Bitcoin Forum

I have a computer which will not used, however, it is about 4-5 years old already,
is it worth to use it to mine BTC?

If yes, how much will I expect to get in 1 month ???

It really dosen't worth it mate; drop it , you probably won't get anything . I asked the same question to people on the beggining of my career on Bitcoin world and they told me to drop it , someone even told me "I can mine with a USB more then you will mine with your PC" (didn't knew what USB he was talking about back then) .
Even if you get something , it will still nothing because - electricity bill > your earnings - which is useless and like you did nothing

Short answer: No
Long answer: Yes, but not much. CPU mining bitcoin is a waste of time and money. As being said before: you'll lose money on the electricity bill.

There are a couple of altcoins, like monero, magi coin (and a couple others), that are CPU-minable, and can give you some return. Chances are slim you'll make more than the energy price, even with those CPU minable coins.

An other option is buying some old USB miners or graphic cards, and hook them up to your PC. But: same old thing, you'll probably pay more for electricity.

Bottom line i've learned: if you cannot invest a couple thousand, and have a good electricity rate, you'll never make money... I do mine myself, but it's only to educate myself, i know i'll never make ROI (return on investment ~ braking even)...

nope, you will most definitely spend more money paying the electricity bill for running that computer than you will make mining; most mining these days is done with specialized ASIC hardware that provide hundreds of gigahashes/second or even several terahashes/second. in comparison, your 4-5 year old computer will at most be able to provide a couple megahashes a second.

Hasn't really been worth mining with computers since 2013 :P

O...sad to hear that
I think it is too late to start my BTC career...lol

I also find there is some site offering mine BTC service,
but the break even time is ard 9 months,
is it really hard to take part into the mining BTC nowaday?

I'm pretty new myself, but i can tell you that it's incredibly hard to take part in the mining, at least, if you're in it to make a profit.
If you're in it to learn a thing or two, it's pretty easy. Otherwise you'll need a really good electricity price (<$0.10/kwh) and a big startup capital to even consider it, or you'll lose money every minute your miners are running...

Cloudmining is an option (IMO), to bad there are almost no honest cloudmining companies out there. I heared great things about bit-x, that's why i use them to cloudmine myself... But remember: all the BTC invest in a thirth party CAN get lost!

i think now is the time to invest your time to acquire bitcoin, and not bitcoin itself, every investments is too risky, mining is dead trading is useless with bitcoin, there is no movements and you need to be good at it anyway

altcoin trading is too dangerous, probably worst than any gambling

altcoin mining maybe can give you something, but it is not like the old time, the earning is very low

continue to work with your signature, it is the only way remained for a good profit

Cloudming is not safe is 1 of my concerns too.
Although I won't invest much there.

Btw...I found most ppl saying abt the electric rate, what if free?
coz I just planned to mine in my office...lol

forget about mining bitcoin on your personal computer completely. it is no longer good because of the difficulty and you always have to consider the electricity costs.
you might have a good chance of mining altcoins. but you have to find a good one, preferably new and what has a low difficulty to mine.

I once tought about mining @ the office to, untill somebody pointed out that you can actually get fired if your employer finds out. Now, i make a lot more in my daytime job than i can ever make while mining, so i decided i wouldn't do it...

In case you do decide to mine in the office: it's possible to make some cash, but don't expect much (with a decent office PC, you can earn a couple dollars per week, if you mine the correct ALTcoin)

so I may just keep my bitcoin jobs, but it really really slow...:(

I can vouch for that. Mining became harder and harder, no matter which coin we talk about.

Most of my coins I've bought from the money I earned from signature campaigns and, really, those are tiny amounts, because I don't want to spend too much time talking.
Since I have a decent job, I ... just do my job. I even turn FIAT into cryptos and I think that this is best way to go forwards: the job gives me more money than I could earn from mining and chatting, and buying can help the coin price (and economy) grow.

So unless you have all you need for starting mining facility (dirt cheap power, good knowledge, space, a lot of cheap ASICS, FPGA or GPUs), it's not actually worth to mine.



