Bitcoin Forum

I have an old Athlon 1.5 Ghz as my computer.  I've been running it for weeks trying to generate a single block/bitcoin.  I leave it running when I sleep and when I'm at work.  Never ever ever is it able to generate a single block/bitcoin, but I see them going up as others generate them.   Basically unless I have a recent computer, it's just impossible.

I think it is a lot like gambling.. you could get lucky and generate one every few minutes on your old computer, but overall the faster computers will probably generate more.. though, maybe not, depending on luck and such.

You probably already checked but just in case.. did you turn on the generate coins option?  It is off by default when you first install.

By the way, what is your address?

Laszlo

Bitcoin lingo for "Would you like a present?" Haha! :D

laszlo,

The generate coins of course is always on and I'll leave the computer idle most of the day.  The software works my CPU to full trying to generate blocks and I keep seeing blocks going up from others but I never am able to get a block myself.  The thing is after weeks, I've found it is just impossible to generate a single coin/block ever.  I'd be happy if I got one per week but I'm certain I'll never get one and though I need to upgrade my computer, fixing my car comes first.

My bitcoin address is 1DcXvfJdeJch9uptKopte5XQarTtj5ZjpL

I have a slightly slower computer which generated five blocks between the 10th and the 16th of April, but it hasn't generated any blocks since then. Your problem is most likely just the increased difficulty of generating blocks and or bad luck. If you leave it running for long enough, statistically it will eventually generate a block. But the electricity may not be worth it to you. You're experiencing what people with faster computers will experience once the number of computers generating bitcoins doubles a few more times over. Anyway, if you don't think it's worth generating bitcoins on that computer, perhaps there's something, perhaps a service which you could offer in exchange for bitcoins.

My thanks to laszlo and possibly others for sending me sample bitcoins.

May I have a bitcoin address to send payment to?

Now that I'm familiar with receiving, I just want to test sending so I'm familiar with things when I set it up on my website.

You're welcome to send test payments to me at 1Dnvwj3hAGSwFPMnkJZvi3KnaqksRPa74p . I'll announce any payments to that address by editing this post for the next couple days, but I won't offer refunds since the sender can't be reliably verified when a bitcoin address is public. You'll also find more test and donation addresses scattered about the forum. There's a thread for posting static IP addresses (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=59.0) which can, whenever a client at a particular IP address is up and running, accept payments and bootstrap your client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_node) in case the IRC bootstrap fails.

Does anybody happen to know how transactions sent and received to and from IP address show up in the client? Does it show the other person's IP address in both cases?
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I received the following four payments, which just happen to total how much I gifted you. Hey, thanks! I censored the hour to preserve the anonymity of my super top secret time zone. :-P But they all arrived in the same hour.

When total blocks equaled 52727,
94 blocks 04/23/2010 XX:50 39.00
94 blocks 04/23/2010 XX:50 9.99
95 blocks 04/23/2010 XX:32 0.01
95 blocks 04/23/2010 XX:32 1.00

It turns out that it is possible and not even difficult. All you need is a processor on your device and a program for mining. And you do not need a 64-bit OS. You can mine with the help of programs, scripts (batch files) and use shell mining. In some cases, even "old" video cards will fit.

I wish you good luck to generate a Bitcoin fraction with a computer today.
Chinese people have made this so hard to do now...

And more, much more than this, is that I feel like the GPU mining is also getting harder and harder.
Hope you funded enough before the recent difficulty levelup !!