Bitcoin Discussion Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
Schro said:
How much of a difference will one see out of these changes? Are we talking 10MH or more?

I just changed from no flag to 256 and i'm not really seeing a difference
Click to expand...

It made about 30MH/s difference on my 6950 and about 10MH/s difference on my 5830s.

I'm guessing setting it to 256 didn't make a difference on your 5870 because that's what it defaults to. I'd at least give 128 a shot and see what difference it makes.
 
Parja said:
It made about 30MH/s difference on my 6950 and about 10MH/s difference on my 5830s.

I'm guessing setting it to 256 didn't make a difference on your 5870 because that's what it defaults to. I'd at least give 128 a shot and see what difference it makes.
Click to expand...

Not seeing much of a difference at 128 as well.

I suppose it was worth a shot :).
 
Chihlidog said:
Here's another question for you guys - I assume most people are doing this on their main rig? Do you just turn off the miner when you're gaming or doing high-workload stuff and leave it on for browsing and stuff? I have 2 other rigs I could set for mining but they wouldnt be worth it at all. Old hardware.
Click to expand...

I think that is where the -f comes into play. A higher number lows the priority so you can do other things without needing to stop mining. Gaming might be an issue though, but high CPU use should still be okay. If you think the mining is choking it, raise your number some.
 
I use Phoenix with an agression of 7 while browsing and dont really notice a slowdown. Watching a flash video will slow down the hash rate by 5-10mhs. If gaming, I will just stop mining.
 
Can someone educate me about the rate of bitcoins going forward?

For example, I assume in a few months the difficulty will increase. Will this permanently affect the rate of return on our computers or are there ways to counteract the slowdown such as getting a bigger pool?

I guess what I'm asking is, if a computer can generate about $300 a week now, will it be able to generate the same in a year? Assume that the market price does not change (I know it will, but just trying to understand the fundamentals).
 
computerpro3 said:
Can someone educate me about the rate of bitcoins going forward?

For example, I assume in a few months the difficulty will increase. Will this permanently affect the rate of return on our computers or are there ways to counteract the slowdown such as getting a bigger pool?

I guess what I'm asking is, if a computer can generate about $300 a week now, will it be able to generate the same in a year? Assume that the market price does not change (I know it will, but just trying to understand the fundamentals).
Click to expand...

No matter what anyone says, nobody has a good answer to this. It's all speculative. It's entirely possible that tomorrow, a bitcoin is worth absolutely nothing. On the flip side, the value may increase significantly. Many people agree that this is a bubble that will burst in the near future. I am one of them, so Im gonna mine what I can, sell fast and be thankful.
 
Cool, that's how I look at it as well. I figure there is zero downside since I already have the hardware and don't pay for electricity. It's still fascinating to look at the theory behind it though.
 
I think if the government leaves it alone, it will do very well.
What the government will do, and when...those are the questions that need to be answered if you are going to talk about the future of bitcoin.
 
To add to Chihlidog, the difficulty increases every ~2000 blocks, or 2 weeks from what I understand. So as long as people are adding more hardware to mining, the difficulty will keep increasing. Also, the payout for finding a block decreases over time, but I think that happens in slower increments than the difficulty. So if the market price does not change, I think you can expect the payout to decrease if you maintain your output. However, the market price is very volatile which makes it hard to predict.
 
computerpro3 said:
Can someone educate me about the rate of bitcoins going forward?

For example, I assume in a few months the difficulty will increase. Will this permanently affect the rate of return on our computers or are there ways to counteract the slowdown such as getting a bigger pool?

I guess what I'm asking is, if a computer can generate about $300 a week now, will it be able to generate the same in a year? Assume that the market price does not change (I know it will, but just trying to understand the fundamentals).
Click to expand...

The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks. That's one block every 10 minutes for two weeks. So every 2016 blocks, the difficulty automatically adjusts based on the total hash rate of the system to try to maintain that discovery rate of one every 10 minutes.

Here's some good info on the topic to explain further. There's some historical graphs and a link to the current difficulty as well.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Lately, the difficulty has been increasing at pretty much an exponential rate. However, the price of bitcoins has also increased at an exponential rate, making the dollars you make per month fairly constant, even though you're getting less bitcoins.
 
