one major issue with this is that the difficulty will always be increasing no matter how many or more importantly how few miners there are.

It is a shame that the CIA World Factbook does not just return numbers for population of each country.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2119.html#rs

I would find it hard to believe that AMD(ATI) have not noticed some rise in their profits recently and that they would not try and capitalise on it. But as to whether they can bring some low power product to market, at a price people are willing to pay, in less than a year is a different question.

Did you watch the video in the OP ?
The bill is to allow the US government to work around the issues caused by a privately held company which they can't control to protect the US people.

I suspect that the H.R. 1098 bill will be passed, because only very rich people hold any significant amounts of gold/silver. And if it passes, their gold/silver will suddenly be worth double, triple or a hell of a lot more.

Why do you want to make a bitcoin mining pool ? Can you not just point your miner(s) at an existing pool and have a second failover pool configured as well ?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

But if you really do want to do things the hard way
Read this before you decide - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8707.0
And this if you really really really really want to do it then read this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10321.0

But to be honest unless you have 10-100+ Ghash/second mining power there is very very little to be gained. The transaction fees are currently about 0.01%, which is not enough alone to pay for the added cost of dedicated pool servers and the large amount of additional network traffic. And expect thousands of people asking you questions no matter how good your documentation is.


If you have to ask these type of questions, you probably shouldn't try and setup a mining pool. Why am I'm thinking to myself that I just handed a loaded gun to a 2 year old to go and play with. Did I just say that out loud ?

Line 82 of the script has a tiny mistake.
It is:
TIME=`+%s`
And it should be
TIME=`date '+%s'`

Looks like a great script - sent a donation.

Very nice. Now all that is needed is an IP map like http://nsa.unaligned.org/ or http://xkcd.com/195/

EDIT: Actually you kind of have that covered by the country graphs. Great stuff, will be very interesting to watch over the coming months and years. Sent a donation.

Please read the two lines in green on my last post.

If one person spends 5K on mining equipment, or 20 people together spend 5K each on mining equipment, they will not magically get extra Bitcoins from nowhere.

So if one person spends 5K on equipment and joins a pool, any pool, they will get almost the exact same number of BTC's as joining up with 20+ other friends. Maybe 0.01% less (if the pool keeps the block generation fees) and maybe a percent or two less if the pool charges for their bandwidth costs and server(s) rental/purchases. But the same extra, hidden, costs if not more would exist for 20 people mining together.

$ echo "4*365.25*24*6" | bc
210384
$ echo "8*365.25*24*6" | bc
420768
$
(the above numbers are once every 4 years, 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day and 6 block every hour AKA one block every 10 minutes)

So after block number 210384 the Generation value will half to 25BTC per block. (circa 1 year 3 months from now)
And half again after block number 420768 to 12,5 BTC (circa 5 years 3 months from now)

But I'm inclined to agree with Gabi and nmat

True, but the current block generation fees it really makes no odds whether a pool shares them with the miners or keeps them. I do agree that every little bit helps, but at about 0.01% that is still only 1 extra Bitcoin for every 100ish blocks generated.

I suspect that the Original Poster does not fully understand how mining works.
(took me a second to work out what OP stood for)

Maybe an example would help.
At current difficulty of 1777774.482
@ 1Ghash/second (solo mining) you would probably find a block once every 88 days, 8 hours, 59 minutes (on average)
@ 10Ghash/second (solo mining)  you would probably find a block once every 8 days, 20 hours, 5 minutes (on average)
@ 100Ghash/second (solo mining) you would probably find a block once every 21 hours, 12 minutes (on average)

Note the magical words above "average" and "probably". Lets take the 10Ghash/second rate of searching for a nonce to generate blocks.
So the average is 8 days, 20 hours, 5 minutes, but this is all statistics so you will have a 50% chance of finding the nonce to solve the block after 6 days, 3 hours, 0 minutes, and a 95% chance of solving a block after 26 days, 11 hours, 23 minutes. It is all down to luck and statistics. The reason why almost everyone joins a pool these days is because a pool smooths out the rough patches. Solo mining you could be really unlucky and the first few blocks you find will take 26+ days each to find, or you could be dating lady luck and the first few blocks take less than a day each to find.

