Bitcoin Mining, anyone doing it ?

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Never even heard of Bitcoin Mining until about a week ago, so today I've installed a client and am currently waiting for it to finish synchronising blocks or something.

Anyone involved in this and know what its all about ?

The only thing I understand is that Bitcoins are a type of interwebz currency that can be used to either buy stuff from certain sites or transfer into real money

Is it worth it?

What sort of turnover can you make with a couple of 6850s mining about 16 hours a day ? (Will they pay for the amount of electric I will use running them ? )

How do you get 2 GPUs to work at the same time for the same account, run 2 x clients ? (Still waiting on it syncing so haven't got that far yet)

How much are bitcoins worth in ? and are there any decent sites you can use bitcoins to buy decent stuff ?

[+John Teacake MVC]

Your only just finding out about it really? Its actually grabbed some headlines over the past year or so. Head over to /. they love storys on it. Anyway I started in the early days but its not cost effective now at all.

[Vice]

I did it for a little while when it first hit notoriety and the first GPU clients came out. But now days you will spend more money in electricity generating the coins than the coins themselves are worth so unless you have some way to get electricity for free or very very cheaply it's just not worth doing it. You can make more money from bitcoins by simply buying when they are low and selling when they are high but that is obviously a gamble.

The whole bitcoin thing reminds me of this episode of seinfeld where Newman and Kramer find a way to use Newmans mail truck as a way to deliver empty bottles to a michigan bottle bank that pays 10 cents per empty bottle while their own state of new york only pays 5 cents. It's a similar situation with bitcoining, if you can find a way to get the electricity cheaply or free then you can make money just like the free truck lowered their costs enough to make the bottle bank 10 cent payout profitable.

[nub]

Unless you're willing to put some money in FPGAs or ASICs its not worth it. Bitcoin has moved past GPU.

http://bitcoinfpga.com/

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  On 07/09/2012 at 16:42, ChuckFinley said:

Your only just finding out about it really? Its actually grabbed some headlines over the past year or so. Head over to /. they love storys on it. Anyway I started in the early days but its not cost effective now at all.

Yea I'd never heard of it until someone was asking why CFX was not working for mining, so I went to investigate what it was :)

  On 07/09/2012 at 16:46, Vice said:

I did it for a little while when it first hit notoriety and the first GPU clients came out. But now days you will spend more money in electricity generating the coins than the coins themselves are worth so unless you have some way to get electricity for free or very very cheaply it's just not worth doing it. You can make more money from bitcoins by simply buying when they are low and selling when they are high but that is obviously a gamble.

The whole bitcoin thing reminds me of this episode of seinfeld where Newman and Kramer find a way to use Newmans mail truck as a way to deliver empty bottles to a michigan bottle bank that pays 10 cents per empty bottle while their own state of new york only pays 5 cents. It's a similar situation with bitcoining, if you can find a way to get the electricity cheaply or free then you can make money just like the free truck lowered their costs enough to make the bottle bank 10 cent payout profitable.

That's what I thought, running the GPUs will cost more than I'm generating

Ah well, was something to keep me occupied for a few minutes :p

[Vice]

  On 07/09/2012 at 16:49, nub said:

Unless you're willing to put some money in FPGAs or ASICs its not worth it. Bitcoin has moved past GPU.

http://bitcoinfpga.com/

There is also this one: http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

I've seen people on bitcoin forums talking about this quite a lot. And I agree completely the days of GPU mining are long gone the power consumption is just so much higher than these dedicated ASIC's that theres just no question which way to go if you're serious about mining coins. For me I'm not serious enough about it to invest in any kind of dedicated hardware. I just don't believe in bitcoins yet especially with the huge fluctuations in price from one month to the next combined with the ability for coin horders to wildly influence price in an instant by dumping or buying lots of coins. It's just too .. unstable for me.

[Reacon]

I mine 8 hours a night with my 5850 as an investment in what could potentially be something big in the next twenty years. It takes no extra attention to schedule it every night, and heats my room to boot. So the benefits and potential returns outweigh the power cost.

I feel like Bitcoin would be a good currency backer, especially once it has received all 21 million of its generated coins. It might not take in the long-term, but there is profit to be had in short term trading, much like stocks. I'm merely banking on the small possibility it has to become relevant in economics in the near future amidst all the economic breakdown and systematic destruction of the gold standard by the US.

