Why is it so easy to give away your Bitcoins?

It seems like common sense has gone out the window in the loaning of BTC here. You are basically doing the equivalent of the topic subject, so make sure you use the same criteria in knowing your borrower as if you were handing someone cash when loaning BTC!

Sounds like they are trying to bring the PayPal ethos to their service. Thanks for letting me know. We can reward companies for this kind of behaviour by never signing up.

Not quite the right price point for mining (I sold off some 330Mhash 5830's for $120 while they were still hot), but a good deal for the gamer.

Pic made me think of this:

This is now a thread about cats.

It doesn't take a slow connection for Bitcoin to take many hours to download all blocks. The blockchain is bigger than an average Netflix movie, plus the CPU is used validating every block as you download them. Consider also that you are downloading from other Bitcoin users on the P2P network, their upload speed also matters, and upload is usually significantly less than download on consumer broadband.

If you aren't a computer noob, you can follow these instructions to directly download the blockchain from a high-speed Internet host (mine).

The Hanns-G is an LCD, I'm assuming. Your refresh rate should always be set to 60Hz, as that is the native refresh rate of the monitor. You will also enjoy a better picture using a DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort connection instead of 15-pin VGA, and using the native resolution (likely 1920x1200 from a Google search). I can't conceive of a way to hurt an LCD by sending it bad video.

The flickering/"tracking" you describe ambiguously, more information about what you are seeing (and what miner software you are using) would help diagnose your issues. Likely the GPUs are running at too high of an aggression. You may be using full-time miner settings on a computer where you really want unintrusive background mining, not leaving enough GPU power to do normal windows things like redraw programs on the screen.

It seems you are referring to a pool's hashrate display of your miners on their web interface. If there is a concern with the functionality of a particular pool's website, you may want to post to that pool's forum thread.

However, I believe the answer you are searching for is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=58242.msg687724#msg687724

Euphemism above is not correct English:

Social Engineering: Using human interaction (social skills) to obtain or compromise information about an organization or its computer systems.

Fraud: Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

Found a pic for you, it looks like that power supply gives even less +12V than that:

A 5970 uses 300w, a 5870 about 175w. Total, that's 950 watts of +12V power, about 79A. You'd be running the power supply near it's max, considering the CPU, fans and other stuff that need power too.

The TPQ-1200 is more in line with these power requirements, here's a review.

Note the load tests on that site, where they test it with +12V 90A, (and 10A on 3.3V and 5V) = 1200W, also +12V 98A (and 1A 3.3V and 5V) = 1200W. It doesn't go up in smoke, many other crap (ahem..Thermaltake) power supplies die when that site tests if they can deliver rated power.

For what happens when you run a power supply near max, look at the noise graphs of the TPQ-850 here, the more you push a supply near max output, the more line noise and ripple you get, more likely to make your system crashy.

Instead of the program creating a blank config file and aborting, that would be a good opportunity to run a little wizard questionnaire to set up the program:

---

[02/08/2012 18:44:39] Welcome to Phoenix v2.0.0-rc1
- I see this is the first time you've run Phoenix, 
  please provide some information for your initial configuration:

Pool URL:
[if not detected in URL:]
Pool Port:
Pool Worker Username:
Pool Worker Password:

Available OpenCL processing devices: 
    [[0]] Juniper
    [[1]] Juniper
    [[2]] Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU    Q6600  @ 2.40GHz

Please input the device number(s) to use (Enter=use first GPU only):

Do you wish to autodetect the best settings (Y/N) (Enter=auto)?:

- Manual Configuration -

Available OpenCL software kernels: 
    [[0]] opencl (default)
    [[1]] phatk2
    [[2]] diapolo

Please select the software kernel (Enter=default):

Available worksizes: 64, 128, 256
Please enter the OpenCL kernel worksize (Enter=autodetect):

Available vector sizes: 2, 4
Please enter the desired work vector size (Enter=autodetect):

Available aggression setting (work unit size): 1-14 (default 6)
Please enter the desired aggression (Enter=default):
 
- Thank you, parameters saved to configuration file phoenix.cfg!
[18:46:23] Connected to server
[18:46:23] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[18:46:23] New block (WorkQueue)

SDK 2.6 (included with 12.1) works best at the stock GPU memclock of 1000MHz; GPU memory underclocking is no longer required (nor available without a drop in hashrate) to get you lower video card power usage. However, if you are able to squash the CPU usage bug when no other drivers worked (100% of your CPU being used on at least one core, happens more often on multi-GPU mining), that might save you 25 watts or more depending on your system's CPU.