I think an argument to hoarding is that you are trusting that what you hold will always retain value. At this point in time, I think a lot of people are pretty hesitant with the rapid fluctuations in price.
 
think if big stores stated taking them like newegg or Amazon or wallmart then you woudl have people spending them, i know if i could go to newegg right now and use coins i woudl go and spend some of mine. and you will always have some one some where selling there coins and if there value goes up a lot think of 1bit coin as a $100 bill not many walk around whit $100 bill but a lot walk around whit $10 bills so in steed of buying 1 coin you buy .1 coins
 
Cool! The Eligius US server is back up and running.

http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Eligius_mining_pool

I like this pool a lot. There's no registration at all. You just set the username in your client to your bitcoin address and it automatically sends you your coins once you reach a 1 BTC threshold. They've got really cool charts and graphs, too.

I wouldn't mine solely on this pool, though, as it's still a bit of a work in process.

To mine on multiple pools at the same time, just setup another client on the same card with the same settings. The two clients should split the work fairly evenly, and if one goes down, the other will just work at 100%.
 
Alright right now I'm running for the Deepbit pool though I think my Mhash of approx 162 pretty low for a HD 6850.
 
yea 162 sounds about right for stock speed try oc your core and using -v -w128 if you use guiminer or WORKSIZE=128 VECTORS BFI_INT if you use phinoix
 
hiodie said:
To add to Chihlidog, the difficulty increases every ~2000 blocks, or 2 weeks from what I understand. So as long as people are adding more hardware to mining, the difficulty will keep increasing. Also, the payout for finding a block decreases over time, but I think that happens in slower increments than the difficulty. So if the market price does not change, I think you can expect the payout to decrease if you maintain your output. However, the market price is very volatile which makes it hard to predict.
Click to expand...

no, the payout is the same for a block regardless (50BTC), it's more like this, there are more and more people starting to mine/updating their mining rigs every day, thus adding to the total hash rate of the network, if they didn't increase difficulty blocks would be found faster and faster, until they are all found, so the difficulty increases are based on the network traffic to keep the rate of finding blocks relatively consistent, the last block will be found in 2140 regardless of the hash rate of the network, difficulty increases pretty much guarantee this (if half of the bitcoin miners quit at one time there would be a difficulty DECREASE to compensate for it), so if you stay with the same hardware and your hash rate stays the same while the network's total hash rate keeps rising your payouts will become less frequent, but if you upgrade and increase your hash rate you can still keep getting the same rate of payout, the question is at what point will it not be reasonably affordable...? that's the question that people will be asking themselves at some point in the next six months to a year...guaranteed...

at least that's how I understand it...
 
Last edited:
I have seen multiple people saying the payout drops to 25 BTC and halves after that with time. Must have been false info. Thanks for correcting me.

EDIT: Wiki says the payout per block drops with time. Makes sense now that I think about it since there cannot be more than 21 million blocks you need a declining amount.

Link
 
Last edited:
thax said:
yea 162 sounds about right for stock speed try oc your core and using -v -w128 if you use guiminer or WORKSIZE=128 VECTORS BFI_INT if you use phinoix
Click to expand...

Overclocked the core to 950Mhz and dropped the memory to 500Mhz (lowest it can go in afterburner) and I added the -v -w128 and I'm now at about 235Mh/s Thanks.
 
Jon855 said:
Overclocked the core to 950Mhz and dropped the memory to 500Mhz (lowest it can go in afterburner) and I added the -v -w128 and I'm now at about 235Mh/s Thanks.
Click to expand...

you can go lower in afterburner, check out my post on page 3, there's a trick to it, plus most cards are most efficient somewhere around 345MHz on the memory clocks, you should see some gains...
 
wol-va-rine said:
you can go lower in afterburner, check out my post on page 3, there's a trick to it, plus most cards are most efficient somewhere around 345MHz on the memory clocks, you should see some gains...
Click to expand...

Hrmm... I've done everything as you've stated. It doesn't work, doesn't allows me to move the slider any lower. Could you verify that everything in the trick is correct? Perhaps a character or something is missing?

Thanks.
 
hiodie said:
I have seen multiple people saying the payout drops to 25 BTC and halves after that with time. Must have been false info. Thanks for correcting me.
Click to expand...

In theory a block will drop to 25btc in 604 days (from today). But based on the current rate, that's currently down to 362 days (again from today). It's a 'far' estimate as lots of things can change. So take it for what you will. It won't be dropping in the near future (ie. a few months) if you're worried about a current purchase.
 
