24 hour timeframe.  bitcoincharts charts are misleading, the intra-day drops are the ones I'm talking about -- to $10-11 buying opportunties, which we've had several times in the last month.   Find those buying opportunities, look for the previous 24-48 hours, use small intervals.  Always a rally, slower consolidate, flatline, kaboom, rally.

Chart is shaping up for another bigun, I'm very optimistic.  (Or is that pessimistic?)

Any miner that's hoarding bitcoins is also speculating.  Their buy price was roughly the average price on mtgox over the time their coins were generated (this means effectively $0 for some) and they're expecting a higher future price.

Me, I don't have a set price target.  I sell when the upward trends reverse, and buy when the dowards trends reverse.  Overall I keep buying lower-ish, but also selling lower-ish.  It really doesn't matter to me if BTC is at $100,000,000 or .01, I'm not a buy and hold faithful.  I hold a few coins in case this thing does go to the moon and beyond, but it'll be a tiny, tiny portion of my investment.

Oh, and I sell most of the coins I generate within a week of generating them.

Just be ready.  If you look at previous charts you'll see the same pattern: rally, consolidate, flatline, drop.  We're currently in the flatline part of that cycle where the range narrows and volume disappears.  This time around the drop may be magnified by the Friday Effect, so I am hoping for quite the payday.

They don't even have to front run during trading.  They have data on how much currency of what type is arriving in real time and can base longer term positions on that.  In other words, if they see a large amount of bitcoins coming in they can lighten their position.  If they see a large amount of dollars, go long.

Dwolla has a slightly dimmer picture and only for dollars.  But there are at least two entities with trading information you don't have.

They come and they go.  Here, this one only needs one PCIe extender to house 3 cards: http://3btech.net/as77pe453mow1.html

And add to that the usual bitcoin pattern of rally/consolidate/flatline/drop.  We're currently in the 'flatline' part.  Let's see if there's a paycheck at the end of this cycle for me. =)

It is a little amusing how one of the adages of successful trading is "Never add to a losing position."  In effect that's what miners do when hoarding instead of selling as prices decline.

Back to the OP: $30/btc caused lots and lots and lots of people to buy mining gear.  5 series ATI cards pretty much sold out world over and we're looking at over a tripling of difficulty over a month -- 2/3 of the current mining capacity is less than a month old.

Now the people with a 20% credit card loans for the hardware (judging from mining forum posts many of the new rigs were built very inefficiently) and power bills to pay are sweating blood and selling everything they mine at 15% of their original profit calculations.  I am wagering a much higher portion of mined bitcoins is being sold rather than hoarded today vs a month ago.

Plus people with a large amount of bitcoins would be foolish not to sell a portion at these levels and diversify and/or reinvest.

Oh, and finally: everyone is still very bullish while prices decline.  Many people expect a $100 price by end of year.  We're nowhere near a capitulation/bottom/stability.

It's a gamble.  You're gambling that NMC miners will grow a brain and stop donating 33-40% of their computational power to BTC miners and go mine BTC instead, buying NMC up to relative $/computation parity with BTC.  That hasn't been a good bet so far, those guys are eager and happy to give away money.  In fact, as far as I can tell, the only people itching to mine NMC have a hard time with basic arithmetic.

After the difficulty drops it's pretty much a given those of us with calculators will swoop in and mine all 2016 blocks in a day or two, leaving the chumps to subsidize us for another month.  I've already got my mining scripts set up to switch to NMC just as soon as NMC block 16128 rolls around.

TL;DR: I doubt you'll see much better than the current .025-.03 NMC to the BTC any time soon.

This is very easy.  Divide current namecoin difficulty (not coming difficulty for both) by current bitcoin difficulty.  At the moment that's:

55882.45/1564057.45 = .036.

In other words, each NMC is worth .036 bitcoins in terms of relative computational difficulty.  With NMC trading at .0254 BTC to the namecoin, NMC miners are donating .036/.0254 or roughly 40% of their computing power to bitcoin miners. 

Thank you, namecoin miners.

You make zero sense.  I'd take .01 of a BTC valued at a quarter million dollars over 1000 btc valued at a penny.  And no, solo mining does NOT have the same payout as pooled mining.  Unless you have many tens (hundreds?) of gigahash to throw at the problem odds are difficulty will increase before you find your first 50 coins.   And increase again, and again, and again and again.  You may *NEVER* find a coin solo mining, whereas with a pool you receive ROI immediately.



Once again you are making $8/day today with 1Gh.  With the most efficient building possible that was possible on a sub-$600 investment (5830@ $100 x 3, $15 mboard, $40 cpu, $20 ram, $20 pcie extenders, $80 psu, $4 usb stick).  That's a 1.3% *DAILY* return on investment as a small operator.   If I was sure profitability would remain comprable I'd be investing tens of thousands of dollars into such an operation even today with a ~25% higher hardware cost.

Looks like people wised up about the Weekend Effect and held their bitcoins to sell later.  Bummer, was hoping for 13 or lower this weekend and the usual run-up leading into Thursday.  Guess I have to look harder for my free money.

The high difficulty is why people join one of the 3 big pools.  They're still pulling a steady rate which matches the theoretical average payout of around 80c/100Mhash.  So a 1GH rig would pull in $8/day or $240/month.  Whether that's worth it or not is up to the miner.

