Looks like Eligius' bad luck continues

Noticed that bfgminer was halted and my miners were sitting idle. I've had to switch back to bitminter

Long live Eligius and WK

WK, do you normally operate this pool by yourself? If so, kudos to you and the work you're doing. You need to be skilled in a lot of different areas to run an operation like this and I know the pain you're going through.

The only thing I have to say to anyone who wishes to question credibility of the pool, is that I started mining for perhaps 2-3 weeks with Eligius early December and then hopped around to a few different pools to get a comparison. I had withdrawn all my bitcoins at Eligius and had stopped mining for around 2 weeks when I discovered that I curiously had an additional pay out from Eligius, worth about half a day's mining at the time. I don't know why I received this additional pay out, but I had seen the pool experience various issues during the time I mined there, and I knew that some manual reconciliation was occasionally required after these problems occurred. No doubt this additional payout was part of a manual reconciliation.

So even though the problems have not been completely resolved yet, I'm still happy to mine at Eligius because I trust what I have seen with my own eyes.

Thanks for all the good work WK.

Edit:
And the second I post the pool comes back up.

Cex has 2 types of mining: the mining which you as an individual bring to the pool (like any other pool), and the hosted mining they offer for people to trade in BTC and NMC. The two do not mix. Cex themselves supply all of the hosting for the hashpower that gets traded on their market, i.e. Cex is in total control of the supply of hashpower in the market - they are supposed to act as "market makers".

The way that Cex does it is they add more hashing hardware in their hosting facilities and then they sell it onto the market at the market rate (which means that Cex earns the bitcoins for these trades) and the price is, of course, set by supply and demand. If Cex did not increase the supply of GHS in the market, you would actually see a rise in the cost per GHS because of more miners coming to the pool with greater amounts of bitcoin fighting over the same amount of supply (yes, this would happen despite the return on holding GHS decreasing as the difficulty increases).

So the reason why I left Cex, is because I don't trust them to add hashpower to the market efficiently in a way that has a minimal effect on the price. They could be as clumsy as adding 5TH/s and dumping it all onto the market at once causing the price to crash, or they could be smarter and dribble it in over time. You just don't know, but I guarantee they are not as smart or as experienced as the traders in a commodities market.

And the problem with "economics" is that none of the models actually reflects what happens in the real world (maybe a silhouette at best until a bubble bursts and they all stand around looking dumbfounded wondering how did that happen because that's not in their model), and that people who call themselves "economists" are complete shams too.

Here is the reason why I'm investing more in bitcoin:

Our monetary system requires an ever expanding debt base in order to sustain itself (because money=debt). The issue is that most people, governments and companies in the western nations are so far in debt that they cannot take on the required loans to continue the expansion of the money supply to the level that is required to keep the system working. This is why central banks have had to step in with Quantitive Easing - to make up the shortfall in debt/money creation that we previously took on ourselves.

So our monetary system essentially behaves like a great big ponzie scheme (which actually broke in 2008 and has been collapsing ever since). Just wait until the Fed starts to reduce QE in 2014 - I predict markets to start going haywire and they will have step back in and actually increase the money printing to $100+ billion every month. That's when the average people (and the media) will finally realise that things have started to go really wrong, and the price of bitcoin will break into 6 figures.

Couple a monetary system that requires infinite growth with the fact that we live on a planet with finite resources and it's pretty easy to predict how it will turn out. There is nothing to be admired about anyone that calls themselves an "economist" or thinks they know about "economics".

Here is a litmus test to try out on someone who claims to be an economist: Ask them if they think economics is a science. If they say "yes", then ask them if they can explain the "scientific method". If they can explain it, then ask them why economics is taught as a "humanity" in school? If they can't explain, punch them in the face.

I mined with cex for a couple of weeks and enjoyed trading hashpower and earning bitcoins rather than just having them sit in my wallet.

The problem that I had with them though is that there was no indication of how or when CEX added to the supply of hashpower. I asked them and they said they only do it when the difficulty increased, but basically it was totally opaque. There is no way that I could tell what was the total supply of hashpower in the market or how it was changing.

Despite that, I traded for a while. I thought I basically had the market figured out. With the difficult changing at known intervals I though it would be relatively simple to sell just before the difficulty changed (supposedly the high) and buy just after the change (supposedly the low). But during the last adjustment the market didn't act like that, which gave me the heebie-jeebies so I sold everything (at around 0.072 BTC/GHS) and I'm super glad I did because it crashed hard the last few days.

The motto of the story is: a market is a market. If you plan to trade in it then you're doing it to make money and you need to invest time to learn it and do it properly. Basically I don't have the time, so I'm not willing to take the risk any longer. It was a good learning experience though.

So let's get this first post over and done with.

I've been mining for a couple of months now with a couple of asics and I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm planning to continue mining in the near future and I'm following closely how the price and difficulty is changing with the numbers of companies producing asics.

I like the idea of hosted mining which eliminates the hassle of running your own setup, but I'm pretty surprised with the resale values of the asic miners. I will probably sell mine in January and upgrade. The question is whether to buy hosted hashpower or buy machines outright?

Although I like mining, it kinda seems to me that the better bet is to just take the money and buy bitcoins instead (I'm a believer in $10 000+ USD/BTC valuations buy the end of 2014). I would have a lot more bitcoins now had I done that the first time instead of laying down the money to buy miners...

What say you guys who read newbie posts?