Here's another question for you guys - I assume most people are doing this on their main rig? Do you just turn off the miner when you're gaming or doing high-workload stuff and leave it on for browsing and stuff? I have 2 other rigs I could set for mining but they wouldnt be worth it at all. Old hardware.
Click to expand...

I can do all normal tasks just fine. Playing video however is a no-go while mining. If I want to do that I stop the miner on my first GPU. The miner is always running on my 2nd GPU though unless I'm gaming.
 
have you set it to as low as it can go then closed ab and reopend it? that works for me on all my rigs
 
FaRKle0079 said:
I can do all normal tasks just fine. Playing video however is a no-go while mining. If I want to do that I stop the miner on my first GPU. The miner is always running on my 2nd GPU though unless I'm gaming.
Click to expand...

why because it locks up? if you using a 6xxx card turn of gpu acceleration for your player works like a charm for teh locks ups
 
Is it possible to run two cards of different generations for example a 5870 and a 6950 in the same system and mine with both? I know you can't Crossfire them or anything but how would they perform?
 
Last edited:
wol-va-rine said:
you can go lower in afterburner, check out my post on page 3, there's a trick to it, plus most cards are most efficient somewhere around 345MHz on the memory clocks, you should see some gains...
Click to expand...

thax said:
have you set it to as low as it can go then closed ab and reopend it? that works for me on all my rigs
Click to expand...

Uh, I don't know what to say but I can't go lower than 500. I've set it all up as specifically instructed to do. Set it to the lowest and apply - quit, run AB again and move it lower (but I can't as it's already at the lowest and I've tried this several times without any success.)
 
I keep reading that you should join a pool unless you have a lot of fast hardware. No one ever says how much power you need to have any sort of moderate luck solo mining though.

Are we talking a few 5970s here or a few 42u racks of rigs running 4 5970s a piece?

When joining a pool do you get points based on how much work you put in? Or is it more communist and every one gets the same amount regardless of some people being clearly better :)?
 
Kardonxt said:
When joining a pool do you get points based on how much work you put in? Or is it more communist and every one gets the same amount regardless of some people being clearly better :)?
Click to expand...

I can't answer your other questions but for the Deepbit pool.

You can choose between two payment modes
  • Pay Per Share: You get a fixed amount for every share submitted. This method has zero variance but slightly higher fee (because pool takes the risk). Recommended if you like steady payouts.
  • Proportional: You get a portion of every solved block proportional to your part in pool's hashing power. This payment method has a noticeable variance: some days you can get less, some days you can get more. This is due to randomness of searching for proof-of-work.
 
does the speed of your internet connection affect your hashes? im on a usb wireless dongle with barely any signal, but can move my rig downstairs if i have to.
 
FaRKle0079 said:
I can do all normal tasks just fine. Playing video however is a no-go while mining. If I want to do that I stop the miner on my first GPU. The miner is always running on my 2nd GPU though unless I'm gaming.
Click to expand...

I just upgraded my rig to a 2600k on a Z68 board. I haven't set up Lucid yet but would there be a way to use my 6950 for mining and the integrated GPU for light tasks such as Youtube?
 
Last edited:
wol-va-rine said:
yep, there are a few tricks to MSIafterburner...

1. your two "unofficialoverclocking" lines should look like this in MSIafterburner.cfg

unofficialoverclockingEULA = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
unofficialoverclockingMode = 1

2. to get your memory low slide it to the lowest possible (and have your gpu clock set where you want it), apply, then close...

reopen afterburner and it should let you slide it further down, basically rinse and repeat until about 345MHz (give or take a few MHz)...
Click to expand...

Well I had to add a new line, I've bold the line - that fixed it for me. However, my Mem's at about 345 or so and the Mhash/s hasn't changed one bit. I guess I'll try to overclock my core more to beyond 950. I know 1Ghz is a no go - it hard crashed, I'll need to try and push it up to 975 hopefully without any volt change.

EnableUnofficialOverclocking = 1
UnofficialOverclockingEULA = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 1
Click to expand...
 
ekuest said:
nice. get a mobo cpu and ram off fs/ft and get folding asap!
Click to expand...

Nah I'm not going to invest in putting together a whole different system right now but I was looking to see what kind of Mh/s I could get out of these in a tri or quad fire setup.
 
Last edited:
What about energy costs? Has anyone paid attention at how much their power bill has gone up?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top