This was (still is) one of my biggest questions about bitcoin. There is supposed to be a max of 21,000,000 BTC eventually, but how many will get lost, deleted, etc.... 10%? 20%? more?

(*WARNING - wild imagination about to go wild*)

What if bitcoin actually succeeds? Say bitcoin gains mass acceptance, and then some wacko decides to bomb a bitcoin convention with the intent of decreasing the supply in order to drive up the demand/price??

yeah, sorry about that, my internet connection went down for a bit... 









just kidding! lol

preface: bitcoins are a revolutionary idea. One that I'm am very much supportive of. but...

the thing about bitcoins is that they rely on the internet. if you are bullish about the internet never having any sort of problem, then bitcoins look to be a somewhat bullish investment.

if you have any sort of worries about an "internet kill switch" or solar flares, or any other kind of disruption to the global network happening in the next few years, well then... you might want to start shorting bitcoins.


-- note -- I am staying somewhat invested in bitcoin as a hedge against the world maintaining the status quo. I am also invested in silver, gold, food staples, cold weather clothing and shelter, and farmland! (I mean like an actual farm, where I can stay and work, just in case

all this stuff going on right now is to risky to lay all your eggs in one basket. just my opinion.

not sure such a bank exists, but the canadian exchange (virtex.ca) seems to be close in that your account is similar to a bank account in that you can transfer both BTC and CAD into and out of your account - directly into your BTC wallet or your CAD bank account easily, *relatively* quickly (1 or 2 banking days), and *relatively* cheaply (3 bucks per withdrawl for CAD, 0 on BTC)

they *seem* to have learned from the mistakes of other exchanges, and perhaps their model should be mimicked in other countries, but only time will truly tell...

*edit* but the premise of the thread regarding making bitcoin more "user friendly" holds true. having to un-encrypt my wallet, open the client, make the exchange, and then re-encrypt my wallet and "delete" the original file *(who knows if it's ever truly deleted, even after emptying the recycle bin? not to mention that the whole time I'm trying to catch up to the network my wallet is pretty much fair game)*

if this doesn't get easy enough for the masses, it will never be adopted by the masses.

interesting to see the analysis, my take on the relative stability over the last few weeks:

having a stable price between 13-14 should give merchants more confidence to begin accepting bitcoins.

that's my dream, to be able to walk into a subway and buy my lunch for 0.5 BTC...

or how about filling the cart at walmart for a whopping 7 BTC?

if the major retailers get on board, we might see some movement, but for now, it's still just "fringe economics"

gratz dude! :thumbsup:

Check out ARSbitcoin 0% fees (I expect this will be set to 1% soon to cover cost of scaling though)

They - or we  - have been very lucky and currently are floating a 800+ BTC buffer to keep those bitcoins pouring in even in the event of a "block from hell"

currently getting 0.000029570125 per share as opposed to 0.00002661294865101 at deepbit.

the only way it would be a waste of money is if bitcoins collapse before you mine enough to pay off your card. if we assume that bitcoin will survive for at least the next year you *should* make profit from your card - eventually.

just ballpark figures and napkin math here, but...

lets say for $190 you could get a card that does around 300 MHash/sec (very conservative estimate)

using deepbit's calculator you could expect to make 0.16 BTC per day..

as of right now mtgox has BTC at 13.7 so you would pay off your card in 86.7 days.

p.s. these calculations depend on the price of BTC and the change in difficulty.

p.p.s. I didn't add electricity into the equation. I don't pay for electricity, so I have no idea how much that might add to your costs.  

hehe, pci extenders is probably best, but...

if you have your mining rig in a regular case (like I do) you might want to try stuffing something inbetween - I've used a plastic bottle cap, but I've heard styrofoam peanuts work great - to give enough of a gap to let the fan breathe.

that's the easiest, but probably not the safest (no idea what the long term effects of basically bending your card's pcb might be)

one thing you can try, depending on your card is take a close look at the cooling solution of your specific card. if it's a reference design with the blower on one end, then you probably need to keep the plastic shroud that covers the heatsink...

but,

if you have a card with a custom cooler, that plastic cover might be doing more harm than good.

I can only speak about the HIS 6950 1GB from experience, but on my card, the plastic cover does pretty much nothing except choke the fan. with the cover on (and no spacer) the cards are almost touching.

so I took the cover off for a closer look and underneath you can see the heatsink has it's own shroud to force the air across the fins.

I removed the plastic cover and now the card has enough room to stay cool (maybe only 3 or 4 millimeters, but seems to be just enough to be able to suck a decent amount of air)

but take a careful look before you try. that plastic cover might be vital to direct the airflow over the fins of the heatsink.

It's possible that it could go down. if the total hashrate were to decrease, the difficulty would have to decrease as well to maintain the desired rate of bitcoin creation.

so yeah, it's possible, but realistically I don't see it happening any time soon.

some good advice so far, here's a few more things that worked for me...

