[1) Not enough people own any of the currency, and retailers will never bite.]

I've racked up quite a few bitcoins myself, and purchased some.  But with the price roller coaster and ever-rising difficulty, why would this or how could this EVER become a usable currency?

Here's some things that have bothered me about the currency.

1) Not enough people own any of the currency, and retailers will never bite.

You need much more than a couple hundred thousand people to have a currency.  Also, it doesn't really work when a very small amount of people have such a large chunk of the total currency.  And why would the rest of the world consider it valuable?  Ever?  

Say myself and a dozen friends come up with a design for a physical coin made out of wood, lets call them woodcoins.  However, for a woodcoin to be worth anything within our group, it needs to be hand carved with a specific and complex design.  We then start trading and buying eachother's woodcoins as a hobby, and the "value" within our group starts to get high because the ones that have the most are considering themselves "rich".  Does the rest of the world care what these wooden coins are?  No.

Ok, so let's find some small mom and pop shops that will accept these woodcoins because they have value to us.  They find that we would purchase them back from the shop for real cash, because we believe they have value.  So the shop sells t-shirts or other cheap crap and will accept the woodcoin as payment, and then immediately go back to sell the woodcoin back to someone else in the group.  So the woodcoins never really leave the group.  Why not?  Because the shop can't buy it's supplies to make it's product using the woodcoins, and it can't pay for it's rent and utilities using woodcoins, they need real world cash.

Eventually, the shop stops accepting the woodcoins because it's more of a hassle than just dealing with straight cash, and it's also unpredictable since the value is determined within this group of a dozen people and they can lose out any time if the price drops.  Shops don't want to gamble, they want to make a steady cash flow.

I like all the pictures of all these crazy homemade rigs and wall-mounted arrays, but I'd like to see what you guys have running in normal computer cases.  What I like to call "Living room miners" or "Office miners".  I'm sure there are quite a few who didn't post in the other thread simply because they don't want to post their case among these rack-mounted monsters, so I figured I'd try to start another.

My case isn't spectacular, but it has to be nice since I use it in my living room

CoolerMaster CM690 case fitted with 6 coolermaster fans and soundproofing foam.
Intel Core2 Quad Q8400 @ 3.8Ghz
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Cooler
8GB Crucial Ballistix @1066Mhz OC'ed to 1200Mhz
ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo motherboard
2x Radeon HD 5830's crossfired overclocked GPUs @975Mhz Mem @320Mhz
---->Top card is Sapphire 5830 Xtreme, bottom card is ASUS EAH-5830 DirectCU.  The ASUS is much better!
Thermaltake 750W modular PSU
Scythe fan controller
RAID 0 with 3x Spinpoint F4's (320GB*3=960GB)
250GB Spinpoint F4
1TB External eSATA

GPU temps 67-72*C

CPU Temp 40*C

Very nice and quiet, even with all my fans maxed.  GPU fans run at 60% for my top card, 50% for the bottom one.

All my intake fans have washable filters to keep the dust out.  Works great, the inside is still spotless!







Still need to work on my cable management a bit more:




And my 52" Monitor via HDMI

After a desperate attempt to file patent and intellectual property lawsuits against all of it's competitors, and not getting anywhere, Apple Inc files a lawsuit against Apple Inc.  

The claims are that Apple's iPad2 is clearly a blatant copy of Apple's iPad, and violates several patents owned by Apple, including the look of the OS, how images and maps are manipulated using multi-touch and "pinch-zooming", the dimensions and look of the casing, and even the packaging it comes in.

The strongest arguments coming from Apple, is that Apple even copied it's boring interface, including how limited it's customization is, and the fact that it's browser doesn't support flash.

An Apple representative stated "We're quite shocked at Apple's attempt to copy our technology down to so many details, including our iPad's browser feature which doesn't support Flash.  No Flash support is our technology!  The fact that the iPad2's browser also doesn't support Flash is a blatant infrigement of our intellectual property rights, and we will be requesting that Apple includes Flash support for their iPad2, which will allow us to retain our position of being the only company that runs a browser without Flash support.  This is an important feature for us."

Shown below is an image of Apple's iPad, next to Apple's iPad2, clearly demonstrating how the iPad2 is an obvious clone of the iPad.


As you can see, the look is almost identical, except for the fact that the iPad2 is thinner, and weighs less than Apple's iPad.

