Okay so here is an example of 1 of them:

a8f7a6cc50cc51013df1d3eb55705d2791ef1635293ac3d3419fdde2b4578f49

I am pretty smart so I looked this one up in a blockchain explorer (figuring that is what you would do for me) and it simply says "not yet redeemed".

Now the question is, what does that mean exactly?

EDIT: looked up the relevant address in blockchain.info and all of them show up green and confirmed...Should I just be patient or is something I do not get going on?

Thanks for the help.

Forgive my noobness but what??   I do not quite understand what that means...

EDIT: Okay, duh.  You mean transaction id's, yes?

I just got a new payout from my pool and the new payout lists as confirmed, but now all my old payouts are suddenly unconfirmed. 

Anyone else encounter this? Should I just give the system some time??

Running version 0.8.1.

Please some advice...

So does a GPU miner like myself gain anything by using a higher user difficulty in Slush's pool?

Amen.

This really is not the discussion for that question. You should probably start a new thread.

As I noted, there were a myriad of reasons for the Euro and I won't get into the politics of it, but to say "there was no solid economic reasoning" is a bit dismissive.  The economic reasons were reduced transaction costs across states and easier cross border investment and trade.  Theories dealing with currency aggregation in regional areas date back to the 1960's.  The Euro may be unstable and/or a stupid idea in practice, but there does exist valid theory behind it.  And as a bonus, when fat, rich Americans travel to Europe they can cross borders will-nilly and spend their Euros like they never even crossed state lines.  Just imagine what economics in the US would be if every state used its own currency.  

As far as altcoins go, sure they may be viable if they are different enough, but viability does not mean they will ever be worth "real" money or possess any trade value.

Here is the real problem with all this BS alt-coin talk.  Just because it is easier for you to mine does not give the thing value.  Do you not see the endless road of this logic?  Bitcoin becomes difficult, so you abandon it for litecoin, then litecoin becomes too difficult and you abandon that for {insert next stupid alt-coin here}.

This is not how currency and commodities markets work.  When the gold became harder to find after the initial California gold rush those miners did not just use their digging tools on some other random mineral/element they decided was easier to get their hands on; gold had a value and that is why they started mining it.  Some jerk just did not wake up one day and say, "Hey I think I will start mining this yellow shit out of the ground and people are gonna pay me for it."  Gold had an intrinsic value, thus attracting miners.  

Yes, technically speaking someone did just wake up one day and invent Bitcoin and now a very modest amount of people have decided that they are willing to trade it for some value, but Bitcoin enjoys an advantage over all these other alt-coins precisely because it was the FIRST to market.  A group of mostly geeks (I say that lovingly) thought it was a decent idea and decided that they could probably use some of their excess (and thus unused) computing power to participate in this cool, new geeky thing.  It now has some value determined by a small market of people who are (supposedly) willing to trade this virtual currency for cold, hard cash.  

The Bitcoin market itself is very volatile though and still in its infancy.  It could crash and burn at ANY moment and all of use who have invested time and money would be screwed, but that is how markets and commodities work.  True, if you own a cow it will  probably never hit a value of zero, but Bitcoin ain't no cow.  It is a virtual currency and currencies rise and fall in value everyday.  They can crash and burn when they are propped up and supported by HUGE banks run at the behest of WHOLE FREAKING COUNTRIES.  Bitcoin is essentially a peer to peer trading group; for goodness sake Mt. Gox was borne from a Magic: The Gathering playing card exchange.

All this talk of "which coin do you like best" is a bunch of garbage.  Do you honestly think that you can just start minting money out of thin air by turning on your PC? That is the height of foolishness.  You have been told that things in life do not come cheap, or free or without work, correct?  Serious Bitcoin miners have spent serious time and/or money to do this.  Just because you found a currency on some web site run by some anonymous prick you have never met with some technical gobbedly-gook scheme about hashes and hexadecimal keys (or whatever) does not mean you just freaking stumbled upon something that is now gonna be the NEXT, NEWEST, BIGGEST thing to make money off of by doing absolutely nothing.

Do yourself a favor and go read a book about currency markets and basic business practices.  Have you ever heard of the Euro? Do you have any idea why they created it?  I will give you a quick answer (one of many, but this reason is relevant to the present discussion): because Europe is millions of people of different cultures living very close together and having a dozen freaking currencies milling about was a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS. So they consolidated all that mess into 1 currency to make things easier.  Now why the hell would the marketplace allow LAZY people to just decide to create a dozen new currencies with no intrinsic value, backed by no major institution, and that is volatile as hell?  What business wants to have to accept whatever stupid virtual currency you decided to show up with and take the risk that his payment will not plummet in value the very next freaking day?

So please, let's all agree that this alt-coin talk is crap.  Only 2 things can happen to solidify a second virtual currency: 1. Bitcoin is hacked so bad it is destroyed completely and everyone flees to another currency or 2. Bitcoin becomes a solid, non-volatile currency that markets and investors (not miners) can depend on, thus proving a proof of concept started by Satoshi and cementing the ENTIRE idea of virtual currencies in the first place.  

Either way, talking about "Well I like this currency," and "I like this one better because my cheap laptop mines it faster," is irrelevant.  No one can predict from here whether Bitcoin or any other virtual currency will succeed at all.

Having said all that, I support Bitcoin like a mother&*^%&.  And I will continue to mine it until it just becomes so damn expensive that only the ASIC corps are left, which is the inexorable end to this mining thing-- just look at gold mining and farming.

Do you like this rant? Here is my address. 15BpbTyRi6JbFue7PZp9gqaVtUUdh6faDx

Can top out at 360 Mhash/s but it gets hot in there real fast.

I had to try several pools before getting any positive results...

I think I understand the technical aspect of this, but can someone explain the benefits, if any?  Is this just better for big, powerful mining rigs?

RBMagillicutty,

Just got this rig up and running, my first "real" rig. Once I have enough coin spare a buck, I will keep you in mind.  Again, thanks. 

Solved: bought new RAM suggested by memory maker for my motherboard.  Everything working like a charm.

Wow. I stand corrected. RAM failed test.  Thanks, I appreciate the help.

I will gladly run these, but all hardware is brand new, right out of the box. No other errors with other programs.  CPU and RAM utilization is minimal anyway.

 But I will let you know...

Did this. Result:

"Database corrupted" And then asks to restart.

Deleted all local data, moved client to new directory and started fresh with backup wallet.  Result: crashed, with same message.

Rinse and repeat...Deleted all local data. Will restore wallet later IF I can get block chain to sync. 

I have seen other posts about this...am thinking about moving back down to 0.8. Have transactions hanging in the ether; I know they should be confirmed when I sync but this still makes me anxious.

I have synchronized 0.8 version on a less powerful PC just last month.  Just built this upgraded PC and downloaded 0.8.1.  PC has been running for days now and still will not sync. 

I have seen some posts about a manual import but those files are accompanied by warnings about "do not use if you already have a wallet."

I used all the same files (restored from backups) to initially use 0.8, prior to 0.8.1. 

Synchronization keeps jumping from 1900 block to 800 block, then back to 1900, crawls to 1800, then back to 800, then back to 1900.  This has been going on now for at least 24 hours.  CPU usage is very minimal, HDD usage is very minimal according to Performance Monitoring.

Please help.