From what I can tell, two points:

1. It lowers the amount of spam that hits the forums.

2. It forces people to read at least a little bit before being released into the main forums. As most newbie questions have already been answered 10x over (if not more) it lowers the number of repeat questions on the site.

While you may find the 4 hour / 5 post requirement to be annoying it will make the remainder of the time you spend on the forum a more pleasant experience overall.

Statuses don't change immediately after 4 hours, it seems that changes are done via a batch job that runs every X minutes (10? 15?).

The group buy page says $269 each:
http://www.cardreaderfactory.com/shop/lancelot-group-manufacturing.html

I think I speak for many when I say it'd be great to see another ASIC company in the market, especially one that is actually able to ship products.

If you decide to produce this I would certainly like to hear more -- and probably buy a few miners, depending on price of course.

At the moment there are no viable alternatives to GPU mining for LTC. If the price of LTC drops so that mining is inefficient then miners who are chasing short-term profits will mine different coins or just stop mining altogether. Fewer people mining means the difficulty will drop and thus profitability should go up a bit again. Rinse and repeat.

I'm not sure. It makes sense to try this first though as it's free and very easy to do.

I'm sorry to hear about the loss from your account and also about the slow service from MtGox.

That said, why did you have so much money in an online wallet? How is it Gox's fault that you had poor security on your computer and managed to get a keylogger by visiting untrustworthy sites?

It sucks that they weren't able to help you but I don't think it's reasonable to blame them for the loss or expect them to refund your lost coins.

I agree there will probably be some level of interest in China. How much impact that will have in the short term will depend on what sort of Chinese person takes an interest.

Yes, there are a lot of people in China but the average income is only a few hundred dollars a month.

Been trying to figure out just what exactly a bitbar is. Enlighten me?

Most hashes per watt is the 7970 though the 7950 does well too.

If you can get 6950s used for good prices you can flash most of them to 6970s which also do well.

You can mix and match these in one rig as long as you have enough power for them.

I am not 100% sure if it is required for every rig or if only some are affected. When it happens though Windows disables any GPUs that don't have displays attached to them.

If it does happen there are two solutions that I am aware of: Disable ULPS (easy, free, and seems to always work) or create dummy dongles you can plug into the DVI port on the card. Before someone figured out to disable ULPS the dongles were the only solution.

The 7970 does 600 to 700 megahashes/sec for BTC mining. For LTC mining you will get roughly 600 to 700 kilohashes however.

You can refer to this chart for more details:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#AMD_.28ATI.29

Yes, you can use two different models without trouble.

Run two instances of cgminer, one for each GPU.

Make sure to disable ULPS as I just described here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195550.msg2035320#msg2035320

Happy to have been of help!

Happy mining!

This is probably the best option:
https://localbitcoins.com/

The problem is probably that Windows has disabled your GPU as there is no display attached to it.

You can stop Windows from doing this by disabling ULPS via the registry:

Go to:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}]

Change "EnableULPS" to 0 under the keys that apply to your video card(s).

You should be able to tell which keys (0000, 0001, etc) apply to your video cards by looking through the keys for the DriverDesc or other information.

Technical challenges I see:

1. Security. Your site has a massive target painted on it as it stores data that represents money.

2. DDoS. As can be seen by what has happened with MtGox multiple times exchanges are juicy DDoS targets for those who wish to manipulate the market.

3. Extortion. If it hasn't happened already it will soon. "Pay us X BTC or we take down your exchange via DDoS for a week."

4. Performance. If you're successful your site needs to be able to scale to handle high volumes of transactions and high TPS rates. Designing a real-time site like an exchange to be able to scale is not as simple a task as it might seem.


That's only half the equation though as you also face challenges on the business and financial regulation side of things:

1. BTC is in a bit of a gray area right now when it comes to government regulation. That *will* change as it gets bigger and attracts more attention. You will need to be able to deal with current and future regulations.

2. Money transmitter status and regulations. Developed economies (so-called "1st world countries") have complex and strict laws that regulate businesses that transfer money. As an exchange it is likely you will be determined (at some point) to be a "money transmitter" and have to put up some pretty substantial security bonds.

3. Banks and banking laws. Banks are nervous as hell about accounts that send and receive large quantities of money to/from large numbers of people. If you're GM or some other large company this is not a problem. If you're some upstart with no history it will set off all sorts of alarms in the bank. In the past this has resulted in many exchanges having their bank accounts closed by the banks they deal with. Banks are very concerned about money laundering laws and rightly so, HSBC was just fined $1.9 billion over it.

Those are the challenges that come to mind immediately.