You need patience; bitcoin has low price now, but a bright future lies ahead. It has to grow eventually.

they are worthless, and they earning is abysmally low, like 1-50% of your stash and per YEAR

so if you have 100 diamond, you will only earn 50 coins a year, which mean 50/365 0.13 a day, which at current btc/dmd price is 13k satoshi per day

a bit ridiculous, when there are faucet that can give you 4k per hour...

not to mention that most signature campaigns on this forum offer much more than this for a single post; altcoins really arent worth the time and effort imo.

thats why I have joined 1 already...
but not much okay for newbie

I suggest you to forget about mining. Sell your computer and buy bitcoins, after that you can buy high rank forum account and join signature campaigns so you can earn more.

Also a good idea...
just wondering how much will an acc cost...

Mining for you isn't completely out of the question yet. Mining for bitcoin is out of the question for you, not altcoins.
Depending on your processor, you may still be able to mine new, low-difficulty coins. These coins usually have a low value, however if your processor is decent you could ROI and make a small profit and or hold onto those low value coins.

NO
you can make your computer dead

Jr. Member/newbie =0.02-0.04btc with potential FM
member = 0.02-0.04btc
Fullmember = 0.05-0.1btc
Sr.member = 0.2-0.3btc
Hero 0.4-0.6btc
Legendary 1-2btc

With good cooling, no but degradation is possible with 24 hours full load.

Mining with old computers is no longer a good choice. You can still hook up a USB miner or any other miner to mine but I doubt it would be profitable unless you have no electrical costs. You can also buy a raspberry pi to hook it up. Most signature campaigns do not accept low quality accounts which many people are selling right now. I would suggest that you could buy one from a trusted seller with assurance that the post history is good.

wow...1-2 btc for a Legendary acc
how long time will it take to become Legendary?
coz i really can't understand the calculation of activity

Legendary is currently between 775 and 1030 activity. If one stays active and never misses a activity, it would be 27 months. If one is unlucky, it would be 36 months. It is currently very rare and the price is because of the rank and nothing else. Others are priced mostly based on number of open campaigns. The amount can vary depending on trust, age and post quality.

mining is not profitable these days because bitcoin price is very low unlike in 2013 to early 2014 where bitcoin price is at its peek.

read the meta section on ranks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178608.0
and i say, you already have an account with 14 account, hang around and built that up yourself. and if you want to buy an account you can but a full or Sr. member which are cheeper.

and for cloudmining i suggest you read this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387.msg9697654#msg9697654 you'll get good information there.

and if you are interested in mining so much, you can look into mining altcoins and selling them for bitcoin.

out of topic

You will lose more power costs than you will earn something from it. There are special coins that are made for mining with a CPU though even then its not worth i.

I the case you now think about investing into hardware for mining bitcoins, please check before here: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

The biggest error most newbies do is not to realize that the profits are going down each month fast. So when you did not get your investment back in the first 2 or 3 months then you most probably will not make the investment back ever.

The same goes for cloud mining. Its simply way too hard.

I suggest stay out of it as long as you dont have some serious advantage, like power costs very low or so.

its really really not worth for you
its just make your computer broken

They weren't much more profitable at that time either. The difficulty was rising tremendously. Even if you chose to buy at the $300-400 price point, by the time your ASIC comes, you won't have much time left to mine. Furthermore, the price crashed a lot in the coming months and people were losing lots of money. If you brought at the $400 price point, you could have just sold it when it reached $1000. Buying Bitcoins is still the most effective way to earn.

Not for now.
If you want to mining, better to find altcoin which have a potential to the moon. But most all altcoin is easy to dump and pump so be careful.


~iki

If you manage to buy some ASIC and attach them to your computer via USB them it might be worth, or not, depending of costs.

Of course mine with any non asic device is not worth today, even for brand new computers made for games

Nah, I have a really good computer and when I tried mining it barely gave me dimes.
There are just too many people/companies dedicated to mining bitcoins now.

Try investing in a miner

Good luck on your endeavours

No, just not invent in any hardware. Don't invest in any miners anymore. Bitcoin mining USED to be profitable couple years ago, but since that time name of the game is big mining farm.
Difficulty of algorithm is not suitable anymore to able to profit from small home miner rig. Early years of mining are gone.

