That's Linux nerds for you. They value feeling smart and important more than doing anything useful.

The more people using it the more the value should increase. if many people are mining then many people will have coins to spend and want merchants/barters for various things.

lol, I installed ubuntu and after about 48 hours of living hell tracing down drivers, symlinks, c headers, libraries, ... just remembered the living hell of using centralized software, have you changed and updated your sources.list and 100 mb downloads to install a text editor. 5 different packages to install the same program. 6 different window managers some light some heavy. Just installed windows and was up and running in 5 minutes.

Whoever wrote the first GPU mining software and released that was a huge moron, though.

I was looking into FPGA mining and I'll be damned if I share that if I get it working.

I think you are underestimating how many of the people there want to see it suceed over their own person gain, there are a lot of dedicated users.

down 6 of last 7 days, volume is up big on today's big drop. bubble bursting?

The first open-sourced FPGA miner has just been released:

http://www.bitcoinminer.com/

Here's the github:

https://github.com/progranism/Open-S...-Bitcoin-Miner

cliff notes: FPGA dev board is $3-500 (depending on academic discount) and cranks out about 80mhash/s using (IIRC) only 11W of power

This is a first attempt so it will likely improve from here, but from a purely price/mhash perspective it will not be unseating 5870s $.5/mhash throne.

In 3-4 months FPGA will probably be the recommended way to mine, but that depends on how effective the radeon 7k series is...

This is actually at the heart of BitCoin...
There is a hardcore, techy, anarcho Cult...
Mostly micro-capitalized Cyberspace Outsiders...
With close to zero mainstream business experience.

A group of, say, 5000 True Believers...
Is a VERY powerful thing...
This is what's 99% driving BitCoin price...
These people are the source of all the Publicity...
And it's a VERY ****ing Good Story...
Even if Economists can blow massive holes in it...
Nobody cares... they just repeat mantras 1000x.

The scary thing is...
If a Pure Cult Driven Bubble can rocket 10 fold...
In the absence of meaningful commercial activity...
What will happen if a killer BitCoin app comes along.

At least now we have a trading range for BTC...
And we've seen a solid market cap of $50,000,000...
Enough to attract some Forex Sharks...
I'm actually more likely to load up at $5.00 than $0.50.

The first GPU miner was not open source, the author charged 5 btc per block. Someone paid a ridiculous bounty (10,000 btc+?) to get him to release the code.

he'd have a lot more BTC if he hadn't...

Maybe, but if he could do it someone else would probably be right on his heels anyway.

I just invested a large percentage of my (small) net worth into bitcoins. It was a great learning experience strategically playing around with my bids on Mt. Gox based on the market depth. There are a couple of market-making algos on there with some (apparently) simple strategies. It seems like it should remain pretty profitable for them despite the 0.65% fee as long as the spread stays pretty wide.

I got in for around $6 per coin. It was frustrating waiting for my transfer from Dwolla to Mt. Gox to get manually entered in by the owner of Mt. Gox (took 3 or 4 hours, apparently Dwolla has some issues with automation and their API), as the price was hovering around $5.5 while I waited.

Of course the most frustrating part was the original waiting to cashout my roll from Stars, get it cleared in my bank, confirm my account with Dwolla, and clear my deposit to Dwolla. During that time bitcoins went from $0.7 to $6...

It seems to me that bitcoins must still be pretty +EV at the current price because there's the tiny percentage chance that they become the de-facto human currency and I become set for life with my small investment. Plus it seems the publicity is picking up exponentially, so even if this is a bubble, or there's some fundamental flaw, at least I can have the excitement of riding the wave for a bit before the crash.

Had my girlfriend start Bitcoins on my 5870 at home. It got to 125k blocks and then stopped. It got to 125k in about 3 minutes and apparently didn't move the 4 days she was here. Obviously no idea why that happened since I'm about 3k miles from the box. No Bitcoins for me!

Before you can generate you need to download the block chain. There are 125460 blocks now and a new one about every 10 minutes.

When you click generate in the client it uses your CPU, this will get you one 50BTC reward about every 8 years. You need to get GPU mining software, there are a few open source versions out there, in order to get any kind of good earn rate.

He was using his GPU, the 5870 he referred to is an ATI card.

Actually he probably wasn't using anything at all. The blocks counting upwards is just the client downloading the block chain. The standard client has to be told to start generating, and it is only capable of CPU mining. You have to download a separate miner to do GPU mining.

Whats the best GPU miner?

Yea you're right.

I use poclbm-gui - it's got a really nice interface and works very well. I'm not sure if it's the most efficient - I think it depends on your card.

It's my understanding that dwolla sends a CSV of transactions and he has to manually enter them for MTGOX

He thought he was using it just because he had it.

I am trying to run deepbit or slushi's pooled mining with poclbm and gui-miner. I have a toshiba laptop ( satellite L645-S4102) with opencl drivers but it wont let me run a gpu miner. Only the decade a bitcoin cpu miner will run. Any quick suggestions?

well ... what's it saying?

I don't know why but I burst out laughing reading this, maybe it was the formatting

But completely true:

A google search shows that your laptop has "Intel Mobile HD Graphics." I don't think that a miner has been written for that platform. Even if one was, it would likely be -EV for you to run a miner, because your hardware would be slow, too inefficient with power, and would generate a bunch of heat that could hurt the life of your laptop.