The most optimized mining settings using 11.12/12.1 are within 1% of previous drivers and SDKs's hashrate, as referenced on the thread mentioned above.

Probably the easiest text in the html to replace in the page per-user is:

title="View the profile of ldrgn"

In forum threads, that is the description for the user name link - when you hover over the poster's user name, it shows that text. The greasemonkey script you can make for each user to replace this with your own text:


Now when you hover over our user names, it shows this description instead.

Pool hopping is detectable by the pool op. If a user's per-share reward value over time is consistently higher than average, they are gaming the payout system. In aggregate data like the total per-share reward vs round time, observation by outsiders will be masked by the total pool size and the modest counter-measures, but on a per-user basis, there will be users who earn the average expected per-share reward, and hoppers that stick out like a sore thumb with higher earnings.

Hoppers will also submit a consistent number of shares per round even when they are long (or shares per block if just hopping on new network block information), and by quitting long rounds, are identifiable.

The time scale of the graph in the first post should be logarithmic, so there is an even spread of round quantiles over time.

My preference is in my sig...

A rewards system is best and most transparent if your payout still comes when the pool finds a block, as long as the pool hashrate is high enough to give miners several daily block finds. It lends to enthusiasm about finding blocks and doesn't hide how Bitcoin works. The rewards system simply determines how the 50BTC block generation reward is split between pool miners, and we want it to be fair and easy. We know that proportional is not an option because it can be gamed by pool hopping.

Geometric formulas that alter or "decay" the value of shares give a level of obfuscation where you can't determine what your shares will earn. A few other pools already have gone to geometric rewards (and PPS with fee), so you wouldn't be offering anything unique by using those. PPS pool ops can be attacked by block withholding. Slush's formula is not perfect and still hoppable. SMPPS you don't have in the poll - good, because it is a PPS, but lowers the reward when the pool gets unlucky (this variability makes it still hoppable).

The only miner complaint (from those who don't understand the system) is "expiring shares". PPLNS, however, also allows for multiple block wins from the same submitted share, so you can be unexpectedly surprised and rewarded by pool luck (on a proportional pool, all shares expire once a block is found, of course). When you submit a share, it will earn you a fixed payout, 1/N * 50BTC, for any block finds during the next N pool shares after submission. The N number can be set higher than difficulty if users prefer a longer window, so during an unlucky stretch there are fewer shares that expire with no reward, or can be set lower, if users want faster bigger payouts. Any value of N still gives both full-time and part-time miners the same expected reward. (Note: N should not be time-based, expiring after 12 hours for example, as this breaks the payout system by making share value variable and exploitable.) Mining is really a lottery anyway - if you solo mine, for example, every hash that didn't find a block instantly "expires"; when you mine and don't find a block, you really contributed zero work to the pool.

Consider any votes for proportional as coming from the pool hoppers. When the posting history is in many pools and pool hopping threads, we know they are the pool exploiters. Pool hoppers don't contribute anything by their straw-man argument that they "help find blocks"; the hashrate of the pool doesn't affect earnings (I was very happy with mineco PPLNS even at 80ghash). When everyone but the pool hoppers leave, there will be one last time that the pool crosses 43% of difficulty shares, and then it will be dead.

PPLNS worked very well on mineco. It doesn't have any pool-op risk requiring extra fees. Miners still get joy when a block is found.

It might be the fan controller making the fan motor "sing" - unplug the fan from the circuit board and run the card, and see if massive silence ensues.

Download LOIC, point at fbi.com, now you are an 31337 haxor!

or

Read this:
http://www.nruns.com/_downloads/advisory28122011.pdf.

Then read this:
http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20101202.txt

Everything you don't understand, learn. Learn until you can explain every word to someone else. Don't know what PHP is? Learn it. Don't understand the C code diff commit? Learn C until you could write the patch yourself. Then write an exploit for the ciphersuite cache issue yourself. Now go find your own 0-days.

or


More practically, read this to learn about how the browser service works in Windows and why you are resolving stale NetBIOS machine names. And check this out from your local library.

CTRL + to zoom in BTW

It's the opposite of that - when buying Bitcoins, you've got to play the "how much BTC can I buy" quote game, since Tradehill won't let you simply spend all your USD. You specify how much BTC you want and it tells you the cost in dollars + fee (and if you have enough in dollars).

If your fee is .6%, then to sell and buy back BTC, your fee is 1.2%. I wouldn't sell for a spread less than 2.5%; if you want to pay more in fees than your own profit, you should go on eBay.