Some alt coins have algorithms which reduces or stop the profitability of GPU and possibly doesn't allow other ASICs to work. Although these coins would be profitable, they may have botnet miners already on them thus having high difficulty. In the first place, OP's 5 years old computer would probably have been under various loads and the performance would have been reduced significantly.

there are still some coins that are profitable but only at launch like usual, if you can catch the train before he leave the station, you can earn something respectable, but you need to be fast there

the good thing is that 1 gpu should be enough for this, so everyone can join the altcoin lottery, the only risk is virus and nothing else, because electricity is not an issue with instamining like this

What are the specs of your computer? I'm surpised no one has asked this. If you have a 24 core processor or something ridiculous then maybe it's worth it. Also depends on where you live because electricity bills vary by location.

Sure, but the OP mentioned it was 4-5 years old already... My Dual L5420 runs 8 threads on XEON cpu's, mining XMG whenever it has some spare cpu cycles (it's running a miner on very low priority). It makes only 5-8 cents a day... Even if it was a server with 24 XEON cores, 4 threads, but 4-5 years old, it would still only make $1/day if used for mining... Or maybe my configuration of my server is way of, and i could be making a lot more than i am ;-)

Can we make a sticky "No, you can't mine with your old equipments/abacus/etc"? this kind of posts..

Unless he has a good, up to date GPU it's most likely worth it as well. I got an i5 which is not 5 years old, and I remember trying to mine Maxcoin and some other less known at release CPU coin, and it was not worth it, I couldn't get many coins.
Your best bet is a good GPU and getting the right coin to mine early on.

I highly doubt the Mobo at that time supports pcie gen 3 16x [At least consumer grade ones] , which most GPUs run on today. Buying a GPU simply wouldn't cut it. OP has to upgrade the entire computer. Even with i7 980x extreme edition, the power consumption is relatively huge with little hashrate.

I too, have considered mining with an old computer I had stored away. I did attempt to do so in the past and i was slightly successful. The computer was able to mine some Bitcoin, But the computer was not able to mine enough Bitcoin to make it worth it.

why not you can you will make a $ maybe in couple of years :D so the ansure is NO you can not really even not with old miners any more

Forget about that, you will pay more for elect. bill than you
can earn by mining with your PC.

Even with special mining hardware, its hard to back your initial
investment and earn something

It is worth because you contribute to the bitcoin network, as a charity.

You wont be earning anything because its already past your difficulty, but as a charity you can do it :D

Since bitcoin price drop into black hole, home mining would'nt profitable, it will bring you into negative profit,
I have tried home mining with a couple rigs, within a month i give up to continue mining operation because i have seen its not profitable with current bitcoin price.

Mining with the old computer doesn't worth. Even 1 year old doesnt worth if you dont have a good gpu.

There will not be any benefit through mining by older computer because the possibilities of these devices will not be able exploration in the 1 millionth of 1 Bitcoin in during the month

Even you have excellent rigs you will never got profit at the moment, the diff are increased minutes by minutes day by day, also as i said above, current decent bitcoin price its so hard to get any profit.

Yeah i know unless you have a good gpu(s), there is no profit.

but it is still possible to mine some new altcoins that have low difficulty still. but you have to search for them to find them as they are new and nobody is mining them so you can be the first.

yes you can mine them but pumps and dumps also can lead you into loosing money so i guess its not really worth the effort if you are not connected with that crypto

Tell me which are these new altcoins that can be mines easily? List some of them which a profitable. 

they are altcoin that are not yet launched, all the old altcoin are worthless to mine, but you can trade with then and hoping that one of those get a pump

the new one instead, without the anti-instamining block, can be mined with a single gpu, if the market is benevolent, you will get a good reward

Nope, not worth it. You'll get maybe 0.0001 but you can't withdraw it because most minimum withdraws are around 0.01.

Just buy bitcoin. You will lose a lot of money to electricity costs with mining. It's not worth

I wouldn't say that this is accurate. You are only contributing to the network if you are solving blocks(for solomining) or submitting shares (for pooled mining). Otherwise, if your computer is not powerful enough to submit a share, you would be just wasting your own resources.

Even if your computer is powerful enough, you should buy a USB ASIC miner and a raspberry pi. Those are much more powerful while consuming far less electricity when mining.

