Id strongly recommend you go for a few used 5xx0 cards. 5850s sell for ~$120 (or less with some luck) and will give you ~350 MH (or more with some luck), so you are looking at less than half the payback time.  Check ebay or the buy and sell section of this forum.

If you are worried about gaming, a pair of 5850s will do just fine in any modern game. Or you could look at 5870s which provide about the same MH/$ and better gaming performance.

non sequitur
Its not because memory speed makes no difference that capacity wouldnt either. As it happens, this is indeed the case, bitcoin mining requires something like 100Mb vram, anything more is pointless, but you couldnt conclude that from the fact everyone underclocks

You have a website called "buy bitcoin" featured in your sig,  but...
 you cant buy bitcoins?
 

Really? Why? This isnt an FPS competition. See how many stales you get, even with a slightly higher ping. Ill eat my shoe if you get 3% stales on a decent pool.

Good thinking. Would need a lot of nails but something like that should work. Or just rocks or bricks. Create a bottom layer of pu foam , then put whatever weight on it, then apply the next layers so its firmly embedded. Ill try that for V0.2 Now Ill just make some "bridges" in the PU that stick out above the PVC bowl and press it down with rubbers. Or something.

With my setup, a pump failure wont cause the card to run dry. The only real chance of running dry is when the oil leaks out in to my pond. I intend to install a floatswitch of sorts to shut the system off, possibly even close a valve, more to protect my pond than my shed . Even so, assuming oil cooling could manage to keep these cards around 50C, you could just define a shutdown point at 70C or whatever.  If there isnt a big difference between working oil cooling and no oil or static oil, then the whole exercise would be proven futile.

BTW, I also already have smoke detectors near my rigs. Of course that only helps if Im home. Still not a bad idea to grab one, they cost next to nothing.

Angel investors.. good luck. Having presented a business case there once, I can say with confidence three key things they look for:
- high potential ROI
- clear exit strategy
- confidence in management (read: preferably experience)

OP can offer none of those.

I wont stop him from trying, but chances of him even being allowed to present his case seem slim to non existent.

Nope. But it begs the question why the miners are mining there. It does no good for their revenue, and it does bitcoin no good to have a few mega pools dominate the scene. The only one benefiting is Tycho.

This is about oil submersion.

I also dont understand why DDoS resistance is an issue. Use a miner with failover capabilities like cgminer. If your pool goes down for whatever reason, it just switches to a backup pool, or p2pool or even solo if all your pools are down.

Im bumping in to my first problem. PU is lighter than oil. It doesnt stick well enough to the PVC container, so it will float. I guess that can be worked around by mechanically forcing the block down, but its not a good start lol. On the bright side, its a joy to dremel canals and stuff in PU foam. If I didnt have 2 left hands, Id start sculpting!

Iran has already called our bluff by stopping oil exports to the EU well before the sanctions were supposed to be activated. Quite clever really, and completely reasonable. Now we will have to buy (Iranian) oil from the Chinese for more money. The Iranians and Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank.

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9010172771

This.

I think he is implying its okay to wipe out a democracy because then its the people's fault for believing they have sovereign rights.  When its a dictatorship or theocracy you do the same thing, but you have to call it differently, you call it "liberation".

Seems like its not only a drop dead stupid script kiddie trying to steal wallets, but possibly a neo nazi too.
The thought he may have lost his paypal account makes me want to cry.
Not.

FYI, eclipse pool charges 7.5% for paypal payouts.

As for volatility; you could protect yourself by selling the coins before handing out the paypal dollars. Youd give a guestimate how much the miner would get in dollar, but you only know for sure after you sold the bitcoins on mtgox. Since we are talking very small amounts here in all likelihood (no newbie is going to accumulate 100BTC from mining and have them paid with god knows what fee), the estimate shouldnt be far from the actual value.

I wouldnt pair this to donations though. This ought to be a revenue stream for you by itself, it doesnt make sense to limit your potential profit that way. Moreover, someone could just turn on donations when he wants to be paid out (and yeah, you could avoid that by only allowing blocks to be paid out when donations where set, but it would seem a lot of pointless work).

BTW, once you have this working, consider expanding the service to payout any bitcoins. So allow people to send BTCs to their bitminter account and sell them through paypal. Though you will want to look in to potential legal ramifications, Im not sure of those. If its doable, it would be a good way to make money and get traffic to your site.


Id do it slightly differently. I wouldnt make it appear as if the miner is paying for his sms messages himself from a savings account, even though to some extend, he obviously will. Enable it for anyone who donates x%, and do keep track of how many SMS he gets and how much the donation brings in, but give everyone some credit, so that even a smallish miner who activates the option gets a message 20 minutes later if a block is solved; even if he hasnt accumulated enough donations yet to "pay for it". Otherwise it may seem as if he enabled an option that costs him money and he is not getting anything for it.

Set an absolute limit for everyone (no point in sending out dozens of sms to anyone) and after 24 or 48 hours start comparing donations with costs and calculate a max number of daily SMS messages the miner is entitled to depending on his hash rate.

Again, I would do this differently. Many newbies and non newbies havent got a clue what to do with their namecoins. Use that to your advantage. One option could be donating NMCs to the pool. Im pretty sure that would be popular. I got about 100NMC in my bitminter account now, their yours once I have the option to donate them.I dont think Im alone here.


K.I.S.S.

Id offer no more than 2 or 3 donation levels max. One of them being "donate namecoins".

And just screw everyone that produced those 3+M shares?  Im sure that will ensure a loyal following.

Actually, I told you . Although its entirely possible Inaba said the same thing elsewhere, its not exactly new or rocketscience.

And unfortunately your reasoning is still flawed. Its not luck, its math. Someone finding a quick block would be far better off finding it solo. And someone with a low hashrate, who is unlikely to find a block solo, would have to feel incredibly lucky because he will be very likely to get far less than he'd get anywhere else. He too would be better off solo.

Anyway; there isnt much you can do. Only upping the bounty to 35 BTC would make it compelling again. Shows you how much there is to win from pool hopping.

Assume I have 1000GH. If I were to point it to your pool, and have an average block lenght, I would earn 20BTC bounty + my share of the block reward which would be (1.3/ 1.3+ 3.1) = 14.7 BTC. Total reward, 34.7 BTC.

Do you think Id go for it, or mine solo?

He was stupid enough to create that account from the same IP?
LOL. I nominate him for most stupid hacked of the year award