Sudden loss of BTC production

[racerx]

Hi All,

Im thinking nothing is wrong but I seem to have an odd production rate of bitcoins. I have a number of servers producing bitcoins (50ish cores) but all of a sudden my production seems to have halted though they all are getting new blocks, are still hashing correctly. Has the difficulty just ramped up alot or something else I haven't noticed?

Code:

gonk@prod-web2.xxxxx.net:~$ bitcoind getinfo
{
    "version" : 31300,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 88869,
    "connections" : 1,
    "proxy" : "",
    "generate" : true,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "difficulty" : 3091.73911604,
    "hashespersec" : 15913782,
    "errors" : ""
}

All the servers are ticking along fine, and they connect out thru a central bitcoin server, but no more BTC since the 26th


Cheers

[ribuck]

Well the difficulty has just ramped up to 3091.

Why don't you estimate your total khash/sec and type that into the Bitcon Generation Calculator. See if you've gone longer than the 95% expected time-to-generate at the current difficulty.

[racerx]

Will do,  but that probably wont take into account the previously generated coins at a lower dificulty.

Also, when did the difficulty go up?

[ribuck]

Within the last 24 hours.

[racerx]

Thanks for the info,

Im generating at about 76230 khash's and with the current difficulty it estimates:

Average   2 days, 0 hours, 23 minutes
50%   1 day, 9 hours, 32 minutes
95%   6 days, 0 hours, 57 minutes

Derived from a collection of hardware Im using and the hash rates I just documented here:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1628.0

So I guess that means I'm still a day away from 95% with my last 50BTC coming in on the 26th.. just odd with at least 50 a day untill then.

[racerx]

Right,

So I just discovered that my 2 6core miners (30khashes combined) have not been taking ntp updates for a while and are about 6 hours in the future. Just reading the http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=960.0 clock thread and Im thinking that might not have helped my cause.

[ribuck]

So I guess that means I'm still a day away from 95%

5% of the time you should expect to take longer than that 95% estimate.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

So producing new coins is becoming hardly worth the power needed to produce it...
Exactly as predicted by satoshi.

Recently I had to shut down minting on my computer completely, because my electricity bill went crazy...

[racerx]

So producing new coins is becoming hardly worth the power needed to produce it...
Exactly as predicted by satoshi.

Recently I had to shut down minting on my computer completely, because my electricity bill went crazy...

I agree, its not cost effective if you pay the bills.

[jgarzik]

So producing new coins is becoming hardly worth the power needed to produce it...
Exactly as predicted by satoshi.

Recently I had to shut down minting on my computer completely, because my electricity bill went crazy...

I agree, its not cost effective if you pay the bills.

... unless you own current-generation AMD/ATI GPU, of course.

[racerx]

still no coinage   must be uber unlucky

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

still no coinage   must be uber unlucky

On what hardware ?

[Marko]

Someone came in with a large amount of GPU power that day. I noticed the dent in my own GPU production as well.

[davux]

So does this mean that producing coins will be impossible to do by average people? Which would mean that the number of computers able to produce coins is reducing: it's only the big ones – the average guy is out of the way. Can it happen that in the long run, a couple hundreds, then a couple computers get the monopoly on coin generation?

[nelisky]

So does this mean that producing coins will be impossible to do by average people? Which would mean that the number of computers able to produce coins is reducing: it's only the big ones – the average guy is out of the way. Can it happen that in the long run, a couple hundreds, then a couple computers get the monopoly on coin generation?

I don't think so... it will get harder and more spaced, but I'm sure others have experienced the odd block found by the 2MHs machine, just like I do.

[FreeMoney]

So does this mean that producing coins will be impossible to do by average people? Which would mean that the number of computers able to produce coins is reducing: it's only the big ones – the average guy is out of the way. Can it happen that in the long run, a couple hundreds, then a couple computers get the monopoly on coin generation?

It's not binary in any sense, the odds just decrease, never to zero. If it used to take a GPU farm X minutes and an old CPU Y minutes now it takes them 4500X minutes and 4500Y minutes respectively. No one picks up any advantage, it gets harder by the same fraction for every imaginable set up.

In a way you could say that the faster you were then the more you lose.