I have similar issues, plus I'm getting a lot more rejects than I would expect to see.  For instance, here's what the output after a long session on BTC Guild:

[329.27 Mhash/sec] [5894 Accepted] [203 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)]

I've heard good things about Phoenix r64, in that it didn't have these problems, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to connect to BTC Guild or Deepbit; it just gives me "[10/06/2011 15:21:31] Failed to connect, retrying..." error messages.  Infuriatingly, it does work on Eligius and local bitcoind, so I have no clue what might be wrong.

The difficulty level is linearly proportional to the hashing power of the network.  It's like converting between feet and meters.  See the y-axes here for an example of what I mean:  http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png

BTC Guild support would be neat.  Good job so far.

Oh, and would you mind releasing the source so I can get a glimpse of what a basic widget looks like?  I just got an Android phone recently and I'm thinking of starting development soon.

I don't think there's any question we're going to be hitting 1,000,000 in the re-target after this one.  The exchange rate has doubled; thus so will the difficulty.

I'm building a combined mining/gaming rig for my father.  I'll be using a Radeon HD 6950 as the primary video card (for its gaming performance, of course), and two HD 5830s for cheap hashing power.  Presumably when he's firing up a game he'll pause the mining on the 6950 and then resume it when he's done.  Oh, and the OS will be Windows 7 64 bit.

The PSU I'm thinking of is a 950 W one by PC Power & Cooling: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817703028
And the motherboard has 3x PCI 16x slots:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157207

The rest of the system isn't really as relevant for mining purposes, but will include a hard drive, an optical drive, a pretty good AMD processor, and 8 GiB RAM.

So, the main question is, assuming I stick it all in a case with enough fans, is the PSU going to be sufficient to power those three video cards along with everything else?  Is the motherboard going to take it?  Can Windows 7 handle this?  Is there anything I haven't considered that I should think about?  (Dummy plugs?)

Thanks guys!

1)  In logarithmic scale, exponential functions appear as straight lines.

2)  You are reading way too much into a random pattern.

See here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU

He specified having >50% of the power of the network.  That necessarily means that, in the time the network finds 2016 blocks, you can find more than 2016 blocks (because your computing power is greater than theirs), unless you happen to be extraordinarily unlucky.

Try running Bitcoin on another computer (including downloading a fresh copy of the whole blockchain), and copy over your wallet.dat and have it use that.

The default client doesn't handle lots of things very well.  In addition to what you pointed out, "generate" transactions don't count as received, so if you do something like listreceivedbyaddress, it won't show up in there.  Also, accounts balances won't show up correctly (they don't take generated coins into account), so the only way to see your proper balance is with getinfo.

Not necessarily.  But the null hypothesis is "Events are occurring at X speed."  If I consistently get experimental data with extremely low probability values at X speed, say they are outside a 99% confidence interval, then I can reject the null hypothesis and posit that the actual speed is different.  To calculate the actual speed, you would divide the number of events into the time window, but of course this is very noisy in a smaller time window.

Nope, Kaji, that isn't a better example.  A better example would be you roll a billion-sided die repeatedly and you measure how many rolls it takes between each occurrence of, say, a face <= 100 coming up.  You can assign probabilities to how many expected rolls it takes on average between getting <= 100, and then if you get something way outside of that range, you can say that something very unexpected happened.

That's not a safe assumption at all.  A lot of people who just brought mining rigs online didn't understand the ramifications of the exponentially rising difficulty level, and made "investments" that will never pay back.  Also, there are lots of people who own suitable hardware for other reasons (e.g. gaming), for whom the cost of the equipment is already a sunk cost, and any earnings are pure profit.

Um, why would you bother sending a physical USB stick when you could instead just ask for the person's address and send the funds directly as a Bitcoin transaction?

The bigger issue here is how to transfer the funds; how to transfer the Bitcoins is trivial.

Kuji, let us example a hypothetical scenario.  Let's say I am flipping a fair coin several thousand times.  Do you believe it is impossible for me to calculate the odds of getting ten heads in a row because "You can speak with statistical certainty about it in bulk, but not at small scales"?  Because it is, in fact, possible to calculate exactly the odds of that happening, as any introductory Statistics student could tell you.

This is no different than Bitcoin.  In fact, the distribution of measurements is exactly the same between the two scenarios (results of coin-flipping and results of hashing to find improbable hashes); both fit a Poisson distribution.

I will refer you to the earlier chapters of a typical college-level Statistics book, especially the parts on calculating probabilities.

Don't use MyBitcoin?  The whole strength of Bitcoin is that it is 100% decentralized; why give that up?

So, here's the thing.  Do you actually have the technical skill and hardware resources to run a pool like Deepbit, Slush, BTC Guild, etc.?  If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do it, and if your pool makes a compelling reason for people to use it (say lower fees than Deepbit but still very good uptime), then people will naturally migrate to it.  If you can't do these things, then people won't use it.  It's that simple.

In other words, do, don't say.

OK, I understand now where you're coming from, but I don't think it's the most applicable per figure to use.  Bitcoins per capita (measured in bitcoins per person who uses Bitcoin) has gone down by a lot as Bitcoin has become more popular.  By analogy to national fiat currency, let's say there's a country with 100 million people whose population is growing at a rate of 5% per year.  If they're only printing 2% of the country's total monetary supply per year, then while the total amount of outstanding currency is going up, it's actually going down per capita, which will cause real deflation (regardless of how you want to define the term).  Bitcoin is in a similar situation, except the difference between the rate of new currency coming online and the rate of people joining the economy is much, much more uneven.

Actually, bitcoins are presently gaining in value.  That means they are deflating, not inflating.

Well, you're right.  Bitcoin is not great for microtransactions.  On the other hand, it shouldn't be.  There's one blockchain which, presently, every single client has to download the entirety of.  It's not in anyone's best interest for the blockchain to be spammed up with thousands of microtransactions an hour originating from MMORPG players trading items in-game.  That kind of stuff is what the priority rules were designed for, and why the fees are as "high" as they are.

Fortunately, there's a really easy solution.

Rather than spending bitcoins in-game directly, you deposit bitcoins into your MMORPG account.  So you might open up World of Warcraft, hit a "Deposit Bitcoins" button, and it gives you a one-time receiving address to use.  Then you fire up your Bitcoin client, send over, say, 5 BTC, and WoW credits your account with that much.  Then you go on trading and whatever as normal within the game, with each transaction being recorded into a database somewhere on Blizzard's servers, and say a couple months later you've accumulated 100 BTC that you want to withdraw.  You click "Withdraw", enter your Bitcoin payment address, and boom.

Yes, it requires some trust in Blizzard's systems, but if we're only talking about micropayments, who cares?  We're not talking about moving thousands of savings in BTC into the system, just a little bit of spending money.