Topic: New poster, getting involved & have some info for starters (Read 473 times)

Hello folks, I'm fairly new to bitcoin, even though I once did a test run as a miner back around 2010, but lost my wallet.dat
Recently, in the past month or so I've been mining using Bitminter and the java client, I have an Ubuntu box (32 bit running Saucy now) along with an ATI Radeon card (Juniper HD 5700). I had a heck of a time configuring the Catalyst driver under Ubuntu 12.04, but now that I upgraded to 13.10 it it seems to have automatically configured CL, once I added the fglrx driver. I also use the "Super Bitminter" site as a "plus", can anyone recommend any other external sites to add to do more minting concurrently outside having the app(s) themselves running on my system?
My box is actually a triple core (2.8 ? Athlon II X3 445) 64-bit, but since I had trouble previously with the AMD drivers, I decided on the 32-bit system as I don't use any memory hungry apps.
Since yesterday I switched to bfgminer (had a lot of trouble with getting cgminer going) but I think that was because I hosed my CL before upgrading to Ubuntu Saucy. Bgfminer was a snap (Graeme's the 'man') and it was actually in his repostory for Debian which was easy to add via adding his source to the list. Then just apt-get install it and the whole thing takes only about 10 minutes from A-Z.
But it just mines about 6 cents a day, so I've decided to order an external bitfury-type box. Hopefully 80 Gh/sec, as my rig here just does about 1/5 of a Gh/sec. This will just be for one rig, but I have 3 other boxes I could run using bgfminer, the only problem is that 2 have Nvidia video cards, so I'm not even sure it's worth the effort.
Two things I'm wondering now - and will try to look it up - how fast is the "difficulty" level rising and how long will many of these external units still be worth the cost after 3-6 months, etc.?
Also, will these raise any flags with my internet provider, or is the amount of data just in short reporting (back and forth) bursts rather than huge continual packets?