I'm getting the "checkpoint too old" message, and while ISAWHIM said it's okay, looking at coinchoose it shows a difficulty of 0.58231 while coinwarz shows 1.5888, which suggests to me that the sites are accessing different chains, and people are mining both.

Yes, I probably will. I don't have very high hash power, and I'm not having much luck with DMD. I'm new to solo mining and don't really understand what I see. I see tentative transactions show up, and they get stuck there. If I restart the software they disappear. Are they stale or orphaned? I also see "Number of transactions: 4", but only two transactions are showing. And that's after having at least 5 blocks accepted according to CGWatcher. So I'm confused.

Thanks. I started mining DMD yesterday and been having trouble with the wallet and network. Trying to sync from start but it's taking ages. I hope the new client helps.

Question about transaction fees:

I started using middlecoin a couple of days ago, and so far got two payments sent: one of 0.00243534 with transaction fee of 0.0069 BTC, and one of 0.00251525 with transaction fee 0.0072 BTC.

Does that mean that each payment should have been close to 0.01 BTC but that I lost most of it to transaction fees? Or does it mean that I made 0.0025 and the pool paid for the fees?

Thanks for the link.

I've been looking at mining litecoin, but it seems to me that the exchange rate between BTC and LTC depends on relative difficulty so that mining litecoin with my AMD card will give me the same dollar value whether I mine BTC or LTC. If the exchange rate continues to behave the same, then once ASIC miners raise the BTC difficulty a lot, LTC value will drop significantly, so it would make more sense to keep BTC, and therefore to simply mine BTC.

(I understand it's more nuanced than this, and I can see how short term and long term strategies may differ, but I'll let you correct me if you think this is wrong.)

I want to get into litecoins, so that would be cool.

I agree. Slush is doing good work, and his work is appreciated.

As someone pretty new to mining however, this just highlights to me how volatile this field is. After having had the little I mind stolen at bitlc the last time I tried mining, and now the DDoS and hacking here, and couple that with all the other warnings on these forum, I feel that bitcoins aren't for the weak of heart.

Plus it doesn't help that I used a password at Slush's which I use elsewhere (because it looked like the site wouldn't accept one with a comma, so I reverted to something simple), so now I'm worried about that.

(Out of the newbie area at last!)

When Slush's pool was DDoS'ed I signed to BitMinter as backup. I noticed that the rate of namecoin mining there is about 10 times faster, which tempted me to continue mining there (not that it's a really good excuse, but psychologically it feels I'm getting more "stuff").

Anyone can explain why BitMinter can mine so much more namecoins?

I have an 1090T too. That would be 23.4MH/s, which is something but I think isn't worth the power. GPU's are a lot more cost efficient. My Radeon 5750 gets 140MH/s with probably about the same power use as the 1090T would take. (That said, I haven't tried measuring actual power, and it's possible to undervolt the 1090T significantly.)

Probably to save the battery for when it's needed. Having it hooked to power all the time reduces its life, since there's still some discharge/recharge going on.

You have to be active on the forum for 4 hours, which isn't easy. Just staying logged in won't cut it, you have to at least refresh occasionally.

As for your question, most pools allow you to create more than one worker, and all of them would mine for you. Just check with your pool of choice if it's possible and how to do it. For example in Slush's there's a "register new worker" link on the account page, and in BitMinter you can do it through the Workers page.

The answer is yes. I asked a similar question recently, and got told that the coins themselves are kept in transactions, and the wallet on my drive doesn't really hold them. That's why I can send coins to it without being online.

Well, limit to 1 hour then.

Really, all I wanted was to make a comment on Slush's pool thread. I can't yet. I've been stuck here for a while. Sure, it brings more traffic to the site and ups the post count, but for anyone who comes across this forum and wants to comment it sucks badly. Since this forum is considered the official support forum for several sites (such as Slush's pool) this kind of limitation is really problematic.

Which is why it's best for those making ASICs to use them while they can make a decent amount of coins, and only sell them when the difficulty is such that it takes a couple of months to recoup the price of one.

This, more or less. Money laundering pyramid scheme.

The 4 hour requirement is pretty hard. I'm still a long way from it. Will probably take me a few more days.

When the ASICs were designed, bitcoin price was a lot lower. I imagine that at the current prices it will be more tempting to run them, because they'd make more money in a week than selling them would. Then again, I have no idea how bitcoin profits would be taxed, which might affect things.

It depends on the relative price and difficulty of BTC and LTC. I haven't mined LTC yet so I don't know if the mining rate corresponds to the difference in market value. I'm planning to try it and see if it's worth mining LTC or mine BTC and sell for LTC.

If mining really becomes unprofitable, perhaps move to folding.

A couple of links I found googling. I hope they help.