Your problem is that you for some reason are stuck on using ESXi. You have a few options.

1. I read somewhere that Windows only uses 100% CPU under certain SDK/driver versions. So if you can find the driver version that doesn't use 100% CPU for mining, you can run windows as the host OS and mine there, and still instlal your guest VM's.
2. Linux doesn't have the problem of 100% CPU use during mining. SO you can use linux as your host OS, mine from there, and install VMWare or some other VM software, and run your guest VM's from that.

What's with the pictures in your sig? Who's face is that?

You are mostly correct about mining contract sellers. They are basically "short" on bitcoin mining (AKA, placing a bet that bitcoin mining will not be profitable). There's technically nothing wrong with shorting. But I think a lot of people might not be smart enough to realize that is what's taking place, and I feel sorry for them. THere is the claim that it might actually become profitable (if difficulty either stays the same, or if the exchange rate goes up), but I don't see that happening any timein the near future. And I serious question if these leech types who sell the contracts would not withdraw from the contracts if mining actually became more profitable.

You then have to also factor in what happens if the operation goes belly up? What happens to the hardware? If it gets sold, who gets the profit from the hardware? In contracts where you are just renting the mining power it makes even less sense to purchase the mining contract because not only are you very likely to lose money, but you will also have no hardware to sell to cut your losses after the 3 months are up.

OP, sounds like you are bad with money, and need to learn the concept of diversification.

I'm pretty interested in helping with the coding. I'm a pro dev and very good at C#, high performance code, and database architecting and tuning. Only problem is I have no idea what the underpinnings of a mining pool look like. For instance what are stale shares?  Why are you redirecting packets for an existing pool?  Are you setting up a proxy that miners like pobclm or phoenix would point to, and the proxy would manage getting work assigned for different pools?

I guess, can you explain in more general detail, to someone who hasn't reallly learned about how mining internals work yet, what problem you are trying to solve / what you are creating / how it will solve it?

I hope it's not campy, and that's it's won't go on during the same time slot as infomercials, because that would just be counter productive.

A miner would want to keep the price down to keep other miners from starting/expanding mining ops, to therefore keep difficulty in check. Eventually that miner would want to lift their price control and let the price rise so they could dump all their BTC onto the market.

If that were what was happening you could work backwards from the BTC price to figure out what their mining costs are. I'm making a rough guess and saying they pay about $.18/kwh and want the BTC price to stay above their mining costs. If smart, such a person would  have set the price in advance of the difficulty, because hashing power is still increasing.

I don't think anyone would do this though. Just throwing it out there as an interesting scenario.

Man. Before two weeks ago I wasn't that concerned about security. This forum has made me super paranoid about network and PC security. Thanks a lot, guys.

Is there any way to detect this virus?

I haven't been following this thread in great detail. I thought I remembered reading that the OP's decided to give 100% of earnings back as dividends. If that's not the case, what % is currently going back into new hardware before dividends go out?

Also, what is/are the other benefit(s) of investing in a mining operation aside from profit?

Flaming those posters to provide the appropriate info or stfu would either discourage the ones who are trolling, or if they are telling the truth, help everyone out by getting closer to figuring out the security mistakes they are making.

1. The main point is to figure out how people are getting hacked (assuming the claims are true) so everyone in the community can benefit from the knowledge to make themselves more secure.

2. A possible secondary point is to find out as much as possible about the people stealing the BTC. Who knows, that info might end up being useful somehow, if only to expose those thieves.

Just for the record, I would like to give you props for your efforts. You are awesome.

I'm not normally one to go for conspiracy theory type stuff, but the point you raise is a possibility that can't be ruled out at the moment. It's suspicious how these guys often ask for money, and almost never provide enough info to troubleshoot. When prodded for more details they suddenly post a message with what they believe to be the loophole by which they were hacked, but without a trail of evidence to make it plausible enough to stop troubleshooting/investigating. If I were hacked I know I'd be a lot more systematic about wanting to find out exactly what went wrong, and I'd be a lot more cooperative with the people on the message boards who were trying to help me investigate what happened.

