Bitcoin Forum

Hi. So I have a Lenovo y510p laptop. I recently learned about bitcoin mining and i hear people are making a lot out of it. especially when their electricity is free. which in my case doesn't really matters because my laptop is already running pretty much 24/7. Therefore i don't think I'd be adding to any costs.

The specs of my laptop are:

Intel Core i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.4GHz
NVIDIA GT755M 2 GB Graphics Card (Pretty decent graphics card as it smoothly runs most heavy graphics games).
8 GB RAM
1 TB Hard Disk

So what do you think? Will I be able to pull it off? Can i earn any money using bitcoin? An estimate on how much would if my laptop stays on roughly 20 hours a day would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

I'm afraid the days of cpu mining are long gone. You need proper mining hardware now. Even if you did go ahead and mine with your laptop it still use more electricity since the cpu would be running 100% full time.

Not many people would recommend getting in to mining now as it's really not profitable. Still, you can get cheap usb miners off eBay would are good fun for learning on.

LOL

you can't mine with cpu anymore, it's not 2009, the same for any altcoin, but there are exceptions here, some altcoin come only with cpu mining because they have new algo that can't be mined with nothing else for a short time.

try to mine those at launch

Nice machine, don't let it fry up for some nano-scale profits.

You can mine with your laptop, but energy cost > Bitcoin return

Your laptop is not running at 100% capacity all the time.  It would be if you were mining... which leads me to my next statement:

Do not waste your time trying to mine BTC with your laptop!

Even if the electricity cost is not a factor, it's still a no-go for you.  Sorry to break the bad news to you.

LOL. ;D

Your 2.4 GHz i7 makes about 50 MH/s. That's good for a CPU but terrible compared to high-end GPUs and ASICs. In comparison, a used Block Erupter ASIC can be purchased for $5 on eBay and is capable of 333 MH/s. An Ice Fury ASIC can be purchased for $5-10 and is capable of almost 3,000 MH/s.

According to this (http://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator) Bitcoin mining calculator, 50 MH/s can generate 54 satoshis per day, 1,540 satoshis per month, or 18,480 satoshis per year assuming that the network difficulty stays the same. 18,480 satoshis is worth just over 4 US cents. Since difficulty tends to increase, it's far more likely that you will get less than this amount.

Your GPU fares better but even so, GPUs are obsolete when it comes to mining and Nvidia GPUs aren't really suited for Bitcoin mining anyway (although they can be useful for mining altcoins - more on that later). The GT755M is capable of ~200 MH/s. This is roughly four times the hash rate of the CPU so you will get roughly four times the coins - i.e. ~16 US cents worth of BTC per year assuming that the difficulty stays the same.

The reason for this is because of ASICs. ASICs are specialized circuits that are engineered from the ground up to perform the computations required for mining bitcoins. General purpose computing hardware such as CPUs and GPUs can't compete with ASICs. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm which has ASICs developed for it. You can't mine other SHA-256 coins like Peercoin with CPUs and GPUs either. Litecoin's scrypt algorithm also has ASICs developed for it which means that other scrypt-based coins such as Dogecoin can't be mined with CPUs and GPUs.

However, some coins use algorithms that don't have ASICs developed for it (yet). For example, you can still mine Primecoin using a CPU. For a list of coins where mining with CPU mining makes sense, see:

http://www.cpucoinlist.com/

Also, keep in mind that just because mining CPU and GPU mineable altcoins is less unprofitable compared to mining bitcoins doesn't mean that it's necessarily profitable after electricity costs are taken into account. Even if you normally keep your laptop running 24/7, the increased load on your laptop's components will increase your laptop's power consumption. Even worse, it could also stress your CPU/GPU and decrease your laptop's life expectancy.

Finally, if you do choose to mine altcoins then it doesn't mean that you have to be stuck with it. Don't like darkcoins? No problem. You can trade in your altcoins for bitcoins on any altcoin exchange that supports your altcoin. To find the most profitable altcoin for your hardware, use Coinwarz (http://www.coinwarz.com/). A good exchange to trade your altcoins is Cryptsy (http://www.cryptsy.com).

You'd make more btc playing with faucets all day than cpu mining, and you can't make diddly squat with faucets.

It looks like a decent laptop, but forget about mining bitcoin...
You could try to find some new, interesting cpu-mineable cryptocurrencies in altcoin section of the forum.
But if i was in your position I wouldn't even try -> mining is very cpu/gpu intense and laptops just don't have appropriate cooling systems for that - you may mine something, but your laptop may get damaged in the process  >:(

No, because the heat will eventually fry it up.

And besides be lucky if you can earn 10.000 satoshi /day with it. You need many ASICS to mine with cooling equipment, which costs some investment, so sorry to say but nope.

Not only this.  But as others pointed out a laptop is not meant for mining.  If you look at desktops you will find most miners use open air as it has a lot of heat at that intensity.  A laptop will die sooner if you mine, it is a fact.   It might handle it fine for a day, week, month, but eventually it will be bad.

Also with a laptop you cant switch out GPU if you fry it mining.  So you could have a brick basically.   

Look into asics in the hardware section and you will thank everyone later.

yes ofcourse you can mine bitcoins with your laptop.. but the question must be, how much "satoshi" you will earn in 24hours, maybe you can earn less than 5000 satoshi and your electricity bill will be doubled or tripled.. in short cpu mining isnt profitable these days so dont waste your time thinking to get bitcoins in mining if you wont use proper mining rigs.. cheers!

If you ask you can mine or not, then yes you can...
But the question here is... How many BTC will you get from mining?
The asnwer is (almost) none  :-\
Except... you instamine or mine an AltCoins
Because, processor & gpu mining is already dead for bitcoins... Now they're using ASIC miner (or somekind like that)
But if you still wanted to mine BTC then you can go cloud mining ;)

For alt coins, there are several ASIC and GPU resistant coins. The difficulty can be lower than Bitcoin. Assuming that it doesn't crash and the price rise, you can still make a profit. However, most coins are pump and dump.

Yes, but it is not worth at all, you would also shorten the life of your laptop a lot. Also if you want to do some real mining you need ASIC.

DOn't mine anything with laptops, you will only destroy them really quickly  and get pennies at most while mining

I think we may have established in this long line of posts this laptop is not good for mining ;)

You could mine with it to see how mining works and learn more about crypto's form it. But keep in mind that you are not going to profit because you need specialized hardware these days and you will risk killing your laptop if mine with it for too long considering the amount of heat that it will generate.

Considering how low the specs are, he would need sometime before he would be able to even get a share. Buying an block erupter would be more practical as it is cheap so you wouldn't have to care if it gets fried badly. But you would probably care if your laptop gets fried. Also, Nvidia can't mine efficiently for those in GT range needless to say, mobile GPUs.

Even if your electricity is free, leaving the laptop on for 24/7 will not even net you enough btc to pay for the transaction fee. Unless you want to continue mining for the sake of educational purposes, you might be better off just buying bitcoin and earn it by providing services

...all you’re going to do is run up an electricity bill and shorten your laptop’s life.

So you shouldn't mine with this laptop? Come on guys keep it going. The OP hasn't contributed to this since it was posted and all the replies to his questions are the same. There's nothing to add to this now.

Yeah right, but do you mean that this thread should be locked then???

Before that happens, I would advice OP to not even think of mining with laptop at all if he ain't in some specific temperature based conditions, I got my laptop burned due to it, so I would suggest "No". Also, if OP wants to mine BTC with laptop, I would say that it's next to impossible to even mine miner's fee per day with just an average laptop.