Bitcoin Forum

Hello there

I would like to ask what would be the best choice for choosing a video card, I got  Radeon x550 but like I figured it out its not open CL. So I can't mine with it, am I right? What would you suggest me, what kind of Video card should I buy in 50-70 euro?
Also I have a Gigabyte G41MT-S2PT motherboard (I'm not sure waht video cards are compatible with it).
So I would thank you verry much if someone could help me getting some unsvers for this questions and clearing this things.
Ty

GPU Mining is dead  :( , its ASIC mining now

http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/
>http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-jalapeno/

These cost $149, and mine 4500 Mhashes.
The best cards in the world is the 7970s, and they mine about 700 mhash OC
and cost around $400 new.

Price to dollar comparison:

Jalapeno: $1 per 30.2 Mhash
Nearly 30X more efficient.

A lot have ordered and been around for some time,
the older 832mhash/$599 been around for a long time
for over a year. Butterfly labs trust worthy now.


https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
Model    Price [23]    Availability    Avg. Mhash/s    Mhash/J    Mhash/s/$
5770    $136    Moderate    212.83    1.45    1.56
5830    $92    Moderate    302    1.68    3.28
5850    $114.96    Limited    346.16    1.92    3.0
5870    $190.16    Limited    393    1.97    2.066
5970    $421    Limited    704    2.2    1.67
6750    $116    Easy    167.59       1.44
6770    $115    Easy    196.67       1.71
6850    $160    Easy    213.7    1.35    1.34
6870    $190    Easy    278.31    1.73    1.46
6930    $180    Limited    350       1.94
6950    $230    Easy    369    1.94    1.6
6970    $271.89    Easy    397    1.89    1.46
6990    $622.99    Limited    772    1.93    1.23
7750    $110    Easy    123    2.46    1.12
7970    $420    Easy    685       1.22  

Thank you for your fast reply.

Hum Lets say you havn't blind me with sience at all, but still a bit confused. Theres no chance for GPU mining, even a small one? Yeah maybe its not efficient but I don't have to worry about the electricity + I can invest a small ammount of money right now.

Or I should just start buy a "Jalapeno" from butterfly? for 149$ . Do I need a performance computer for it or any of them are good?
I saw it generates 832 MHas/sec => 30.2 MHash/sec/$ <=>0.03 cent/s?

the 832/mhash is the rig on the left you want to preorder a jalapeno.
There are others you can order, a little more expensive but faster.
the 832/mhash isn't a jalapeno its the older generation device and its much slower
and more expensive.

This is what you want to order it Asap, get on the order list.
The sooner you have it the more BTC you can generate before difficulty and things increase.
http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-jalapeno/

It works with every computer, laptop, device flawlessly.
No upgrades or anything needed. Plug it in, install Cgminer,
and done. The instructions all should be on a paper, and
you can ask on the forum for any help that is needed,
or personal message me if you wish.

Btw I am off to sleep.
Any more questions,
I'll take a look at this post.

Best regards
Lightlord

Light lord - you say in your first post "Butterfly labs trustworthy now".

Was there a time when they were not? What happened to change that? AFAIK they still have not shipped a single unit and we still haven't heard a confirmed shipping date fir the first units.

Given the talk on this forum about their trustworthiness it seems unfair to tell newbies they can be trusted without any supporting evidence.

I have received mine  :)
So that proves what I am saying.
There are 100s or so that ordered
and received there's

here's the list of people that received them
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77796.0

It was delayed in the beginning and things,
but units still got shipped out as usual.
Besides I wouldn't blame them.
They had over thousands of email,
and lots of work to do in the past.

Its better today. They have already shipped out 200 or so of these,
and a few $20,000 ones. They all got to the door.
There's more then enough evidence for butterfly labs.

Sure, but nobody's received their new ASIC singles or Jalapenos...

Until they actually start shipping new product, there will always be skeptics...

Lightlord - arent they they FPGA devices, i was talking about ASIC devices.

I see that ahzmaan has clarified what i meant also

So lets say I buy one; 2nd step is to plug in to an op, system, and put a miner program on it. Then let him "mine" and I will get the bitcoins in my wallet. Am I right?

But seeing your replys, I don't understand, they just shipped the "big orders", the expensive ones, the FPGA's?