On average at 10Ghash/second (at current difficulty) you will in the long term find blocks at the average rate of one block every 8 days, 20 hours, 5 minutes.

Joining a pool increasing the hashing power so the pool will find blocks faster, but not faster than the combined rate of all it's miners. If the pool consisted of 3 miners one at 1Gh/sec, one at 100Gh/sec and you at 10Gh/sec the combined rate (at the current difficulty of  1777774.482) of 111Gh/sec would one average generate a new block every 19 hours, 6 minutes.

But statistics are still at play so there is a 50% change of find a block after only 13 hours, 14 minutes and a 95% chance of finding a block after 2 days, 9 hours, 14 minutes.

There is no magic involved you mining at 10Gh/sec will still end up with, on average, 50 BTC after 8 days, 20 hours, 5 minutes.
The pool in total, on average, should have mined 555 BTC after 8 days, 20 hours, 5 minutes.
500 going to the 100Gh/sec miner (10 times more hashing power than you).
50 going to you mining at 10Gh/sec and
5 going to the 10Gh/sec miner. (10 times less hashing power than you).

There are only two ways for the amount of bitcoins you receive to increase. One is for you to add more hashing power, the other is for the difficulty to decrease. It has been trickling down over the last few difficulty re-evaluations. And it is predicted to decrease at the next difficulty adjustment in 94 blocks time to about 1750233. But that is not going to increase your possible income by any significant amount.

Pool mining, solo mining or a group of friends buying hardware will not increase your average generated BTC's, It is purely based on your hashing power and the difficulty. The difficulty is adjusted up/down every 2016 blocks generated, circa every two weeks, to match available hashing power to try and keep the new block generation rate on average once every 10 minutes. So as more hashing power joins the Bitcoin network the difficulty increases, and if hashing power leaves the difficulty will be reduced.

+1

All you would get extra are the block fees, which are next to nothing (circa 0.01%). Even if you were pushing double to triple digit Ghash/second they are still relatively nothing (at the moment) In a few dozen years the fees MAY be more than the block generation value.
e.g.
Generation: 50 + 0.0178 total fees
Generation: 50 + 0.0015 total fees
Generation: 50 + 0.0235 total fees
Generation: 50 + 0.0045 total fees

EDIT: I forgot to say, with the link,  that shuffling the deck before every single hand is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that card counting is dead.
http://casinogambling.about.com/od/blackjack/a/shuffler.htm

Thanks for informing us of the issue (a lot of sites don't) and especially for the work involved in bring the site back online.

That is true, apart from it is not at loss it is heating the house during winter. So in effect it is subsidised heating. But come next spring it will be time, for me anyhow, to stop mining and buy Bitcoins.

export/dump all the private keys from your 20 wallet.dat's - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8091.0
import them all into a new wallet.dat
now with an empty folder, apart from your new wallet.dat, download the block chain again.
(your client will show 0.0 BTC until the entire blockchain is downloaded)
Or else run bitcoin with the -rescan option, but it may not work this way.
(keep all wallet.dat files in case something goes wrong, always good to have backups)

With Catalyst 11.7 and later under windows this is no longer required. And it was required to allow the OS to be able to use the cards, but that is not your problem since you can see all 6 GPU's.

Do you have the same wallet.dat on two or more machines ?

See this thread

What are the temperatures like ? Any cooling issues ?
Very high temperatures can force the GPU's to underperform to avoid physical damage.

EDIT: Just checked through your previous posts for more background information. And since you already have 4 Ghash/sec of mining equipment running you know all about good cooling. You can ignore my questions.