I have not yet used this, though I've used CoinPal 3 times by now.  Went ahead and looked at the going rates, and they're highly competitive against Bitcoin2CC which I see as the only real competitor at this point in time.  Looking good mndrix, hope this all works out well for you.

I know there was a time in which slush's pool did not solve a block for 10 hours, but I suspect other blocks outside the pool were solved during that timeframe.

You completely miss the point of the switch.  It's calculated based on time now to prevent people from cheating the pool, not because it's more fair.  Slush never claimed it to be "more" fair.  Over time your reward should even out to be exactly the same as it would have been with the old system, and because of the increased security, you get your round statistics back.  Before the switch, Slush had to remove pretty much every useful statistic from the site in order to prevent people from gaming the system.  It was annoying, and I'm happy to have those stats back.

Yes your rewards are going to fluctuate more, and it's very unfortunate that the switch happened so close to the difficulty increase because that gives the impression that it's Slush's fault you're getting less money for the same hash rate, when it's not.  You should be expecting a 40% drop in rewards because of the network, not the pool.


Because statistically, at some point you will be one of those last shares before the round ends, and that share will be worth much more than it would have in the old system, thus bringing your average back up.

Now perhaps if you want to argue that the current decay rate for old shares is too fast, then you might have something to stand on.  People have expressed concerns with that already. 

Another way of thinking of it is that it's spending its time buying and checking thousands of lottery tickets per second.  The cost of these tickets is the price of the electricity used to process them.  If you happen to get a winning ticket, bam you get 50 Bitcoins.  But the typical CPU can only check so many at a time compared to these $600 GPUs (which can process millions and/or billions of tickets per second) that statistically, you're unlikely to ever get a winning ticket even if you ran the computer 24/7 for a year.

As others have explained, in terms of "usefulness," all you're really doing is strengthening the Bitcoin network.  That's it.  No actual problems are being solved, no complex proteins are being mapped, and you're not donating CPU time to find aliens.  You're just trying to hit the jackpot.

Using your screensaver connected to a mining pool, you may make a few cents a day, which is better than nothing at least.  Slush's pool works by sending you the same sort of work you'd be doing on your own, but it's MUCH MUCH easier to find a solution.  Your client doesn't know the difference and thinks it hit the jackpot and sends that info to the pool.  Each time your client finds a valid "block" this counts as credit for you in the pool.  When someone does happen to find a block that the Bitcoin network accepts (a TRUE "winning ticket"), the 50 Bitcoin prize is split up amongst all who contributed.  The splitting up is a bit more complex in that it involves the time you send in your shares versus the time of the winning block, but that's a minor detail.

Darker is better to my eyes.  I would of course wait for other comments as well.

Based on http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3176.0 I'd be wary of using LR for the time being.  You'd have better luck conducting a trade using Bitcoin-OTC.

Agreed on the legibility issue.  Perhaps it's the specific combination of colors that accentuates it, but at first glance I absolutely cannot read whatever is in that green bar.  Perhaps all it needs is a darker shade of green or something.

EDIT:  for reference, I'm running on a resolution of 1680x1050 on a 15-inch laptop screen.

I too am receiving payments correctly to my standalone client.  I do not have an account on MyBitcoin.

We know nothing about the daily costs associated with hosting the pool server.  It could very well be more than 12 BTC worth, just as likely as it could be less.

Probably not much, given that he recently had to enforce a mandatory donation in order to keep things running.  I highly doubt he's making a profit after all the bandwidth and server costs, and is providing us the service more or less out of goodwill.

Try this instead:

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, sorry.  Here's the best example I can give.  If your username on slush's site is MyUser, and you've registered a worker on that site site named "MyWorker" with a password of "MyPassword" then the *.bat file you use to launch the OpenCL miner should look something like this:

I forgot exactly what the -d0 part does, so that might need adjusting to your specific case.

The Bitcoin client gives you an address unique to you, yes, but beyond that you don't have to have it running for pooled mining if you don't want.  If you do select the "Generate" option then it will attempt to do CPU mining, which at this point is rather futile due to the high difficulty in generating a full block, so I wouldn't recommend it.  Have the client open for receiving coins, but otherwise it doesn't need to do anything.

