Why Iran? Its one of the few countries in the region where women actually have rights, where there is at least  some limited form of democracy and freedom of press and expression. And yes, Im quite aware of how limited those are, but if you are insane enough to start a war because you dont like how other people run their own country, at least start with Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Compared to those, Iran is almost a secular model democracy.

I need some help with this.

Situation: some miner rigs running cgminer on windows are behind a firewall that cant be controlled. I need to access the API remotely, so get around the firewall. VPN seems like the obvious solution, however I dont want the getworks and longpolling etc to go over the VPN, only the API traffic.

From what I gather, this requires a split tunnel. This seems to be relatively straight forward to configure on linux, but does anyone have a clue how to do this with on windows? Im looking at OpenVPN but the documentation is a bit ... overwhelming and I dont see anything like what Id need.

Other suggestions besides VPN are welcome too. On linux Id try SSH reverse portforwarding, and in theory Putty should enable that on windows too, but I cant seem to make it work.

It should be possible to find out now if the coins used to pay GPUmax users originate from pirates trust. Would be interesting to see someone try to connect them, but Im skeptical.

I got that startup bug again. Launching BS I get a black screen with just the title bar. Pressing the 'back' button on my phone takes me to the main screen and then everything seems to work. So its really not a big issue, just a minor inconvenience. Using V0.5.3b

Thank you. 5BTC sent.

Hmm.. interesting. Kinda hard to believe tho.
Would you mind doing some testing, by shutting down the fans on your radiator and allow the water temp to go up, and see if there is indeed a tangible impact on power consumption?

I think its more likely you accidentally changed something else, say, something that lowered CPU usage, but it would be worth checking.

I think the most important question to ask yourself is: what can I offer that existing pools dont offer yet?

You will have to come up with something, because unless you have a huge farm yourself, you will not be able to offer low variance (when opting for PPLNS or DMG) or low fees (when using PPS) simply because you will not have 100+GH like most established pools.

Its a chicken and egg problem thats proven difficult to solve, even for pools that have been around for a long time. Have a look at Mt Red, currently offering PPS with no fees (= certain bankruptcy at some point) or Bitminter (PPLNS with no fees). Both are great pools, yet struggle to attract enough miners.

What do you think you will do better?

I meant shares as in hashes. GPUmax isnt the only place you can buy shares/hashes to point to a pool and get clean coins, everyone and their dog is offering mining contacts, no one seems to get anything like GPUmax prices for them tho.

sure, a lot of gpumax volume can be traced back to regular pools, maybe all of it (for now), but that doesnt solve the mystery, if anything it adds to it, because even deepbit seems to be getting a fair amount of gpumax traffic, go figure.


Sure, but even for dollars, afaik criminals usually dont pay 50% for money laundering.  For something which already is as difficult to track as bitcoin, I just dont see that as a likely explanation, not at those prices, and those volumes. It also doesnt explain why they would use gpumax exclusively and not jump on other occasions to buy mining contracts that would clean their coins just as thoroughly for just a fraction of the cost.

Im not quite buying the OPs conspiracy theory, but  I admit I got no better answers to his most pertinent questions either, and Ive been wondering for quite a while.

Another issue to add to the list, is that shares offered for sale outside gpumax dont seem to attract anything like the rates GPUmax gets. If there is such a market for hoppers/gamblers/pool testers wanting to buy shares at 150% PPS or more, why arent they bidding on contracts like the one in my sig and other similar ones?  Apparently gpumax offers those buyers something that regular miners cant. I just cant see what.

Lastly to throw some oil on the fire, a quote: "GPUMAX is something much bigger that it appears and until that information is public all i can say is wait for it."

None of that proves its evil or a scam, let alone a government front to destroy bitcoin, that seems rather far fetched;  but I sure am curious what it really is.

Looks like I signed up at a bad moment; the problems described above have been solved, and the VPS has been stable and very fast since.  Support is quick to respond.

Its too early to draw broad conclusions, but since there are so few testimonies in this thread, I thought Id let you know;  if this keeps up, Ill be a happy customer.

Compared to buying at gpumax, its a 50% discount!

I assume you can ship the cpu in a bubble envelope world wide with regular mail?
If so Im interested, but I would like to use escrow or pay after receiving, given your low post count and that of the other buyer.

