Bitcoin Forum

[July 2017: This is an old post (September 2012) and the information is no longer relevant. I just brought it up to celebrate]

My computer doesn't seem to be mining for Bitcoins.

I downloaded Bitcoin-Qt 0.6.3 from the main page (redirected to SourceForge for the download) to my Windows 7 tower (4GB RAM, 3.0 GHz). Not much else is running on the computer. I've watched the green bar to the left of "Synchronizing with network..." go from "~50,000 blocks remaining" to completing the blocks, and then starting over. I have 55 active connections to the Bitcoin network.

18 hours later, I have 0.00 BTC. I thought I'd at least see something...anything but "0.00". Maybe I'm just anxious after 18 hours, but I wanted to see if this is normal or not.

I'm sorry if this has been asked and already answered. I tried searching and didn't see anything about this.

http://www.weusecoins.com/mining-guide.php

Bitcoin-QT is a wallet.  It doesn't mine anything... ever.  The analogy would be like asking does my Bank Of America online banking do mining.  At one time (a long time ago) the client had a built-in miner but it was removed because it simply couldn't keep pace with the difficulty.   You could mine for years and not get anything with the old client.  To put it into perspective difficulty is now ~2.7 MILLION times higher than when the network launched.   For the same amount of computing power it will take you 2.7 millions times as long to produce the same amount of coins.

Today to participate in mining you need a piece of software called a "miner".  This would be seperate from Bitcoin-QT (or any other client/wallet).  You also will need a significant amount of GPU computing power and cheap electricity or specialized hardware (FPGA) to have the ability to mine more than a token amount (bitcents per day).

Thank you for answering my questions and verifying that I wasn't mining.

What solo miner software do you recommend if I have 7-8 separate PC's, most of which are in one room and several others are a few miles away? Cooling and electricity will not be a concern.
 
I realize that I won't make much, but why not give it a go since I have the computers and have no other costs?

Even if you had properly set up the client to mine, if you aren't mining as part of a pool, you are solo mining. Unless you have some serious hardware pumping out giga hashes, you could go a very long time solo mining before ever discovering a block.

cgminer is a good mining software. Set it up on each device/computer and point it towards a pool or a computer running your bitcoin client service with RPC active. However, don't solo mine unless you have 50-100 GH/s minimum, which is the equivalent of about 100 HD7970 ... Use a pool software instead, e.g. p2pool.

If your mining with cpus on those rigs, its really not worth it, they wont make their value in bitcoins before they burn out.

If you do plan on mining with you CPU's only I recommend triplemining as your pool and GUIminer as an easy miner for your first mining ops.

Please note, mining is not a get rich quick scheme.

And please, go read the bitcoin wiki and some guides before you attempt other things.

And cpu mining is epic useless.

This is c789 making my 789th post :) I thought it would be fitting to do it here where it all began.

As you can see from my first post, I was franticly trying to learn to mine as quickly as possible. In fact, "c789" means nothing special. It's just happened to be what I hurriedly typed out while thinking "I don't want to have to create a user name on another board that I'll never use again...I just want to mine!"

Thanks to everyone for your help. It's been great!