First, let me welcome a flood of newcomers to the alt-coin community looking to strike it rich in a digital gold rush. I lovingly refer to you all at the Thriteen's because there have been more alts spun up in the past five months than I believe in the previous two years, leading to a new digital gold rush.



You're heard the stories of people striking it rich with BTC and recently Litecoin because early adopters got in on the basement floor and helped build the coin up. You see how BTC is going through the roof and how LTC will be the next big thing and you're running into the wild west of alt's looking for your riches.

The problem?

You're all fucking crazy and refuse to even learn the history of alts in an effort to not repeat the sins of the past.

Feathercoin? Chinacoin? Junkcoin? All attempts to get in and be an early adopter on a coin. The problem? They're just clones of Litecoin with minor variations (if any).

The only coin I've found interesting was PPCoin but even them still relied on a central authority (defeats the purpose of a cryptocurrency, doesn't it?) to maintain proof-of-stake until the network could sustain it.

That being said, I honestly truly welcome the Thirteens to the community and hope with your joining us, you bring some good original ideas to the table. Not just desires to strike it rich quick.

[EDIT]

So I've run into this problem on several FC pools and thought I'd throw this out there to the general community to see everyone's thoughts.

Because FC generates blocks so quickly (compared to LTC/BTC), my client barely has time to even start hashing on the CPU before a new block is found and work needs to start all over. There was a period this morning after pointing one of my LTC miners to FC, where an i5-3770 went seven minutes before generating a single share of work due to the rate at which new blocks were generated on the network.

This might be an issue with both FC itself (block generation is just too fast for Scrypt clients) but also the pools need to lower their share difficulty. The issue here is that it'll put a heavier load on the pools and eventually drive up costs for hosting them, which could mean trouble for the coin.

Curious folks' thoughts on this

Cheers!

EDIT (for those who apparently need it):

The reason this is an issue specifically for Feathercoin compared to BTC/LTC is that BTC wants to issue 6 blocks per hour. If there's a CRAZY jump in hashing power, that can hit 10-15 generating a new block every 7-10 minutes. Faster, but plenty of time for miners to still submit shares.

With Feathercoin, new blocks are generated every 2.5 minutes. If hashing power doubles or more (as it has been since it's a small, growing network), blocks can be issued every ~45sec-1 minute. Depending on the share difficulty of a pool, this isn't enough time (on average) for a miner to even complete working on a share.

A workaround to mask this issue (as I stated prior), is for a pool to lower the share difficulty so miners submit shares more frequently.

I'm looking to cash in on the high prices and invest in another LTC rig.

What's the best GPU out there as far as khash/$ is concerned? I'm thinking a $199 deal on a 7850 might be the best deal going but curious if there's any other input on the matter.

Thanks in advance!

All I can think...

Hey Folks!

Now that LTC is gaining some momentum, I'm curious if there's any OpenCL developers out there want to take a stab at optimizing the OpenCL core for scrypt that is used today by cgminer and the ilk. I know with some debug work the bitcoin folks were able to squeeze performance optimizations of 5% or greater by dropping clock cycles required to perform operations.

Anyone out there with more knowledge on the topic than I up for the challenge?

Has anyone done any research on the new SHFL commands being added to Kepler?

The new _SHFL commands (to me) seem the same as BIT_ALIGN_INT (32-bit shifting) without having to hit shared memory.

With the upcoming GeForce Titan card supposedly being the same Kepler based GK110 that powers the Tesla K20X at a price point of $899, anyone think that nVidia might be a viable option for mining sooner than later?

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/GTC/PDF/GTC2012/PresentationPDF/S0642-GTC2012-Inside-Kepler.pdf

SO, although I'm still a skeptic, the Avalon folks pulled through and delivered a test unit like they said, so kudos to them!

BFL currently has their estimates of shipping their first wave of products to customers February 18th. Avalon is currently (or at lest one) shipping their product to customers and delivering 65Ghash/sec per unit. They SAY they're shipping 12 per day, meaning that let's say they continue to ship between now and the 18th, that'd be 14 THash/sec added to the network before the first BFL box even leaves their facility. That would represent a 50% growth in network speed and (I'm guessing) a 50% increase in difficulty, which (I assume) would mean a 50% drop in income for BFL customers who were counting on a quick ROI assuming they'd be first to market.

Side car question: Is the assumption that the thousands (?) of ASIC miners will eventually just corner the market and split the 6 blocks per hour once GPU miners drop off due to decreased income? I couldn't find a thread that discussed.

So, I've been watching the oscillation of Litecoin difficulty over the last couple difficulty changes and this last one was interesting.

I could say that it looks like people are switching between alts depending on difficulty, but this last one had the network hash rate almost DOUBLING just before difficulty adjustment. That's some serious horsepower to all the sudden show up to the party.

Anyone have some thoughts on this? I would say that it seems either someone with considerable horsepower is invested in keeping LTC difficulty high (thus much less profitable than BTC mining) or people are just switching between the two depending on difficulty. I would say it might be a proxy pool, but most all proxy pools are SHA based, so they couldn't proxy out the SCRYPT proof-of-work to their clients.

Dearest Community,

I think the recent DDOS events show us how susceptible out small community is to malicious attacks. To the point where if a few (~4) pools are attacked, the network hashrate drops to the point where the chain can easily be 51%'d by a third party.