[n_K]

I looked at bitcoin and thought it was an idiots game, then I remember hearing when it got hacked and someone sold a load of hacked bitcoins which crashed the virtual market, they got the money and other people lost a lot, and it was proof that it was an idiot's game.

All the smart people with bitcoins got in when it first started and have sold everything they got from it, now it's just a pyramid scheme.

[Reacon]

  On 07/09/2012 at 17:02, n_K said:

I looked at bitcoin and thought it was an idiots game, then I remember hearing when it got hacked and someone sold a load of hacked bitcoins which crashed the virtual market, they got the money and other people lost a lot, and it was proof that it was an idiot's game.

All the smart people with bitcoins got in when it first started and have sold everything they got from it, now it's just a pyramid scheme.

And now it's back up to 10+ USD per Bitcoin. People lost faith after a huge bubble, but came back later. Bitcoin is like stock right now. If something happens to the companies supporting a new currency, share holders will lose faith, sell out, and bring the price down drastically. It's simple economics, really.

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  On 07/09/2012 at 17:07, Reacon said:

And now it's back up to 10+ USD per Bitcoin. People lost faith after a huge bubble, but came back later. Bitcoin is like stock right now. If something happens to the companies supporting a new currency, share holders will lose faith, sell out, and bring the price down drastically. It's simple economics, really.

And what sort of timescale does it take to generate 1 bitcoin with a couple of mid market GPUs ?

[349857345]

And what is the program actually doing when it's mining for bitcoins ? Just use up GPU power to calculate stuff ?

in b4 "it's mining for coins"

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  On 07/09/2012 at 17:12, simmo said:

And what is the program actually doing when it's mining for bitcoins ? Just use up GPU power to calculate stuff ?

in b4 "it's mining for coins"

My guess was something similar to F@H

[Reacon]

Let me explain how this works in layman's terms.

Bitcoin uses "blocks" to finalise every transaction, but in order to generate a new block, the network must first find a hash suitable. So it's like the network of miners are collectively brute forcing a password. The network generates 50 coins per block as inflation and an incentive, and gives it to the person who find the hash. The reward given will decrease over time until it's at a standstill at 21m~, and fees paid per transaction will go up to compensate to keep the miners mining. (fees bump up the order in which your transaction gets set into stone with the next block).

So now we have a basic explanation of how the market inflates for now, and where that inflation goes, but where does it end up after the miner who found it? There are two probable options:

1. A bitcoin miner got extremely lucky, and found it on his own.

2. A mining pool of many miners found it, and the 50 BTC are distributed based on pool policy.

The former is extremely less likely to happen.

poclbm is a miner that uses Open CL, and any hardware that can use Open CL will be able to generate coins for it. Guiminer is a basic GUI for poclbm and a number of other miners. There is a framerate you can put on the miner to give other applications priority, if you want to work your card 24/7 with minimal FPS drop in games.

There are many pools at varying popularity. I've been with "Eclipse Mining Consortium" since its conception, and I would recommend it based on its policy of an optional fee, and its reward algorithm. I recommend everybody do a google search, however, to see which pool would serve them best.

Last thing to note: As a rule of thumb, ATI is a far better hashrate than Nvidia. I think it's common knowledge that AMD usually has more raw computing power, however. Google some charts to see just what driver/card combination is the most effective. I have a 5850.

[+John Teacake MVC]

No way are you ever going to make anywhere close to $10000 trying to mine BitCoins!

[+Byt Subscriber¹]

I would love it to be a viable idea, and a profitable one!

But i just dont see it, i looked into it around a year ago and even then it just seemed like a bunch of people making insanely electric hungry setups just to farm these coins and then they have to hope the coins will be worth anything by the time they have a few saved up :/

[Izlude]

I've mined 1 bitcoin in 4 months... I still have it too. I'm not sure how to sell it -_- ebay shows between 20-40 dollars for 1 bitcoin, but "we buy coins" websites will pay you 5 dollars for one... Plus paypal apparently freezes accounts of people who sell/buy bitcoins on ebay.

I simply don't know what to do with it...