Looking scammy now. On both exchanges to sell walls of over 30BTC apperead and are dumping the price.
Who buys that much in Ico and dump it?

Cold Wallet is better than Desktop Wallet and Desktop Wallet is better and safer than Exchange.
If Exchange gets hacked you loose all.

this will moon now

100USD will be just the beginning.

For me is Bitcoin the best investment I ever made. I bought some years ago and still holding them.

Oh great, this is still a thing? Can I still use my btc on overstock?

Yes they could be flashed with custom firmware, but the ARM processor within would be so pathetic it would be completely and utterly pointless. The power consumption probably wouldn't increase by much. Network performance (I'm guessing) wouldn't drop as the miner would run at a lower priority, so network processing would take priority. But if it's a busy network then there'd be hardly any processor time left for mining anyway making it next to useless.

As I will now be running one of my machines headless I want to jam Linux on it along with a few other bits and pieces. Obviously transferring the wallet.dat over is no problem, but can I also transfer the rest of the data files across? My bandwidth is limited and I'd really rather I didn't have to re-download the entire blockchain again.

Possibly check the CPU affinity settings. If I have something CPU intensive on the same core as one of my GPU miners then it kills the performance.

I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Freenet yet - it is effectively the decentralized internet that people are mentioning. The client allocates a certain portion of your disk (you specify this, default is 10GB) and then web data is stored on your machine. If someone wants to browse the site then it retrieves this data from the nearest peers.

My apologies, I was quite tired and it just seemed like a bit of a snide comment that's all. I think the amount I can contribute here is now limited as this is going beyond the extent of my knowledge. But if you did these things I mentioned (cut memory speeds / size, cut bus width, using cheaper non-solid-state caps, cheaper high airflow fan), how much would the reference PCB design need to be changed? The latter two I don't think would require any change at all (maybe a few slight changes for the caps). The bus width I'm not sure about, but I think the only major thing on there is the change in memory. Even still, it's not as if you're drastically re-designing the whole thing, just a few changes here and there.

Yes I do know that Tesla is based on the Fermi architecture, are you aware that they have 6GB of memory on them which would be totally useless?

You're talking about improving performance, I'm talking about cutting costs. I would have thought it would be pointless making an ATI "super GPU" equivalent to the Tesla, I'm saying it would be better to take a cheap consumer card (a HD 5850 for example) and cut the crap which isn't used. I'm pretty sure that the performance wouldn't budge, but that's got to have a fairly serious impact on the price.

Please don't take such an offensive stance, I am merely bouncing an idea off people.

I am talking about taking a standard gaming card (not a workstation card) and cutting the features down. I didn't mention an ATI-esque Tesla for mining, I was referring to a comment somone else made about the lack of ATI GPGPU cards.

Hmm you both have a fair point. I guess in the next year or so it's really MH/Watt which takes precedence over MH/$. Although the FPGAs recently released are untouchable for power consumption, they don't half cost a lot!

I don't think you understood me correctly. It's obvious no company wants to produce cards for mining (why would they?), AMD/ATI don't produce the cards, they design the chips and a reference card and that's it - they couldn't give a monkey's what manufacturers choose to do with their design.

So take the reference design => Cut out a load of stuff which isn't needed => Final result is a "mining" card with a much better MH/$.

So there's lots of talk going around about various projects to fund custom FPGA and ASIC miners, the latter of which has developmental costs in the millions (ie. far out of reach for average users here). A while back someone mentioned they couldn't understand why ATI doesn't produce GPGPU cards like Nvidia's Tesla range, and I think they have a fair point in that: for mining the two essential factors are stream processors and core frequencies - standard consumer GPGPUs go half way on this by meeting the stream processor and frequency requirements, but have enormous VRAM chips (which would be pointless for mining).

As people are prepared to invest a total of millions on an ASIC, would it not be cheaper and more worthwhile (for your average user here) to start taking reference ATI designs and cutting all the unnecessary extras which bring the price up but don't improve mining rates? I don't pretend to really know anything about this field; but from what I understand, graphics card manufacturers take a reference design, tweak the design by changing routing and components to meet a specification, buy the components in and then assemble them onto a PCB - all of which is within reach for a well organized community project.

So by taking a reference design, cutting the bus width (would this decrease costs?), reducing the memory capacity and effective speed (DDR2 / DDR3 are still readily available and cheap) and using a fan chosen purely for airflow, I reckon that would sheer off a fair amount of the cost.

Now obviously economies of scale apply here, but even still - is this realistic?


This is really just a thought I had the other day, so I'd be interested to see what thoughts you guys had.

Cheers,
Mike

I'm pretty sure most miners can be configured for solo mining (I know GUIminer can be for a fact). Again, all miners will display the current hashrate. I do believe that for solo mining to be worthwhile you need somewhere in the figure of 15GH/s + ... but don't quote me on that (could be +/- 3GH/s).

I guess at the end of the day it's whatever you make of it. I thought it would be worthwhile setting up an Arch install specifically for mining (I'd only had limited experience with "Linux" (Ubuntu) up until that point) - I learnt a great deal about the internals of Linux from doing that, and it's definitely been worthwhile as I am now using a fresh Arch install for just about every project that I've done since then.

I have to say, a couple months down the line from making this thread:
Initially I thought it might be possible to use mined BTC to fund part of my gapyear travels later in the year, but it dawned fairly quickly that this is pretty unrealistic. Yet I'm still mining BTC now. Why? Because it's a bit of fun and a challenge I guess - I've cobbled together an assortment of old parts lying around to reduce the costs as much as possible, and I've had a great time trying to get 110% out of this pile of shite!

So although it's not at all profitable (at least for me), the vibe here is just great, and I'm very much looking forward to spending my hard-earned BTC @ BitBrew.net.

In so far as it will try to utilize 100% CPU to process the hashing - yes it costs money. But your computer specs will determine how much the bill goes up by - I very much doubt that it would skyrocket.