I think you have that backwards. Most of the time the big whales are accumulating (buying) when the price is down and then they distribute (sell) their cheaply acquired coins for higher amounts as the price rises. This simple concept is why they stay rich and everyone else stays poor.

To expand on this, notice when BTC was down around $200 last year there were plenty of "sell before it goes to 0" type of posts and a lot of people were predicting the end, "get out while you can". There were probably a good many people taking that advice and selling their $400, $600 or higher coins for half, or even less value, thinking it was better to get something than nothing for their coins. Meanwhile, the smart money was buying, and probably many of the same ones buying were also the ones that were talking the FUD up in the first place. This was the accumulation phase.

Now early this year when the price was near $450 all those people who were posting the end is nigh, sell me your coins, are the same ones who now are posting advice such as "buy now while its cheap, moon tomorrow" while they were secretly selling you their $200 coins at over 2x profit. This was the distribution phase.

Granted, with Bitcoin it is more spread out and not as clearly defined as with many of the alts where you can plainly see this pattern much more readily, but the concept is quite the same.

Credit Cards do indeed charge a fee, although most times this is to the merchant and not directly to the customer, although the merchant certainly passed this fee along to you in the form of higher prices. While you often will not see direct evidence to this as most places will set their price to offset this fee to be spread out to all customers, some place will offer a discount to certain forms of payment.

In my area gas stations are a good example of this concept as cash customers can pay 3-5 cents less per gallon than credit card customers.

Some online vendors do the same with Bitcoin payments, by offering a slightly less price when paying with Bitcoin than with credit cards. One example of this is at a precious metals dealer, where they will usually treat Bitcoin payments the same as cash or bank wire as far as fees are concerned and Credit Card users pay a higher premium.

Here is one such example from Amagi Metals:

If you have 21 BTC it is actually closer to $8,400 at today's value ($400/btc).

But yeah, I also have BTC spread among several addresses, so I do not think simply counting how many addresses hold => 21 BTC is a reliable measure.

Just to keep things simple to start, this line should be all you need:


You can add any additional parameters once you get the basic setup running.

Did you check Device Manager to see if all 3 GPUs are showing up? It should look like the image below, but with 3 just gpu's showing:

I am actually mining with several makes/models, but the 2GB ones are mainly the R7 370 model. I have one rig with 4x of these doing about 60 MH/s on ETH and up to 70-75 MH/s on EXP. When mining ETH I am earning about 1.3 ETH/day on Dwarfpool for this rig, or about $9-12/day after power costs and depending on ETH's price any given day.

I am not sure how long before 2GB cards will remain viable, but looking at the DAG file growth it seems to be increasing at a rate of roughly 8 MB every 6 days, or 1.35 MB/day. I am assuming it can grow close to 2 GB in size before the cards quit working. With let's say a 1.9 GB limit for sake of argument, and the current DAG size of 1.4 GB, this would give 500 MB room yet for growth. So 500 MB/1.35 MB day would give about 370 productive days yet for mining, or about another year.

Ok, I thought maybe there was a new development or something. 

Even if that was the case with those cards, I doubt that enough older cards were in operation to affect the mining difficulty much. I think it has to do more with the day-to-day price swings, it seems some miners are very price sensitive and we can see hash-rates drop in concert with price.

Explain please. I am running several 2GB cards right now and have not seen any DAG allocation size error, they are currently mining just as well as my 3GB and 4 GB cards.

Yep, it is only around 1361 MB in the card right now.

I just picked up (4) R7 270 cards and am playing around right now trying to get them to work a little more efficiently, so this post made me think of it again.

BTW, anyone else using these cards and have any tips? I am thinking of volt modding these down a little bit to reduce the power draw. Right now I am getting about 62 MH/s (pool) from all 4 pulling 550 watts from the wall, would like to get under 500 watts, even down to 450 watts if possible.

So what you are basically saying is you think that the stage Eth is currently at is most comparable to BTC's first rise to $50?

This is indeed interesting as I was originally figuring Eth was roughly operating on roughly a 1/20th scale of BTC, meaning that the $15 recent peak equated to BTCs $270 top and that we could expect to see a ~$60 peak this summer. According to your view on things this actually would be closer to 1/3 scale and we could potentially be looking at a $400 top...

Well that pretty much ends this weeks program ladies and gentlemen, we hope you enjoyed the show.


Agreed. It is more than apparent this was simply a troll-fest to get peoples hopes up and play with their emotions. Classic textbook trolling.

Yes, I fail to understand why people think more coins is somehow bad. Everyone talks about once mass adoption hits, blah, blah.

Well Bitcoin only has 21 million coins, and even less than that will be in circulation due to lost coins. So even if we use the US as an example, with a population of ~350 million people, let's even half that figure to cutout children and married couples, and even rounded down some more to 150 million people, you can see we have a problem already. This means a hypothetically evenly distributed coin (in this case BTC) would only allow each person to own about 1/7th of a Bitcoin.

So using the same figures, even 226 million coins is, as TreasureSeeker stated, a minuscule amount. If it were to become a truly mass adopted coin, most people will want more than one, so with more than 7 billion people on the planet, you would probably be even ok with a coin with 100's of billions in distribution.

