Oh Right, I'd rather work in British pounds, because I am British. Nothing wrong I'm sure with the Polish Zloty, but I doubt the whole extra costs thing, maybe you don't get charged, but I do. Why because my bank charges 2.75% for a transaction fee for foreign currency exchanges into a British sterling based account. Maybe I have a greedy bank in that regard, no doubt, but I'm not going to change it for that reason, because they are rather good in other areas that are slightly more important.

Not sure what you just said, feel free to expand abit.

I think it is great to see bitcoin being used in this way, gets it noticed in the public eye more. Just hope it doesn't screw him over for taking the risk.
He probably should of thought it through a little more in how he setup donations to be sent via bitcoins, like asking for atleast a statement of whom you are before showing the address, but no ones perfect he is the first to do it.

Not having much luck with the 210 bitstream, going to move back to the new 200 one by your Makomk. I've found it to be a little more stable.
The 210 has brillant results for about 3-4 hours, but once left unattended over night, It had the lame duck effect, where one half would start mining at about half capacity.

I've just got into securities as a nice stable place to earn interest, until I feel like selling a good chunk of my bitcoins.
I like mining based securities for that safe bet aspect, so I think you are doing okay having an even spread.

Going to give the 210 Bitstream a go today. Great work Makomk.

In the region of 1000 pounds so far. That went mostly on the FPGA's.
Working out to be a good investment.

Ah yes, I see your problem. You could do it, but having a 3rd party verify your hashrates by using a pool would be them confirming the numbers.

Going p2pool from the start with that sort of hashing power would probably be a good idea. Alone you could be bigger than any other pool, unless their was a pool you really wanted to mine on.

I've only got 2 boards, so don't expect 10 to react the same, but ubuntu and windows do react abit differently to a boards and their tty/com ports.
In ubuntu the order they are plugged in usually chooses their number, lowest first. In windows generally it remembers the one that board had last time.

So the first plugged in will always get 0/1/2/3 and the second always 4/5/6/7.

Have to say that is a very pretty usb hub.

One my boards is currently happy on the shortfin200 and the other can only cope with the shortfin190.
Not sure why, can't get both to run without a lame duck effect occurring. It is good progress and I'm happy with the results.

Thank you.

I'm new to Investing via GLBSE, but I like your project, so I'll put a few bitcoins towards it.
Think I need a cup of tea first, deposit is just pending confirmation.

BFL aren't the only ones working on ASIC's, there is Block Erupter as well. Can't blame you for disbelieving BFL, I don't think they can hit their stated numbers either.
However any ASIC based products will have a major impact, since even early results are showing their 130nm design could do 1Gh/s for 10w and apparently they can just stack them. These are really cheap as well (<$1 a chip), their are other parts of course and other costs, so I have to be honest, it's the way forward. But I totally understand wanting to be able to sell up easily if it doesn't work out. Their is no other use for the ASIC outside of bitcoin really, but at their price it's hard to argue, since they'll probably be under $100.

Ram is a really unimportant area for a dedicated Rig, 8Gb is overkill, 4 or even 2 will do.
I would go with Linux based OS and an USB flash drive, really no point wasting money on Windows, also Linux is generally more stable.
For a dedicated Rig you could save some money and energy by going for a sempron.
The PSU is definitely a good make, but you could find one with enough cables for all those GPU's, but a slightly smaller wattage. If not it will do just fine.
Good choice in GPU's, they overclock/undervolt well and they will be far easier to resell later down the line.
Good motherboard, should handle it all okay.


I hope you get very cheap electricity since with the difficulty rising, block halving and more FPGA's and ASIC on the horizon, GPU's for brand new dedicated Rigs are not well advised. Sure you can always resell them if needs be, but your energy efficiency and ROI could be a problem later down the line. If Electricity is not an issue and you can get all that at a good price then by all means.

:O

That is really low price, amazing. Guess it helps to have contacts in the right place that will do it at cost price for you. Guess I'm a little to use to prices to manufacture them over here in the UK or USA. It would be more expensive.

Not everyone, but their is a lot of developers here, since after all developers are the kind of people who created bitcoin, made all the programs, software and websites that makes bitcoin possible in the first place and found it most fascinating, it took a while before other personality types saw it's potential. But they did and I'm happy about that since it's showing it's not just a geek thing and could one day be adopted to a lot more people.

It might always remain a geek thing, but I'm always interested to hear about how others intended to use it, or of course why they got into bitcoin.

I do a fair amount of programming work, and one of the projects I do for a client is for an online game, so I was doing research for e-currencies, merchant services and secure trading of currency online in general. The client really did not want to use the free to use options like Paypal and google checkout, their reputation for screwing you was well know, but he also didn't like to work with banks for the huge fees. So I had limited options and a lot of research, that maybe fell outside the normal and well known brands that many gaming sites use to discover if their was anything new or interesting out there.

I found bitcoin during all that research, bitcoin is a great project, but I could not use it for this game, it did not however stop me from being involved personally and using it for later projects. I'd been involved with things like SETI and Folding projects for nearly 10 years I think, so I saw a great potential for how it worked as a single currency, that traded just the same all around the world. Almost all my programming work is international (global), so the ideal of working in one currency without huge fees is ideal, rather than having to deal with at least 3, knowing I'm going to get dinged for big fees eventually. It's slow but I am slowly moving more clients over to the idea of paying via bitcoins.

Shortly after finding about bitcoin, I started mining on my laptop and after realising I could make a sizeable income this way, I took a big step and instead of buying more GPU's, I went in for FPGA's to really boost up my hash rate. It worked and provides now an additional income stream and is a regular talking point to other techies and market traders I know.

I might not came into bitcoin really early, but that hasn't changed how it's provided a nice income for me.

ASIC is a custom chip, they are a built to order to a very specific spec (for bitcoin mining) and in large amounts to be cost effective, usually over 10,000, however really large orders of 200k make it far more cost effective, but larger upfront costs. It's static, unlike a FPGA, so they can't upgrade it once made, it's why it costs so much generally.
So ASIC can be quiet cheap when you compare them per individual chip price, but it's a big start up cost for the designer. FPGA's are more expensive individually, but you can do more with them, and on a small scale the cost is easier to pass on without hurting their accounts.


Price could be cheaper than what BFL is offering their ASIC devices at since their first designs are on a older, but more cost efficient for them process, while BFL opted for one over 3x more expensive by the speculation circulating their numbers they saying it will do.
It however is far more efficient hash/s per watt. I'd estimate the Block Erupter chips (just the chip) will only be $5-15 a piece, but that isn't all that goes into them and also they have their own profit margins to worry about, so it won't be that cheap. But below $100 would be reasonable, since we know it's less expensive to make them.



FPGA's and ASIC will play a bigger part in bitcoin by next year, personally I do believe the use of GPU's is going to start fading, just like it did for CPU's. It's a matter of time, but it will eventually happen, some are making the step now and enjoying lower energy bills and often faster hash rates.