Cryptocoin Mining?

[wand3r3r]

Wow, lot's of ...err... pumping (using the term loosely since I'm not sure what's behind these) going on! Maybe the alt-coins aren't dying too soon. They always seem to get another boost (and drop). Doge, Lotto, now Cat. Good for those who held.

 

[Silverforce11]

The whole point of mining on hashcows in the first place is their ability to autotrade for you.
hashcows profit switch to mine the profitable coin, then instead of paying you whatever you earned from that coin, they bulk sell all of it on an exchange and pay you in btc.

Problem is, that they have issues with their automated system sucking and the end result is less profitable then even mining LTC, must less mining a profitable coin yourself.

They acknowledge this with this following cop out


Also, they have connection issues which waste mining time and about 30% stale rate on top of that. So I stopped using them after a day.

Yeah hashcow.ws has issues lately, and some of their coins are chosen badly with very high stales.

Middlecoin.com has been spot on for me, I couldn't have earned more mining and instantly selling.

I mined with them for about 2 weeks when Doge was down in value.. much regret..

 

[taltamir]

I hear middlecoin has been having connection issues.
Have they been resolved?

At the moment I am using multipool with the intent to sell coins on bter daily manually. (I would love autosell but cryptsy has been crapping out lately)

EDIT: I actually went to middlecoin, so far so good.

 

[geokilla]

The CAT is back.. too many lives!

It's because there's a new fork and updated wallet and source code going to be released soon. Everyone is going back because they feel this will save the coin. I was already mining CATs yesterday to rake in some nice CATs before difficulty skyrocketed.

 

[taltamir]

It's because there's a new fork and updated wallet and source code going to be released soon. Everyone is going back because they feel this will save the coin. I was already mining CATs yesterday to rake in some nice CATs before difficulty skyrocketed.

what did they change?

 

[Freaksterz]

Aaand another dump to drop doge to 150, Back upto 190 now though..
Made another 20% profit

 

[geokilla]

what did they change?

I don't know. I don't even know what is the reasoning besides these source code and how one coin is different from another. All I know is that all of the new wallet, forking, etc. is happening soon as a last attempt to save the coin.

 

[KingFatty]

Turns out one of the fans on my Nvidia card died, it's not moving at all. No wonder. It's a Gigabyte 560Ti w/ non-standard cooler... is the fan replaceable? In the meantime managed to shave 10C off load temps by undervolting to 0.962.

PS. the card only gets 140-150 khash but the machine with this card gets free electricity

What kind of fan is it using? If it's a blower fan, you can pull off the rotor, it should pop off the spindle. Then apply grease and pop it back on (see my avatar picture showing a blower fan disassembled in this way).

I use AMD-colored bearing grease for my AMD fans, but I'm having trouble finding Nvidia-colored grease for my Nvidia fans, any suggestions? The closest I saw was some brownish green. Usually the grease is sold in tubes you can pop open and look at the color of the grease (in Walmart or whatever auto-parts store).

 

[KingFatty]

Also, just saw the two articles mentioned on the slashdot post below, where a commenter mentions how:

"The problem with Bitcoin is once a Bitcoin is lost, it's gone forever and can never be replaced. There's no provision in the system to void a coin and then mine a new one.

Therefore if bitcoins are lost at a rate > 0 the probability there will be zero bitcoins is 100% over time."

I've raised this point before, how maybe a sophisticated entity (government, large stake-holder, etc.) could intentionally destroy a portion of the coins, in order to increase demand at a non-linear rate, to therefore reap an overall benefit. Like, if you destroy 25% of coins in circulation, that could create an increased demand in remaining coins by, say, 200%, therefore you come out ahead overall if you are a large stakeholder. The rebuttal is that nobody would have a financial incentive to destroy coins, because that would be like destroying gold. But bitcoins are finite, once destroyed they cannot be recovered.

