Interesting, so shares actually drop to 0 value if the round goes long enough? I realized they were weighted toward later submissions but not to the point at which early shares would be worth 0. I was expecting a logarithmic curve.

Between this and what the other poster suggested (that my difficulty is set too high) I think I may have pieced together the cause (yours) and the fix (his). Testing now.

I don't think that could not be the issue here. If I were completing shares but not submiting them, why would the stats page be showing that I have 384 shares. Even if the page only displays shares given instead of shares received, it would make no sense that I would pick up multiple sets of work without submitting the first set.

I have dropped my suggested difficulty from 64 to 1 though to test this.

I'm currently looking into some unusual results from slush's pool payouts. Most blocks on which I complete work (shares) receive the appropriate payouts however some display shares completed but no payout amount.
A screenshot of this issue can be found at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_G2Isi7ITVMR25OcnRBYXkwams/edit?usp=sharing .
worker name: brinebold.worker1
uasername: brinebold

Can anyone explain this behavior. Please don't just blindly guess though. If you can't test your theory or provide a definitive answer, please move along.

I don't think these are stale shares because the odds of every single one of hundreds of shares being stale in the same block and this issue occurring on multiple blocks seem incredibly unlikely.
I don't believe this is a case where no work was successfully submitted because I was apparently awarded shares by the pool.
I don't think this is a case of simply being rounded down to 0 because I don't meet the minimum for a payout because the division works out to more than other blocks for which I have received a payout.
I don't think there is a problem with that blockchain, for example, it was rejected by the bitcoin swarm, because other people received a payout for one of these blocks.
These aren't simply unconfirmed blocks because there are blocks that are confirmed that also have shares but 0 payout.

However, if you can find some way to confirm any of those theories, I'd be glad to try it.

Not really.

The time to buy a bunch of GPUs just to mine bitcoins is rapidly closing if it isn't already gone.
The time to throw your othersise idle gaming rig on to mine a few dollars is still here but probably disappearing after a few runs of the BFL miners ship unless you don't pay your electric bill (utilities-included apartments, you electric heat almost year-round, etc).

I made around $20/mo worth of BTC at current prices on my old GPU and it doesn't cost me anything but a bit of time setting the miners up to autorun at low priority. My computer would otherwise be idle and I don't pay the electric bill here. if I paid electric then I probably wouldn't do it for $10/mo.

Go in with reasonable expectations of what you get for having your computer do a marginal amount of work and you'll probably be OK.

If you're talking about buying, then it's whatever currency you currently have. If you have multiple, then buy with whatever you think is going to inflate the most in the future.

If you're wanting to sell to buy stuff now, then sell for whatever currency you can use locally.

If you're wanting to seell because you think BTC is about to inflate, then sell to whatever currency you think is most inflation-resistant.


Basically, all FOREX trading (including BTC) boils down to taking your money and leaving it sit in the currency that is deflating the most or inflating the least. Change as necessary whenever you expect the currency you're holding to inflate faster than another currency.

I'm going to pick some nits here, since you're invoking the 1st law of thermodynamics in your argument. While energy in a closed system can be neither created nor destroyed, your house is not quite a closed system as the walls do not prevent the escape of all energy. We'll ignore the loss of heat because you'd be losing it at the same rate if generated by an electric radiator too so that's net 0 in this comparison. However, you're going to export some of that energy to the internet in the form of data packets.  I haven't quite measured it myself but I'd imaginee proof of work takes up at least as much bandwidth outgoing as incoming work requests. You'll also be leaking energy through your walls in the form of EM waves (more if you use wifi) that pass through our walls without being absorbed and converted to heat.

Accounting for what probably amounts to less than 1% of the energy in use here, your logic is still sound. I have gone months later than most people before turning on a heater because my apartment is well-insulated and I have two computers running in my bedroom so I know processor-based heating really works.

Not boring, just not possible. Bootstrapping a currency that has no tangible value would be absurdly difficult to the point of impossibility. Without speculators providing liquidity to and from existing currencies, any currency without an issuing authority assuring some kind of commodity backing or a government coercing accceptance is more or less worthless.

Nobody takes it because it's not valuable and nobody values it because nobody takes it.

You are correct. GPU mining will never even come close to paying off the cards once a few hundred of these make it out the door. A few more batches and a thousand or two ASIC systems will make GPUs not even worth the electricity they cost to run. The same thing happened to CPU miners back whenh GPUs started showing up.

Under the logic that speculation from traders hurts a currency, FOREX must have ground the dollar and yen to dust by now. Speculators might cause some volatility but not having them also causes a massive amount of inconvenience and logistical problems.

Bitcoin would not be nearly as useful right now if it were not able to be exchanged to and from national fiat currencies. These speculative markets providing liquidity are really what makes bitcoin worth having until it reaches a critical mass where it's accepted nearly universally (probably not in our grandchildrens' lifetime). I'd argue that these speculators are probably the biggest boon to bitcoin's development since the original algorithms.

Think about it without your idealism and you'll realize that if you could only trade bitcoins directly for goods and services that could then only trade them to other people directly, there would be far fewer people taking bitcoins right now. The ability to cash them out and buy a plane ticket or a cup of coffee from your convenient merchants is key to early acceptance.