No. Don't mine with it. Mining bitcoin needs a heavy duty and high-end built PC. Mining in old computer is just a waste of time, you won't get anything and you will just waste your money in paying electricity bill or your computer might wear off.

It's not worth it. Believe me. Used to do it.

not worth it to mine with pcs

I would say it isn't necessary for miners to have a high end PC if they are going to mine GPU capable coins eg. Bitcoin, litecoins. The CPU can be weaker and cheaper as it doesn't really affect hashrates. The casing cost can easily be deducted if you use milk case to provide a better airflow. Mining alt coins however, depends on what kind of algronithm you want to mine on. But since scrypt and SHA256D already have ASICs designed for them, most miners with old GPUs would just go for coins which can be GPU mined. CPU wise, not so much as most of them don't have good CPU when they build it.

No is not
You'll lose time,power and money
For me it is still profitable because I'm still mining with my 3x S5 that have 1.2 TH/s and 590W/per hour.  :)

It is possible but you would be mining at a slower speed. USB ASICs are limited in terms of thermal output as they don't have a fan attached. It is also limited in terms of power consumption as they can't run with much power when powered from USB ports. There have been reports of people receiving faulty ones though. Nevertheless, you can consider getting it if you just want to learn more about Bitcoin. Otherwise, the cost of powering a computer as a host would already eat the profit.

I would like to mine for a little while just to understand how it`s done. My electricity costs are almost zero - I pay a flat rate as part of my condominium fees, I won`t pay anymore if I mine.

But I only have an old pc, and have no idea what equipment I would need to start mining. And I know very little about computers, other than knowing what a usb port is. I should look for a USB ASIC?

I personally think its better to just sell old stuff or reasonable stuff you would sell on ebay for bitcoin.

If you can get good deals on ebay, and resell it back on here if you catch the value increase.

I dont think you need to rape your old computer. Because you barely will have any success in the end. Mining is not very profitable nowadays. And with weak hardware you wont make enough :)

Mine BTC requires ASICs at the moment, and most of them can be plugged to the computer using USB or other means.

An old computer can be used in the mining process, but you can't use the old computer to mine

You can but not bitcoin.

Anything with difficulty over 0.1 i think is impossible to get rich quick from.

However try POS coins, special mining coins (that are distributed by other forms of mining not hardware), or low difficulty altcoins.

Nahh it will just slowly destroy your computer, cause heat in your house (especially since its summer right now), and give you pretty much no btc in return.
Mining BTC right now is a joke, mining litecoin/dogecoin is pretty laughable, but you might actually get something from it.
There are other shitcoins that you can mine, but they are called shitcoins for a reason.
Mining with your average computer is pretty much dead these days, unless you start your own coin, premine 50% of it, and slowly unload it once you release it.

even 0.1 is too much for a cpu, although it can be good with gpu, for cpu you need something like 0.01 to earn block fast, and since any cpu coin is almost dead you can't wasting time making 1 block per day or something

I think you'd be better off selling your old computer and buying bitcoin with whatever you sell it at.

Even then, i just bought 2 old U2's, running @ 2.2 Ghs (i get about 4 Ghs continuously). They made me 1600 satoshi's in 24 hours... freebitco.in is currently paying around 700 satoshi's an hour to fill in one capcha, so i would have made more BTC just filling in 3 captha's.

I knew this from the start, and only bought them to learn about mining, but still, even with prior knowledge i would never ROI, the payout is below my expectation...

The only way to make money mining (AFAIK), is buying really efficient ASIC's (antminer S5 or something) in bulk, and getting a really good electricity rate...

And we all know faucets are horrible on pay.   Today's miners really need cheap electricity this is first thing.

And you really need asics if your going to mine.  Old computers are good for maybe a cold wallet?  But not a lot of use without losing money.

I you want to leave it on 24x7 you could have it be a bitcoin node.

using your old computer to directly mine bitcoin is a hard thing to do. But you can still mining bitcoin but not directly to mine bitcoin but use your old computer to POS mining or staking for altcoin. Search for the profitable POS coin such as Diamond, Hyperstake etc, and then you sell your staking coin to bitcoin

It's not a hard thing to do. You can do it easily with a program or two.

