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The total number of nodes is important, of course, but it really only takes maybe 2-3 permanent, trusted nodes to maintain the whole network, as far as I know. As more open-ported miners/clients stay running, people will start to get lists with a lot of nodes, but many of them will "expire" as computers shut down or ports close, etc. The ones noted by SuperTramp are nodes set up to be permanent, so you don't have to worry about them getting turned off on the fly just because some miner decides to turn off his computer, for instance. Specifying trusted/stable nodes is just a way to force looking at those IP addresses for nodes. The client will start finding other nodes as it keeps running, if they exist. One benefit of a bunch of nodes and client connections is in downloading the blockchain, I think. The more, the faster. (I'm pretty sure on that, anyway.)

It fluctuates quite a lot, which is the understatement of the week. For a while there, MNC price was low enough that it didn't really pop up to the top of the mining profitability charts very often, which led to a lot of steady miners who were making a good return on low difficulties. The hash rate was lower, but seemed really consistent with some dedicated miners. Lately though, the major spikes in difficulty brought about by the big switching pools have hurt MNC mining in general once the price dropped a bit along with all/most of the alts as people got Bitcoin Frenzy recently. There can still be some steady mining, but as the price goes up, the switching pools and profitability charts will always ensure there's going to be a massive diff spike and subsequent drop in mining activity. (I'm trying hard here not to bash the switching pools, but I sure don't like their effect on coins.) The best defense against the massive fluctuations is to keep steady hashrate on the coin. This can be hard for many miners when other coins show up as higher immediate profitability. If you're a miner with a longer-term look at things, MNC mining is always a good thing, IMO.

Hello, and welcome! No direct USD conversion exchange that I know of. The common process for most alt-coins is to trade them on a MinCoin exchange like mcxNOW and then move the Bitcoins somewhere that exchanges them for USD. [edit: Oops... I read you exactly opposite! Same answer roughly applies though: you need to buy bitcoins and deposit them into an exchange that handles MNC. There are no ways I know of to buy MNC directly with fiat of any kind.] I went ahead and created a thread with the pools I know about and found in a quick search: http://mincoinforum.com/index.php/topic/128-mincoin-mining-pool-list/

Thanks a lot for making that available, even if it's the old version. Since it's not a hard-fork sort of change between the versions, this is still useful to Linux users.

Yep, cranking away! That will only be your CPU mining using the wallet like that. You'll have to install another bit of software to get your video card's GPU grinding. The wallet miners only use CPUs, as far as I know.

Right on. Welcome.

I've been swamped lately, but I'm trying to follow up on this and see what I can find out about getting some official client/wallet and daemon releases posted. Sorry in advance if I don't get this info quickly.

Great point. I do enjoy that part of mining.. I have bills to pay on all my equipment and electricity usage, but I like the idea of being part of what's happening with crypto-currencies. Thanks for putting down that perspective. It's a nice reminder of that side of things.

(Wow, that was a tome of text!)

Hmm... not really sure what the pure needs of the coin are, with regards to network hash rate. I'm sure the maths are simple for someone less tired and distracted with other work than I am at the moment. The network hash rate has to do with moving coins around in transactions, as well as ultimately releasing the normal inflation rate into the wild. The thing is, if only one CPU was mining the coin, the difficulty would go extremely low so that this one miner got blocks roughly every minute. It would be something like a diff of 0.00001 or whatever. So technically, if I'm thinking of this correctly, you only really "need" a single miner running constantly to get all the coins for the network and to move the transactions through. The diff increases/decreases in a manner as to constrain the flow of new coins every day. The higher the hash rate before the next adjustment period (every 60 blocks, there's an adjustment), the faster transactions flow during that time. However, after the diff goes up, things slow back down to closer to the 1-minute mark again anyway. (Then, typically, a bunch of miners fall off as they think it's too hard to mine at the new higher difficulty, which then slows the network down a bunch with transactions slowing to a potential crawl until the difficulty drops considerably to match the lower network hash rate.) ...I feel like I'm talking in circles. I don't have time to edit this post better, so I hope it's making sense. There's really no doubt that all this stuff is a big waste of energy -- crypto-mining in general. The biggest issue is to make sure there are enough distributed nodes mining/hashing to protect the network from some big whale coming along and finding most of the blocks and performing a malicious "51% attack" on the coin. With that in mind, the more network hash there is, to some degree, the more secure the network potentially is. ...again, I think that's roughly coming out correct. I'll wait to see if anyone rebukes my points here to come in and clarify better. I hope I'm making at least some sense. The idea of using all this power for something more valuable to the world society is a bit of a Holy Grail at the moment. There have been some efforts, but currently they're not showing too much fruit, from last I checked. CureCoin was one of them, but my research on the subject is stale. I'd personally LOVE to push all my hashing power at something like protein folding or such. It's just that there's also the greedy side of things where protein folding (et. al) don't make money for me, and I'm not in a position to be very altruistic at the moment.. unfortunately.

The difficulty adjustments are a mechanism to help control the mined coins per day. It won't always be exactly 2,880 per day, but over time, the adjustments try to even things out so that on average, that's how many are mined. If it's low difficulty and say 3,000 are mined, then the difficulty adjusts up enough so that same amount of network hash power can not get over 2,880 again the next day. ...roughly like that, anyway. I'll avoid further explanation attempts until I can get some more coffee.

Welcome, all you newer-than-last-time-I-posted folks!

