i was looking for trading a small amount via skrill and they said on their chat their minimum is $50, for anyone thinking of smaller amounts. but quick responses either way

@coinscollect, i have €9.50 in my skrill account, need about 0.02 btc after your %. can you help?

I found a shop in my city that sells bitcoin for cash, so i got sorted. thanks for the help though, a lesson learned!

moneygram are only available in shops which are closed now, and western union basically is charging about 60% extra to send from Ireland to the US using a card.

@turtlehurricane are you sure it's only in the US? I've bought stuff before using Amazon payments on .com and .co.uk sites, so that might be an option

I also have a skrill account if thats any use?

@devthedev What are my options? I've spent the evening looking up ways to get them via SMS (and nothing seems to exist), none of the sellers on localbitcoins where I'm from (Ireland) have any coins to hand, there is one called eircoin but their minimum order size is about $70, and i was looking on to see how I could do it with btc-e where I've an account from my litecoin mining days, but okpay will take ages to process paperwork. There was a bitcoin atm not far from me, but it's currently doing a tour of colleges here, so that option is ruled out too :/ There are some people on ebay, but they're charging 3 or 4 times over the odds.

So new to actually having to pay real money for bitcoins and see now how bloody difficult it is! What I have from my 12ghs mining isn't enough to send to my wallet for a while yet, and I need to try and get something sorted by the end of the week.

Hi there,

As I blew most of my bitcoin on steamloader during the summer sale, I'm looking to get my hands on a small amount worth ($11) so i can test an ecommerce site I'm working on.

I can pay by paypal, and I'll pay fees. Any offers at relatively close to market value, please pm me.

Thanks!

Jamie

I've noticed things have picked up a bit in the last week, especially now that the pool speed has gone from a low of about 8.5k back up to 12k. It took a little while to kick in, but the pool has been fairly consistently, bar a couple of very unlucky days, getting about 1 block every 1.5-2 hours on average. Some times there's been none, followed by two or three in fairly short succession.

my earnings have been going up and down, as the pool speed dropped, i was getting more per block on fewer blocks, but now i'm getting less on more blocks, and earnings are going up again for me.

i had this problem today, after updating on win 8.1, tried a couple of things which got it working in the end.

1. i have a paper backup, so am assuming you do too. if not, do this first

2. uninstall bitcoin armory

3. uninstall bitcoin core (all versions)

4. delete locally stored blockchain on your computer in your user profile

reboot computer

5. install bitcoin armory again - when loaded, but was offline as couldn't find bitcoin

6. install bitcoin core again

reboot again

7 open bitcoin armory - for me, it had saved my wallets, but was basically doing the first load like when I used the software for the first time. It's now downloading the blockchain over bittorrent, then will catch up and scan.

So hopefully this helps!

Jamie

well it's still averaging about ten blocks a day, today was looking pretty crap but we found three out of the last six blocks in a row, and hash rate is up to about 9200. I have an account on ghash.io and they were about 46ph a couple of days ago, but tonight they're down to 37ph, so it looks like a lot of people with their own hardware are shifting across to discus fish, but their own people are locked in with the hardware pointing at their pool. I found when I switched a few weeks ago to ghash for a weekend, that while there were four times as many blocks, I was getting only half of what I was seeing with BTC Guild for a smaller number of blocks.

I'd say a lot have seen the discus fish post from a few days ago, and the PPS definitely is attractive as I only had that for a few weeks when I started before BTC Guild stopped offering that, and dropped their pool fee to 2%. In a space where ROI drops every fortnight, I understand profit focused people jumping to pool giving the steady return while also hitting more blocks.

Did a quick check on blockchain and they've mining pool share has been

4 day ghash 31% - discus 20% - btc guild 7%
2 day ghash 30% - discus 22% - btc guild 6%
1 day ghash 26% - discus 23% - btc guild 7%

but ghash dropping 17% market share in less than 100 hours is probably a good thing for the ecosystem, especially when they got such a high % before.

What does the pool owner need things to be to be sustainable? is there a target market share you'd like to keep (ie 5% - 10%), or want to grow to (ie back up to 20%+) ? surely a bit of PR to the bitcoin media plugging the strengths of the pool might bring a lot of new miners in, and increase the block finding rate. There's a lot of pools now, and it's all about economics now

i see the law of diminishing returns when it comes to hardware, which is why I don't run my own, especially in a country where electricity is so expensive to begin with, and a hard lesson from litecoin mining which basically superheated my laptop case, through the hinge, and cooked 1/3 of my monitor. 2 ltc for €400 of damage = lesson learned ;p Love watching the bitcoin arms race though from the sidelines, reminds me of all the graphics cards trying to one up each other in the days of 3dfx and OpenGL

Hi

I've tried a few of the pools and found btc guild to be great and with the best uptime. I'm also seeing the THs drop, but this has gone from 7000 when i started mining a couple of months ago, up to a peak of 12500 a little while ago and then back down to 9040 this evening, and the share on blockchain drop down to 5% today.

I'm also keen to find out what the plans are, as I'm only a hobby miner.

cheers

Jamie from Ireland