Hashvoodoo bitstream, which shows the chips as separate rather than pairs is a little better for picking up those which can't handle it well (hardware errors).

Nicely done! Once home I will start experimenting with this.
Are you keeping tabs on how popular specific difficulties are?

This seriously needs a face palm picture.



Please tell me this is just a joke and people really have not invested, over 7k Btc in what stinks of scam?
Please someone...

How complicated is it to have multiple different share difficulties run from the same pool, and in your case I presume the same server?

Well their is a rather significant bet going on right now on GLBSE (I'm sure others are doing it else where too), by Diablo.

29.6 Btc predicts they will fail.
7.4 Btc predicts they will succeed.

So I would say a lot of people are betting they won't achieve what they said they'd do. How late they will be I don't know, but their past history for new ventures certainly does not give them good credibility for being on time.

https://glbse.com/asset/view/DI.BFLSC.FAIL

Never bother looking at that before, but their seems to be quiet a bit of feedback referring to his trade of currency back and forth.
That part is not surprising, consider what he was doing, but paypal?! seriously haha. There is your risk.

The only thing that will change any time soon and is always changing is difficulty, to maintain that blocks are not solved too quickly, by the network in general as I understand it.

Your going to have to explain that magic pony...

Well since the password can be anything at the moment, if a user puts it down as d20, that could be the difficulty they get given, if it's something that doesn't look like a difficulty request you'd use a default.

I've been mining long enough to realise merged mining means very very little difference to overall bitcoins I end up getting. Merged mining just makes it so that all these other bitcoin copies end up staying around longer than they should.

What I saw as nice was a PPS rate that is done exactly like everyone else, but with only a 2% fee, which is quiet tempting and to be honest, not having to register an account to mine their made the process really a lot easier.

Sure you could give it a face lift, but if you don't it's not the end of the world. I just want to see how my FPGA's handle doing a higher difficulty.

Just testing out your Pool, Fireduck.
Surprised it's still this small, already got my first payments came through.

Is 32 difficulty really that scary to everyone?

Pretty sure Theymos already said he will get one, under condition I'm certain given pirates recent statements said in IRC he obviously fail to commit to.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104261.msg1141973#msg1141973

btw for comparison, most of the big banks individually, usually have an total energy consumption which is measured in millions of Megawatts Annually.
Just this year, BOA said theirs was a little under 5million Megawatts annually, with hopes to reduce it by 25% over the next 3 years.

So for arguments sake, the bitcoin network is still obviously showing itself to be far more efficient, since it's still a long way off that.
With ASIC tech I don't see it ever getting that high.

My apologies, I was not around when they released it, I must of been misinformed on that part.
Maybe I took it as first to talk about FPGA's, then with all their famous delays got beaten by others.

Technically their would be less energy consumption if you only excluded the energy now not used by bitcoin.
Bitcoin is however starting to replace for some the energy consumption by more traditional methods of currency exchange, which if you are aware of how the big banks do it and how many computers are involved you'd realise they are far from energy efficient.
So one could say few years from now, if bitcoin adoption for online and global trade really picks up enough, it could save energy by not needed as many computers from more traditional methods of currency exchange.

The entire bitcoin network spread across the entire globe (assuming majority used inefficient GPU's) would be about 2400 MegaWatts a year last time I estimated it. Of course that number will start to go down pretty quickly once adoption of FPGA's and ASIC picks up, which have a 1/10 and 1/100 fold differences in energy consumption in comparison.

The worlds energy consumption is in the region of 20,000,000,000 Megawatts a year. So am I worried about a new method to trade currency, digital created for and by the community, which could make a significant difference to entire world and how it does trade, costing at the moment 0.000012% of the worlds energy. Bitcoin has spread that far, it has had an effect in some small way in every major country in the world. So am I worried?
Nope!

It's a scale thing, doesn't really put much of a dent in it. Also unlike most things as they grow bigger in popularity it's not going to consume more energy as a whole. With technology adoption going to quickly it's going to start declining on the energy consumption front, since ASIC tech is so cheap when mass produced there be no reason to sue GPU's any more. 1 years from now, it would not surprise me if that figure looks more like 200 Megawatts or less for the entire network.

Their are 2 main corps doing it right now. Think their might be a 3rd, but think it can't stalled.

One well know as the first to bring FPGA's to market... BFL. Not exactly a good reputation but they did get there first, so made plenty of mistakes in unknown territory.
The other is a new to market ASICMiner whom has been incredibly open about the entire manufacturing process, of which I did have some involvement in their first board meeting.

You may have your reasons to doubt them, but it will be done. I suspect ASICMiner will be first, just a hunch. It won't necessarily be the fastest but I don't doubt their ability for it to arrive on time well before the end of the year.

Not really, I came late to the party (bitcoins) and use energy efficient mining hardware, FPGA's, so I'm using 1/10th the energy most GPU based mining rigs would. When ASIC's come a long I'll be using those for most of my mining eventually, thus reducing my energy footprint even further.

As far as I'm concerned I do my best to move to a more energy efficient hardware, I pay my electricity bill (of course) and do my best to encourage the energy company to invest in greener ways of producing energy. In the UK is historically expensive, so their is a lot of plans in place to encourage both individuals and companies to build wind and solar panel farms, both small and large. It's taking a while but we do have some really quiet large wind farms now on this little island.

Also it's funny to hear you bring up this topic, when you aren't even paying for the electricity you use in your Apartment. The energy companies continuing to use heavy polluting methods of energy generation is a choice of profit. It's not a choice I made, their are alternatives and yes it could be done if they wanted to.

Bitcoin is not such a bad energy consuming method of generating a digital currency, that it hurts the environment and if you want to label it as such their are most certainly worst offends which never get labelled as such. It's advancement in technology it can make use of actually makes it one of the most efficient in the industry.

Some one is, so for you who isn't paying the bill yes the GPU is the better option.
*sigh*

Most 6990's can pull a hash rate of around 750-800 Mhash/s (overclocking).
Which yes is very comparable to any of the quad spartan-6 based FPGA's which do around 800.

Saying that most 6990's use about 400 to 450 watts when doing those above numbers.
Most quad spartan-6's do more like 50 watts. Big difference if your electricity costs are a major cost to you.

Cost is about the same, all depends which ones you get. Cost is a hard one to calculate since neither can operate alone aswell. In the end it works out quiet well for FPGA's, since a single pc can handle a lot more FPGA's than a single pc could handle GPU's usually.

So no they are not looking stronger, if anything the hash for has is about the same or better for FPGA's and are about 10x more energy efficient.

If you run a regular rotate between the pools? are you not going to get a few naturally occurring rejects just because it can't submit a share to the pool it's connected to when it changes over.