Eurovision 2012 first semifinal results

The first semifinal of "Eurovision-2012" finished in Baku last night. Now we know all the final results of 10 lucky finalists.  In the finals we can see Romania, Moldova, Iceland, Denmark, Hungary, Albania, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland. Among them there is "Buranovskie grandmothers" from Russia.
In the first semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest participants were Latvia, Montenegro, Iceland, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Russia, Finland, Israel, Albania, Romania, Austria, Moldova, San Marino, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, and Greece.
Note that the second semi-final will be held May 24 and the final of  Eurovision Song Contest - Saturday night live May 26.

The Eurovision competition run in the palace of Baku Crystal Hall, built on the shores of the Caspian Sea specifically for "Eurovision-2012". Baku Crystal Hall can accommodate 23 thousands spectators, another 16 000 spectators can watch a live broadcast on large TV screens.

Bitcoin mining - calculate difficulty rising

Let's try to calculate how much Bitcoin mining difficulty will rise over next future adjustments. To do it we need determine who the miners are and what is their behavior. All Bitcoin miners can be divided into three categories:

1. enthusiasts;
2. casual miners with gaming/office PC;
3. business rig owners;

Let's look on the behavior of members of this groups. Enthusiasts mine coins to support system and community or to trying to quickly get rich in Bitcoin gold rush. They do not invest much money into upgrade of their rigs. To return initial investments is quite enough for them. They may stop mining if electricity cost would be higher than mining earnings and return after difficulty drop. They mining hardware probably run in 24/7 mode.

Casual miners just experimenting with Bitcoin and do not target some goals in earnings from mining. They probably mine in working hours in the office or at home. Existence of such type of miners gives us intraday volatility of mining difficulty which can be approximated at 10-15% level.

Business rig owners trying to make Bitcoin mining the main source of their earnings. They trend to invest into upgrade and expansion of mining hardware to get more profit. This group gives us main piece of rising difficulty value. Let's calculate how much they can add to computational power of Bitcoin network each round.

The part with always-on mining hardware we may take as 80% of all Bitcoin network performance which for now estimated at 13.73 THash/s. As we saw all of them eventually would invest into hardware upgrade to increase hashing power. All Bitcoin network earn each round 50BTC*6per hour*24hours*14days between difficulty switch, which gives 100800BTC or 1310400 USD. So 1M USD will go to our serious mining group. All consumed power estimates now around 10MWatt for the network, so for this miners it costs 10MWh*24hours*14days*80%*0.1USD/KWh = 268800 UDS. Here we got left 731000USD to spend or invest for them. There is really different behavior in investing strategies among miners from 0% to 100% of profit. Lets say that they invest 50% all the time into upgrade, this is 365000USD. What you can buy for this money: most efficient cards with 1.5MHash/USD gives us 550Gh as evaluation for increase of performance each round. This is 5% of total Bitcoin network performance. So we can postulate that some rounds ahead we won't see increasing difficulty less that 5%, more likely around 10% because of newbie miners joined to Bitcoin.

This process may be interrupted by drop of BTC price. If price move down to 5USD/BTC the net profit for our 80% miners will be able to invest only 134400USD or 100Gh/s or less. This value will be less than 1% of network performance. Newbies at this price also wouldn't have reasons to join the network and difficulty will stabilize.

Bitcoin Faucet gives free Bitcoins

There is one place in the Internet where you can get some Bitcoins instantly and absolutely for free. This is Bitcoin Faucet site. It gives away to each new visitor 0.001 Bitcoins. You may ask your bitcoin only once for each IP address and Google account. To get 0.001 BTC you need to enter your bitcoin address and authorize with your Google account. Then you will get transfered coins in your Bitcoin wallet almost instantly.

If you are a developer and test your Bitcoin-related soft you also can get some coins in Bitcoin TESTNET branch.

How to send namecoins to peer's wallet address

Users of Namecoin console client namecoind.exe may wonder sometime how to transfer coins from user's wallet to peer's or other user's wallet. This may happened when user decides to move namecoins to exchange market to convert it to USD or Bitcoins. The command for transferring coins in Windows is really simple:

namecoind.exe sendtoaddress Nxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx amount-to-send

This command will send amount-to-send namecoins to wallet with address Nxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Try it by yourself and see who it works.

Bitcoin to Namecoin difficulty ratio

Namecoin original site got very interesting page with Bitcoin and Namecoin difficulties and future changes. This page contains two tables with three rows: current value in the network, instant value based on current network hash rate and next Bitcoin difficulty value with date of switching. Also there is third table with Namecoin/Bitcoin difficulty ratio which may help you decide what currency to mine - Bitcoin or Namecoin.

