+1 on the weirdness above, I'm below for that block

17925   2013-05-08 14:13:44   1:27:14   11634278   558   0.00000013   235160   25.21733124    91 left

... 25 bitcoins per block since block 210000 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply)

Slush has been doing this for years, and it is 2013 not 2008. We can all safely assume that passwords were at least SHA hashed and salted.

No word on the matter is because the man is slaving away, on no sleep, to get everything back up and operational after a severe inside-job hack attempt.

Many props to you Slush, your efforts are greatly appreciated!

Sounds like you may still be mining for the old server. Blocks are being found regularly for me here, and the slowdown you're seeing will be because most have switched over the the new.

Check that stratum.bitcoin.cz resolves to 54.214.x.x for you, and then restart your mining processes and you should be up and running on the new

Awesome, thats great news 

So finally got my Sapphire 5850 yesterday, and have been lucky enough to get it pushing 403.35MH/s at 1020 core / 300 memory clocks, using Phoenix / phatk on Windows XP, SDK 2.1 and 11.5 Catalyst. Had to use 1.2 volts to get there, but my core temp is ~70c and my VRM temp just under 80c.

Using GPUTool (old school Furmark, essentially) to test for stability, this is no where near stable for actual 3D graphics / gaming. However I only get rejected blocks when they are submitted around a block switch-over, and only had a driver crash when pushed up to 1030 core - otherwise I'm hashing away happily.

Is stability above the maximum gaming overclock because only part of the graphics core is used while mining? And would the shares generated by Phoenix show as "rejected" if they were invalid due to an unstable overclock?

Woah! Decision made. In terms of the two cards - you could always run two power supplies, meaning you have the option of getting a cheaper / lower wattage power supply to run the 5770 maybe, and then use your 525W for the 5850... perhaps.

Then def have a look at the 5830 and see if the price is lower I'd say - either way with 2 cards I fear that you'll need to get a new power supply regardless.

Hi!

1) 150MH/s isn't ridiculously low, there are likely to be plenty of people around who throw less than that at it and are quite happy doing so.
2) No, you probably can't handle those cards with that power supply. Probably 850W+, but the brand quality is also very important. Read reviews.
3) If fortunate, you can get around 500MH/s with 2 5830's: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison, if you aren't afraid of overclocking. They're also about half the price of 5850's ($230 vs $110, from a glance on NewEgg; I'm not from the US - your prices seem high). But with a decent enough powersupply and fortunate chips, you could get ~700MH/s if you did spring for 5850's.
4) From what I understand, crossfire doesn't matter for mining - and is better without.

Really, it comes down to how much money you are willing to throw at this, given the ever-increasing difficulty. If you just want to get started and have a tinker with lower risk, buy one card, and skip the power supply. It is unlikely that you'll see any serious return on any investment at this stage - so just keep that balance in mind.

Or you could always just get one card, and stick with your 5770 as well...

Intel Graphics Chip's have pretty much always been shocking - so I'd say that chances are it'd be about the same as a CPU anyway. If not worse.

I wouldn't be sure that solo mining is the way to go, unless you are an extremely patient person.

Put your expected numbers in here: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php - note that this also doesn't take inevitable increases in difficulty into account.

If you are set on solo mining, you'll want to run bitcoind with the -server flag (`./bitcoind -server`). Then you'll be able to set the host in your miner to localhost. Then once you have set your rpcuser and rpcpassword in ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf you should be able to connect to your local bitcoin server. I'd give you some wiki links, but the wiki is throwing a 403 at the moment (https://bitcoin.it/).

Good luck!

Where's your sense of wonder!? 

Fair call, I see your point, thanks.

I understand that it is an estimate, but mining as far as I understand has a hefty luck element to it - you can push through as many MH/s as the other guy, but you might come out with more submitted shares.

My point is whether the MH/s shown elsewhere could be seen as a measure of this element of luck to an extent?

This is just a random thought that I might share

I'm in slush's pool, using DaCoinMinster's Chrome extension. One of the additional statistics displayed is a calculated MH/s. I assume that this is calculated based on something like: (cluster GH per sec / total shares) * shares I produced. I believe that some other pools also display this information, although I haven't dug too far into many of them.

I push a (stonking) 35MH/s total at the moment (soon to be moderately and prudently improved), and there is pretty large variance in the calculated MH/s displayed for each round - sometimes I'm seeing 100.64MH/s, others 7.30MH/s and anywhere in between. This variance sometimes evens out over longer rounds (which you'd expect) but often it makes no difference whether it is a 2.5 hour round or an 8 minute round.

Do you all think that this could be perceived as a measure of "luck"? As in, for rounds in which I'm fortunate my MH/s is over-represented, and on bung rounds it is lower?

Or am I pushing so few MH/s into the pool that the overall measure is probably going to be completely out of wack anyway?

Keen to hear any insight or general musings

Awesome, thanks for the heads-up slush

http://faucet.bitcoin.st is a bit of a fail anyway - they asked me to enter a 8 digit verification code... but the one they sent was 9 digit (starting with 100xxxxxx) - which means it failed verification. They've run out of 8 digit numbers! Heh.

That could be your issue Mabsark?

And really the performance of ATI in gaming isn't that bad - they do make their cards for gaming afterall

I the payout set very low atm (don't see alot of movement with my low 31.7M hash rate) and have no problems at all.