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Bitcoin Discussion Thread

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Yeah. Difficulty is relative to the hashing power of the network. The more hashing power the faster we advance to the next difficulty bump (this should be obvious to anyone). As of today and with our current hashing power the next difficulty bump will happen on block #133055 and the difficulty will be bumped up to 1248407.37961526.
 
But you would also assume that the difficulty increase will slow down or even decrease as it becomes less profitable to mine. That doesn't really mean you should go all in anymore, unless you have no issues in high risk investments.
 
Teenyman45 said:
I might be able to arrange a volume buy of brand new 5870s at a sub $300 price. Anybody interested or is H now devoted to mass groupings of 5830s.

BTW somebody up above or down below dislikes my attempts to build some dedicated rigs. I was going to order 10 of those 5830s (3 each in 3 rigs and the last for my main computer). Then was called away by the boss. By the time I got back, all of 'em were sold out.
Click to expand...

I'm interested in a 5870 mostly to complete my crossfire setup but will probably mine until its not worth it anymore.
 
The next set of questions becomes "At what rate do you think people will continue to be able to hardware?" and "What percentage of the theoretical hardware addition will actually be dedicated to bit mining?"

Global hashing is about 2.5 times what it was at the tail end of May. Will this ramp up continue, or will most of the less efficient miners that do not have access to free power eventually drop out?
 
For those in the EU, there are a couple of Italian e-tailers that have 5970's for about 320-350 euro ex-Vat. In a block of 5 it actually becomes cost effective to ship to the States, but EU merchants don't seem to like having or dealing with any customers beyond their xenophobic little bubble.
 
Probably a noob question but, if i were to get a 5830 and place it in a pcie 1x with a 16x riser would I get the same mhash results as it would in a full 16x? I don't have a dual 16x mobo.
 
hiodie said:
But you would also assume that the difficulty increase will slow down or even decrease as it becomes less profitable to mine. That doesn't really mean you should go all in anymore, unless you have no issues in high risk investments.
Click to expand...

profitability has a lot to do with it, but technically the difficulty won't slow down until the network slows down, which of course will happen when people start seeing diminishing returns on their investment and stop/slow down their mining...

I predict at some point there will be a HUGE sell off of used 5850s and 5830s, HUGE, I mean there may be people trying to sell them for less than $40 just to get something back on that 8 card investment they made, it will definitely be a buyer's market...
 
To wol-va-rine: Which is primarily why I had been trying to buy 5870's and 5970's, they actually have some real utility beyond that of mining if when the market might collapse.

Example, I just got another e-mail back from a vendor that has Asus Matrix 5870 Platinum editions for less than 170 euros ex-VAT and again not willing to ship overseas. Stateside the price of those cards, new, never really dropped below $400. Moreover, that card, in theory, is roughly as good for gaming as a locked 6950 provided you're not going to crossfire.
 
wol-va-rine said:
profitability has a lot to do with it, but technically the difficulty won't slow down until the network slows down, which of course will happen when people start seeing diminishing returns on their investment and stop/slow down their mining...

I predict at some point there will be a HUGE sell off of used 5850s and 5830s, HUGE, I mean there may be people trying to sell them for less than $40 just to get something back on that 8 card investment they made, it will definitely be a buyer's market...
Click to expand...

That's sorta why I'd rather have say, a 6990 or a second 6950 at a reasonable price that can still mine but if mining becomes unprofitable you still have a nice card to game with.
 
Lorien said:
Heh, if bitcoins were accepted widely you wouldn't be beholden to any of those quantity restrictions since the transaction would be completely anonymous and they'd have no way of tracking you.
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You still have a physical shipping address. :p
 
I'm only going to get another card if I can find a great deal on a second 5850 like I did yesterday, then I'm gonna sell off my 6850s. I'm debating selling my 5770 as it is, since its my weakest card anyways.
 
ROFL
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102946
image2jz.jpg
 
Teenyman45 said:
To wol-va-rine: Which is primarily why I had been trying to buy 5870's and 5970's, they actually have some real utility beyond that of mining if when the market might collapse.

Example, I just got another e-mail back from a vendor that has Asus Matrix 5870 Platinum editions for less than 170 euros ex-VAT and again not willing to ship overseas. Stateside the price of those cards, new, never really dropped below $400. Moreover, that card, in theory, is roughly as good for gaming as a locked 6950 provided you're not going to crossfire.
Click to expand...

yeah, I predict a lot of people are gonna have a lot of left over 5830s when they decided to stop mining, and they could be stuck with them (all the while thinking they were gonna sell them to recover some of their investment), think about it, the market will be flooded with them, and probably for a while, and the first sellers will be the people with lower hashrates, one, maybe two cards, by the time guys with 4, 5, 6, or more 5830s quit the market will have already been saturated with 5830s, there won't be many buyers left, and there's a good chance they'll get stuck with them...

that's why I've been trying to caution people, but they keep buying them up...lol
 
eh, they really need more namecoin pools. I estimate it should be possible to produce about 1/hr, and sometimes I do that, or more. I always see lots of errors, so I don't know how much processing gets wasted. As is, I often switch for solo. I had hit a block the day I started, but then the difficulty increased... :(
 
Yep that's why I only bought 2. As it stands, I need to make $410 to break even, assuming I don't sell any cards before the values crash. My desktop has 6850 crossfire already, I can do 5830 crossfire in my htpc, plus I have a 5850 on the way, and a 5770 idle for the moment while I figure out where I'm going to put it.
 