At current difficulty, no.  If difficulty falls to 1/4 the current level (like it was when we last dogpiled on), yes.  Ok, the 1000 was a bit of hyperbole, but if all BTC miners switch for a day at 15k difficulty we could mine out all 2016 blocks in around 24 hours.  Leaving namecoin with a 1.5 million difficulty, and several years of massively subsidized mining at a rate of a block per week until it adjusts back.

In reality something short of that will happen.

Come to think of it, if the US government wanted to kill bitcoin today that'd be the way to do it.  Ask the NSA to switch their cracking lab to mining for a few hours over a weekend, rack the difficulty up to say 20-30 million and bitcoin is history.  The fact that it hasn't been done proves to me that the US gov't, at least, is utterly unconcerned with bitcoin.

At the moment namecoin miners (whose number appears to be increasing ?!?) are donating 55882.45237847/1564057.45=.03573, with .03573/.0275=1.3.  In other words, they're donating 30% of their computing power to bitcoing miners.  It's amazing.  The worse their payback, the more miners pile on namecoin to lose money...

It's like running 3 5830s in your rig, but with one pointed at the test pool.

The mind just boggles.  Now, I can definitely see getting namecoin compiled and ready to go by the 12th (which is when it looks like block 16128 rolls around and we all need to be ready to pile on namecoin, but still.  It makes negative sense to mine NMC now.  I guess I should thank them for their donations though...

Now, when the new difficulty does happen I fully expect the NMC network computing power to increase not just by a factor of 10 like last time, but more likely by a factor of 100 if not 1000.  We should have all 2016 blocks mined out in well under 24 hours.  Good thing the chumps are willing and able to pick up the slack during the month+ long "subsidize" time to make several hour "profit" time that much better.

Oh, I agree an efficient builder can still make the case for mining.  The OP is far from an efficient builder.  In fact, it'd be hard to build less efficiently unless you buy 6850s at ebay markups to go with $250 blinged out PSUs, $200 gamer cases and $400 gamer motherboards in addition to getting hard drives and windows licenses.  The OP is a classic case for buying efficiently mined BTCs instead of overpriced mining gear as a BTC investment.

Also, your 3 month timeframe for an efficient builder (see: my post above) ignores the possibility of hardware failure, brownouts, downtime due to DoSed pools, network outage, and a wildly spiking difficulty.

If you haven't mined at deepbit then you won't understand.

You know why I do it?  I'm getting less than *HALF A PERCENT* rejects.  That's right.  Half a percent.  Not five.  Not six.  Half. 

That right there (plus not being down randomly, plus being credited for all submitted work) is why they're my #1 pool, with all the others as backups.  And screw variance.  If I wanted to risk it all I could solo mine.

Here's another way to look at the OP's investment.  He could have spent $8000 on bitcoins.  I'm sure they'll be $13 again this weekend, so I'll use that as the price.

8000/13 = 615

At 7 gigahash the OP should be mining around 3.5 bitcoins a day, at a power cost of at least .5 btc/day.  Now assuming no difficulty increases we're talking 200 days to earn that many BTC.

Look at prices and difficulties right around the end of last year (200 days ago) to guestimate how likely it is your hardware will *ever* generate anywhere near 600 bitcoins over its lifetime.  You've just bet 8000 dollars no ASIC of FPGA miners get introduced until well into next year, and the 7 series radeons won't be very good at mining -- both very poor bets.

3x sapphire 5830, $129 each = 387
3x pcie risers, $18
Any board with 3 PCIe slots of any sort, cheapest CPU - $60
Antec 750 watt gamer series, $55 (+2) = 57 AR
1 Gb USB memory stick, $1

Total: $533, should pull nearly 900 Mhash and pull about 600 watts out of the wall.  All of this may still be possible today, was definitely possible last week on newegg.  Even without rebates there are plenty of 700-800 watt PSUs capable of feeding 3 overclocked 5830s under $100, so call it $600 for 900 Mhash or 1.5 Mhash/$ or .66 $/Mhash.

Assuming fixed difficulty this gets nearly half a bitcoin a day.  Let's call it $6 after power costs, or 180 a month.  3 and change month ROI.

OP's builds require more than 6 months of no difficulty increases and $15/BTC exchange rates.  Good luck with that.  I'd send that crap back and eat the restocking fee if I was him.

So wait, what you're saying is it's fun to have fewer namecoins than more?  At the end of the day you just see a balance -- your balance would be higher by mining BTC, even with one card or CPU and *buying* NMC.  Higher numbers are more fun than lower numbers, or did I misunderstand?

There, we have our answer.  People who can't or won't do math are mining namecoins.

Good by me, it just means instead of the difficulty drop on the 21st it looks like it'll be around the 11th instead.  THAT is when the great BTC hordes will descend on namecoin once again, mine out all 2016 blocks in a day or so, and leave the chumps to 'support' another month mining at an artificially bogus difficulty.

Y'all are giving up .07 per namecoin by mining NMC rather than BTC at current exchange rates.  Good thing you make up for those losses with higher volume! 

In a free market (which this is), and assuming rational actors we would have everyone mining BTC and buying NMC until NMC reached price parity.  That's how rational people would support NMC.  The current subsidy yoyo with NMC miners lining up to *give* money to BTC miners for destabilizing NMC will have predictable effects.