Pool Operators do what they do for their own reasons. Some do it because what they make on the back end through fees or what the pool keeps after payments, others do it to genuinely support the alt chain they're running. Miners mine for the same reasons, either to make some money off their hardware and/or to support the network by adding their hashrate to the hive mind.

Our biggest weakness in the alt chains is how much customization needs to be done to the default Bitcoin software packages (Simplecoin, etc.) and how few have been able to successfully make these modifications. Because of this, there are very, very few operational pools when compared to Bitcoin. A low number of pools weakens the network.

To this, I'm asking pool operators Open Source their Litecoin customized version of Simplecoin or web frontend that works for Litecoin in order to bolster the network and make it less susceptible to DDoS attacks against a few pools. As mining software authors do, please, let the community come together and help make a stronger more resilient network.

Curious to hear people's thoughts.

Just noticed the large increase in network hash rate that seemed to line up with the latest (insane) difficulty jump. Anyone suspect foul play? Or people just getting on board that quickly? 

Greetings fellow Earthicans!

I was curious is there was any interest in perhaps recruiting some of the more technically savvy people from the Litecoin community to bring ArtForz's fork of pushpoold up to date with the latest and greatest enhancements that are going into the bitcoin community. Such as stratum support and perhaps other enhancements to pushpoold to make it provide fewer stales, etc., etc.

Personally, I lack the wiz bang knowledge to make this happen, but I'm sure there's some out there.

Would there be any interest in someone putting together a bounty to get an updated version of pushpoold for Litecoin/SCrypt put out on GitHub for the community to enjoy? 

Good Deal on OCZ PSU's for anyone looking to spin up some low end/cheaper mining rigs:

http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/72372/ncix.com-ocz-power-supply-units-modxstream-pro-700w-modular-psu-40-after-30-rebate-fatal1ty-750w-80-bronze-psu-50-after-25-rebate

Cheers! 

I'm not much of an economist or speculator, but I was curious to get this groups input on a thought of mine:

Looking at the Bitcoin "Total Hosts" graph hosted at http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/ , it makes me wonder if Bitcoin isn't set for a long decline and the price has only remained stable at $5 due to hoarders who won't liquidate because they don't want to be "left behind" when "thing turn around".

You can't deny from those graphs that the network is on a downward trend as far as people actively using Bitcoin. Technical issues that have been brought up years ago as weaknesses in the technology any why it could never be used as a high transaction payment system haven't been addressed.

So I guess to the speculators out there:

1) What's holding the price up if there's a constant influx of mined coins to the market from miners and there is a downward trend on network activity? (Are there that many "dark traders" who don't even have a Bitcoin client and just keep all their funds/coins in their brokerage account?)

2) Couldn't it be said that the longer the price remains constant the more risky it is for someone looking to invest new capital into the system? An example I think of is if someone tomorrow were to pump $1M into MtGox and drive the price up to let's say, $10, there's be an immediate flood of sells on people trying to get a piece of that capital pie and the price would instantly come crashing back down.

Thanks folks! 

I'm trying to setup a private pool for my company and I have one question that I've seen discussed but not entirely in-depth.

The "rpc.target.bits" functionality is my biggest question. Do I need to adjust this manually with each difficulty change (since it seems to impact the # of shares submitted)?

Thanks!

Cracks me up that this was moved to Off-Topic

I was trying to find this thread to see if there was any sort of updates. Mums the word from BFL it would seem.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD7000-GPU-28nm,14121.html

Interested to hear from the horses mouth. Hope it's more a jump from previous generations GPU than Bulldozer was for their CPU line

I stated in another thread that breaking below $4 was my bottom line and I've shut down my miners for the time being (until difficulty drop + price increase).

I'm curious: What's your shutdown point?

This isn't a question of "being brave when others are fearful", it's just math. Depending on your electricity cost, you could spend $5 to mine a bitcoin that would only have cost you $4 to just buy.

NewEgg is having a labor day sale this weekend and they have a PowerColor 6850 for $129 after coupon+MIR. I know the 6850 isn't the best mining card in the world, but at this price it has a really good (if not the best) Mhash/$ ratio. Also free shipping

Use coupon code: EMCKAKH26

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131374

Cheers! 

I guess I'm just paranoid, but I downloaded the latest .24 client from the Bitcoin website and I can see that the client is logging onto IRC? (irc.jipugtug.org, #bitcoin42).

What's up with this??

I was thinking today while looking at the steady downward trend of prices over the last week or so. I began to wonder if this wasn't a trend due to the influx of miners.

My theory is that if you look at hashing rate over the last 60 days, you see a considerable jump in hash rate meaning people either joined up or made the monetary investment in mining for bitcoins. These people aren't using bitcoins as a source of exchange for services or goods, but as a method to extract capital from the current bitcoin market.

Because there isn't a healthy market for bitcoin purchases (some would argue this, but my opinion is that they're all still in their infancy), there's no capital flowing into the market (aside from speculators) and capital is leaving the market at a faster rate as miners look to make a return on their investment.

So my guess is that we'll continue to see a steady downward trend in prices as miners continue to cash out their earnings, until you see another large news story hit/eCommerce catch on where people would pump capital into the market to begin driving prices back up.

Thoughts?