I wonder how hard it would be to get at the information for the recent Humble Bundles (www.humblebundle.com) since they accept BTC payments now. For indie game devs, maybe some sort of crypto payment setup would be a nice option, I'd think. Takes a lot of work to manage all that stuff though, since it's not as easy to find "distributors" of indie stuff. You have to juggle a ton of companies to sell games of any selection. Still would be cool, though. Now, if Steam would accept MNC... mmmm.

Not so many these days, I think. I used to solo it a lot and knew a couple others. Lately the diffs are typically over 4-6 all the time, creeping into the 8's & 9's. It's making soloing a bit rough, especially for only 2 coin block reward.

Thanks for sharing the experiences. I also have been thinking that anyone really interested in cryptos is also often anxious to get to actually /use/ them for something. When it comes down to it, the opportunity to buy goods with them may push them past the privacy concerns around keeping their address secret. People who want cryptos to expand also may be some of the first to be totally fine buying up physical goods. The shift from digital currency to physical goods seems a bit of a paradigm shift that many might just be clawing to support.

Sorry I missed helping out.. I was out of my office for a long weekend. I've noticed a lot of issues with changing the worksize for other situations, but not yet with MNC. Glad you sorted this out! I'll also add that to my bag of tricks to see if it helps others. Thanks very much for reporting your solution, too!

Ugh.. I realized I'm doing too many things at once and they're getting munged together... you were telling me that while mining BTC at Slush, it works, but when you try --scrypt, it doesn't. Also, we're not talking about Slush's pool, but that was just your example of non-scrypt. *sips more coffee* OK... sheesh... If the drivers info I posted doesn't help, please post your full cgminer command line string here, or go follow a guide like on here: http://mnc.vircurpool.com/index.php?page=gettingstarted or similar I'm groggy and distracted with too many projects.. sorry if I'm just making noise instead of helping.

The driver versions for all their software often is confusing. There's the Catalyst version, the display driver version, OpenCL version, etc. It's a rat's nest. If you're talking about Catalyst 11.10, you're not on current drivers. It looks like Catalyst 13.9 came out a few days ago that supports the HD 4000 series: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=legacy2&os=Windows%207%20-%2032 (32-bit windows link, if it works) Maybe give that a shot, unless I'm understanding wrong. Also, as another shot in the dark, maybe try mining with their stratum connection and see if that works? I'm not familiar with Slush, but I saw on their site that you can do stratum. Instead of your -o URL, give this a shot?: -o stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 There's some chance that you might need protocol also, but that was pulled from their page. If you need more, try this: Let's see if any of this helps.

Actually, in late May, the big update at 75k blocks changed this diff re-target to just 60 blocks. This has had a fantastic effect on hashrate/difficulty stability on the network. Worked like a charm. If 720 retarget is still posted in details somewhere, that needs to be changed.

It's not very many confirmations. I've mined a lot of these puppies and it doesn't take very long to show up in the wallet... I don't remember the specific number though. It sure seems like no more than 6 though.

MNC really is a coin that is hard to see as a "mine and dump" sort of coin. If you have a bunch of them from mining, you really don't want to just eject them for nothing, I think. When people were buying them for super cheap over the past month-ish (.0002-.001, I think is super-cheap), they were gathering up large quantities of them at a time, so big sells were happening a bit "easier". I think as the price comes up more, it will stop seeing so much of the big dumping behavior and more of an investment-minded behavior where sells are a little more guarded. This will of course ratchet prices up.. I hope. ...but I'm no financial guru.

I think it's 6 confirmations. You can check your wallet on the "transactions" tab/page. There's an icon to the left of the transaction line that shows the current state of the transaction. Hover your mouse over that icon and it shows the current status -- "3 of 6 confirmations" or whatever the wording is. When it's fully confirmed, you'll see a green check mark icon.

Some of the modules I've seen can be clunky, in that the process involves giving the user an address to send payment to, and then they have to wait for the merchant to confirm that the payment is on its way (with some number of conversions) and then they continue processing the order. I do remember seeing a module that would track a TXID and monitor confirms, but I didn't really dig into it at the time. It was a while back when I was only dabbling. I think the main thing for a good module is to be set up like a credit card payment module, where you can set up "payment processors" like they often have now, but in this case, it would be "crypto currency" and their relevant addresses that could be generated and tracked on the fly for a variety of coins. Many of them are one coin, but not flexible enough to serve multiple coins. BTC is most common, of course. I really need to do more research to get current. I did a quick romp after I posted the last comment and found quite a few new options I hadn't seen before. It appears a lot of progress has been made.

One thing that's hard to figure out, is just how many people are really buying stuff with their cryptos. I might just have it all "wrong"-ish in thinking I have to worry about it at all. I've definitely decided that adding acceptance of any crypto currency needs to be accompanied by links to info on how to obtain said currency -- links to exchanges or forums like this, etc. Most of the stuff I think about selling targets tech-minded folk anyway, or even specifically people who already are into cryptos. There will be a big switch to get into "mainstream" channels anyway.

The MinCoin client will automatically seek out nodes as it runs, but it's also possible to specify them in the .conf. With a strong network for a coin, there will be many nodes that start getting connected to, but they must be open ports on the various firewalls for miners & coin clients. If your port isn't open and forwarded to your computer, you won't show up to others as a node. ...that's how I understand it, anyway. There are indeed many folks who will put a couple dozen nodes in their .conf file, which is totally valid. You just have to know a list that is consistent. Many miners/clients shut off after a while, so that node disappears. There's no point having those nodes hardcoded, so you have to know what the real "permanent" nodes are. Many pools will provide a more permanent node, for instance. There's not much reason to specify addnodes unless you're having trouble getting connections. Three or four connections will do the trick.