I Hope ALL Of Your Are Running Your Bitcoin Client As Well As Greedily Mining..!

[gigabytecoin]

Even if you don't have to because you're mining in a shared pool and don't really use bitcoin yet...

I know I am!

There is strength in numbers. The larger our network looks to outsiders the more secure/accepted it will be perceived.

[Grinder]

Mainstream people aren't going to have a clue about how it works under the hood, so it won't influence their confidence in it at all.

[snedie]

I always leave mine running to accept auto payments from pools as they come available. If your wallet is on the mining machine, it really is a "Why not" kind of thing.

[Cryptoman]

I have seven clients which run 24/7, five of which are standalone mining machines.  Non-mining machines still strengthen the network by improving connectivity.

[gigabytecoin]

Non-mining machines still strengthen the network by improving connectivity.

My thoughts exactly.

[dust]

Am I correct in thinking that only clients with port 8333 forwarded are helping the network?  The 8 connections made by non-forwarded clients are all receive-only, right?

I have one of my mining boxes forwarded, as well as an EC2 micro instance (free tier, anyone could set one up to improve network strength)

[Cryptoman]

Am I correct in thinking that only clients with port 8333 forwarded are helping the network?  The 8 connections made by non-forwarded clients are all receive-only, right?

If port 8333 is not forwarded, you cannot accept inbound connections.  However, you can still forward transactions received from one of the 8 connected nodes to the other 7.  So it still helps.

[Grinder]

You can only forward to hosts that have opened the ports, and they are much better connected to the rest of the web than you, so they don't need it. You're actually just adding load to them, because they have to be hubs for all the peers that don't allow incoming connections.

[bittersweet]

Even if you don't have to because you're mining in a shared pool and don't really use bitcoin yet...

I know I am!

There is strength in numbers. The larger our network looks to outsiders the more secure/accepted it will be perceived.

I run client, I don't mine. I'm not interested in mining for profit, because I would have to wait to long. I could "donate" 5-10% of my CPU to make the network a tiny bit more secure, but not 100%. And if I enable generating coins it's always 100%. When I suggested on IRC an option to set how much CPU is used, I heard "it's open source, write it". So I laughed and never thought about enabling the generation again.

[Grinder]

Any particular reason for the 5-10%? It's pretty pointless to mine with a CPU, but if you're going to do it, there's no point in limiting to 10%. Just set the process priority to low and you won't notice it.

[bittersweet]

Loud noise of CPU fan make me notice it. Besides it increases energy usage.
Like I said, if I would ever "mine" I wouldn't do this to generate Bitcoins, the only reason would be contributing a little to network security.