I just spent some time optimizing one of my rigs -

890FXA-GD70
Sempron @ 1600mhz
Cooler Master 1000w 80+Gold
All mobo options disabled, USB drive/linuxcoin

3x 5970 + 1x 5870, undervolting & underclocking all the cards
2317Mh/s @ 880w - 2.63Mh/J (measured with kill-a-watt)

In the time between blocks, there are still subsidy payments rolling out to miners!  

I don't believe it's bullet proof at all; I listed 2 of the biggest flaws that NEED to be addressed right away.  A [block]chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

I agree that having someone paid to look for holes is a good thing but I think that is better achieved by paying bounties for exploits to anyone who finds them.  I don't see the point in trying to raise tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay some hardcore commercial netcode/crypto analysts to spend months auditing bitcoin for flaws, and I doubt they would accept BTC as payment.  I'm not trying to be negative, just realistic on what would be more effective.  I'll gladly contribute to bounties for finding exploits.

Here I'll save you the trouble.

BlahBlah security crypto consultants inc. has found the following weaknesses in bitcoin:

1. blah blah hash collision blah blah birthday attack gives us a one-in-one-quadblahdrillionzillion chance of double spending coins when it was previously thought to be one-in-onequadblahbilliondrillion
2. people can walk into your house when you are not home, log onto your laptop and steal your coins
3. any criminal/bank/govt with enough financial resources can easily DDoS the largest pools and execute one of many 51% attacks RIGHT NOW if they wanted


Mitigation summary:

1. encrypt and backup your wallet in the client by default and add multi-sig transactions to the protocol
2. decentralize mining ASAP (encourage use of p2pool, integrate p2p mining in client, etc)

I have small wood rails (made from 1/4 round) with thumbscrews that can be fastened to the end of the cards but I don't always attach it because I'm constantly tinkering and improving the layout, swapping power supplies, etc.  I also have 2 ducts (not pictured) that I keep over the cards that channels the air from the fans in the back.   I don't have any problem with them sitting they way they look in the pic though, it's flat and the cards don't move.

6 Gh/s
all stock voltage or lower
memclock 160mhz
LinuxCoin + cgminer 2.0.8

+1

I think this would be a great idea, especially if GPU mining was enabled.

Soon Gavin / Luke-Jr will buy up mining power with lots of early adopter BTC and direct at pools that support BIP 16 / 17.   Set your rates high at voting time folks...

Yeah come on gigavps... one of us... one of us... one of us...

I cleaned up the wallet, it should track correctly now.

The donation script is now disabled.  Thanks to everyone who donated.

You could trust my cron job to do it for you.  

It will send a fixed amount once per day at a random time to miners at p2pool.  The amount is based on the balance at the following address:

Any donations to this address will be sent to the p2pool miners

The job script is dynamic and sends a fixed amount based on the balance of the address in the wallet.

1-10 balance -  1 BTC per day
10-99 balance - 2 BTC per day
100-999 balance - 3 BTC per day
etc.

This should work for now.  I can change the daily amount later if a lot of people start donating.  I will fund it with the remaining 9 BTC of my pledge later this evening.  If I decide to stop the job from running at any point, the remaining balance will be sent to all miners in the pool at that time.  I just set this up to take care of my donations so I don't have to send them manually but I figured why not open it up to anyone else.

(1/20/12): BTC sent.  You can track the deposits here ("Received"):
(1/21/12): had to do some wallet cleanup, address now shows correct balance
(1/24/12): donation history updated
(1/26/12): added some better logging that I will include in the donation history going forward
(2/7/12): minor network issue last night prevented the donation from being sent, so two payments were sent this morning
(2/8/12): made some changes to the script to adjust the timing intervals, additional payment sent yesterday
(2/19/12): final donation sent.  The remaining amount was too small to split effectively so I sent it to forrestv (p2pool author)
 

This was the final donation.  The amount was too small to split effectively so it was sent to forrestv.  Thanks for everyone who donated and a special thanks to forrestv for his continued support and excellent software.  The total amount donated to p2pool miners was ~43 BTC.  

Integration would be really helpful.  For bigger miners with lots of nodes, the current setup is pretty flexible though.  Just run it on a box with bitcoind and point all your miners there.  Do what is right for bitcoin and benefit - no more DDoS outages and better control of your hashing power.

I'm donating to miners on p2pool

Anyone feel like matching?

I've been playing around with p2pool and I think it's a fantastic and absolutely necessary idea.  As bitcoin grows we really need to take precautions to preventing a 51% attack.  Any criminal/government/hacker with the resources could easily DDOS a subset of the major pools and compromise or take-over the largest remaining pool.  I sincerely hope p2p pooled mining becomes the majority of hashing power in the network this year.

Joined with all my miners.

Bumping this because I just replaced the fan, thermal pads, and thermal paste on one of my 5970s.

The card in question looked pretty bad:

http://chrono.firex.org/images/g5970-1.jpg
http://chrono.firex.org/images/g5970-2.jpg
http://chrono.firex.org/images/g5970-3.jpg

Maybe there is variance in the design, but advice in this thread to use 1mm pads on the RAM and 0.5mm pads on the VRMs was wrong for this card.  I am also using phobya pads and with 1mm on the RAM everything was pushed up much too high and the 0.5mm on the VRMs barely made contact.  Booting the card confirmed this as GPU temps were very high.  

I pulled everything apart and opened up another 5970 for reference.  The memory padding did not look like 1mm, so I ended up using 0.5mm pad on all the ram and the VRMs.  The only place I used 1mm was in the two recessed areas that had thermal padding.  It looks like the controller chip between the GPUs had a 1mm pad as well but I'm using a 0.5mm there as well and I don't feel like pulling the card apart again because I'm out of AS5.

Temps are now fantastic.  Prior to this, the card would barely run stable mining at 725mhz with temps in the ~74C range, much higher than any of my other 5970s.  Now its running 800mhz at ~55C and the thermal paste hasn't even fully cured yet.  

Did you make sure to tune the memory/cache/threading parameters?  Proper isolation levels?  Indexes?   I use mysql in a lot of applications with very high traffic and query activity and I have always been able to get fantastic performance.  The out of the box configuration is fine if you're developing, but once you start seeing some load it needs to be tuned.

/ot


I've been mining here for a day now against the us.ozco.in server.  I seem to get a higher amount of "pool not providing work fast enough" than abcpool.  Otherwise the pool seems to be working well.

As a matter of personal taste,  I'd like to suggest that the green and blue together are rather bright and a bit much.  Perhaps darken/fade the green a little and try a white/gray on the menus? 

+1 occulta, excellent trade.

I bought multiple cards from occulta.  Easy transaction, thanks again!

I finally had the time to install a pair of Gigabyte 7970s last night.

I tried a few of the settings in the other thread and also found the best I could get out of cgminer was around 475Mh/s per GPU.

I downloaded diablo miner, oc'd the cores to 1100mhz on stock voltage and dropped the memory down to 600mhz.  Started up and bam, 1300Mh/s.   It was very late and I had no time to do any tinkering, but 650Mh/s per gpu out of the box on stock voltage with a nice oc is pretty awesome.

+1 excellent trade with user "72289".  Thanks again!

I'm impressed.  The writers did a great job and the episode was very entertaining.   I loved the parody of the weusecoins video too.

I got calls and txt messages from friends the whole time it was on... I guess I talk about bitcoin too much.