Bitcoin Mining

[Odon]

Since it apparently went over your head. We've been mining since that point.

This is likely the peak before the bottom drops out. Like Forum Gold and the dozens of other niche online currencies that have come before it.

At least you agree with me on this. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

[Tymon]

Crunching numbers on how much one would make using bitcoins at the current difficulty is a mistake, as the difficulty of mining has been set so much higher by comparison that it isn't even worth discussing anymore.

It is very easy to say that someone that began mining in winter '10 could have saved up enough coins to make $25,000 if they sold at $30 (the market peak, didn't last long)

$25,000 is lenient. You could make much more. That is, if you can sell all of the coins for that much. The problem with doing such a thing is that by selling off so many coins YOU directly crash the market (temporarily) and soil your profits.

There's no way around this, other than to sell in small amounts and hope the market stays around, or rebounds. Just like real stocks. Because for all intents and purposes, it is real stock trading, except the stock is worth nothing and they're only being traded because drug dealers like being invincible.

[Celeras]

Since it apparently went over your head. We've been mining since that point.



At least you agree with me on this. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Nothings over my head, I'm just trying to warn the sheep who would think that getting into the tail end of a pyramid scheme is a somehow a good idea. I personally thought Satoshi was going to cash in with his hoarded pile when it hit 10 and the whole thing was going to crumble.

[Odon]

But as I've already explained, it will go back to being around 5-10 dollars once it bursts for the last time. It won't ever go away. Once all the people who just jumped in to make a quick buck, leave, that will just further reinforce this being the currency of choice for criminals/black market activities

[Celeras]

None of them ever go away completely, they just descend into worthlessness. Made a few hundred bucks off Forum gold back in the day, it's still alive and kicking but you'd need to amass 1000 times(probably more) what I did to resell for that now.

The saving grace this thing has for longevity is the cap placed on how many coins will be generated, eventually it'll just be a flat number in circulation and stabilized. In which case it goes back to being an underground alternative rather than anything you can profit off of in the real world. And when that happens, its really just a bunch of geeks trading coins.. since I wouldn't really expect anybody to be interested in purchasing at that point for anything but anonymity.

[Odon]

Are you talking about JSP, in regards to forum gold?

[aurik]

Fuck yea forum gold for your Gul rune.

[Vandole]

man, most people have so many forum gold now that you can get a half decent toon for >10 fg. if you can get the stuff to make runewords with and happen to get a perfect you'll get an ungodly amount though

hell, i got a shaco, skullders, war travs, gheeds, and some other shit for free just cause i asked. and free rushes from norm->hell

[Odon]

Well if we're talking about that, Bitcoins are in no way the same fucking thing. You could just donate to the guy who ran that site and poof you would have instant JSP created from no where. At least you have to actually mine there and people just don't up and create as much as they want.

[Celeras]

Well if we're talking about that, Bitcoins are in no way the same fucking thing. You could just donate to the guy who ran that site and poof you would have instant JSP created from no where. At least you have to actually mine there and people just don't up and create as much as they want.

Similarities:
-Imaginary coins
-Underground/not mainstream
-Assigned value by geeks and used as currency
-Purchasable
-Obtainable via non-currency resources (time/electricity)
-Exploited for real money by early adopters
-Gold and circular in their fictional nature

Differences:
-Quantity: Limited vs. Limitless
-Traceable vs. Untraceable

You're right they were completely different.

[Odon]

You cannot just throw money at Bitcoins and have them magically appear from thin air. They have to have been mined.
JSP was just created whenever someone donated. What would happen if the US just decided to print money whenever someone asked for it? It would be worth jack shit. Which is exactly what happened after years and years of people donating to get JSP.

Stop nitpicking, you know the majority of what you said has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

[Tymon]

I completely understand the criticism of the concept, but what I don't get is any reason at all to hate on it at this point in time, when there is literally zero downside to trading it.

If someone wants to buy it from you, that's their problem. And your profit. It's not illegal to sell it, and not illegal to trade it.

Will it probably end up being unprofitable as a result of deflation? Yes.

Is it right now? Debatable.

Was it profitable at one point? Absolutely.

[Celeras]

You cannot just throw money at Bitcoins and have them magically appear from thin air. They have to have been mined.

No? You make it sound like youre throwing on a fucking hardhat and walking down a dark tunnel. You're not, you're throwing money at your electric bill by mining the same way someone playing a vidya-game was doing. And if you throw even more money at a dual 6990 rig dedicated to 24/7 mining.. bitcoins don't appear out of thin air directly into your wallet?

