I guess I'll have to dig through p2pool to see if there is a way to dump the individual user generated BTC to the logs. I'd hate to have to curl and scrape that page.

The following output gives an URL
GOT BLOCK FROM PEER! Passing to bitcoind! 74b22adc bitcoin: http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000000b8fea2523bd5ba56ab32e6cd6e0a1068d6f983e92074b22adc

that could then be scraped with grep, awk and sed

curl http://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000000009743ecaf0e954afc3d1ee59cebbeb47e22d32bb4f6db52cc17 | grep ${btcaddress} | awk '{print $3}' | sed 's|</li>||'

I guess that is a temporary solution. The GOT BLOCK FROM PEER! message should have a way to output this like..

GOT BLOCK FROM PEER! Passing to bitcoind! derpderpderp bitcoin: http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000000b8fea2523bd5ba56ab32e6cd6e0a1068d6f983e92074b22adc. Shares: x (y orphan, z dead) Stale rate: xx% Efficiency: yy% Block payout: x.y BTC

Is there any way by crawling the p2pool logs to see when a block is found by p2pool and the reward distributed to my wallet? I'm not seeing any notifications in the p2pool logs. Trying to automate a report email so I can start gathering some mining stats with p2pool.

Subed.

There is an entire sub-forum to FPGAs. Check it out. Since you are in LA you deal with very high power costs and very high ambient temperatures. The MH/W efficiency on FPGAs would make perfect sense for you, if you are in the belief that Bitcoin will be around for a while.

Just go with 2x2GB kits and split 1 stick per rig. 1GB and 2GB sticks are almost identical in pricing and another gig doesn't hurt in case you end up running other things like p2pool.

Yeah.. I'd have gone with a smaller initial IPO, get something hashing and use that to snowball your growth. Would also let you potentially pull in more BTC if the value per share increased between releasing chunks of shares. Regardless, watching intently and curious what/when your first move will be.

Very true. I am renting a separate location due to the power and cooling requirements associated with mining under GPUs in quantities more serious than a gaming desktop. Some people will have the space for that but apartment dwellers are screwed 

I just redirected a pair of rigs @ p2pool as a trial run to monitor bandwidth consumption and BTC throughput. Does the below output look ok?

2012-05-12 20:39:29.682525 P2Pool: 17410 shares in chain (9724 verified/17414 total) Peers: 10 (0 incoming)
2012-05-12 20:39:29.682617  Local: 4445MH/s in last 10.0 minutes Local dead on arrival: ~2.6% (1-5%) Expected time to share: 11.8 minutes
2012-05-12 20:39:29.682643  Shares: 13 (2 orphan, 0 dead) Stale rate: ~15.4% (4-43%) Efficiency: ~95.2% (64-108%) Current payout: 0.0798 BTC
2012-05-12 20:39:29.682673  Pool: 353GH/s Stale rate: 11.1% Expected time to block: 5.9 hours


Just synced the server running p2pool with ntp and have ntpd running, not sure if that was the cause of the orphans. I think my intensity is set too high(9) on one of my boxes which might explain the stale rate?

At this point in time in order to make any serious BTC/USD from Bitcoin mining you have to maximize MH/w efficiency and MH/$ efficiency. You'll also have to invest in more than just a casual gaming computer if you plan on buying anything, be it USD or goods, solely from the BTC you mine.

Any place there is a profit to be made people will find a way to make it work. With the profits that miners can achieve now, aggressively pursuing a greater share of the networking throughput makes perfect sense. So long as you keep your MH/w and MH/$ efficiencies on par or higher than the average then you will come ahead in the rat race. Rat race isn't a completely accurate term, it is more a "keeping up with the Joneses" situation. A few thousand dollars, invested in the right hardware, will return a few thousand dollars within a year. Those types of margins make mining very attractive at this point in time. After the reward drop that may not be the case but I guarantee the difficulty and price will eventually stabilize to where miners are making a slight profit.

The time for the gamer to earn any significant amount of BTC by mining when not gaming with their GPUs was between the first GPU miner and before the spike to $30USD/BTC. After that spike the difficulty increase effectively pushed out single GPU miners as the network grew to 10+ TH/s. Who knows what is going to happen in the coming months with many miners aggressively switching over to FPGAs with MH/w efficiencies of 10:1 and higher.

I'm seriously considering watercooling these. It depends on if a faster bitstream is released that could be thermally limited by the small heatsinks we're using on these FPGAs. If I can get another 15-30% by watercooling and keeping the core temps low then I'm all for it.

That is an excellent video displaying what took me something like 40-50 mounts to figure out. That should pretty much end the argument for the spread method. My only complaint is that he used a little bit less paste than I'd use. I like a little excess to squeeze out to get full coverage on the IHS.

Daaaaammmnn. Does someone have a stopwatch running for a start to first board? That seemed incredibly fast.


Kind of wish there was a higher resolution/more clear photo so I could print it out and pretend to have a stack sitting at my desk 

Medium sized farm here. 16 GH/s from HD5K series GPUs. Efficiency at around 2.4 MH/w right now(damn 5830s dragging me down..). I've spent quite a lot of time considering many different options ranging from expanding on GPUs until the reward drop, expanding just with HD7K series to resell, expanding with a mix of FPGAs and GPUs, or just expanding with FPGAs. In the end expanding with just FPGAs won and maintaining my GPU farm won.

With 16 GH/s of GPUs running, which is mostly paid off with mining proceeds already, I effectively have 16 GH/s + FPGA GH/s paying off the FPGAs. I figure if I can get an unknown amount X GH/s of FPGAs completely paid off by the reward drop I will then be prepared for multiple events.

If GPUs suddenly become unprofitable I then liquidate my GPUs, purchase a few more FPGAs and continue as usual.

If GPUs just barely scrap by on profitability I will likely still liquidate the GPUs and continue expanding with FPGAs.

If GPUs are able to run with every $1 made costing $0.50 or less then I'll keep running the GPUs and use their output to buy more FPGAs.

If Bitcoin tanks then I liquidate the GPUs and attempt to find some money making opportunity with the FPGAs.

Worst case if Bitcoin tanks at the reward drop then I escape with a small overall profit from the sales of the GPUs and a fun experience. If Bitcoin continues after the reward drop with similar earnings levels then I continue to pay off student loans and other debts with my income

You done bitching?

It would be the ultimate troll if someone found the source of his profile picture to stir up some gossip.. look how easily you guys get up in arms over this 

Nice to see some serious progress on this. Thanks for all the information. Look forward to seeing the first run of boards running. I guess we'll see the first assembled boards powered up and running after May 21s?

I said if, not it is. No need to get uppity.

I gathered that, but it is worth asking if they'd open source their bitstream so the community could potentially spur their project along. I imagine if they are using Spartan6 cores for the Mini Rig they'll be using or at least starting with the open source Spartan6 bitstreams..

Nice to see you guys offering more speed to existing customers. Any chance you guys would open up your development to the community? This might yield additional speed increases and increase the value of the product you are selling.

This is not a botnet. If the owner wants to step forward then I am sure he will. I can confirm though that this is not a botnet. I mean seriously.. a botnet with just FPGAs and GPUs?

edit: I say that I can confirm this is not a botnet as the owner of this operation approached me with an offer.

*waves hand* These aren't the droids you're looking for.