Prices could also go down depending on a multitude of factors. The value of a bitcoin is not linked to the difficulty of generating one, except indirectly: they're both driven by popular interest. The increases in difficulty everyone is expecting to see over the coming months is going to be driven primarily by the release of ASICs, not by an increase in popularity, and so there's no compelling reason to think that prices will go up proportionally.

Another alternative is to find someone trusted on the OTC market and trade with them.

The USD I withdrew from Bitfloor yesterday morning has appeared in my bank account. Total turnaround time was less than 24 hours, but I was already verified and I requested the withdrawal a few hours before trading halted.

Give it some time. After the hack last year, in which all Bitfloor users' BTC funds were stolen, Bitfloor moved to storing most BTC funds in a cold wallet. Now that everyone is rushing to withdraw their funds, BTC transactions cannot all be processed automatically. The funds have to be manually taken out of the cold wallet first.

Well, damn. I just sold some BTC there this morning, which was my first-ever trade on Bitfloor, and afterwards requested an ACH withdrawal all of a few hours before this announcement. I got verified a week or two ago. Nothing to do now but hope that I receive my funds within a couple of days as expected.

In light of the recent correction,

Yes it is. Certainly, keeping ASIC devices to mine with them is the more profitable course of action at current price points, but selling them is profitable as well.

No, it doesn't. I now get "VPU Recovery" errors saying that the GPU stopped responding.

The problem may be software related instead of hardware, though it did seem like a possible power issue at first (and I should have posted this in the support subforum instead -- my apologies). I thought that Catalyst 11.12 came with APP Runtime 2.5, but it's bundled with 2.6 instead, which isn't supported on WinXP. I'm going to try moving to 11.12/2.5 and see if that helps.

I haven't actively mined since 2011, but last week I had the good fortune to find a MSI 6950 on Craigslist for $100 and figured it was too good a deal to pass up. If I can earn back the cost of the card before the difficulty skyrockets, awesome; if mining becomes unprofitable for any reason, I'll still have a cheap upgrade to the 5770 currently in my desktop. I have a WHS system that is already running 24/7, so I put the 6950 in there. I installed Catalyst 11.12, which (to my knowledge) is the latest set of drivers with OpenCL that works on WinXP.

The card will only allow me to overclock it as high as 840MHz, and the lowest the memory will downclock to is 715MHz. My server PC is typically headless, but I connected it to a monitor to install the video drivers and make sure that everything was working. I'm using cgminer, but I haven't yet gotten it to run stably for more than a couple hours. The problem I'm having is that it'll crash, and the GPU will reset all of its settings, which includes placing the hardware acceleration setting near the low end of the slider. When this happens, it disables OpenCL, the TightVNC server stops working for some reason (stopping/restarting it has no effect), and RDP is useless as always in this regard. This means that I have to physically reconnect a terminal to the server in order to crank up the hardware acceleration back up to full and get everything working again.

I'm not yet sure why this is happening, so I want to double check some things. My only suspicion is the PCI-e x1 riser I had sitting around which I used to connect the video card to the PCI-e x16 slot in the motherboard, as there wasn't enough space to plug the card directly into the x16 slot. The 6950 has a TDP of 200W, and can get 150W through the two 6-pin PCI-e connectors. Can the remaining power be pulled through a PCI-e x1 connection? I know that the power pins are the same regardless of the bandwidth, but I also recall reading that for some reason PCI-e x1 connections are restricted to pulling 25W through the motherboard. Is that the case here? If so, I guess I should get a x16 riser instead. Thoughts?

Second, because I know this question will be asked, the power supply is a 500W OCZ. Other components in the system are a 95W CPU, the micro-ATX mobo, an optical drive which is almost always idle, 5x HDDss, 2x 80mm fans, and 1x 120mm fan. That's it. There are two 12V rails each capable of providing 18A, so I don't see any reason why the PSU shouldn't be capable of supplying ample power. The more I write about it, the more I think that it has to be a power restriction because of the riser...

At the moment the price spread between the BTC-e ask ($243) and the MTGox bid ($246) is just 1.2%, making arbitrage non-profitable.

New test video from BFL shows one of their SC boards running at 160W (167% over target): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C4bgho5JSI

Link to update

Summary: They claim to now have working prototypes, but the problem is that the power consumption is missing their goal of 1W/GH/s by 70%+. The units weren't designed for such high power requirements, so they have to underclock them, thus reducing the hashrate.

So, I wonder which charity or charities will be the lucky recipient(s) of 1000 BTC?

Bitfloor is US-based, I think. There's always localbitcoins.com.

I got verified in less than 24 hours. Just follow their instructions precisely.

First, are your graphics cards installed in the correct expansion slots? That system has 6 PCI-E slots. The two on the top are unusable without a 2nd CPU. Of the four on the bottom, the 2nd and 4th (from the bottom) are x4. Your cards should be in the 1st and 3rd slots from the bottom which are x16.

Second, I cannot fathom why any 1200W power supply would have only 2 PCI-E connectors, or why any system with multiple PCI-E slots would use such a power supply. But that's Dell for you.

Third, the tech sheet is unclear on DC output. Do the 10 letters mean that your power supply has 10 12V rails each capable of providing 18A? If so, that's a measly 216W per rail. Your 7950s each have a TDP of about 200W.

One possible source of the problem is the Y-adapters. I hope that each of the PCI-E connectors coming from the power supply is on its own 12V rail, but if they're on the same rail then they would easily be overloaded.

Are you trying to mine on both these cards simultaneously, or does the PC crash when you try to start mining on a single card? What happens if you uninstall a card and try to mine on the one that remains?

If this offer is still active, I'm interested.

I'm Rishodi. I'm a libertarian philosophically and a software engineer by trade, so Bitcoin quickly captivated my interest when I first learned about it ~2 years ago. I've been a long-time lurker on these forums, and I can occasionally be found on /r/bitcoin as well. I figured I should make an effort to get more actively involved, as I strongly want to see Bitcoin succeed.