also likely that you will be able to buy them for $10 rather than $15. With these numbers the BTC/USD rate in one year will only have to be 334, which is pretty much where it already is (my guess is that in one year, BTC/USD will be close to $1000).

So, as long as you buy units with fiat currency, it should still be possible to not just break even but make a healthy profit with lowly block erupters.

What do you think?

-Michael

Hi,

I've been playing around with infinidice for a bit, and it's quite enjoyable and quick to play. And because IFC's aren't really worth that much, it doesn't matter if you lose a lot :-)

I was wondering if there was a dice site for some of the alt coins with a little more value. Like YaC or FTC or similar. There was an FTCDice site but according to informed sources, that site is no longer operational (i.e. not paying).

Does anyone have a more complete list of good "satoshi-dice-like" sites?

-Michael

So yesterday I was trying out mining IFC on p2pool.org. It was basically just an experiment to get a feel for the whole p2pool experience.

I connected with the address from my IFC wallet which I keep synchronized on my local pc. Mining looked fine, crunching away at the usual scrypt rate.

After a couple of hours I went to p2pool.org to see what the result of all my efforts had been. And sure enough, according to the Payout tab, there were payouts of 200ish, then 300ish IFC to my address.

Actually why don't you simply go to p2pool.org, click the IFC button and then look at the "payout" tab. Nobody's mining IFC there so nothing has really changed since yesterday, all the payouts from yestereday are still showing. Look for iNAHRCK39TMHopxcVhwgj9dgUUDHYsJunt, that's me. See the payout for 313.97915385?

So why haven't I received anything yet?

-Michael

Hi all,

Bit of a newbie question here I guess, but here goes.

Are there any benefits whatsoever to setting up and running my own p2pool node, and then mining on that node, compared to just pointing my miner to any of the currencies available on p2pool.org?

-Michael

Hi,

Has anyone managed to successfully place an order on BTER using Java to access their api?

I can't seem to get it to work. I believe I am doing the SHA512 signing correctly but the server just returns "Invalid data", which is somewhat of a dead end as far as problem solving goes :-)

Please don't post a response with a link to the guy who did a Python wrapper for the api. I'm doing precisely what he is doing, only mine isn't working :-/

-Michael

"Notice: Do NOT use p2pool to deposit directly to your Cryptsy wallets, as it will not show the address in our wallet and we will be unable to credit your account."

Does anyone know the technical reason for this?

I always understood cryptocoins as a public ledger that would show each transaction. How can p2pool "not show" its address? If a transaction has my account as the end point, why are they not able to process that transaction?

-Michael

Hi,

Although GPU mining is very quickly becoming a fond memory as far as bitcoin is concerned, there are still some potential in scrypt based mining I think.

Problem is power cost. So far I've only been able to find colocation type hosting that juuuust about breaks even or makes a profit, but only by a hair's width. And as soon as the network difficulty goes up, what little profit may be realized is likely to go out the window.

So the question is, does anyone know of some way to get your own server hosted in a place where power is cheap or even free? I'm thinking Russia, China and places like that. To hell with reliability and security, power is key to making this work.

Someone must have figured this out. Otherwise what are all the GPU miners doing with their hardware these days?

-Michael

Hello all,

I would like to use some low cost hardware for mining. It's based on the Cortex A9 processor (probably like the one in your smartphone) and by rough estimates it will clock in at around 1.5 mh/s.

I understand that with this sort of hashing power I will not likely be quitting my day job anytime soon. But that's ok, this is just a proof of concept for me at the moment.

Question is can such a device be used for mining *at all* ? What I'm worried about is the time it will take to find a share on just about any pool. Won't every share returned be stale? Would it help if I ran a stratum proxy and then told a bunch of these Cortex based devices to proxy through that?

- Michael

Hello,

I'm selling my account at mybrowsercash.com. The account is loaded with an account balance of $23,55 and a purchase balance of $1.019,55. The total value is $1.043,10.

The account will be sold for BTC 7, which means I am paying a premium price of just under USD $150 per BTC (the current price on Gox is around $120, so you get $30 per BTC as a premium). The reason I am selling my account is because I have other priorities and not enough time to be in the "make money online" business.

Beware that the bulk of the balance is for "spending only". It cannot be withdrawn, only spent on advertizing and creating tasks for others to execute. So don't get all worked up thinking you can make a quick profit here, you should only consider this if you are into online marketing and want to get some cheap advertizing. So if you have a good idea for how to spend around $1000 advertizing a product or a service (like selling advertizing gigs on Fiverr) here's a chance to get a good discount.

HOW TO TRADE: Since I don't assume you want to send a sum of 7 BTC without any way to verify the account balances, I suggest we use an escrow service like btcrow.com to facilitate the transaction. However, if you prefer a different approach, I'm open to suggestions.

-Michael


ABOUT mybrowsercash.com:
Earn money by clicking ads or doing tasks (create your own tasks, too). Spend your money on advertizing either on their site or via regexnetwork.com, which serves up ads using custom software, inline content as well as organic searches on Google, Bing and other major search engines. It's a pretty good site that has been around for years and is widely recognized as the best of its kind. I have used them several times for product- and affiliate advertizing and they deliver quality traffic.

Hello all,

In relation to this thread I got the idea, that it might be possible to build a purely peer to peer based crypto currency exchange.

I do not have anything concrete as to how it might be implemented, but I imagine that as a user I would be able to start up the client, it would then connect to peer nodes in the network, collect all active bids and asks, and then show them to me in a "depth" style overview.

I would then be able to enter an amount, a bid or ask price and then click "submit". My bid/ask would then be broadcast across the entire network, looking for a matching bid or ask. If a match was found, it would automatically create a payment to the peer user, and the peer user client would be able to claim that payment in the opposite currency only by sending the agreed currency to me as another payment.

As I explained this is just a very rough idea, hopefully someone will be able to run with it and make it more concrete. There are lots of questions to answer, such as which currencies should the network support (ideally any currency for which a client like bitcoin-qt exists), precisely how the actual exchange can happen in a secure way that would prevent one side from taking the other sides money without sending anything in return, what to do with limit orders that are partially filled or cancelled - etc etc. As for exchanges with real, fiat currencies, you could imagine that clients could be built that would use API's on Gox or BTC-e to continuously bid and ask BTC for USD using the latest prices from the p2p network. The reverse is also true, real world exchanges could bid and ask on the p2p exchange similar to what I could do from my own home.

I'm thinking that if we had such an exchange, people could trade their btc to ftc to ppc to min to yac - back and forth however they liked, with no fees, no spread, no delay, no central server to handle a massive load, and no way to cheat the system -- and no simple way to take it down (dwolla).

What do you guys think? Is this too wild to implement?

-Michael

Hello,

Yeah I know it sounds a bit strange but I'm looking for a crypto/cpu based (i.e. scrypt/scrypt-jane (read:FTC/YAC)) Javascript miner. I'm in a situation where I have access to about a dozen pc's that I can't install anything on, but they have a browser and I want to put them to work over the weekends.

Google has various suggestions but I haven't found anything yet which is in a usable state.

-Michael