Resource is resource. You got JSP by running a game, you get bitcoins by running a program crunching meaningless numbers. Run multiple D2 bots, increase your energy bill, get more JSP. Run more miners, ", ". And yeah, limited supply vs limitless supply is in the difference column.. it's one of the few. It's exactly the same otherwise, in both concept and practice.

And I agree with Tymon, there's no downside to flipping these types of things if you can do it profitably.

[Odon]

No? You make it sound like youre throwing on a fucking hardhat and walking down a dark tunnel. You're not, you're throwing money at your electric bill by mining the same way someone playing a vidya-game was doing. And if you throw even more money at a dual 6990 rig dedicated to 24/7 mining.. bitcoins don't appear out of thin air directly into your wallet?

Resource is resource. You got JSP by running a game, you get bitcoins by running a program crunching meaningless numbers. Run multiple D2 bots, increase your energy bill, get more JSP. Run more miners, ", ". And yeah, limited supply vs limitless supply is in the difference column.. it's one of the few. It's exactly the same otherwise, in both concept and practice.

And I agree with Tymon, there's no downside to flipping these types of things if you can do it profitably.

What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Talking. About.

You did not need to play the game to get JSP, you could suck a dick for $20, put that in the bank and donate that to the forum for $20 worth of JSP.

Not everyone pays for the electricity they are using. If you're mining at a Uni, you're not paying. If you're using a network at work to mine, because you're the admin and can, you're not paying. You make it sound like mining costs 589829852 dollars in electricity to fucking do, the fuck are you on about? Guess what? Mine a bit coin, congrats you paid for the cost of mining for the rest of the month. Holy fuck you're an idiot. If you cannot understand why a currency that can be created at the whim of someone as much as they want forever is different than bitcoins, I don't know what the fuck to tell you.

And to further illustrate this point.

If you took ten million dollar and donated that for 500 trillion JSP and spread that around, this is going to crash the JSP market. It will not be worth as much everything will cost millions of JSP.

You cannot simply just walk up to someone and ask them to create BRAND NEW Bitcoins at the drop of a hat whenever you want.

Do you get it?

[Tymon]

By the way, there is a cap to how many bitcoins can be created.

They set a limit to the maximum number to be in the economy at any given time, it's just theoretically impossible for that many to be created for at least a couple more years.

edit: according to my calculations, one bitcoin has to be below $4 for you to no longer profit from mining at all.

That is assuming you mine 24/7 at full load for 30 days at 250 mhash/sec.

250 mhash/sec = 6950, an affordable common gaming card. About $30 per month, and an equivalent energy bill as well.

Anything more and you profit. Right now 1 BTC is $17.50. So you're making about $100 in profit on a monthly basis.

[Vandole]

if i OC my pc i can get about 800 mhash/sec but i dont like OC'ing my 2600k to 5.0 ghz >.>;;;

however if i were at college i'd do it all day erryday.

[Tymon]

What? CPU mining is incredibly inefficient, you only need your GPU to be under load to mine.

OCing a 6990 would be the most effective. You only need a garbage AMD Sempron single core if you were building a dedicated mining PC.

[hey]

I assume he is using both at once.

[Darus Grey]

Yeah no shit, my 980x pulls a whopping 30mhash, no point in even trying.

Also no point arguing with Cel, he still thinks it's a pyramid scheme(and obviously has no clue what that actually is).

Though tbh, a lot of people just seem mad that they didn't get it on this earlier, I'm a believer in the concept and was a fairly early adopter(8~ months ago, early compared to now at least). What they fail to realize is that the strengths of bitcoin make it more akin to a physical commodity than a fiat currency, and strangely make it worth more than most national currencies.

At the end of the day all currencies are just junk that only have value because a community agrees that it has value, and as long as a community agrees there is value in the concept of bitcoin, it will have value. The media coverage only helps this, because more adopters equals more stability.

[Shuvo]

CPU mining is about 1/50th the speed of GPU mining, and incredibly inefficient (~50%). Their's just no point at all in running it, you'd probably be slowing the pool down with the inefficiency. In fact, if you have an nvidia card their's almost no point in mining either, they mine at about 1/3rd the speed of ATI cards of the same generation. That would bring the BTC value a lot closer to the cost of electricity (if that is an issue for you).

But for those with an ATI GPU ~ the higher electric cost is not too bad if you think about it in terms of it being an investment. As I mentioned earlier, my bill works out to be about $1.20 per day for about 10times that value in bitcoins.

http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/8...bybrandgen.png

Look at your energy companies' website (it should have a calculator) to work out how that power consumption translates to cost.