Why would you prefer to use it for internet transactions over a credit card?
Why not just use cash for physical transfer (assuming legal transactions)?

I'm curious how people see the future with regards to how Bitcoins are actually used in day to day life.  Looking at the system from a high level it obviously has a number of unique properties that clearly differentiate it from existing currencies and payment systems, but I question how many of those properties are actually positive when it comes to trading currency for goods and services.

For example, lets look at legitimate (in this case I mean legal) retail trade which is probably the most common way that currency changes hands (at least in the number of transactions if not in the total value amount of transactions).  Right now if I want to buy something I'm either going to pay cash or use a credit card.  For myself, both of these options are working out pretty well.  Cash is easy to come across, is usable virtually everywhere that I will physically purchase goods and is generally a pretty speedy way of making a transaction.  A decent credit card is going to come with a number of benefits (for the sake of this argument I'll ignore the "credit" part of it and assume it's paid off immediately) including automatic tracking of my spending, insurance on my purchased items, rewards, ability to make purchases over the internet, ability to reverse a transaction in the case of fraud, losing a credit card is no big deal, etc.

When it comes to legitimate retail trade, Bitcoin doesn't have most of the properties that make these two payment methods convenient.  It's not fast (you have to wait for enough confirmations), there's no recourse if I get scammed by a retailer, it puts the potential for loss or theft entirely into the hands of the user, and doesn't come with any of the rewards of a credit card.  Even if Amazon started accepting Bitcoin, why would I ever want to pay with Bitcoin over just using my American Express?  As a merchant I can see the desire to accept Bitcoin as it becomes somewhat equivalent to accepting cash via the internet and it lets you avoid credit card merchant fees, but as a customer I'm going to balk at making a large-value transaction without some sort of protection (credit card company, paypal, etc).

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is useless.  From a usage point of view, the primary area in which Bitcoin excels compared to current payment methods is in illegal trade.  Despite the fact that it's not currently quite as anonymous as some would probably like, I struggle to see how a government entity could completely shut it down.  Even if operating or using an exchange were made illegal, I have no doubts that if the black market continued to find a use for it (and I think that it would), there would just be black market exchanges.  The existing network of drug dealers could probably slip into this role quite easily.

From an investment point of view, the fixed currency supply and decentralization means that Bitcoin has some positive properties as an investment vehicle to hedge against devaluation of government-backed currencies.  I'm not sure how much value Bitcoin would have if there was little trade outside of investment, but either way it has a number of properties that make it unique among investment options.


Is Bitcoin "doomed" to the black market and/or investment?  Can it actually take off and compete with current payment methods?  One scenario I can imagine is Bitcoin becomes just another currency (minus the cash aspect) where your average user never actually touches the Bitcoin network and makes purchases using their Bitcoin-based credit cards, however is that actually an improvement on the current system?  Will a more mature Bitcoin ecosystem open up currently unavailable possibilities?  I would like to see Bitcoin succeed, however I struggle to see how it actually becomes useful to your average person.

Absolutely, it'd be a tough balance between keeping the time window long enough to give the desired accuracy while keeping it short enough to be useful.  I'm sure someone with a statistics background could figure out the needed time to get a small enough margin of error.

As far as turning the worker red, you could probably base that time interval off of historical data, e.g. if I've been working at X Mh/s over the past 24 hours then you should be able to figure out that 99% of the time you should see a new share in under N minutes.

Only other thing I can thing of would be to change the "Total Shares" statistics page to show "Your Shares/Total Shares" to see how much you contributed to each found block.

Really though these are all superficial changes to how the data is displayed so they're all just polish and not really important.  Functionally there's not really anything that I find lacking.

One thing that I'd find useful is extending the worker's table under "My Account" to display hash/s for the past 30m/24h/all time.  Since I've got this all running on a separate box I find it's much easier to visit your site to check on my miners than to get to the miners directly, and if I'm not at home it's the only way that I can check on them.  Turning the worker red when it hasn't received a share in 30m is useful, but only detects complete failures, it doesn't detect misconfiguration (e.g. I forgot to overclock a card or accidentally ran two miners on a single GPU).  To keep things clean you could probably remove the password and reward columns since they only change when the user changes them.

Great job with the site/pool so far though, definitely worth the 3% it for all of the benefits it brings.

When running in linux I noticed that poclbm showed a reduced hash rate when I lowered the memory clocks under 900Mhz, however DiabloMiner has stayed steady all the way down to 160Mhz.  IIRC poclbm wasn't having that problem when running under windows.

Unfortunately not as far as I know, it appears to apply the settings to all GPUs (at least in the case of my multi-5870 setup).  If you're just looking to have different memory clock settings through what you can do is use the utility to set all of the clocks down to 160Mhz (or whatever your GPU minimum is), then if you go back to aticonfig you should have the full 160Mhz-1300Mhz range available to set as you like.

I'll also note that I've found the overclocking utility to be a bit flaky, sometimes it will fail to set the clocks (if you run it from the terminal you'll see it print errors).  I've gotten it to set everything eventually by turning down the clocks in increments (set to 900Mhz, then 600Mhz, then 300Mhz, then 160Mhz).

It looks like the 5870 is using ~30-35 fewer watts @ 160Mhz mem vs. 1200Mhz mem, pretty huge savings.  DiabloMiner doesn't seem to care about the memory speeds either.

I found a solution using "ATI Overclocking Utility" referenced here: http://www.overclock.net/software-news/514993-phoronix-ati-overclocking-utility-linux-2.html#post6338431

There should be instructions on that page for installing it.  On ubuntu I also had to "sudo apt-get install libqt4-network" in order to get the util to run.

This utility appears to change whatever values aticonfig is using for bounds so once you lower the memory speeds in the utility it will expand the range available to aticonfig.  I could clock my 5870 as low as 160Mhz, however anything under 900Mhz or so seemed to affect hash speed (~340MH/s @ 900Mhz, ~290MH/s @ 300Mhz using poclbm).

I'd be interested in this as well.  With my 5870 under Windows the CCC would only let me bring the memory speeds down to 900Mhz, however using MSI Afterburner I could bring them down to 600Mhz so it should be possible without flashing the bios or otherwise modding the card.

As for reasoning, the hash performance always stayed consistent regardless of the memory speed (which makes sense since mining barely requires any reads or writes), but dropping the memory speeds from the default 1200Mhz to 900Mhz results in lower temperatures and saves ~10-12W.