You can buy red fury USB miners (2.7 ghs) on eBay, if you look you can also find Bi Fury or Twin Fury USB sticks (around 5 ghs).

Some events happening next year:

- Wall Street is going to get involved, major pumping (and dumping) is going to happen in Q1 or Q2 of 2014
- More adoption in China, people will have found a way around the obstacles, already BTC China is accepting vouchers that people can buy elsewhere
- Mining SHA256 based coins is no longer profitable for individuals starting Q2 2014, there will be a shift towards shared cloud mining operations
- Mining Scrypt coins is starting to become unprofitable for individuals starting Q4 2014
- Bitcoin will be tied to other electronic currencies, such as the M-Peso
- Trade volume will go up, arbitrage trading will become less profitable
- Countries will make further clarifications towards crypto currencies regarding regulation and taxes
- Crypto currencies become a major threat to the remittance industry
- PayPal will introduce an integrated Bitcoin wallet
- Bitcoin will hit the transactions per second bottleneck, will require software update
- Bitcoins blockchain will require pruning to be implemented or people using remote servers. The first will require a software update
- Bitcoins market cap will grow towards 50-100 Billion USD
- A lot of infrastructure and products and services will be added to the bitcoin eco system, providing solutions for consumers and merchants.
- Signifant adoption, tens of thousands of merchants are accepting bitcoins by the end of 2014, including several very big retailers.

PSU issue, use a 2nd PSU and make sure you short the plug on the 2nd PSU otherwise it wont work. http://www.overclock.net/t/15751/info-can-i-use-two-power-supplies-with-one-computer

Mining altcoins - even the lesser known ones - and exchanging them for bitcoins is much more beneficial than mining bitcoins directly.

Change the intensity to a lower setting and see what it does to the temperatures, this will lower your hashrate but help you figure out if the VRM temperatures are throttling your GPUs

I think 112 and 114 is too hot and the GPU will throttle, can you increase the airflow? Or try setting the fans to 100% manually if they're not already at 100%. Can you add a fan to blow the air through the cards out?

Tab "Sensors", scroll down, look for "VRM temperature 1 and 2", all the way at the bottom.

Mine are between 90-105 degrees. Very hot, but they're designed to withstand somewhere between 125 and 140 degrees.

Is it possible (you can see this with the GPU-Z program) that your Voltage regulators are overheating. Normal GPU sensors don't show these values. You can view them with: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

If you're using the MSI Afterburner program, there's a setting that synchronizes, clock speed and voltage settings accross all of your cards. Perhaps you can try that?

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

With regards to SHA256 mining I agree for several reasons:

- As a result of the new generation of ASIC chips coming out, the difficulty will increase so much that current setups are not profitable anymore
- If people do expand, the residential power supply is going to become a major bottleneck. If not this generation of chips, it will be the next generation

With regards to Scrypt mining, I think people can mine at home throughout most of 2014. The first generation of Scrypt mining chips won't be spectacularly better or cheaper than GPU mining and the first generation won't come out until at least the beginning of Q2 in 2014.

None whatsoever...

I had this problem before with my R9 280x Vapor-X cards. In my case it was a difference in the clock speed between the two cards. I'm now using the following settings for CGMiner and that seems to work well:

--gpu-platform 1 -d 1 -w 256 -v 1 -I 13 -g 2 -l 1 -T --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune -20,-20 --auto-fan --temp-target 65,65 --temp-overheat 85,85 --temp-cutoff 90,90 --gpu-memclock 1500,1500 --gpu-engine 1080,1080 --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --no-submit-stale --thread-concurrency 11200

I'm getting 750-760 khs on both cards with these settings.

I'm in Hong Kong and have been to some gatherings here. I think within January or February we will hear about a partial solution to the China problem. Either because the people have found a way or because the exchanges have found a way. I know of the following ideas that are being considered by some people

- Install bitcoin ATMs in China. I'm not sure how this would be legal, but some people would think without the trading element the situation might be different
- Sell hardware (usb sticks) with bitcoin wallets on them
- Setup exchange in Special administrative zones in China, in Hong Kong or in Macau. Rules are less strict there.
- Let people buy another commodity (such as gold) and exchange the gold for bitcoins (instead of fiat currencies)

These are just some of the things I've heard. I'm by no means an expert, but it does seem the problem is being worked on.

I'm using the speedminers pool and it seems to be working. It's all still "unconfirmed", but i've only started a few minutes ago.

