Then make a deal with the someone else's and give them a share of the revenue (possibly in return for them providing support on the software)


No harm in stating you'd only support Linux. I think most serious miners use linux anyway. At least the market for "linux able" miners is infinitely bigger than the market for people who are familiar with FPGAs.

Just my 2 cents.

Or someone figures a way to extract just a fraction of the 1.6 quadrillion tons of gold that are contained in the earth core
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/innerfortknox

The price of bitcoin is not relevant to its usefulness as a way to conduct transactions. Even if bitcoins become nearly worthless with a trade value of $0.0001, it will still be an awesome way to transfer funds. You only have to type a few more zero's when you do a transaction. Volatility is a bigger problem if its value fluctuates too much on a short timescale it would make it less usable.

I also noticed bitminter runs like a dog on my rat-rig (pentium 4 3.4 GHz). Im not sure i understand why. On my Core 2 quad, bitminter's cpu load is basically zero (okay 2%). The P4 is of course slower, (God, it really is painfully slow lol) but not 50x slower.

No biggie, bitminter is more suited for desktop users than dedicated headless mining rigs, you want a command line app for those anyway, but I found it surprising it brought the P4 to its knees. Then again the P4 has an nvidia card for now, so maybe thats somehow causing it. Even with phoenix Im seeing 100% cpu load, but the system remains usable nonetheless, unlike with bitminter.  I guess Ill find out when my new 5850 arrives.

By that logic, the sun and the rotation speed of the earth influences BTC price. Take away either  and see what happens to its value.

On average, this is simply not true.  Each 0.02 BTC a miner earns on a block could push his wallet over whatever psychological barrier. And if there are less miners earning more BTCs each, dont forget this implies BTCs are worth less, otherwise there would not be fewer miners. The only reason this would not be true is if miners act irrationally and they are behaving like speculators,  investing dollars or euro's in mining with the expectation of increasing prices. Incidentally such or other speculation is about the only thing defining BTC prices today. The networks global hashrate is a result of this price, its not a factor determining it.

I just tried, and couldnt get on it either. I wonder if some entity managed to shut it down? If its maintenance, youd expect some page saying so.

oops,  I used bitcoin.cz

Cant find any such setting in my router. But Im using the same router with my main mining rig which has extremely few stales. Then again, maybe it is related to the speed.. if it takes the nvidia card so long to finish one share, maybe the connection times out where with my main rig it does not, as it never takes 5 minutes to complete a share with my 5850.

For me its not worth bothering. But in the stats I see some with pretty slow machines (unless they turn them off frequently), perhaps you could check the stats and see if anyone is really suffering from many stales. As for how to solve it.. dont ask me

Thats cool! And that explains the lack of ssl.
So basically the traffic is all encrypted, and moreover, without the key, you have no way of knowing where the server is? Do I understand that correctly, that every peer forwards the traffic, but can not know if its forwarding to another peer or the actual server?

However it works, its pretty clever.

No, it was with phoenix. But when I ran the same miner on the same machine on slush pool for a while, I didnt have any rejects. If it helps, here is a screenshot:




I actually did put a fire detector/alarm in there And Im still gonna turn it off for the night. There is a supply of firewood in there, and its right below my bedroom.  Illl probably also add a deskfan of sorts,  as despite being so open, heat does get trapped in it. Couldnt have used a worse CPU, 3.4 GHz prescott and a motherboard that doesnt let me underclock it. And with nvidia openCL its constantly running at 100%. Thats what you get when you use scrap lol. Think I have something lower power somewhere or at least a motherboard that will let me underclock it.

Well, as I mentioned in the edit, for whatever reason it does seem to work now, only,  Im getting suspiciously high rejection rates on the slow nvidia/phoenix machine. On my main rig I have 2 rejects out of 6000+ (which is awesome). On the slow nv machine Im now looking at  4 rejected out of 27. Is that just terrible luck or because its so slow?

as for the fastest cuda miner; no matter, I was simply testing the 'case' and internet connection, running it headless etc, as the machine is tucked in a kewlox cupboard in a side building of my house:


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Since it seems to work and no fire has broken out yet, so I have just ordered a 5850 to replace the nvidia card.

edit seems to be okay now 

/edit

Is there a problem with multiple workers and/or phoenix?