As for hardware, Apple's iPad2 beats Apple's iPad in a few areas.  The iPad2 boasts a newer dual-core processor compared to the iPad.  The iPad2 also has twice the RAM compared to the iPad.  Other features included in the iPad2 that are lacking in the iPad are a front and rear facing camera, a gyroscope and HDMI output.


Clearly, Apple is furious that not only did Apple copy their design, but they made a better product.

The Marketing Director stated "How dare they come out with a product that is so similar to ours, but it so much better!  We can't have tablets running around in the wild that are better than ours!  Especially after all the time and effort we've spent toting our iPad and claiming that it's the best thing since the invention of fire.  I mean, what's next?  A tablet that supports SD memory cards?"

Uh oh!  Look out Apple, looks like it's not only Apple that is trying to out-do you.  Seems that there are already a few tablets out there that support SD cards!  I mentioned this to the marketing director, pointing out that SD support is already present.  His response : "Well, that's not a problem for us because we will just include SD support in our next version, then we will patent it or buy a generic patent that somehow relates to SD memory cards in some roundabout way, and then we'll sue every company that has SD tablets.  We just have to claim that we came up with it first and stop them from selling their products.  Easy peasy."


So, what will happen with this Apple vs. Apple lawsuit?  Hard to tell.  Looks like both companies have a strong case against eachother, although Apple seems to have proof that their iPad came out before Apple's iPad2.

Either way, whichever company loses will have to revert to their next step in their "pad" product.  It uses no batteries, doesn't crash, doesn't need updates, and you can customize it and do whatever you want with it!  The product has already been shown to a select few at this year's technology expo





















Lastly, a preliminary hearing was held today, which was quite short...  Both sides didn't even get a word in.  As the judge took his seat and was introduced to the plaintiff, Apple Inc, and then the defendant, Apple Inc, he simple yelled out "ARE YOU F^#$ING SERIOUS?!?!?!?"  and then walked out.

(Yes, this is of course a joke!  I've been following the apple lawsuits in the news and find it quite funny.  I'm not an apple-hater, although I don't like them or what they're doing.  And yes, I did buy an iPod a long long time ago for the gym, but that's it.  I actually don't like their computers or their ridiculous iPad)

EDIT : Just wanted to throw in here that I'm NOT trolling, I DON'T hate bitcoins, and I"M NOT trying to get people to stop mining!  I've been buying up hardware and mining, and I'm still mining, so don't take this post the wrong way, this is just something that popped into my head the other day...



I'm sure some of you are aware of the impending worldwide upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 because we're simply running out of address space.  The 32-bit IP addresses we know today are close to complete exhaustion, and statistics say that we have less than year until we're out of addresses, especially with the recent boom in smartphones, of which each has it's own IP address...

Temporary solutions have been subnetting and NATing, but the address space has been stretched, far, and chopped into so many pieces that we're running out of fixes.

So, the solution is the long awaited IPv6 (128-bit), which will replace the current IPv4(32-bit) in the next few years, slowly.  How will this kill bitcoins?  Well, IPv6 will also have subnets.  The first and largest of the subnets will be the ones that divide countries and geographical locations according to the first few hexadecimal values.

Meaning, (and these aren't real numbers...) if the IPv6 address starts with 34 then the originating IP is from China, if it starts with A8 then the IP is from the USA, if it starts with 6F then it's from Germany and so on and so on.

So, this is how the governments or ISP's will kill bitcoins if they see fit.  By simply ensuring that ISP's and the like block access to the bitcoin network either outside of their subnet, or selectively block traffic to/from specific subnets.  Effectively creating a bubble around their slice of the internet.

This won't affect ONLY bitcoin, but can affect ANY internet traffic.  So it will be interesting to see what governments and ISPs do when they have their own piece of the internet which they can control.

I do know that yes, you can still use 256-bit encrypted VPN's and proxies, possibly, but to use them all the time for everyday surfing?  Yuck.

Don't mean to put a scare into anyone, because this whole change over is going to take years and years, but it's happening.  I'm already implementing IPv6<->IPv4 translating using TRT Cisco hardware at work since we're considering just getting it over with and switching our internal network to IPv6 now, just to stay ahead of the game.

But as the years pass, you'll notice more people and websites having IPv6 addresses, and IPv4 slowly disappearing...