Anyway, my fear is that, even assuming nobody intentionally destroys coins, there has to be a non-zero "loss" rate where people just lose their wallets now and then, so the coins will eventually disappear due to your average joe forgetting to back up his wallet, getting some small portion of a coin, then losing his wallet. So it's not just miners that can lose coins over time, but your typical non-tech computer user that will suffer a hard drive crash and lose his coins he bought (not mined).

http://slashdot.org/story/14/01/22/1511217/marc-andreessen-on-why-bitcoin-matters-and-a-critique?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

 

[geokilla]

Also, just saw the two articles mentioned on the slashdot post below, where a commenter mentions how:


I've raised this point before, how maybe a sophisticated entity (government, large stake-holder, etc.) could intentionally destroy a portion of the coins, in order to increase demand at a non-linear rate, to therefore reap an overall benefit. Like, if you destroy 25% of coins in circulation, that could create an increased demand in remaining coins by, say, 200%, therefore you come out ahead overall if you are a large stakeholder. The rebuttal is that nobody would have a financial incentive to destroy coins, because that would be like destroying gold. But bitcoins are finite, once destroyed they cannot be recovered.

Anyway, my fear is that, even assuming nobody intentionally destroys coins, there has to be a non-zero "loss" rate where people just lose their wallets now and then, so the coins will eventually disappear due to your average joe forgetting to back up his wallet, getting some small portion of a coin, then losing his wallet. So it's not just miners that can lose coins over time, but your typical non-tech computer user that will suffer a hard drive crash and lose his coins he bought (not mined).

http://slashdot.org/story/14/01/22/...utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

There are already lost coins out there. People lose their wallets, computer gets thrown out so they lose their wallets, coins are sent to the wrong address, etc. Doesn't change anything.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

Also, just saw the two articles mentioned on the slashdot post below, where a commenter mentions how:


I've raised this point before, how maybe a sophisticated entity (government, large stake-holder, etc.) could intentionally destroy a portion of the coins, in order to increase demand at a non-linear rate, to therefore reap an overall benefit. Like, if you destroy 25% of coins in circulation, that could create an increased demand in remaining coins by, say, 200%, therefore you come out ahead overall if you are a large stakeholder. The rebuttal is that nobody would have a financial incentive to destroy coins, because that would be like destroying gold. But bitcoins are finite, once destroyed they cannot be recovered.

Anyway, my fear is that, even assuming nobody intentionally destroys coins, there has to be a non-zero "loss" rate where people just lose their wallets now and then, so the coins will eventually disappear due to your average joe forgetting to back up his wallet, getting some small portion of a coin, then losing his wallet. So it's not just miners that can lose coins over time, but your typical non-tech computer user that will suffer a hard drive crash and lose his coins he bought (not mined).

http://slashdot.org/story/14/01/22/1511217/marc-andreessen-on-why-bitcoin-matters-and-a-critique?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

No big deal. Bitcoin is divisible. A few are destroyed, the value of the others goes up to compensate. Significant amounts of gold have been "destroyed" in the history of the world (in landfills, as plating on cheaper objects too un-economical to recover; at the bottom of oceans in Spanish ships) and it's not like we've run out.

I don't think that anybody has enough of a corner on BTC's to make it worth their while to intentionally destroy them. Maybe if somebody had something like 50% of all BTC's.... but AFAIK there's nobody even close.

But really, how would anyone ever know? I could tell you right now that I have "destroyed" BTC's, but all that means is that they show up in an address and they are stuck there. I could be lying; I could retain the private key but just refrain from using it for X amount of time. You could never prove that I don't have the private key sticking around somewhere. I could have printed it out and stuck it under my mattress.

So BTC's can never really be "destroyed"; they can just be "stuck" or "inaccessible"; and the outside world can never really be sure whether they are really in that state, or simply being stored long-term. Nobody can ever go through all 21 million BTC and state definitively how many have been lost/destroyed.

 

[Grooveriding]

There are already lost coins out there. People lose their wallets, computer gets thrown out so they lose their wallets, coins are sent to the wrong address, etc. Doesn't change anything.

Yup. I have 4.6 BTC in a btcguild.com account that has the wallet locked to an address I lost on an old hard drive.

Feels bad man.

 

[KingFatty]

I was thinking more along the lines of how, over time, the remaining pool of coins would approach zero. Even if you continue dividing the remaining share of coins, so long as a portion of a coin is lost here and there, over time the remaining supply will go to zero.

I mean people continue to suffer hard drive issues without backups, so when bitcoin goes mainstream, you'll have an increased rate of non-techie types that will easily lose their coins.