Ive just brought an old rig online as test, and created a new worker for it, and I would get between 1 - 3 accepted shares fairly quickly, and then nothing for hours, while the machine was still claiming a whopping 30MH.

Ive deleted and recreated another worker and reconfigured the miner, and had the same thing. First share was accepted, then nothing.

Now Ive tried it on a different pool, and I have no problems there, currently looking at 10 accepted shared in about as many minutes?

Im using phoenix btw, as its a really old machine (pentium 4 with a geforce 8800) and I got way "better" performance with phoenix than bitminter

PM sent.

Thats just a stupid argument using hypotheticals while not distinguishing between mining for coins and mining for transactions. The latter is all thats needed for bitcoin to operate., the former is the only reason people today mine and neither has an effect on BTC value. The latter has an effect on BTC transaction costs, but just like mining, in reality the relationship is inverse and ultimately the amount of miners will be a result of the amount of BTC transactions. If no transactions are done, no one will mine. If BTC becomes more popular than Paypal, people will mine to earn those transaction fees. None of this proves your point that mining influences BTC price, it simply does not.

But the node before that, you could call exit node, no? And it could be an FBI computer.

Browse around on the site. Seems like all the sellers list their PGP private keys.
I suppose there are good reasons why they dont use HTTPS. Like, who is going to apply for the SSL certificate?
Im also not sure how secure SSL really is, Id rather trust PGP.

HTTPS would be good I guess, but its not uncrackable and might give a false sense of security. People there use PGP encryption to encrypt all their communication (at least the non retarded ones do).

And so  it "only" anonymises  you as a user. And yes people should be aware its not a substitute for encryption to prevent eavesdropping, thats no different than when not using tor, but tor does exactly what it claims to do: hide your identity (not your traffic).

Care to show me an example of webstart java malware and what it can do? Since it cant access my filesystem, I really wonder what it could do that a website could not.


Gee, I thought this was an alternative currency, trying to build an economy based on free market principles, not a non profit neocommunist experiment. Shame on anyone trying to make a profit on bitcoins! Whats next, you gonna start badmouthing BTC trade?

BTW, I know what DrHaribo is working on, and it has the potential to do more to advance bitcoin as a currency than anything I recently read on this forum. That his motive is profit is fine by me. Its the same motive driving mt gox and everyone else.

Oh, and one more thing. Making miners more efficient does NOTHING for bitcoin. Nothing, nada, niente. Think about it. If someone releases an opensource miner that doubles our hashrate, what changes?

Digging gold requires pickaxes. That doesnt mean pickaxes have an influence on the price of gold.
Unless pick axes would be so expensive that it would influence how much gold is being dug up, but there is no such analogy for bitcoin, as no matter the amount miners or their hashrate, the creation rate remains the same. Mining is a zero sum game.


Thats where you are wrong. No matter if I mine alone or 1 billion people mine with 6990s, there is only 50 BTC produced per 10 minutes.



But it doesnt matter how many ppl mine. The creation rate is constant.


Yes,clearly, that doesnt mean it influences the price of bitcoins. Its the opposite, with simple math you can calculate approximately how many miners, or more correctly, how many MH/s  there will be for a given BTC value (and a given electricity/hardware cost per MH). In the other direction there is no relationship. None.


Now you confuse mining for the  creation of coins and mining to confirm transactions. Can we agree today no one is mining for the transactions fees? Im only talking about mining for those blocks of 50 BTC, and even if no one did that, BTC wouldnt lose its value. THe opposite is true, if BTC loses its value, no one would mine. It is a direct but one directional relationship that I can put in a simple formula.

Thats nonsense, think about it, when "all BTC are mined", you say BTC value will be zero?


Obviously true. Doesnt prove that mining influences price, its the other way around.


Rational miners mine because the product of their work is at least marginally more valuable than their cost. Which is the case now, and which will on average always be the case, no matter if bitcoins are worth $0.01 or $10.000. All that will change is the number of miners distributing those 300BTC/hour.