But you will lose money with electricity on PC running.  And not to mention you cannot compete against asics.  2 old usb block erupters can match sha power on hashing with great GPU's.   SHA is a asic game now.

Not only it is not worth but is impossible to mine bitcoins with a computer. It is impossible to mine with a new computer. To not speak here for a old one.

It's NOT impossible. Even when we were to where it was "impossible" to GPU mine, someone hit TWO blocks with a USB miner. It's basically just the lottery. Claiming it's impossible is naive. Are you likely to? No. But if you feel lucky, go for it.

Were talking very very low odds though.  If you just use a old pc and no asics on mining BTC it is going to be just horrible odds.  You can use a few old block erupters and be more of a lotto machine.

If you are going to do it get a raspberry PI you will pay it off in electricity savings.  And you can run the lotto machine there with a few usb miners.  Chances are you will never hit a block... but if you get very lucky not impossible.

I'll second the idea of a Pi and USB miners. Even if you never hit anything, that's ridiculously cheap (even the USB drives are pretty cheap, should be a couple dollars each at this point).

it may be possible to hit a block(with a very low hash) now that the diff isn't rising too much, but don't expect the same thing if the price was climbing without rest

so hironically solo mining can have a point when bitcoin remain stable, still it's better to mine altcoin with the same hash, mre profit is awaiting you

I'm in the process of trying that out (mining altcoin with my U2's), i'll give a detailed analysis in a couple of weeks :)

People claim altcoins are more profitable, but it's because they leave out a major calculation: how much of those alts they could buy using Bitcoin.

For example, you can mine 0.01 BTC per day with your current rig. You can mine 10k of a coin that's worth 0.5 bits, but you theorize that they will be worth 2 bits next week (and very well might be). Your mining is now a choice of:

1) Mining 10k of that coin
or
2) Mining Bitcoin, converting to that alt, and having 20k of them

Now, when the value jumps from 0.5 bits to 2 bits next week, it's a matter of:

1) Having 0.02 BTC
or
2) Having 0.04 BTC

The second scenario, while it sounds like less in the beginning, just netted you a 100% higher return than if you had mined the alts.

This has been true with every single altcoin over the past 2 years that I've followed them. I haven't found a single altcoin that was better off being mined instead of doing Bitcoin and just converting. Far too many people aren't paying attention to the economics, despite how basic the concept is.

That said, everyone's free to do what they want. If people want to continue devaluing themselves, that's their own choice. I can only educate people so much.

Yes it is a lottery, but chances are horrible. If you think you can hit chances like that, than you are better off playing a real lottery and if you win, you will win much more than hitting a block or two in Bitcoin. Lol

It also depends on hashrate.  I know there was a group on the forums that was renting large hash rates.   They did multiple runs, and I believe in the end had a positive amount.  Which is part luck of the pool they used when solo mining.

So it can be done but yes with a usb stick miner or two it is horrible odds.

I think you could probably run a Pi and a couple USB miners off a small solar panel. If so, you could be essentially getting free lottery tickets, and if you don't win, you didn't really lose anything. I'm wondering if a small panel could sustain that, though. May be worth doing just for the lulz.

this was a good strategy with various altcoin, many were renting an enormous amount of hash back than from betahash miningrig ecc... and pointing everything at every new altcoin, then dump fast, it's go without saying that a thing like this did not last so long...

but it was very profitable risk were minimal, occasionally dev screw the launch and you lose quite a good amount, from 0.1 to 1 btc

if you mine BTC with a computer like that most likely you will earn just a few satoshis per day or less. Maybe mining a new alt-currency and waiting for it to grow in price if it had potential might be a good option IMO.

No, I'm 100% sure it won't make you any money, and even if you have free electricity it will took ages to mine some normal amounts of BTC. But if your processor is good enough, you can try to mine some new and low difficulty coins, just watch altcoin announcements, I'm sure you will find something for you :)

Read this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1096520.msg11949107#msg11949107) for why mining an altcoin instead of straight BTC is almost always a bad idea.

It might be true, yes, but he has a really old computer and he won't mine anything. If he has a good processor he can mine some alts with CPU, but you can't mine BTC with CPU so that's the problem.. :)

I tried to back read and look for the specs of the "old" computer that the OP is saying and cant find any or maybe i'm blind