The word is sarcasm. No need to be an ass.

Don't worry guys. Im away for the holiday weekend. I had some concern about burning my house down so I shut the miners down. Be back in full swing on Monday midday with new capacity arriving Wednesday.

Where in the world are you?

There is absolutely no comparison between gas and electric heat where I am. I paid about $60 a month to keep a 4000 sq. ft house toasty warm with gas last winter.

I'd be better off burning dollar bills to keep warm than paying for electric heat.

I actually hope so.

Otherwise, this in the kind of idiocy that gives sysadmins a bad name.

That P4 is going to be a huge bottleneck relative to your GPUs. However, a very nice, modern motherboard and CPU can be had for $200-300 if you want to come fully into this decade =)

I'm starting to get tired of seeing this.

If buying and selling BTC were as simple and straightforward as mining has become, it would be a good point. As things stand it's nowhere near it.

A newcomer can start mining and take his first payout in minutes. An ambitious one can build an array of machines and mine for nearly a week before his payments clear through Dwolla and MtGox.

Instant, or at least fast gratification and ease of use is very important.

I think most of these discussions would benefit from differentiating between profitable and "worthwhile".

To use an extreme example:

Few people would consider mining with a single device for a gain of $1.00 per day to be worthwhile even though it's technically profitable. However, the same margin at 2000x that scale might be equally profitable but widely considered worthwhile.

At that scale you could even hire a couple of employees to handle daily operations and set aside a fund to replace the 4 or 5 devices that would fail each week while still turning a tidy profit.

Not true at all. Half the users on BTCguild contribute <300 Mhash and they account for over 10% of the total pool hashrate.

I'd wager that <300Mhash users have even greater representation in the general population.

Your question is silly because a single worker connection does not necessarily equate to a single device.

You'd be better off googling for 5870 overclock records under air and LN2 and extrapolating a hash rate from that if you're wondering what a single device is capable of.

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"How can pool operators identify someone who submits a false 'share complete' message to the pool without actually performing any work to calculate a solution?"

Nonsense.

"A" is the only thing that really matters here. The market value and amount mined are absolutely irrelevant.

Essentially every employer has a computer use policy which identifies any unauthorized use as grounds for termination. I've had a hand in writing and enforcing these policies.

It's not a game, particularly for any organization that deals with money or PII.

I imagine the chances of getting caught are pretty slim but, the penalties are likely to be severe.

If running something as innocuous SETI or F@H on company machines will get you fired and sued for the cost of power, re-imaging the machines and a subsequent security audit then hashing Bitcoin for profit is going to see the book thrown at you.

Particularly for the guys in finance. The bank is going to lose it when some security consultant tells them they need to trash every bit of equipment that has potentially been "tainted" with bitcoin and inform their customers of the breach.

At a glance it seems that 4+ Ghash users are fairly common and the top 20% of miners are producing 70% of the hashrate.

Y
I'm seeing the same. Multiple idles popping up once every 90 seconds or so.

First things first, we'll worry about blocks once we get DOOM running.

If I were you, I would get as much as possible up and running by booting from a Ubuntu desktop CD in order to produce while doing additional research.

I think It's a combination of many things with plain old misunderstanding and groupthink probably being the biggest contributors in the past. Right now there's probably a growing dose of jealousy and regret mixed in there too.

At some point in the future when the concept has been broken down into spoon-feedable chunks and repeated through enough sources you'll be able to go back to the same places and have by any number of Google-powered experts tell you just how much you don't know.

Last but not least there's the bitchiness of Internet culture in general. Being positive and genuine about anything is cause for ridicule while jaded sarcasm is normal.

Fake-rich beats "not any kind of rich" =)

I'm actually more bothered by correctly predicting the rise or fall of a number of tech stocks like this one, this one, or this one and having cash to invest but never having the confidence to actually jump in than missing the boat on bitcoin.

Reddit, last week.

I feel the same way.

I was actually looking for something like this for a long time, spending lots of time in various distributed computing projects and benchmarking/performance circles even dabbling in creative uses of OpenCL. I somehow missed on Bitcoin entirely.

I actually went back to see if I'd simply overlooked it in one of the feeds I regularly consume.

Nope.

Apparently, bitcoin discussion was pretty tightly confined. I think part of the problem is/was that a lot of people have an irrational hatred for it. In some forums, the mere mention is grounds for having your posts mocked or deleted prior to being banned.

It's fine to have the same daily, circular arguments around Intel/AMD, which Linux distribution is the most elite or spend hundreds of dollars on completely ridiculous liquid nitrogen overclocking experiments that produce nothing beyond bragging rights but talk about bitcoin and mining are completely unacceptable.

I am so, so glad that my work no longer revolves around email systems.

When this happened it was one of the happiest days of my life. Utilization of my filtering appliances dropped 60% overnight.

Email is what it is. I don't think there's much use in trying to modify or extend it, there's just too much legacy to contend with.

Big ideas should be looking towards the next forms of communication.