Just got my three Blue Fury units in the post now. I'm trying to use them with MinePeon 0.2.4 PR2, but they are not being detected by cgminer or bfgminer.

Any suggestions?

Yeah, I bought three of these and now I'm wishing I hadn't. Exponential difficulty increases will kill their profitability very quickly.

I think I just discovered a little bug where the total amount of Spendable and Maximum funds is not correct. It's only taking the total of one of my wallets and not the sum of all of them. Is this a known issue? If not, I can post a screenshot.

I'm using 0.89.99.5-beta

I have 10 USB Block Erupters on a MinePeon setup that earn me a few cents a day. I'd like to switch to an alternative cryptocurrency. According to wikipedia Namecoin and PPcoin are both based on SHA256.

How can I get my setup mining either of these two?

Mining is easy; making ROI is not. There is lots of easy-to-use mining software out there. I recommend MinePeon, a Linux mining distribution for Raspberry Pi. You certainly don't need a degree in computer science, but some configuration is necessary.

I just want you to understand that you won't make a profit doing this -- especially if you are mining on a desktop, which consumes more power. Treat it as an educational hobby

50BTC seems to have had its account servers hacked



and Eclipsemc pools show up as dead in my MinePeon status screen.

Are these incidents independent, or are they part of a broader attack on the Bitcoin network. Additionally, can someone recommend to me a mining pool that is robust enough to withstand such an attack?

Reality Check

BTC has just jumped to AUD$190. I bought in at AUD$135. If I had just bought the BTC and sat on them (or possibly put them in a Certificate of Deposit) I would have earned a return of ~ 20% in 5 months. As it stands, I'm about AUD$2,000 in the red.

My prediction that the value of BTC would go up was correct -- but I do acknowledge that it is still very volatile and could come down.

My mistake was getting into mining without understanding rising difficulty. I just assumed the return from mining would be constant over time. Instead of a stable return, I have seen an exponential decay in my revenue, as Moore's law rapidly pushes up the total computational power of the network.

At this point, I'm sure some of you are thinking "I told you so", but that is not constructive. I'm still glad I executed this experiment, and now we have some hard data to look at.

As many of you have probably concluded, buying ASICs for mining probably won't make ROI. Why not? Well, why would you sell something that makes you more money by using it? It's the big companies who, through economies of scale, mine with their own hardware who really make the returns. I have learned that if you want to seriously get into Bitcoin, just buy them from a reputable vendor.

After five months, my investment has made me no AUD or BTC. But, it has been a lot of fun for me, and I'm glad I could contribute to both the network and the community. I'll continue to update this thread, but we now have a result:

Entry level mining won't make ROI.

A New Hope

MineForeman has pre-released a new version of MinePeon: 0.2.4 PR1. The most significant change is the use of bfgminer as the default platform. I've had it running perfectly for over a day now. Hashrate is steady at 3,351 MH/s, error rate is 3.24%. I'll keep it going for a few more days, then see about reintroducing the LCD stats module.

Downtime

Due to continued instability in cgminer, and somehow being unable to get bfgminer working, my rig has been offline for a couple of days. Also, the delivery of my three Blue Fury ASICs have been delayed by Chinese holidays. Grumble.

Hopefully MinePeon 0.2.4 will address these issues.

Stability And Other Shenanigans

Because MinePeon 0.2.3a was giving me stability headaches, and because I'm a Linux noob and thought that git pull would give me a better platform to mine with, I have had serious issues keeping my miner going for the past few days.

I tried reverting back to MinePeon 0.2.2, but guess what? The newer Block Erupters are not compatible (or at least not plug-and-play compatible) with that release of cgminer. I was getting massive comms errors on several AMUs.

So, I asked for some help on the MinePeon forums, and Neil helpfully suggested I run MinePeon 0.2.3 instead of 0.2.3a. I also reconfigured how my hubs are connected to my Raspberry Pi. Additionally, I put my wifi dongle on an extension cable, keeping it somewhat away from the miners and RPi.

I also abandoned the LCD stats module. It uses massive resources on the RPi, and just isn't stable enough yet.

Currently the setup has been performing well, but there's a glitch with the miner uptime. It keeps counting miner uptime from 1970, which breaks all of my statistics. Neil provided a possible fix here that I have just implemented. I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT: Hrm, my pool settings just reverted to default values for no particular reason.

My cheap chinese fan arrived, damaged and broken in the post. Fortunately, I was able to fix it with my trusty hot glue gun!

murraypaul, you abuse and insult me for doing something educational that I enjoy. This thread has had over 10K views, and is a valuable resource for many who are considering mining. I view the money I have spent on this project as 1) a hobby, 2) a contribution to Bitcoin, and 3) a source of information for other people.

But most of all, yes, I'm having fun doing it. So please take your memes elsewhere.

Cool, thanks for checking it out

I just installed 0.89.99.5-beta, and was a little disappointed to see that the Message Signing functionality is only compatible with other versions of Armory. Will there ever be an Armory/Bitcoin-Qt cross-compatible signing mechanism?

Still getting the "Miner DOWN" web page. I'm using the latest http git pull on minepeon 0.2.2

Can someone tell me how to get the http stats screen working after changing from cgminer to bfgminer? I just stopped the cgminer service and started the bfgminer one.

Okay, I've got bfgminer up and running, but now my http stats don't work. Hrm. . .

Can you provide instructions?

Anyone? I'm still getting cgminer restarts and LCD script termination.

Does anyone know if/when cgminer will support the new Blue Fury ASICs?

I'd like to buy three. Australian postcode 2600.