To be honest, my feeling is that the value of BTC will fall more than 15% in the next month, so I'm hesitant to do this loan. If it were nominated in usd, that would be different.

I'd be willing to lend to you if you can tell me how to check your rep. Do you have an otc link?

I really disagree with the way Synaptic has presented himself in this debate, but I do agree with his basic premise. There are some real problems with FPGA as it stands right now. If things improve with respect to $/Mhps, then the equation changes, but I don't see how it's really viable. In fact, without a rise in btc price (or a drop in difficulty), I don't see how buying any hardware now is viable. Here is my math and reasoning (since Synaptic doesn't seem capable of producing any).

Right now the X6500 FPGA costs 610 and will deliver 180 Mhps. I have a spreadsheet I use to calculate out ROI and at least for me the ROI puts it at around 40 months. The problem is in about 15 months the block reward will be cut from 50 to 25. This actually makes the ROI 25 months longer. At the time of recast, there will actually be 50 months left. But wait, in that time, there is another block reward reduction. So assuming a constant difficulty and price, it doesn't seem that the current FPGAs can pay themselves off. People say that at lower btc prices FPGA make more sense but when I lower my btc price to $4, the FPGA ROI goes to 55 months. At $3, it's 76 months. This doesn't include the reward decreases.

Another factor here is that the hardware is all continuously improving. What do you think GPUs will look like in 40 months? What about other FPGAs? There's really no easy way to trade up FPGA hardware, but you can pretty easily trade up GPUs (sell on ebay, buy new GPU). When you buy a current FPGA, you lock into a specific amount of MHps. You could sell your FPGA to other miners, I suppose, but my feeling here is that this will more strictly follow performance relative to the latest chips because there isn't any ancillary use (gaming) for these boards. Because the hardware is used as well, you will need to discount it and it's possible that this discount will just take up any profit margin you had on that board. This is all theoretical, but it seems likely to me.

At these prices, GPU mining isn't much better. My mining rig is running at 60 months ROI. But then again I've been mining for the last two months and have been selling at some good prices, so when I take out what I've profited, it goes into the 30s. If I take out what I can sell my cards for on ebay today, it goes to under 10 months. So it still makes some sense for me to mine. But I can't recommend it to someone else unless they want to add a card to their machine for gaming and will mine while idle.

I don't think that people are being realistic about the price drop and the effect it has on long term profitability. Maybe people will begin to understand and this will result in a pull back in difficulty, but so far this hasn't been evident.

It's generally not thermodynamically possible to cost more in cooling than it is to cost in mining. Essentially the cost is related to the power used. The power used from the cards represents a certain amount of Watt-hours. The cooling system would generally have less Watt-hours than this depending on the efficiency of your cooling system. A typical heat pump central air system should be able to give in the 80-90% range and a standard window unit would be around 80% as well. As an example, I have a window unit to supplement my central air that cools 10000 btus using 450 watts. Using the factor 3.41 btus per Wh, we see that to cool 10000/3.41 = 2932 watts of energy takes 450 watts, so only 15.4% of the mining cost can go to cooling. This also makes a very basic assumption that all the energy used on the mining rig is converted to heat, which is clearly not true but I have no real way to measure it.

So given this and using a conservative 20% for your cooling factor, the cooling on $164.70 should be no more than $32.94.

I take it that solo miners aren't getting a lot in the way of transaction fees.

I'm mining and my cutoff for my server at the current difficulty is at $3.99. I'll actually mine a little below that, but at that point, I might as well be saving the electricity and buying btc directly. At a certain point, I would end up selling the cards.

All the ICE takedowns have been at the domain only. If you put the IP and hostname in your /etc/hosts or %WINDIR%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file, you can still access the sites. There is even a Mozilla plugin (MafiaaFire) that automatically works around it.

My bet is this is faked.

If you want the hardware for other uses, then it could be a good way to subsidize it, but alone it won't earn its keep.