Current values at time of writing this post were:

Namecoin next difficulty row:

• Block number 16128
• Next difficulty switching time 22/07/2011 06:57
• Next difficulty value 22'483.11
• Next/Current difficulty ratio 0.40

Bitcoin next difficulty row:

• Block number 137088
• Next difficulty switching time 19/07/2011 22:41
• Next difficulty value 1'673'141.39
• Next/Current difficulty ratio 1.07

Table with Namecoin/Bitcoin difficulty ratio contains this data for next Namecoin switching date: next difficulty switching time 22/07/2011, NMC/BTC Ratio 74.42 BTC/NMC Ratio 0.0134

New Official Bitcoin Client Released

Development team has made a new release of official Bitcoin client, the new build got 0.3.24 version number. This update contains some bug fixes and improvements which fixes a block download problem, a crash that would occur if there was a loss/lack of network connectivity. Improvements consists of UPnP option enabled by default because the percentage of Bitcoin clients that accept incoming connections is quite small, also DNS seeding option is enabled by default.
Some code added for the wallet encryption feature to be released with v0.4 version.

Bitcoin Mining Hardware Comparison List

When you got your first experience with Bitcoin money you may want to try bitcoin mining on your PC. First of all you need to get configuration information of your PC and check if your hardware capable to run bitcoin mining fast enough. As you know, CPU mining currently is faster than GPU mining more than 100 times. So it's very important to have really fast video card on-board. NVidia GeForce GPU cards are surprisingly slow in comparison to AMD ATI Radeon HD. It's pointless to run bitcoin mining on NVidia cards. Here list of most effective cards to run mining:

Best performance/cost ratio have ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5xxx series cards:

Radeon HD 5750 ~140 MHash/s - 90W
Radeon HD 5770 ~190 MHash/s - 110W
Radeon HD 5830 ~260 MHash/s - 175W
Radeon HD 5850 ~290 MHash/s - 151W
Radeon HD 5870 ~380 MHash/s - 188W
Radeon HD 5970 ~640 MHash/s - 294W

AMD Radeon HD6xxx series cards are more expensive and got lower performance/cost ratio:

Radeon HD 6670 ~110 MHash/s - 50W
Radeon HD 6790 ~190 MHash/s - 150W
Radeon HD 6850 ~210 MHash/s - 127W
Radeon HD 6870 ~280 MHash/s - 151W
Radeon HD 6950 ~310 MHash/s - 200W
Radeon HD 6970 ~370 MHash/s - 250W
Radeon HD 6990 ~690 Mhash/s - 375W

Full hardware comparison list for Bitcoin mining with all GPU and CPU performance data you can find on wiki page. When you determine your mining speed in MHash per second value go to Bitcoin GPU hardware mining calculator and calculate how much money you will earn running your mining rig for week or month.

Bitcoin Mining Calculator

While running Bitcoin mining on your fast GPU ATI hardware you may want to know how much it earn you in next days or weeks. For this purpose you may want to check some Bitcoin mining calculators.

Bitcoin wiki got a page with link to all popular calculators around the net for today. There are two most popular - Generation Calculator which can compute how much would you get American dollars (USD) in day, week or month based on your hardware hash rate and market exchange rate of 1 BTC.

The second one will show you more information about current state of the Bitcoin network and future changes in mining difficulty. This gives you more accurate assumption on your earnings in the future, which will be lower while difficulty rises.

Bitcoin exchange MtGox back online after hack

As you can hear MtGox is big bitcoin exchange and it got hacked last week. Exchange admins said database was leaked with password hashes. Some of weak passwords were computed and hackers started sell-off bitcoins and excahge rate down to 0.01 USD for BTC. Admins stopped operations on the site and promised rollback all hacked transactions. A few hours ago MtGox went back online and started transactions. Current prices are 17.5$ per BTC.

Protect Bitcoin wallet from stealing - How to

Today first anti-virus company Symantec has reported that it found a new Trojan in the wild stealing Bitcoin wallets. The Trojan name is Infostealer.Coinbit and it looking for Bitcoin wallet.dat file on computer's disk to send it to the hacker. To protect your wallet from stealing by such type of trojans Symantec recommends additionally to general security actions to encrypt your wallet and choose a strong password for this in the event that a hacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open.

Use and mine Bitcoin money- How to

Bitcoin is an online peer-2-peer full electronic currency system. It is open to anyone, backed by strong cryptography and has no central authority. To start using Bitcoin money you need an account number, called "wallet". It can be created by Bitcoin software downloaded from official Bitcoin site. A wallet number is a long hash string with digits and letters and looks like this one: KeG7KqZ4R17LM2J9mtpFu2Px5Dzpc1E3s6 Using this number you can send and receive money between wallets. You can use Bitcoin money to buy real products and services or you can even exchange Bit coins for other real world currencies too on exchange markets.

How to make your Skype client work if it has signin issue

If your Skype client crashes at start and you have installed latest 5.x version, you can fix this issue by removing file C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Skype\shared.xml in Windows 7, in other OS path will be different. Then start Skype, it should work.