Since I had to manually learn all of this stuff I will make it easy on you and explain everything.

BFL started out as a scam until they figured out they would make more money actually selling a product. There is lots of lingering distrust towards them because one of their major employees was convicted of many many years of defrauding the elderly through the mail offering them "Guaranteed Lottery Winnings". Shady shady people. I wouldn't support them.

On purchasing mining equipment: GPUs really are dead. If you buy one now, you will be disappointed in your return especially a couple months from now. "Also I have a Gigabyte G41MT-S2PT motherboard (I'm not sure what video cards are compatible with it). " it will probably accept any of the PCI-e 16x cards i believe, I would google your motherboard and read its specifications.

on the grand scale of things for mining: CPU>>>>GPU>>>>FPGA>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ASIC. I have no idea why someone suggested FPGA to you in this thread, as ASIC will overpower them just like GPUs. FPGA are basically "programmable ASICs". They run a lot slower though. They served as the next step up from GPUs and a stepping stone into ASIC.

here is why you should get into ASIC instead of GPU/FPGA; a decent GPU will get you 250mh. a 150$ jalapeno will get you 4500mh (4.5gh). and also many others will get the technology as well, which means less rewards/mh, but the general consensus is that these things will pay themselves off easily and will continue to generate revenue! we just aren't sure how long that will take.


I also wanted to let you know about the mining process: there is solo and pooled mining. solo mining, you get your rewards in chunks of 50 btc, but these are REALLY spread out. you could be waiting on that block for a long time. also, we will soon approach the block reward halving, which means each block solved will get you 25BTC instead of 50. Anyway, just do pooled mining. They pay you for the work you do instead of getting one huge payday, you get paid every "share" (share = piece of work). step one: acquire ASIC. step two: download a mining program (guiminer is a good start, there are plenty of good programs to mine with). step three: join a mining pool and tell your mining program to do the shares of that pool. step 4: get a wallet program. step 5: give the pool your wallet address, they should automatically send payment, but every pool is different. you may have to manually send it every week or whenever you feel like it.

on which one to buy: if you have very little funds go ahead and go for the jalapeno. but if you are serious i would consider purchasing the 600$ unit either from BFL or bASIC. there are other companies pre-selling asics as well, go and shop around.

i hope i was able to help! please keep asking questions if you need to! bitcoin is complicated!

Thank you very much for you answer, finally I got clearified for a while. Yeah I got the part with pools. Just its a bit hard to "see" what are yo utalking about if I can't try it on my own, and my GPU is too old for mining, so all of wah tI was reading is like a dream for me.
Investing already 150 $ in somethign I dont know , is already a big investition, thats why I want to clearifi all my questions. yeah I'm thinking of preordering a jalapeno after all, the only thing what holds me back right now it's that no one has one of that yet....

Last few things to clearify.Lets say I got the Jalapeno, so next is to run the cgminer and thats all leave the Jalapeno work for me. That's all?
My comp will see the Jalapeno like another GPU, so the program will recongnize it, am I right?

And thank you again for your handful answer!

I understand what you are talking about, it is hard to understand at first because it is complicated and lots of things are happening that you don't see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP43xJh_ad0

here is a video about setting up guiminer, a video similar to it helped me understand a lot.

when you set up guiminer, it will ask you what device to use. the choices normally are: your CPU and GPU. i am not sure how they are going to make it simple to have the software find the device, but considering that each manufacture is making their own hardware, they are likely going to implement their own software. FPGAs operate similarly and I haven't seen someone have a hard time. but yes, once it is set up it will keep mining and mining. if the computer turns off or the internet you may have to start the mining program again, but that won't be hard.

All of the companies selling ASIC surely will help you set them up and provide instructions. They are providing a product, not a problem to solve ;P hopefully.

BFL recently showed off pictures of their boards, so someone has one :P!

They started selling and shipping FPGA months ago. But FPGA, like GPU mining, is going to disappear once ASICs hit the market.

ASICs should be shipped in some months... probably. And, as you can see, a 149$ Jalapeno with 4.5Gh/s happily kickass every FPGA or GPU.

Question is: will BFL really ship ASIC? Or it is a huge huge scam? Until the first ASIC appear, we don't know.

