I've never used bitminter, maybe try cgminer?

Did he put his phone number in the transaction?

It would be cool if you could convince sparkfun or similar to do it.  It seems like too many parts to order and stick in individual baggies for a regular Joe.

That's true, it's the reason the finance industry doesn't send money to a client's bank account.  I mean dealing with transactions, collecting and reconciling which bank account to send the money to and matching those accounts with their client's records, it's just too impossible.

I don't think any of the other SHA alt coins are profitable.  But, you don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse for a raspberry pi should you go that route.  You'll need a powered hub though.

Why even reply to that guy?  At least don't quote him so I don't have to read it.  It should auto-hide quotes from people you have ignored.

Ok in that case -- if you had chips you'd have to design a PCB and mount them.  There are some open source designs for specific chips so you might start with that.  But, you'll spend much more to get the PCB made and populated than if you were to just buy a miner.  Miners either plug into the USB port of your computer or are standalone and have an ethernet connection to your router.

If you want a miner buy one of the little USB stick miners.  You're going to lose money no matter what you buy, so you might as well lose the least.

Which chips do you have?

I bet he retired.

Ouch, their default level of coverage on the site (1000 GBP per BTC) adds up to cost 4% of your balance per year.

Ok if you're going to ignore us we're going to ignore you.

You don't really need to wait for any confirmations.  It's actually really difficult to double spend BTC.  And you're only talking about a few dollars, it's not really high risk.

Have someone give you money to hold then give that money to someone else.

If you think the difficulty is changing very fast you should dump difficulty and time for each block in the past x days and integrate that way.  I suppose fast difficulty changes would affect the pool's payout based on luck a lot, but I haven't done the math.

Thanks for the update and level headedness.

It's possible the pool is just taking half your bitbars.  Some altcoins have could rapid difficulty increases when multipool switches to them, that could be another explanation.

You could look at the solve time of the last n blocks and calculate the hash rate then convert that to difficulty.

In your Nvidia and catalyst control panel there should be a place to tell it which programs to use which adapter for, probably under 3d settings.

You could always tell your ISP you're being attacked and maybe get a new IP assigned?  Or go through a VPN for $10 a month for all your traffic.

My advice is don't trust wall street.