Jason,

Thank you so much for finally producing some numbers.

Since the initial announcement of butterfly labs last year Ive been speculating they used HardCopy to achieve their original claims (1GH/s 25W IIRC), because it seemed to make perfect sense.
 Your numbers even far exceed what I would have expected. Even if you take them with a few table spoons of salt, its hard to understand no one seems to have gone down this route yet. Unless BFL actually did, but on a much older, cheaper design and process.

Is there a way to guesstimate power consumption in your simulation?

As a workaround, you could run several instances of cgminer, each managing 8 or whatever # devices works. You can define which devices each instance manages by using --device.

In the long run, I think its clear the GUI has to be separated from the miner, so ckolivas can concentrate doing what he does best, and any half competent dev can make a gui using the API. Of course then the API should work and not crash, its something I havent heard before, I hope someone looks in to that.

In that context, Id also like to bump my earlier feature request:

Got another feature request for the API. 2 in fact:

1) be able to read the worker name of a pool over the API
When using multiple workers for things like GPUmax, its currently impossible to distinguish between them. I can understand password being hidden, but the username is even visible on the screen, so why not expose at least the worker name over the API when calling the "pools" command ?

2) ability to delete pools over the API.
This has been discussed before, but its possible to do it in the CLI, it would be great if this were enabled over the API too; its one of the last things an alternate GUI using the API cant do.

Ill pledge 2.5 BTC for each feature if they make it into the mainline.

Dan zal het dat wel zowat zijn voor een 7850 vrees ik.
Is dat trouwens niet gewoon een herstickerde  6850? Die haalt namelijk hetzeflde.

OP, if you are still looking, there is an auction for a 1 million share mining contract in my sig.

Ik weet echt niet wat een 7850 zou moeten krijgen, maar probeer deze settings eens:
worker size  256
manual vectors off

de rest op default

Probeer bitminter eens.
https://bitminter.com/

I represent a consortium of miners who have combined (dare I say, pooled?) their hashing power and now for the first time, we offer some of our hashing power for sale publicly. This first public 1M share auction is a test for us, and if successful, there may be many more similar, bigger and smaller contracts auctioned off, either here or on Bitmit.

Buyer will receive  1 million bitcoin difficulty 1 shares delivered to any pool he choses.

Delivery will begin no sooner than 26/04 and will be completed within 7 days (note, difficulty will change on the 26th).

Starting price for this auction is 1 BTC, bid increments will be 0.1 BTC minimum

This auction ends on Monday the 23th at midnight (UTC), or one hour after the highest bid was posted, whichever is later (to avoid ebay style sniping), but no later than 12hr after the original closing time.

Highest bidder is expected to pay the full amount up front within 48 hours of winning the auction.

Some questions you may have:

- Can this be delivered at *any* pool? P2pool? 110% proxy pools? GPUmax?
In principle, yes, assuming the pool is functional, can handle the load and you can provide us with several valid worker credentials.
If you want your shares delivered at P2Pool, you wont get 1M shares, since they are not difficulty 1 shares, but if we can work out the equivalent, then we can mine at p2pool (if you provide the workers).

- Can this be used for poolhopping?
Probably not. All 1M shares will be delivered to the same pool and we only guarantee you will receive your 1M shares within the 1 week time frame, we dont guarantee a minimum or constant mining speed or more precise timing.

- Can you guarantee delivery on time?
Yes. 1M shares per week is only a small fraction of our combined hashing power, we intend to run multiple such contracts concurrently in the future.

- Do you accept escrow payment?
A mutually agreed escrow service is acceptable, but the escrowing costs are for the buyer.

- Is this contract for 1M accepted shares?
No. The contract is for 1M shares, including rejects. Because we dont know what pool you will want these delivered to, we can not assume the risk of unusual high reject rates at some obscure pool. However, if the pool is working properly, you will not see more rejects than usual.

- How will you handle unexpected problems, like pool issues or other disputes?
Like adults and in good faith.  In principle the payment is non refundable, but if for some reason the contract can not be fulfilled in time, because the pool is down or for other unforeseen circumstances we will either agree to change pools, change dates or refund you pro rata the amount of delivered shares. We are reasonable, and our goal is just to be paid for our shares, not to profit from contractual loop holes. We expect the same from the buyer.

- I'm a miner, can I join this consortium?
Not at this point.