Sure, they won't be worth big huge numbers in such quantities (DOGE for example), but if you really want mass adoption you need coins to distribute. I know Bitcoin tries to get around this by saying it is divisible to 8 decimal places, which is true, but most humans like to own whole amounts of things and not fractions. That is why I have 1 dollar, 20 dollars, 100 dollars, or even 1 million dollars as a dollar is small enough unit most everyone can have one or several of them. Imagine if we used the million dollar point as our "base" unit, I would need to walk around saying I have 0.0000001 million.

But as you can see this simply ends up being a case of moving the decimal point around, so really in the end 21 million coins valued at $500 is no different than 210 million coins valued at $50, or even 2.1 billion coins valued at $5.

Probably not, but then again how many would have known about Bitcoin back in 2013 if it wasn't pumped to $270 by (I believe) the Winklevoss twins. That brought in a lot more people that helped to push it to $1,200 later the same year. So why would this be any different? If it follows BTC's pattern, this initial pump will be sold off quite hard and then it will stabilize and grow more naturally.

The question now is, was this latest ETH rise equivalent to BTC's first $270 pump, or the second more spectacular $1,200 pump?

I am unclear as to your statement. The ATH was just set on the 14th, meaning it would need to beat its high from only yesterday. So you think if a coin does not beat its ATH day-after-day it is a PnD?

I also sold a lot (not all) yesterday during the run-up to 0.037 as I had a feeling being on the new exchange would knock it down somewhat. I missed the dip when it went under 0.027, but I am thinking in the days ahead we will go down some more so there should be plenty of buying opportunities coming up.

I am still on the fence, probably 50/50 whether ETH is the real deal, or simply a hyper-inflated bubble, but the ups and downs sure provide plenty of profit opportunities. I will have to monitor the downtrend closely to see if it is simply a dip or the beginning of a prolonged downturn. I guess in a month we should know one way or another.

The ETH price held up better than I thought it would for its first day on Bitfinex, after a slight dip it is basically back to where it started. This coupled with the DDoS against Poloniex, I was surprised it didn't drop lower. Maybe the homestead release is offsetting any downward influences for the time being.

One interesting thing is many people were predicting Bitfinex would bring a lot more ETH/USD trading to the table, but it was surprising to see the first day volume with ETH/BTC at $ 1,889,180 and ETH/USD at only $ 441,813 in trading volume.

That is my point, your argument is we don't matter, we just take whatever the big pool operators or big miners tell us to take (i.e. shut-up and be happy) That's where I think the beginning of the end will start. So how is what you are saying, "I as a user don't matter" is any different that what we already have with government and banks telling us what we can do and not do with our money. They make the rules and we just live with it.


Again, we already have enough people doing this to us everyday in our lives, so now we have Pool Operators and Large Miners also wanting to join-in and tell us they know best and its for our own good.

I don't think the concept of a pool itself is so bad, but do agree that mining should be spread to more than just 3-4 super-pools. Maybe 30-40 pools would be better, but unfortunately most miners are just out for immediate profits more than they are looking out for the long term health of a coin. What I would like to see is more emphasis on non-asic mining. Even with GPU mining, at least the average person has somewhat of a chance to stay in the mining game. Once a coin switches to dedicated hardware, home miners quickly become out-priced with both hardware and electrical costs. Of course there will always be the mega farmers in warehouses located where there is cheap electricity no matter what, but I think the move to totally dedicated asic hardware was the death-blow to most home mining.

New coins such as Ethereum with memory-hard algorithms seems for now to be resistant to this, so while the difficulty is still going up, it is still possible for many home miners to make a ROI and then a bit extra. I think to maintain decentralization this needs to be a requirement going forward. It will be interesting to see how much more Bitcoin mining centralized after the block halving, as I am sure many borderline miners will be forced to turn off their unprofitable rigs. Fast forward another 4 years, and we will again see another halving further reducing the number of miners, etc until is all in the hands of a few big players.

I would think in addition to keeping mining on platforms available to the most people, GPUs are probably more preferable to CPU only as to avoid botnets, but there would need to be a way to minimize the electrical cost to help even the playing field. So maybe some hybrid GPU PoW, with a storage cost attached, such as needing 1 TB HDD space for each mining instance. I don't know what, if anything would work, but believe any coin with a true chance at decentralization will need to keep mining accessible to the masses.

That little piece right there tells me all I need to know.

So for just us "little old users" we don't matter? Seems you revealed your true intentions right there. Good luck supporting all those miners and Pool Operators without us non-important users funding the entire thing. Your whole argument is about Blocksteam being up to no good and manipulating the system, and here you are calling for a select subgroup to front-run everyone else to meet your own goals.

Truthfully, I don't know which side to believe, but I think "as lowly a user" being thrown under the bus to advance your own agenda isn't going to help.

Lol, good call Bob. Even they were too lazy to change the timezone in the profiles, all show the exact same "local time" value, or basically the default GMT. After checking all the ones on your list, I decided to randomly check peoples profiles in a different area of the forum, sure enough they would for the most part be set to different time-zones, presumably of their home. I know none of this is conclusive, but it sure seems to add a bit more credence to the fact that most (or all) of these are shill accounts.

The latest version of the Mist wallet https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases is pretty much ready to go out of the box.