 - I pointed my air conditioner towards the tower, it's about 5 feet away but it seems to help a lot.

 - also I have the side fan blowing in against the cards (I haven't tried the exhast method yet, but it definitely sounds like it's worth a shot) and my case (antec 1200) has a tunnel thingy to help aim the air from the front right onto the cards as well.

 --- biggest difference I found was removing the dust filters from those 2 intake positions (other 2 intake fans still have the filters) yeah I might need to clean out the dust more often but that one change reduced the heat on the hottest card around 15 degrees

 - give those plastic heatsink shrouds a closer look. Not sure what kind of cards you got, but I have a pair of HIS 6950 and the plastic shroud is almost purely cosmetic and by removing it I was able to gain a few precious millimeters of space for the intake (no spacers needed)

 - also check if swapping positions might help, when I first started my top card (we'll call this card 1) was over 80 degrees C and the middle (we'll call this card 2) was less than 70. card 3 (bottom) is actually a 5850 and it will be staying at the bottom as it seems to be my strongest clocker and hashrates (Asus directCU TOP)

Once I swapped the 6950s, card 1 (now in the middle spot) is still hotter than card 2 (now at top position) but card 1 is only hitting 75 at the moment and card 2 is at 71, which I'm comfortable with - for the moment, when I get the urge to push these cards harder I will definitely be re-doing the thermal paste on both. 

"Temp in the room was 2C yesterday."

that's colder than my refrigerator! I once hit 4GHz (*edit* oops, 3GHz actually, http://imageshack.us/f/183/3000pi329qp.jpg/ ) on my old athlon by leaving the window open in the middle of winter when I lived in yellowknife (that's in northen canada) but I had to stop from fear of the pipes bursting...

do you live in an igloo?

this was on slush pool, aka BPM, aka mining.bitcoin.cz right? did you change your wallet recently?

I just had a bit of a scare (still somewhat worried actually, but I will find out for sure soon)

I changed my bitcoin address, and hit the button that sends you the email to confirm.

click the link on the email and it said "confirmed" and I thought I was good to go.

but the notification on the "my account" page kept saying that I needed to confirm still, even after refreshing the page. (I did not try to log out and then log back in, which I probably should have.)

so after a while this message started to piss me off and I hit the "resend" link and got another email, hit that link and I thought everything was good this time! the confirmation needed message went away and everything.

but then a couple days later, I notice that I passed my auto-cashout limit (1.3 btc) and yet I did not see payment in my new wallet...  it was at this time that I realized that I don't recognize the wallet address for my slush account.

I am rebuilding my old wallet right now *(it's taking FOREVER) in the hopes that the coins went there, but I'm worried that it might have been sent to one of the many test accounts I made when I was first playing around with transfers. (yes I was trying to figure out a way to cheat the system

I think it unlikely but there's also the chance that I somehow got redirected and someone, somehow, maliciously substituted their own address for mine when I hit the resend button... but I think that's highly unlikely. I mean, come on, it's only 1 freakin' coin, lol.

just wondering if you also changed your wallet address recently?

curious, how loud are these cards at 100% fan speed?

Bump!

never used "craiglist" but I'm guessing it's similar to kijiji?

A local listing of items to buy and sell with bitcoin, let's make it happen!

(i 'spose you could just offer up your items on either of these established listings for payment in bitcoin, but a dedicated site would be preferable)

I feel your pain FaT, for a long time I had the same problem here in Canada.

Until a local exchange (virtex) started up there was really no easy way to exchange bitcoin for real dollars in your bank account. (or at least nothing that wasn't prohibitively expensive.)

Keep checking for a local SA exchange to pop up, or start making some connections and get one started! (legal help with that would be strongly advised

hey all, been reading a while, mining a while, first with BTC guild, till their DDoS problem which forced me to try other pools.

since then I've landed with arsbitcoin, the higher pps payout pulled me from deepbit...

anyways, wanted to post my results on the 6950 crashing problem thread, but of course, I can't.

with latest drivers I am able to watch .mkv with videolan with no issues, which I heard others were having.

haven't tried youtube yet, still a bit traumatized from the crashing I 'spose.

but I did find that even on my old 5850 (asus directCU TOP - this thing is a beast!) my hashrates would get cut in half when watching youtube vids...

anyhow, just chiming in here until I get "established" enough to post in threads where my info is actually valid, lol.

*edit* if it helps any towards getting permission to post you can check out my stats on arsbitcoin (also xtremesystems, I don't post there often, but same username.)

*2nd edit* still having problems with 6950, any app that uses hardware acceleration (this includes youtube) causes the whole system to crash. I need to stop mining with the primary card in order to browse the web as many sites will have some kind of flash or whatever that will crash the whole computer. if anyone sees this old buried post and has a solution, please PM me! 0.5 BTC for whoever comes up with first fix!