You guys are all making profitability predictions based on the price of bitcoins remaining at $20.

What force is stopping the price from going beyond $20 and making mining profitably beyond the next 60 days impossible? I'm asking a serious question. Yes difficulty will likely continue to rise, but let's pretend a bunch of major news organizations all covered bitcoin and the user base grew substantially and more people invested cash into it...voila! Suddenly 1,000,000+ difficulty doesn't seem so bad!!

Yes I understand bitcoin could also receive no coverage, a couple large investors could cash out and a large portion of the user base could ditch...but the point I'm making is no one knows right now...

Some of you seem convinced that profitable mining is inevitably going to end very soon, and I would like an explanation as to why...Is it because you don't think bitcoin truly has value as a legitmate electronic currency and is 100% a speculative bubble? Or you think it's just too complex for the general public to grasp right now?

Enlighten me! Mining may not be 300,000% profitable or anything crazy anymore, but I still think the price of bitcoins has room to grow considering the true infancy of this whole project.
 
I look at it as a good excuse to buy that second 6970 for my main, a good excuse to buy a 5830 for my file server, and maybe the chance to earn some cash :p
 
[rant mode] called away again and therefore unable to buy the slightly more expensive 5830 Xtremes! This is now the sixth time something has gone wrong when I try to actually buy rather than just price out any dedicated mining hardware! At least this time it did not involve a PSU fan shredding itself. If I can't work out a deal to get the 5870's I want then I'm quitting mining and selling my gear before something explodes! [/rant mode]
 
as for the whole value issue.... value is imaginary anyway, but it tends to be somewhat pegged to work and effort. That is why with each difficulty increase you are likely to see value go up. Because 'easy' coins are going to become more scarce. Speculators will buy with the expectation that in the future prices will continue to rise. No doubt they will be right up to a point, the point being if a bubble develops. A bubble will see exponential growth in price. At that point it would be time to get out. Anyway I would not invest any money in buying any e-currency. But "free" processing time, yeah, I can do that. I estimate my 6970 costs 60 cents to run a day. And I hit another namecoin block today. Woot!! :)
 
What was a good way to "OC" your card by lowering the memory? I have non reference xfx so I believe it doesn't OC quite well if I recall.
 
EdGaRRRRR said:
What was a good way to "OC" your card by lowering the memory? I have non reference xfx so I believe it doesn't OC quite well if I recall.
Click to expand...

The trick that people have discovered is to overclock the GPU (if you even want to go that far as a stock card is typically great too depending on the GPU) on the card while lowering the memory at the same time to somewhat tolerable levels while mining exclusively - that lowers the energy requirements on the cards, generates a bit less heat in the long run, and apparently gives better results for whatever reasons. Since the actual mining process relies almost entirely on the GPU itself, the memory bandwidth required is negligible, hence dropping that speed to reap a few more benefits.
 
so.... what utility are you guys using to downclock? catalyst can't do it, can't figure out how in rivatuner, msi afterburner complains about corrupt files... :(
 
jiminator said:
so.... what utility are you guys using to downclock? catalyst can't do it, can't figure out how in rivatuner, msi afterburner complains about corrupt files... :(
Click to expand...

it complains about corrupt files...? I've never seen that, did you try downloading it again...? maybe the download was corrupted somehow...? the only real pain was downclocking the mem on cards in mixed crossfire because I had to sync the gpu clocks and mem clocks, then close and reopen to downclock to where I wanted...

it's much easier with just the one card now...
 
Joe Average said:
The trick that people have discovered is to overclock the GPU (if you even want to go that far as a stock card is typically great too depending on the GPU) on the card while lowering the memory at the same time to somewhat tolerable levels while mining exclusively - that lowers the energy requirements on the cards, generates a bit less heat in the long run, and apparently gives better results for whatever reasons. Since the actual mining process relies almost entirely on the GPU itself, the memory bandwidth required is negligible, hence dropping that speed to reap a few more benefits.
Click to expand...

many people have reported that a 3 to 1 ratio with the gpu clocks and mem clocks give the best results and I can confirm that it works the best on my cards (6850 and 5850)...

to OC/UC, your MSIafterburner.cfg file needs to look like this (it's a lot to type out so it's easier to just copy and paste)...

[ATIADLHAL]
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

then you can OC and UC...

downclocking the memory usually means downclocking as far as you can, applying the clocks, closing afterburner, and then opening it up again, then the mem slider should go down as far as you need it to...
 
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Yes dropping the memory will drop your over all temps 5-10C, pretty substantial. I run all my 5830's @ 300, 6950's at 400.
 
Starting to switch to Trixx myself to get the ram clocks down to 300 on my cards. The less heat I can generate the better. 2 5830s and 2 6850s do a good job heating a room up.
 
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