A bunch of harpies who are angry at reduced profits due to difficulty increases have taken it upon themselves to whine loudly on the forum about how mining is a bad investment.

These people invariably have their own mining rigs: they don't follow their own advice. They're trying to avoid further difficulty increases, which may make them lose money.

Mining is still very profitable, and if it wasn't, these assholes wouldn't be spending their free time trying to convince you not to do it.

In conclusion, if you think it would be fun to participate, go for it. Hopefully you know something about hardware, software, and trading. You'll probably make your money back no problem. It may take a few months. Bitcoins probably aren't going anywhere though.

Just remember: all of these people trying to convince you not to do it, are themselves not following their own advice. If they did follow their own advice, they would sell their bitcoin machines RIGHT NOW to other miners via craigslist.

I'm not selling my mining rigs, and they aren't either, because we all know that mining is profitable and fun and will most likely remain profitable.

1. Use ClearCoin.

2. Use #bitcoin-otc to deal with people who have good ratings.

3. Don't use paypal.

4. If you're going to use paypal anyway despite it being a scammer's paradise, do not send your bitcoins until the paypal funds have been withdrawn from your paypal account into your bank account.

You go here and buy me a $20 eGift card: https://www.starbucks.com/shop/card/egift

I send you $20 worth of BTC, at the mtgox price plus small discount, say 1.45 BTC right now

Anyone want to do this?

DDOSing is extremely hard to circumvent event for the top security experts in the world.

The status quo is tremendously easy to exploit by these Russian botnet operators. They seem to be doing it regularly now.

1. DDOSing all the pools.
2. They increase their bitcoin profits for awhile.

I don't see how this is going to stop in the long run.

What is the countermeasure? Pool hopping is not a great solution because they can just DDOS all the pools.

So I had my two Asus 5850s running nicely.

gpu0 was at 85C, overclocked to 800MHz, getting about 305 Mhash/s

gpu1 was at 80C, overclocked to 950MHz, getting about 380 Mhash/s

Everything seemed fine, and I had read that it was safe to overclock these cards to 950MHz and since the temperatures weren't too bad I figured it was ok.

But then gpu1 went down to 0 Mhash/s

After letting it cool I tried again, rechecked all the settings, made sure everything was working right, and it runs at 300 khash/s

Is this what you guys call a brick? Did I wreck my card?

I thought 950MHz was fairly safe for these cards? I had read that ATI cards won't even crash until 100C

Am I screwed?

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