It's more than just this. We really need a whole economy or at least some vertical economies. Part of the trouble is that people still need to buy their inputs in their local currency. The guy who is selling beef? He needs to get his feed in GBP. He has a whole bunch of other inputs too (land taxes, machine repairs, etc), but if he could switch over the majority of his inputs to bitcoin, then his prices could stabilize. But then the feed company would have inputs too and they would need to stabilize that.

I do agree it's the speculators that are pushing the price around too much, though.

One thing I wanted to add on here is that you have to consider opportunity costs. So if you have 3 high powered Radeon cards mining, it could still be technically profitable to mine with btc at $1.00 and difficulty at 1,700,000, but you need to consider the value of selling those cards on ebay and buying a treasury bond or some other investment. There is also the depreciation on the cards themselves, as gaming hardware doesn't hold up value very well over time.

So you want to buy bitcoin at a 14% discount, simply because it's a whole number? Maybe you would get some takers for $6.25 as this would give you 40 BTC. Otherwise, you should just transfer your dwolla to tradehill and buy and sell like the rest of us.

You mean like Bidding Pond?

In order to overcome this, we need good producers to make goods and offer them in btc. This can be a little hairy for them, though because they would probably buy their inputs in their local currency, and then it's hard to know what kinds of things people people in the btc economy would want to buy.

My wife sells coupons on ebay, but I'm not really sure there are enough couponers who also use btc, so we haven't even bothered to offer them.

I'll bet 2 BTC that USD/BTC will not hit $20 on the TradeHill exchange by 12:00am September 1, 2011. This will be determined with the 1m Market Data view.  One thing about this, I'll be at Burningman at the time, so I won't be able to pay until around the 6th if I do lose.

I see this attitude a lot, but it doesn't seem to line up with reality. The dollar exchange do anywhere from 20-50k btc trades per day while the actual number of bitcoins sent is about 10x that. Look at Bitcoin Watch to see what I'm saying. Yes, there is still 10% going through the exchanges, but then again people still need to join into the btc economy somehow and mining is not for everyone. With 90% of the economy being transacted in the btc currency, it seems to have some kind of traction.

I don't know what people are buying, but they are buying something.

How do you figure this? The daily supply of bitcoins is around 7300. The daily trade volume for bitcoing is in the 20-40 thousand range depending on the day (in the last 24 hours it's been about 24 thousand, but I've seen it higher this week). Clearly more people are buying than there are coins being mined.

Except that the thief could then either dl every non-common file or run the program on your machine relative to it. I think I would only do this if the file were on a removable drive. But then there's the chance of losing the file.

A passphrase is still the best option, imo.

There's no guarantee that MtGox doesn't keep a record of where the bitcoins came from and where they went to, and in fact it is in their best interest to keep these records.

So, if I were to steal 100,000 btc from you, and then deposit into mt gox, and then withdraw it to another account, police could probably still get that the coins went into account x and then they went to bitcoin address y. If I then paid for something to be delivered to my home with bitcoin address y, they could contact that seller and find out where I live.

Presumably a mixer would not keep these records.

And if the option isn't there, check the MB website for an upgraded bios flash.

Your config should work. I have 2 at 8x and 1 at 4x with no problems.

If there is a molex connector on the motherboard and you have a molex plugged into it, remove the plug. I don't know why but this made it so my MB would only see one card. Only use the power that plugs directly into the cards.

If that doesn't solve it, take out both of the cards and put them in one at a time into each slot and reboot to ensure that the slot is working. If there are any slots that don't work, you might have a defective motherboard.

After this, put in all of the cards. Switch positions for the two cards. If the card that is not mining high still is not working, then it's a problem with the card. RMA it.

If you still have a problem with both cards but in the same slot, install the latest drivers for your motherboard. Wipe out all ATI software and drivers using these instructions. Reinstall catalyst.

At this point it should work.

If this post helped you, please donate some btc : 1KZnfWkXXLdEjvQKYALbEsjbeWpvSG9NWB