As I understand it (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) when merchants opt for immediate confirmation with Bitpay, it is the merchant, not Bitpay who accepts the risk. This is viable small amounts and for orders that are revokable (i.e. if you double spend they just cancel your order and don't ship), but not for everything.

Also, even "offloading" the risk means the risk will get priced into processing fees, raising costs.
 
The real reason that fast confirm times are useless is that it means you just need more confirms to guard effectively against orphans and double spends. So in that sense yes, it is a waste of resources in order to impress people who don't really understand the issues.

Don't have skrill set up, some red tape involved with blocking it (or at least slowing it down) at this point.

I want to sell BTC at bitstamp plus 5% and get paid by player transfer on PS. You send first. You can rely on my ratings here or on otc or localbitcoins to establish trust, and I would also like to start with a smaller trade with larger trades to follow. PM

I just punched 100 GH into a mining calculator to get a sense of the magnitude of current mining earnings for that hash rate. Obviously this fluctuates all the time with exchange rate (and to being with depends on which exchange rate you use, etc.), so just treat it as an approximate number.

No, it really doesn't. Everyone on p2pool has orphans. That's the nature of a block chain with a 30 second target, and is unavoidable. The p2pool shares are just used to divide up the bitcoins (as with other pools). As long as your orphan rate isn't higher than others', you get your fair share of the bitcoins.

Yes there is variance. You might get an orphan, which makes your earnings go down in the short run. But others are also constantly getting orphans, which makes your earnings go up.  With a little patiences it balances out and ends up in your favor.

If you want immediate gratification, yes go ahead look elsewhere. If you want better returns over time, stay with p2pool.

One downside is that you won't see any evidence if things aren't working. In fact I'm not sure how the miners work exactly but it seems like they might not failover under some conditions if they don't have the opportunity to try get new work and have it fail, so your miners might continue mining on a down pool.

You were not "losing day by day." What you had was the normal random fluctuations (and not even that much fluctuation).  From the 14th to the 16th your earnings went up, then from the 16th to the 18th they went down. Overall you probably got about what you were supposed to. If you stick with it your earnings will continue to go up and down a little, and again you will get about what you are supposed to (which is more than other pools since you won't pay pool fees, and won't ever suffer losses from a pool being dishonest or getting hacked).

Put that way, the answer has to be that people can't do math.

Difficulty rising will reduce your earnings no matter how you mine. Unless of course you upgrade, which is what a lot of people end up doing (otherwise you won't me a miner for long), in which case again you are looking at a long term proposition to smooth out short term fluctuations in your earnings.

Sigh, this same myth keeps getting repeated over and over again.  100 GH (or really any GH) is just fine with p2pool, as long as you realize that your normal $23/day mining revenue will fluctuate from day to day, not get paid every single day like clockwork. Over the course of a few weeks you will get close to what you expect. It just requires a bit of patience.

The only real downside is that it takes some resources (computer, bandwidth, time) to run a p2pool node and maybe it isn't worth it for a $23/day operation.

?

It shouldn't really depend on ambient temperature unless the fans are maxed out. (They might be if you are overclocking.) There is a temperature range defined in the config files somewhere, and the fan speed should adjust to stay in that range. When the ambient temperature goes up the fans should run faster and make more noise, but temps should still stay in the range. That's exactly what I see (and hear) on mine.

If you are on linux and using iptables you can use the recent module to block IPs that attempt connections too fast. You are still vulnerable to DDOS but I guess that just goes with the territory of having anything open to the world.

+1!!!

You need to start bfgminer with --http-port, also make sure there is no firewall (iptables, etc.) blocking your miners from connecting to that port.

Most certainly they will be worth less, but I don't think they will drop to near zero in a month. I was throwing that out there a s point of reference, not specifically suggesting selling on eBay. I actually sold one small miner on eBay and it worked fine -- got a good price and all -- but I gave up after that, and went back to selling at lower prices on the forum for BTC. Too much stress to deal with all the ways I might get scammed by buyer/eBay/Paypal.

The mine-to-own concept is a fine one.

EDIT: I'd consider doing it mostly to help out the group and I have cheap electricity, but part of the deal would be that I supply the PSU, as I don't trust the BFL PSUs anywhere near my house.

Through the GUI you just get fail over as you described. I don't know what you might be able to do by editing config files in ssh.

Actually no, history has proven you (I'd say us except that I didn't make a prediction a year ago) right. Difficulty has not doubled every month. In fact it is now increasing by only about 60% per month. 


That would require the rate of increase in difficulty to increase, an unlikely (but certainly plausible) prediction.


Well, June maybe, that's 5 months out, not 3. And there will always be people with cheaper (all the way down to free) electricity, so they will never be fully unprofitable, just profitable to a smaller and smaller market (which affects resale value). I agree they don't have much value at that point.


True. "Long term" is a weasel word though. Nobody knows what that means in the real world.

I specifically wonder whether there is any value if having a local p2pool node that just talks to the VPS node.  That would reduce latency between the miners and the p2pool node, but would slightly increase latency between the miners and the rest of the p2pool network (due to the extra hop). Likewise if there is a local p2pool node, is there an advantage to also having a local bitcoind node, again connected only to the remote VPS bitcoind? That would reduce latency between p2pool and bitcoind (getblocktemplate) but again I'm not sure how much that matters.

They do seem to be worth a fair amount (active auction with 10 bids, high bid $1375): http://www.ebay.com/itm/BUTTERFLY-LABS-60GH-s-BFL-Single-ASIC-Bitcoin-Miner-IN-HAND-/231139562777

Edit: BTW I do not expect difficulty to double every month which is what would be required for these to become unprofitable in three months. In fact difficulty increases have been running closer to 60% for the past few months. Yes TH+ rigs are coming but most of the manufacturers probably premine with their gear so if they were going to ship soon we would already see that hash rate on the network (in fact we probably do). Absent some extraordinary price jumps, I expect the monthly rate of increase in difficulty to continue to decline over the next year or so to something like 10-15%.

I know how to set up bitcoind on a VPS generally. Just wondering about the p2pool aspect of it. For example, is it better to have bitcoin and/or p2pool local nodes that connect to their counterparts on the VPS or just have the miners connect directly to p2pool+bitcoind on the VPS?