With US dollars, the solution is to continue to mint new dollars to replace those that are destroyed or otherwise taken out of circulation. But by design, bitcoin cannot provide this needed function, so mathematics says bitcoin will eventually run out of coins due to incompetency and other incidental, unavoidable losses associated with the human condition of forgetfulness/laziness and failing to backup etc.

 

[Attic]

I was thinking more along the lines of how, over time, the remaining pool of coins would approach zero. Even if you continue dividing the remaining share of coins, so long as a portion of a coin is lost here and there, over time the remaining supply will go to zero.

I mean people continue to suffer hard drive issues without backups, so when bitcoin goes mainstream, you'll have an increased rate of non-techie types that will easily lose their coins.

With US dollars, the solution is to continue to mint new dollars to replace those that are destroyed or otherwise taken out of circulation. But by design, bitcoin cannot provide this needed function, so mathematics says bitcoin will eventually run out of coins due to incompetency and other incidental, unavoidable losses associated with the human condition of forgetfulness/laziness and failing to backup etc.

Off the top of my head I'd say that lost BTC is <0.25% of total available BTC each year. This would take over 100 years to lose <25% of available BTC.

I think for BTC we may be <0.1% loss.

Either way, it's going to be very insignificant. The idea of the amount of BTC going to zero due to lost BTC's is clearly true on an infinite timeline, but it's ridiculously unimportant given the relative nature of it approaching 0 and the next 5-10 years, let alone the next 100 years.

 

[Torn Mind]

No big deal. Bitcoin is divisible. A few are destroyed, the value of the others goes up to compensate. Significant amounts of gold have been "destroyed" in the history of the world (in landfills, as plating on cheaper objects too un-economical to recover; at the bottom of oceans in Spanish ships) and it's not like we've run out.

I don't think that anybody has enough of a corner on BTC's to make it worth their while to intentionally destroy them. Maybe if somebody had something like 50% of all BTC's.... but AFAIK there's nobody even close.

But really, how would anyone ever know? I could tell you right now that I have "destroyed" BTC's, but all that means is that they show up in an address and they are stuck there. I could be lying; I could retain the private key but just refrain from using it for X amount of time. You could never prove that I don't have the private key sticking around somewhere. I could have printed it out and stuck it under my mattress.

So BTC's can never really be "destroyed"; they can just be "stuck" or "inaccessible"; and the outside world can never really be sure whether they are really in that state, or simply being stored long-term. Nobody can ever go through all 21 million BTC and state definitively how many have been lost/destroyed.

Enlarging or shrinking the money supply can cause inflation or deflation, respectively. More precisely, it is the percent change in the money supply that corresponds with the percent change in inflation. It does not matter what form the money supply takes. It is just that there is a limited amount of gold to be mined, so hyperinflation is pretty much impossible. A 2% increase in the money supply will cause 2% of inflation. Gold that is stuck in CPUs or old currency from long-gone nations has no effect on the money supply because that gold is not being used as money to begin with.

Currency that is not "circulating" and stuck in a dead zone can also cause deflation because the money supply shrinks. What matters is what percent change does it cause to the whole money supply. If its 1 or 2, no big deal. If it is one-half of the 21 million, its a big deal. In addition, if the supply of Bitcoin gradually decreases to 16 million, such as a 2% decrease over a large number of years, the deflation would likewise be gradual. If it suddenly dropped to 16 million over a year, the deflation would be much more sudden.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

I was thinking more along the lines of how, over time, the remaining pool of coins would approach zero. Even if you continue dividing the remaining share of coins, so long as a portion of a coin is lost here and there, over time the remaining supply will go to zero.

I mean people continue to suffer hard drive issues without backups, so when bitcoin goes mainstream, you'll have an increased rate of non-techie types that will easily lose their coins.

With US dollars, the solution is to continue to mint new dollars to replace those that are destroyed or otherwise taken out of circulation. But by design, bitcoin cannot provide this needed function, so mathematics says bitcoin will eventually run out of coins due to incompetency and other incidental, unavoidable losses associated with the human condition of forgetfulness/laziness and failing to backup etc.

Say the loss rate is 0.5% of BTC per year. (This year, that would come to ~60K BTC destroyed, or $48M.) (It was probably higher in previous years, but with BTC gaining so much in value, I would think it's decreased markedly.) In 100 years, we would still be at 60% remaining. I think that's not so bad. Not to mention, new coins will still be mined for a couple hundred years, with the total stock set to almost double from what it is today.

