Difficulty just increased 52% today, so if your income was 44 BTC/day the previous week it will be about 29 BTC/day now. The new estimate is a 30% increase the next time, and if other people has been as optimistic as you that will only get higher during the week.

Guess my computer's just is really good at fooling Slush's pool, then.

poclbm will say "Verification failed. check hardware". You probably don't need to worry, at least I've never seen this from overclocking. Either it generates valid hashes, or the computer freezes. I've got a 5850 running fine at 930 MHz (default is 725). It actually didn't crash before it reached 970, but I had to flash it to put it in a Linux server so I can't really fine tune it.

With an unlocked firmware on a 6950 I get ~292 Mhash at 800 MHz and ~321 Mhash at 880 MHz, both with -f 20 and poclbm. When I'm at home I usually run it at 850 MHz to avoid too much fan noise, and when I'm away I run it at 915 MHz (~336 Mhash).

And if all the tech companies had earned as much as the speculators expected that bubble wouldn't have burst either.

Guess there'll be a lot of used Radeon 5x70 cards on Ebay in a month or so.

It's like they say in poker, superstition means bad luck. It causes you to make bad decisions, which lowers your chance of winning. The time you spend doing these things wastes cycles, and that lowers your chance of solving a block.

ctrl-c is the standard shortcut for stopping a command line program...

Can you please just fix this one problem and release a new version so people stop posting about it, m0mchil?

If you don't already have the system you can probably just forget about it. Difficulty is only going to rise, and most of those who buys big systems to mine do it to sell them, so the value of BTC will most likely stay low. The people joining BTC to mine now aren't libertarians who believe in the BTC and want to keep it to use it as a currency, they just see it as easy money. I believe this will push the price down, because the libertarians will run out of money to buy all the new BTC on the market.

Technically, all he's saying is that if prices go down they may pause at that level before they either fall further or start rising again. You can't use it to predict if prices will go up or down from that level.

It was pretty good with low invalid or stale for a while, but now it seems it's bad again. I think everybody would be better of if you just forced a 3 or even 5% fee and did the upgrades that are necessary to make the pool handle the load.

The pool is just a subset of the total mining power of the bitcoin network, so those who use a pool which throws away a lot of calculations will on average get a lower payout than they would if they mined on their own.

Everybody gets their fair share of the solved blocks. However, the total performance of the pool is lower than it could have been, so the daily payout to everybody who participates in it is less.

Since yesterday I started getting unusually many invalid or stale responses, some times up to 4 in a row. It happens on two different computers. Is there any known cause for this?

It's a combination of the fact that mining with high end cards is currently very profitable, which has made a lot of people buy more GPUs, and the Slashdot effect.

The programmer(s) of the C4C client may have taken inspiration from poclbm, but it's clearly not written in Python, so it's not a copy of it. It's also much less efficient. I tried running it, and the load on my card bounces between 80 and 95%. With poclbm it stays at a constant 99%.

I'm currently running a 5850 card under Debian Squeeze with stream 2.1. I tested it with the 6950 as well. It worked fine, so it shouldn't be necessary to use 2.3. I downloaded the drivers from AMD and installed to /opt/ without building packages, mainly because it refused to build one.

I've been trying to find a solution for the overclocking problem for days, so I think it's safe to say that going past the AMD imposed limits is not possible under Linux. You would be able to do it with the 6970 bios, though, because it's limits are higher. I ran mine with the 6970 firmware for several weeks with no problems, but as I said it's more risky. The best you can hope for is probably 5% higher performance.

I'm using polcbm on Linux as well, never could get Diablo to run. The -f parameter has a strange effect with my setup. If I set it to 1 the cpu usage on top will be zero, but the load will grow indefinitely. If I set it to 30 cpu usage will be 50%, but load stays below 0.1. You might want to keep an eye on that.

You don't really need a batch file to run it from Windows. Just make a shortcut on the desktop and using your example add
D:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110215\poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=0
to target and
D:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110215\
to Start in.

Then you can just double click it to start.

dadittox: Run the script with python -u poclbm.py

edit: guess that won't work with the exe file. Try running it from a .bat file and add
set PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
before running the program.