<edited out redundant comment> Not sure about the software config for solo mining, as I mine in a pool.  For the small-time miner (which, if you've 70euro to spend on hardware, you are), your chances of solving a block on your own and scoring the entire 50BTC reward (soon to be 25BTC), are slim to practically non-existent.  By participating in a pool (and there's much debate on what's the best pool to mine in, the best paying pool, the fairest pool, etc etc etc, do your own research), you increase your chances of payouts. For example, in Slush's Pool, I make about a bitdime, BTC0.1 per day, or BTC3/month.  it'll take me 71.5 weeks to make BTC50.  On my own, with only 200Mhash right now, without some ridiculous luck, I could mine for that long and never hit a block at all. Even at 9Ghash (i ordered 2 BFL Jalapenos), with the difficulty ramping up and the reward about to be chopped in half, I'm still better off participating in a pool. My daily earn should (hopefully) be a little better, but I'm still not expecting some get-rich-quick ROI...

I was wondering the same thing as OP. With regards to ASICs, it seems that the BFL ASICs versions are just optimized for computing SHA256 hashes but surely there are other companies that sell similar technology? I'm a bit of a noob with regards to the actual workings of the ASICs but just taking a guess from what I'm reading.

esoteric - asic chips only do what they are made to do and nothing more. in mining/hardware section of this forum you will find lots of competitors to BFL.

No they are ASIC devices. The jalapeno is what I am referring to.
And its a ASIC

weren't the FPGA's also referred to as "Singles"? Regardless, I did say, and intend to say, ASIC singles and Jalapenos....so not sure what I was being corrected on, if anything.. :-)

I would like to check if I get it right, after the ASICs will be realesed , the difficulty will go up really fast, am I right?
And why is that sometimes the difficulty drops?

When the price of bitcoins fell back from $20 in July 2011 lots of people turned off their miners, and so the difficulty fell. Anytime there is less hashing power in the preceding two weeks the difficulty will fall. The reverse is also true and once the first batch of ASIC's ships then yes, the difficulty will rise by a significant amount.

Just be real aware there is also risk involved with mining. Ordering an ASIC today will put you at the back of the line in the long list of pre-orders. BFL has sold 1000's. bASIC has just cut off pre-orders for their first batch, but you can order for the second batch said to be shipping sometime in January. If I were to make an educated guess, you most likely wont see your ASIC miner (ordered TODAY) until late January no matter where you ordered it from. Don't let this deter you from ordering because bitcoin is a great thing! But you need to know there is going to be a wait. By the time you actually get your ASIC, the mining difficulty should have increased 10x+ minimum (likely WAY more). If I had to make an educated guess it most likely will be around 30x+. But no one can really say for sure. Whats that mean? A Jalapeno will yield .07 bitcoin per 24 hours with a 10x increase from today's difficulty. That number also took into consideration the block halving too. Converted into USD that's somewhere around $.80 a day on today's market value. Of course Bitcoin may rise (I think it will if it follows suit with pasted difficulty increases), so .07 bitcoin may be worth more than what it is currently today. But then again, once ASIC miners are in full effect we may see a lot of people selling off their coins rapidly to try and get their investment back. This could in turn substantially decrease the value of bitcoin for awhile too. No one really knows, and currently its just all speculation.

In my opinion, in order to really dive head first into this, you will need a 30+ g/hash device. A Jalapeno is a great device for someone who wants to test the waters. It will allow you to make some coin (not much), but allow you to play with the market with your own generated coins. Theres still a lot of unknown factors. Ship times, power consumption, difficulty increase, bitcoin value, and other things that will determine the long term numbers/profit.

Again, I am not trying to scare you off, but its something you should be aware of before investing. You need to know what your getting yourself into :)

-Ryan

Oh so dificulty depends on the total of miners Mhas/s, and not on how many hashes done.

Are you joking or what? It's exactly the same thing

I think I'm in that group that want's to test it because like I said earlyer I can't mine with my Comp, and I never saw a miner GPu or anything in real.
You didn't scared me at all, but gona recalculate something :)

@Gabi : under total miners Mhash/s I mean the all miners Mhash/s summed why whould that be that the saem with what I wrote? ( Also I'm not joking just trying to clearify everything for myself, so I can take everything in consideration)