Bitcoin Mining

**Cantih** · 2013-11-19 01:02

And now it's past 700 a coin.
God I wish I had tried this shit on my laptop when I heard of it on boingboing so many years ago.

Can I even earn ANYTHING from keeping it running on a normal machine? (I hear there's something about getting sips off of an optional transaction fee.)
Also, do any of the good/safe clients let you limit how much hardware mining uses up? I don't want to be constantly redlining my machine

**Boyiee** · 2013-11-19 01:31

My understanding is that when this caught on and people started trying to make bank off it, it wasn't worth the wattage to get coins. You ended up paying more than you made. But with prices now, it sure is silly.

Spoiler: show

**Cantih** · 2013-11-19 02:42

Well, I'm not too worried about power, my total household electric bill is $34 a month (and this is with an electric oven/range in the house, no gas).
Just, if with a normal household PC, I can even get anything at all. I know expecting a block reward would pmuch be like playing the lottery (can you even get one without a special rig? Or is a block too big? idefk)

**Jefe** · 2013-11-19 03:18

At this point you're basically competing against data centres mining 24/7 w/ top of the line gpus. It'd would take a hellaluv time to compute what said centres do. You'd probably be losing money to boot.

**Tymon** · 2013-11-19 14:48

The only people that got filthy rich out of this are in one of two camps:

1) Mined with beastly computers 4+ years ago
2) Purchased insane amounts of BTC in the same timeframe.

#2 is what I could have been in on but didn't take advantage. It hurts pretty badly now.

**octopus** · 2013-11-19 15:00

Originally Posted by Tymon

#2 is what I could have been in on but didn't take advantage. It hurts pretty badly now.

A lot of people were in the same boat. It's actually kinda amusing reading the replies in the first pages now...

**hey** · 2013-11-19 15:15

Originally Posted by Cantih

And now it's past 700 a coin.

What the fuck just happened?

**Silenka** · 2013-11-19 16:33

This happened, lol. Crazy shit.

**Jefe** · 2013-11-19 19:27

I wonder how the government will try to get their filthy paws on this.

**Boyiee** · 2013-11-19 20:15

they already did

**hey** · 2013-11-20 18:16

.

**Maguspk** · 2013-11-26 15:20

Originally Posted by vagus

Silk Road has closed. First bitcoin ATM opens today. Curious how many of you that posted in this thread 2 years ago, has your views and wallet changed? Lol.

Haven't been on BG in ages but Ragns contacted me about BG Bucket recently and Bitcoin has been at the top of my mind for the past few months (for obvious reasons) so I decided to do a search. I remember posting in this thread back when prices were around 10 dollars and I had sold some coins around then too.

Right now? I put in my last large chunk back in September/October when prices were around 113. Now I'm just dollar cost averaging and watching my investment grow, it's pretty insane. Told a few coworkers to get in when it was rising at about 350 and they said I was crazy and it'd crash. Not even 2 weeks later I was explaining it to people when they began to ask questions and the price had hit 900, crashed to 500 and risen back to about 700.

It's also funny how people will casually ask you 'How many bitcoins do you have?'. It doesn't seem odd sure, but basically it's like asking someone how big their portfolio is or how much money they have in the bank, it's quite invasive.

Just some random thoughts, here are some nice links for tracking prices....

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/

The original Bitcoin whitepaper

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

**octopus** · 2013-11-26 15:29

I just wonder if the guys who said early in the thread that they'd get about 0.5 bitcoin a day kept mining... how rich would they be now? >.>

**hey** · 2013-11-26 15:43

Originally Posted by octopus

I just wonder if the guys who said early in the thread that they'd get about 0.5 bitcoin a day kept mining... how rich would they be now? >.>

Millionaires

**Maguspk** · 2013-11-26 15:46

Originally Posted by octopus

I just wonder if the guys who said early in the thread that they'd get about 0.5 bitcoin a day kept mining... how rich would they be now? >.>

If they kept the coins they might have a nice chunk of change but keep in mind the bitcoin mining difficulty increases with each 2016 successful block verifications (nonce'd hashes) and you are literally competing with everybody else and with hardware growth you really aren't even in the game anymore unless you're mining in Th/s (which was out of the question back in 2011). Also, winning produces less coins now, back then it was 50 coins and now it's 25 and due to drop to 12.5 pretty soon, plus transaction fees.

The paper millionaires are those who were buying a decent amount of money early before the price shot up to where it is now. It is entirely possible to have been mining (alone) for years and never guess a valid hash which is why pools are such an attractive prospect. Still though, you are looking at needing thousands of dollars in hardware to even break into that game. It's much more intelligent to simply buy coins at this point.

**hey** · 2013-11-26 16:59

Mining bitcoins without specialized hardware is probably always going to be at a loss, if you have to pay electricity costs, now. Mining Litecoins with a gpu seem to still be profitable, even at current prices, but not particularly. I'm making about $2-3 per day worth atm, with a 7850. Hopefully the price on them eventually goes up a lot, and it can turn into a decent bit of money, but even if not, i won't complain about $60-90 a month for free. If you want to gamble on them, feathercoins are probably more profitable than litecoins right now, and have very very low difficulty, but idk, litecoins seem like a safer bet. Feathercoins are easy to mine now though, so if they ever become valuable, you could make a lot on them.

**Aragon of Odin** · 2013-11-26 20:24

Is it even viable to do litecoins or feathercoins with an Nvidia GPU? My laptop has a GTX 660M, but reading through this thread everyone was saying roll with AMD, has this changed at all or still the same?

Edit: Also, are you able to use your PC while mining, I use my laptop a lot for torrenting and watching movies, would I have to pause the miner while I was watching a movie or anything?

**hey** · 2013-11-26 21:15

Originally Posted by Aragon of Odin

Is it even viable to do litecoins or feathercoins with an Nvidia GPU? My laptop has a GTX 660M, but reading through this thread everyone was saying roll with AMD, has this changed at all or still the same?

nvidia? On a laptop? Probably not. AMD gpus are far better for mining. And obviously a laptop is going to be even worse.

Edit: Also, are you able to use your PC while mining, I use my laptop a lot for torrenting and watching movies, would I have to pause the miner while I was watching a movie or anything?

Maxxing out my gpu, making my entire computer otherwise unusable, gets me about 280 khash. Slowing it down enough that i can run 3 instances of ffxi without issue, gets me about 250 khash.

**Aragon of Odin** · 2013-11-26 21:28

Thanks for the info. Still interested to give it a shot just to see, but I'm pretty sure ASUS soddered my GPU on and its nearly irreplacable, so that would mean having to buy a whole new PC, which isn't an option now lol

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