Food for thought.  Thanks for reading!

And, woohoo! Post 69!

[336 cores]

So I have at my disposal, 2 HP Proliant G6 blade arrays which I could use for mining.

My question is, would this even be worth the hassle of setting up considering it's all CPU's?  I will also have to contract an internet line installation which would be pricy.  But I am not paying for electricity.

7 blade servers in each array, and I have 2 arrays = 14 blade servers (Proliant G6)

Each blade:
Dual AMD Opteron 6174 processors (12-cores each)=24 cores.

24 cores x 7 blades = 168 cores

168 cores x 2 servers = 336 cores.

Each core is at 2.66 Ghz.

2.66 Ghz x 336 = 893.76 GHz of processing power.

RAM = 512GB

Hard Drive space : 24TB SAN array x 2 = 48TB total

Here's one of my babies


I could be using these for some projects of mine, but I have others to work with and these aren't "needed" for what I need to do.  Basically, these are for testing and playing around and I can do whatever I want with them.

So what do you guys think these can hash up?  Is it even worth the setup?

P.S. don't mind the cable management of the fiber lines.  That rack is just my toybox  

[K]

So I was in the chat the other day and nobody believed that I can hash at 220+ Mh/s, NOT Kh/s, Mh/s!

Until I showed them a screenshot.

Here's a screenshot


And yeah, aero is disabled when I mine, and my resolution is weird because it runs on my 52" television.

The highest I can get is around 280 Mh/s.  To sustain that speed I ran an excel spreadsheet with a macro that just calculates crap repeatedly.  Because of my speedstep being enable, it seems to slow the Mhash when the computer is ONLY mining, even though all cores are at 100%.  But clicking around and opening stuff keeps it going fast.

Like the subject states, everytime I start up the bitcoin client, I have a new bitcoin address.  If I click on the addresses button, I can still see all my old ones including my original one, but it creates a new one everytime I start it up.

Is this normal?  I have 5 addresses now but I'm only using one!  I don't want any more addresses!

Running on Windows 7.

 

Since I'm still stuck in the noob forum until I rack up 2 more hours, I'll post here.

I'm running 2 5830 Xtreme's overclocked to 935Mhz and ghetto rigged some extra fans next to my cards until I get my new case.  My GPU's run 73-75 *C.  Is it a safe temp?  Can I bump up the OC even more?

I'm now running at 580-590 Mh/s with this setup.

Just got my 2nd graphics card in and with them slightly overclocked +90 Mhz I'm getting 500Mh/s.

Is it worth trying to solo mine at this point or should I wait until my new coolermaster case arrives so I can crank the overclock higher?  Or wait even longer for my new motherboard and 3rd graphics card to come in?

Cheers

Yes I am still a newb here.  1 Week of mining.  Already purchased a second 5830 video card which should be here today, and just purchased a new CoolerMaster PC case, so I guess I'm in this for the long haul!  Plans for my next rig is in the works as well...

Being that tomorrow is Canada Day, our young nation's 144th birthday,  I'm planning an event.  I'm in the Army, posted to Europe, and hosting a Canada Day BBQ for all my Canadian, American, German, Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian and Polish co-workers, and could use a few funds to help me recover the costs to support the troops.

Since it's the 144th birthday, I'm hoping for at least 1.44 BTC in donations, but 14.4 would be ever better

Thanks in advance!  And Happy Canada Day!

Donations to : 1EnvfqUWB2mWwQV4ruqWgBBMytcR2ezB9b

So I'm pretty new to this and started mining 7 days ago.  New hardware is already on it's way to more than double my hashrate...

Anyways, I'm concerned about my stats and balance on my Deepbit account page.  They don't add up.

From what I understand, on the stats page, you see everything your mining rig's accomplished, and the reward you received for it.  But, if I add up all my rewards, it doesn't add up to my balance.  And I don't mean by a little bit, it doesn't add up by a longshot!  As in, my balance is almost HALF to TWO THIRDS of what the rewards on the stat page add up to!

I realize stats can be delayed by an hour or so, but it wouldn't make this much of a difference...

Can someone clarify why it's doing this?  Is Deepbit miscalculating something or am I wrong about what the "Reward" column is for?

BTW, my worker is setup as Proportional, not PPS.

Thanks!