Translates to: I'm not buying anymore. 

No, there are no enemies as part of the swarm. Members of the mining swarm don't have the capacity to do any actual damage and that's part of the beauty of bitcoin. You can help or you can ignore it but you can't really do anything worse than neutral to it on a global scale.

They might not be true believers but they are certainly not hurting you. In fact, their interest leads them to have bitcoins in their virtual pockets and eventually they'll have to start spending them. Right now, they're spending them on Dollars and Euros but that's certainly better than nobody spending them on anything.

Yes. You do not need much in the way of CPU for bitcoin mining so your old P4 will be fine since it has PCI-e. Just don't turn on CPU mining, you want your miner to be using GPU only.

I'd take a look at http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2221/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.6.9.html and run GPU-Z to check whether your card is overheating and downclocking. If so, I would recommend pulling the clock speed down to a level where it doesn't do this. This constant downclocking is putting your GPU through massive amounts of thermal stress (orders of magnitude more than running at 99-100% constantly even if it is on the upper edges of the GPU specifications).

Also, clean out your GPU fan if you haven't. Dust might be causing overheating even at stock clock speeds.

Good thing the US Dollar and Euro don't consume electricity to produce, maintain, or transfer. Once block awards become infeasibly small and all the machines currently doing 'busywork' because there aren't enough transactions to process for useful work then BTC will be roughly as energy-efficient as any other virtual currency and several times more economically efficient than any physical currency.

Who is *they*? If you're talking about the creators, they are not benefitting from bitcoin anymore than any of the other early adopters who were doing the same for a currency that was worth exactly 0.

Other than your fans, which are actually rlatively cheap to replace with adftermarket parts, your GPU is actually less stressed by bitcoin mining (assuming it isn't overclocked) than it would be by the interimittent stresses of normal gaming. *Changes* in temperature are bad for electronics. Higher than ambient temperatures are not significantly stressful unless they are high enough to cause damage and your card will shut itself down before that point.

Again, you seem to think there is a *they* or a *he* who hands out bitccoins to people and then buys them back later for currency. The leap in logic here is astounding: why would someone who can arbitrarily create and hand out some digital item then buy that thing back when he could simply create more of it? It makes as much sense as Microsoft asking people to send in their copies of Microsoft office for cash payments.

Buyback of physical goods makes sense. Buyback of digital goods doesn't.



Bitcoin miners are verifying the cryptography associated with BTC transaction logs + some arbitrary 'busywork' work to keep the giant swarm of people doing this now from completing it too fast and creating coins at an excessive rate. They are "paid" by all the other people verifying those logs by mutual agreeement that whomever finishes this bit of verifiication work (that everyone estimates will take 10 minutes) finished first gets 25 BTC added to their account. There is no 'they' managing this system except all the people mining, including yourself.

bump. still interested in figuring this out.

This is something that the protocol is designed to handle via changes later. Once transaction registers get too long, the database itself will no longer be hosted entirely on each macine in the network and will instead be distributed (with plenty of redundancy) full database nodes will still exist but will not be nearly as common as it is now. As the network grows, the protocol can be modified to allow normal nodes to carry half the database, then 1/4, then 1/8th, and so on. The larger number of nodes will allow smaller portions of an ever-larger database to be carried on each node without risk of loss.

The difficulty level is increasing significantly right now. You may or may not see a payoff on your card purchases unless BTC prices rise again. If you're really interested though, fast AMD cards are the way to go right now with the 7970 leading the pack.

I'll give you the same advice I give everyone else: if you're looking for an excuse to upgrade your gaming rig and picking up a few BTC over the next month or two is enough to push it into 'buy' territory for you, it's OK. If you're looking to get rich quick, you're already too late.

It's worth noting that only the accuracy of the creation and distribution methods are backed by math. The willingness of people to take the things in exchange for stuff (the whole point of a currency) is just as mucch in the realm of economics' theory and speculation as any other currency. The only difference in economic terms here (and it is definiteely an interesting one) is that you can absolutely, positively trust that only X coins will be printed per day and the currency will deflate steadily over its lifetime. It'd be like if the central bank of New Zealand (one of the first to set a small inflationary goal and actually hit it reliably) took over the US Federal Reserve and then decided to set a deflationary goal.

I'm currently looking into some unusual results from slush's pool payouts. Most blocks on which I complete work (shares) receive the appropriate payouts however some display shares completed but no payout amount.
A screenshot of this issue can be found at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_G2Isi7ITVMR25OcnRBYXkwams/edit?usp=sharing .

Can anyone explain this behavior. Please don't just guess. If you don't know why and can't test your theory, please move along.

I don't think these are stale shares because the odds of every single one of hundreds of shares being stale in the same block and this issue occurring on multiple blocks seem incredibly unlikely.
I don't believe this is a case where no work was successfully submitted because I was apparently awarded shares by the pool.
I don't think this is a case of simply being rounded down to 0 because I don't meet the minimum for a payout because the division works out to more than other blocks for which I have received a payout.
These aren't simply unconfirmed blocks because there are blocks that are confirmed that also have shares but 0 payout.

However, if you can find some way to confirm any of those theories, I'd be glad to try it.