I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly concerned with how much a BTC will be worth in 100 years. If they increase/hold their value for 10 years, I'll be elated. Even just 1-2 years and I will be very happy to have been involved with the experiment. If BTC crashes within 6 months, however, I will be screwed.

Just remember, on a long enough time frame, the survival rate for everybody drops to 0.

 

[taltamir]

I don't know. I don't even know what is the reasoning besides these source code and how one coin is different from another. All I know is that all of the new wallet, forking, etc. is happening soon as a last attempt to save the coin.

more like its just a gimmick for another round of pump and dump...
or rather, the announcement was the pump, the sudden surge in price due to it was the dump period.

 

[taltamir]

So BTC's can never really be "destroyed"; they can just be "stuck" or "inaccessible"; and the outside world can never really be sure whether they are really in that state, or simply being stored long-term. Nobody can ever go through all 21 million BTC and state definitively how many have been lost/destroyed.

I wonder if in the future you would have treasure hunters trying to crack those ancient buried bitcoins

>Lost wallet with 500 bitcoins
>Was worth less than 1$ when it was originally lost
>Now worth millions

 

[KingFatty]

Can someone summarize whether Dogecoin has legitimate architectural advantages to Litecoin?

I'm a bit nebulous on details, but my vague understanding is that Litecoin can be a good complement to bitcoin, because Litecoin is designed to have faster transaction confirmation or something.

But what about Dogecoin? I can see the trendiness of the meme etc., but I'm thinking that it's high transaction rate is in-part *because* each coin has a low value. If the value raises up, it will tend to lose that easygoing nature of tossing some coins here and there. It's just clumsy to say give someone a percentage of a coin compared to giving like 50 coins or whatever, so I think part of the appeal of Doge is how you can toss it around due to low value.

Anyway, is there something about dogecoin that fundamentally gives it an advantage, like transaction time etc., that would be useful to someone actually using the coin, and not just miners? Something better than Litecion?

 

[slashbinslashbash]

Can someone summarize whether Dogecoin has legitimate architectural advantages to Litecoin?

I'm a bit nebulous on details, but my vague understanding is that Litecoin can be a good complement to bitcoin, because Litecoin is designed to have faster transaction confirmation or something.

But what about Dogecoin? I can see the trendiness of the meme etc., but I'm thinking that it's high transaction rate is in-part *because* each coin has a low value. If the value raises up, it will tend to lose that easygoing nature of tossing some coins here and there. It's just clumsy to say give someone a percentage of a coin compared to giving like 50 coins or whatever, so I think part of the appeal of Doge is how you can toss it around due to low value.

Anyway, is there something about dogecoin that fundamentally gives it an advantage, like transaction time etc., that would be useful to someone actually using the coin, and not just miners? Something better than Litecion?

Dogecoin is simply Litecoin, with a new name and a few parameters changed (maximum coins, mining reward per block, difficulty reset time, etc.). Almost all of the scrypt altcoins are the same way. Literally they are just copy and paste the code, change a few numbers, slap on a logo and away they go. Ever wonder why all the wallets look exactly the same? Even Litecoin was largely built on the Bitcoin code; they changed the algorithm and some other stuff, but the underlying code is the same.

In any case, you're right, there is a psychological effect to the number of coins you can get, but all this is doing is just moving decimal points around. Different coin makers approach this in different ways. DOGE went the direction of having a lot more. RonPaulCoin went the opposite way, promoting itself as "rarer than Bitcoin" with only 2.1M possible coins compared with 21M. 42Coin will only have 42 possible coins, ever. All other things equal, BFD, right? If RPC is 1/10 as common as BTC then set 1 RPC = 10 BTC and go on your merry way. (Again, all else being equal, which it's NOT but just talking theoretically) And if DOGE is 10,000x as common as BTC then set 1 DOGE = 0.0001 BTC and go on your way. However, once again, psychologically speaking, we like to work with big numbers rather than small numbers. I would rather have 25 of something than .0000025 of something. Keeping up with all of those decimal points is hard.

 

[blastingcap]

Dogecoin is simply Litecoin, with a new name and a few parameters changed (maximum coins, mining reward per block, difficulty reset time, etc.). Almost all of the scrypt altcoins are the same way. Literally they are just copy and paste the code, change a few numbers, slap on a logo and away they go. Ever wonder why all the wallets look exactly the same? Even Litecoin was largely built on the Bitcoin code; they changed the algorithm and some other stuff, but the underlying code is the same.