They should just all be pushed into a separate forum and urged to stick to a template if they want to get any help. Yet another case for having a bitcoin forum with better moderation.

Do you think you could answer the additional questions people have so we could continue in trying to figure out how you were hacked?

It doesn't help your case that right now you are doing what a lot of other "I was hacked" posters do when pushed for more details the "I was hacked" -- being evasive.  (by not providing the info being requested by those trying to help you out)

My bad. I do know what deflation means. That was a typo. I am sometimes dyslexic like that, embarrassing myself by typing out either an antonym or homonym of the word I am thinking of.

I think it does count as getting your deposit back. Any time you put in a deposit and get it back it has most likely lost value due to inflation. You're pointing out the obvious.

To some, probably to most, guarantee of getting a deposit back beats uncertainty of an investment where you might get a high return at first but no guarantee of ever breaking even or getting back your deposit.

A lot of people call bitcoin a Ponzi, which while there are similaries and I can see why they would say that, is technically incorrect. But a mining company like this one one step closer to a Ponzi. The returns are guaranteed to go down due to difficulty. Quoting an annualized rate of return is bogus because is not reasonable to assume that the rate of return so far will not either decrease or increase wildly over the remainder of the company's 1st year. Just to point out the risk involved, in order to maintain the current level of return , new mining hardware has to be continually added to keep up with difficulty. This means new investment is regularly needed to purchase more mining hardware, just to maintain an initial rate of return.

Of course that comes with the standard disclaimers that both BTC value as well as difficulty could either increase or decrease. No one knows, and what you are doing when you invest here is essentially making a bet on what will happen with those two factors. Plus you also play a juicy premium to have the mining company run the mining for you.

EDIT: Fixed typo deflation -> inflation.

Very nice explanation against insider trading, and why it should not be done, even in bitcoin companies.

Glad to see there are others who recognize the wild west nature of bitcoin and fight back against the morons who fuel it.

This is off topic, but I was curious: Is Julian Assange still running wikileaks? Or is it run by a consortium of people?

Those threads go nowhere. The OP's never provide enough info, and the same back and forth questions get asked in each thread. THe OP's never seem to give enough info to figure out what happened.

This is common enough now that it's in everyone's best interest to adopt a standard template/script of how an "I was hacked" thread should look, and what info should be included in the OP of each one of those threads. I'm not a security expert at all but I will take a rough stab at starting it off:


Required Info:
Screenshot of wallet showing the unauthorized transactions, and the ones before and after it
Address(es) where BTC were stolen from
Address(es) where stolen BTC were transferred to

List of all places on which wallet.dat were stored, including:
OS of machine, version, bitness (32/64 bit), etc
Any software firewall on the machine? What kind of policies are in place?
Is the machine behind a router with hardware firewall? If so, describe security measures in place/ firewall policies.
Stored in plain text/truecrypt/protected zip/encrypted drive/etc?
Is the machine a VM?
Describe security software setup of the machine (AV, anti-malware, etc). Are these services doing real time protection?
What browser(s) do you use? What kind of security precautions are taken for browsing (noscript, adblock, private mode browsing, etc)?
What files have been downloaded recently? (Note, this is probably a useless question because your machine could have been compromised long before you got into bitcoin)


Has the hacked wallet ever been stored in the cloud (dropbox, google docs, transfered via any email service, etc)?
Are the passwords for any of the machines, or cloud services on which the wallet has ever been stored shared with any of your other passwords?
How strong are the passwords? Describe char length, and what mixture of chars are used
Was hacked PC on when the hack took place?

Can you check your bitcoin client Debug logs for more info?
Can you check your router/firewall logs for any suspicious traffic?


I doubt I will have time to maintain this, so I would appreciate if someone else would like to take over creating & maintaining an standard "I was hacked" post template.