Not at all, I've two main boards Z87 Pro, each have 2   R9 280x cards. I'm waiting for powered risers to add more cards. I've a 1200 watt PSU on each, so I'm not expecting problems upto 4 cards. The board has 6 PCIe slots.

Currently I'm getting 750-760 khs out each of these cards with the following settings in guiminder-scrypt using CGMiner

--gpu-platform 1 -d 0 -w 256 -v 1 -I 13 -g 2 -l 1 -T --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune -20,-20 --auto-fan --temp-target 65,65 --temp-overheat 85,85 --temp-cutoff 90,90 --gpu-memclock 1500,1500 --gpu-engine 1080,1080 --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --no-submit-stale --thread-concurrency 11200

I'm using several of the R9 280X cards. Though they are hard to find now. Have a look here for a comparison: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

It's working now. I'm guessing the worker wasn't ready yet. How long does it normally take for a worker after having been saved to be usable?

Not working for me, getting:

2013-12-22 20:16:37: Running command: "C:\Miners\guiminer-scrypt_win32_binaries_v0.04\cgminer\cgminer.exe" --scrypt -u woutersteven.eac1 -p x -o stratum+tcp://eac.cryptominer.net:3403 --gpu-platform 1 -d 0 -w 256 -v 1 -I 13 -g 2 -l 1 -T --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune -20,-20 --auto-fan --temp-target 65,65 --temp-overheat 85,85 --temp-cutoff 90,90 --gpu-memclock 1500,1500 --gpu-engine 1080,1080 --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --no-submit-stale --thread-concurrency 8192

2013-12-22 20:16:37: Listener for "EAC0" started
2013-12-22 20:16:37: Running command: "C:\Miners\guiminer-scrypt_win32_binaries_v0.04\cgminer\cgminer.exe" --scrypt -u woutersteven.eac1 -p x -o stratum+tcp://eac.cryptominer.net:3403 --gpu-platform 1 -d 1 -w 256 -v 1 -I 13 -g 2 -l 1 -T --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune -20,-20 --auto-fan --temp-target 65,65 --temp-overheat 85,85 --temp-cutoff 90,90 --gpu-memclock 1500,1500 --gpu-engine 1080,1080 --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --no-submit-stale --thread-concurrency 8192

2013-12-22 20:16:37: Listener for "EAC1" started
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:16:37] Started cgminer 3.1.0
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:16:37] Probing for an alive pool
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:16:38] pool 0 JSON stratum auth failed: (null)
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:17:37] No servers were found that could be used to get work from.
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:17:37] Please check the details from the list below of the servers you have input
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:17:37] Most likely you have input the wrong URL, forgotten to add a port, or have not set up workers
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:17:37] Pool: 0  URL: stratum+tcp://eac.cryptominer.net:3403  User: woutersteven.eac1  Password: x
2013-12-22 20:17:37: Listener for "EAC0": [2013-12-22 20:17:37] No servers could be used! Exiting.
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:16:37] Started cgminer 3.1.0
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:16:38] Probing for an alive pool
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:16:39] pool 0 JSON stratum auth failed: (null)
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:17:38] No servers were found that could be used to get work from.
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:17:38] Please check the details from the list below of the servers you have input
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:17:38] Most likely you have input the wrong URL, forgotten to add a port, or have not set up workers
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:17:38] Pool: 0  URL: stratum+tcp://eac.cryptominer.net:3403  User: woutersteven.eac1  Password: x
2013-12-22 20:17:38: Listener for "EAC1": [2013-12-22 20:17:38] No servers could be used! Exiting.

I can confirm this.  The message on their dashboard (After logging in) says:

“Dear BTC China valued customer: Due to new government regulations, BTC China will temporarily suspend CNY deposits. BTC deposits/withdrawals and CNY withdrawals are not affected, and will continue to operate in the interim. Rest assure that BTC China will continue to operate normally. Please pay attention to our notices for updates, as we find other ways to allow for CNY deposits. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience. BTC China, December 18, 2013″

I can confirm this, the message on their dashboard says:

"Dear BTC China valued customer: Due to new government regulations, BTC China will temporarily suspend CNY deposits. BTC deposits/withdrawals and CNY withdrawals are not affected, and will continue to operate in the interim. Rest assure that BTC China will continue to operate normally. Please pay attention to our notices for updates, as we find other ways to allow for CNY deposits. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience. BTC China, December 18, 2013"