For pooled mining, make sure you have an account at slush's site, with a worker registered, and that those credentials are what you're using with the OpenCL miner program.  Make sure that you've entered one of your personal receiving addresses (from the Bitcoin client) into your "My Account" page, and you're good to go.  If you want to use your CPU to contribute to the pooled mining as well, you'll need a separate CPU client, either by jgarzik or puddinpop or ufasoft (all have threads in this Mining forum).  I'd suggest registering a new worker on slush's site for this new CPU worker, just to be on the safe side.

EDIT:  You "connect" it by specifying that url when launching it.  You are launching m0mchil's OpenCL program with a long command, right?  Part of that command specifies the URL to use, while another part specifies your username, your password, number of threads, etc.

I'm having an odd issue.  About once every 2-3 minutes, both of my miners lose the connection to the pool, to reconnect a few seconds later.  I don't think it's my Internet connection because I pinged Google continuously during these periods with no packet loss.  Pinging http://mining.bitcoin.cz at the same time yields a tiny bit of packet loss and extra delay.

Are there bandwidth issues going on or perhaps should I test more diagnostics on my end?  I'm using both m0mchil's GPU miner and ufasoft's SSE2 miner (1 thread) at the same time.

EDIT:  Also, if this keeps happening, does that count as a disconnect for the new scoring system?  In other words, if this happens every 3 minutes, will every share I contribute count as an "early" share?

Use "dir" to show the current directory listing.  Any file name with spaces MUST be enclosed in quotation marks, for instance:
cd "Program Files"

"cd .." moves you up one level in the folder hierarchy.  "cd \" returns you to the root of the current drive (in your case, E:\)

Use tab-completion to let the console automatically complete file and folder names for you.  Start typing the first few letters and hit Tab (if it gets the wrong one, keep hitting Tab a few more times).  Tab completion will add quotation marks automatically if necessary.

To switch between drives (C:\ and E:\ for instance) simply type the drive letter and a colon and hit Enter.

EDIT:  If you want an easy way to open a command window already pointed to the folder you want, there are a few options.  In Vista and Windows 7, hold Shift as you right-click a folder and click the "open command window here" option.  In Windows XP, the same can be accomplished by a tiny program called Drop To Dos, available at http://tinyapps.org/file.html

Alternatively, you can create a batch file (standard text file with a file extension of .bat instead of .txt) consisting of nothing but "@%comspec%" without the quotes.  I personally call it "00startcmd.bat" so it will appear at the top of a list when sorted alphabetically, but the name is entirely up to you.  When double-clicked, it will open a command window pointed to whatever folder the batch file is in.

That happened with the old scoring system as well, just perhaps not to quite as strong a degree.  At least the estimated reward field is back to begin with, heh.

I can't say anything about the first question (I use different credentials for my GPU and CPU miners), but for the second one, pretty much every miner I've seen lately includes a "-threads=X" option to specify how many cores to use when CPU mining, so you shouldn't need to run multiple instances just to max out the CPU.  Check the documentation for your miner and see if there's an option for that.

Regarding the original program, this probably won't work, but try adding "-gpu" to the very end of your command to launch the program. 

If you're getting 0 Mhash, make sure you've got the full URL (including port number) and that the username and password are spelled correctly including correct capitalization for both.  Also with slush's pool make sure you're using two different workers for your two instances of the miner.

This is really interesting.  While with jgarzik's CPU miner I can get just about 1 Mhash/s per core, with this one I'm getting closer to 2.2 Mhash/s per core.  This is on a Core 2 Duo T9300 @2.5 GHz.  I have not compared to any other 4way miner though for comparison.

When I first bought into Bitcoins, I did so because I was curious about the ideas and the uses of the currency.  As it started rising in value rapidly, I started thinking of it more as an investment opportunity.  Right now I'm kinda in the middle of the two camps.  On the USD side I'm now even, so any remaining coins I have are what I've got, whether they're to be used to buy stuff or to sit there and (hopefully) gain value.  I don't exactly know at the moment.