In any case, you're right, there is a psychological effect to the number of coins you can get, but all this is doing is just moving decimal points around. Different coin makers approach this in different ways. DOGE went the direction of having a lot more. RonPaulCoin went the opposite way, promoting itself as "rarer than Bitcoin" with only 2.1M possible coins compared with 21M. 42Coin will only have 42 possible coins, ever. All other things equal, BFD, right? If RPC is 1/10 as common as BTC then set 1 RPC = 10 BTC and go on your merry way. (Again, all else being equal, which it's NOT but just talking theoretically) And if DOGE is 10,000x as common as BTC then set 1 DOGE = 0.0001 BTC and go on your way. However, once again, psychologically speaking, we like to work with big numbers rather than small numbers. I would rather have 25 of something than .0000025 of something. Keeping up with all of those decimal points is hard.

Pretty much this. There are some quibbles you can make, like in theory faster confirmation times helps, but frankly no coin so far can match the ~7 seconds it takes for a VISA/Mastercard transaction anyway so for retail sales no coin is adequate. For online it doesn't matter if it takes a little longer so 30 secs, 1 minute, 2.5 min, even 10 minutes (bitcoin), whatever. You can have overlays with faster "confirmation" on a thrid-party system, but those cost extra transaction fees (e.g., coinbase).

So basically there is no point to any bitcoin clone such as litecoin, dogecoin, etc. except maybe psychological (it seems less lame to tip someone a few dogecoin, than .0000001 bitcoin). Without demand, these coins will shrivel up and die eventually. Bitcoin has huge market cap and liquidity and non-speculative demand via people who use it to conduct transfers. Litecoin shares dev resources with bitcoin, but there is little non-speculation-based demand, so it's a pretty fragile coin compared to bitcoin... but it's been around a long time and has a relatively large market cap and liquidity compared to everything other than bitcoin. Dogecoin has a niche for itself as a reddit tipping/fundraising coin. So long as (notoriously fickle) redditors have non-speculative dogecoin demand, there will be support for dogecoin. If redditors abandon it for something else, though, expect dogecoin to crash hard.

 

[broken_pixel]

Yup. I have 4.6 BTC in a btcguild.com account that has the wallet locked to an address I lost on an old hard drive.

Feels bad man.

If the BTC is still on the pool then it is still there. Can you unlock the address and send it to another BTC address?

I do not know about locked addresses as I have not ever locked an address.

 

[Gloomy]

Dogecoin is being backed by mysterious Chinamen.

 

[suklee]

What kind of fan is it using? If it's a blower fan, you can pull off the rotor, it should pop off the spindle. Then apply grease and pop it back on (see my avatar picture showing a blower fan disassembled in this way).

I use AMD-colored bearing grease for my AMD fans, but I'm having trouble finding Nvidia-colored grease for my Nvidia fans, any suggestions? The closest I saw was some brownish green. Usually the grease is sold in tubes you can pop open and look at the color of the grease (in Walmart or whatever auto-parts store).

My card is this one: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3707#ov

I'll take a look later to see if I can pull it off. The fan that's not spinning is the one closest to the exhaust at the back of the computer.

 

[suklee]

I was testing out the risers and finally gave up for the moment and was looking at my 290x's and when I started the machine the second cards fan stopped. In AB the core was 0 and the fan was 0 etc.

I shut down the PC quick, and restarted, same thing.

I was wondering if the riser fried one somehow although I couldn't imagine how, then I started cgminer and it started up. The card fired right up. I guess the 2nd card was in such a power saving mode it didn't do anything until there was a demand? Pretty cool I guess, although it doesn't pay to look in the case. I don't know if crossfire enabling would force it to run always.

I went down to the computer shops last night and only found one shop with a 1x to 16x cable, but the guy strongly recommended me not to hook up my 7970 this way. Are the risks that high or is he being over cautious? I was just going to leave the 7970 'hanging' off the side of the case. No pets or kids in the house so not much chance of the PC being bumped accidentally.

If I can't find a 16x-to-16x cable, I've read that for mining the 1x PCIe slot will work just fine?