Bitcoin Forum

Off Speccy

CPU
   AMD Phenom II X6 1045T   39 °C
   Thuban 45nm Technology
RAM
   6.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 535MHz (7-7-7-16)
Motherboard
   ASUSTeK Computer INC. M5A78L-M LX PLUS (AM3R2)   54 °C
Graphics
   HP w19 (1440x900@60Hz)
   896MB GeForce GTX 260 (EVGA)   47 °C

Running my system with no overclock, how much Bitcoins can I expect to make/hr? I'm guessing around 10 cents worth?

About none.

GPU mining died about 2 hours ago at the halving event.

$0.10 an hour would be generous.  At current difficulty, block subisidy, and exchange rate $0.10 per week (using $5 in electricity) might be more likely.*


*Note this was SWAG but honestly any reward would be so insanely low as to be insignificant.

you wont make 10 cents worth per hour running an nvidia card.

My friend tried mining with a GTX 275 and it didn't do much but heat up his system for an extremely low hashrate

Plugged his data into a calculator and assuming low average electricity cost we get these fine numbers per month:

Power cost per time frame: 82.18 USD
Revenue per time frame: 4.79 USD
      ... less power costs: -77.39 USD

Yep, what he said.

Actually I'll have to correct that. I still had the old reward in there.

This is more like it:

Power cost per time frame: 82.18 USD
Revenue per time frame: 2.39 USD
      ... less power costs: -79.79 USD

Mining with a nvidia card is a bad bad bad idea

I'm at an apartment so it doesn't matter if I use $1 of electricity or $10000 of electricity. But I think the wear to my rig would still cost more than the $3 I might make.

Given those numbers, why would anyone bother computing bitcoin hashes? Shouldn't bitcoin be dead by now since there is no incentive to help others encrypt transfers?

And yet it's still alive!

Weird, isn't it?

And i'll repeat myself: mining with nvidia card=bad idea

Those numbers are exactly why people don't bother to mine on NVIDIA cards.  Since the halving and with the pending shipments of ASICs, many GPU miners are walking away completely.  Unless you can get free electricity, GPU mining will not make a profit, and even if you can get free electricity, the wear and tear on your rig might not be worth it.


There are still a lot of people who support bitcoin not just to make money (though many of the people who support it have made a great deal of money by getting in early).  For them, securing the network is the incentive.

The man difference with GPU computing when comparing NVIDIA and ATI is that NVIDIA favors float point calculations where ATI favors integer based calculations.  Bitcoin mining is integer based, so the performance gains when comparing the two are astronomical.  It really doesn't make sense to use NVIDIA for this purpose.

I like how you answer the second sentence while restating my first sentence.

Anyways, I'm under the impression that "most people" run bitcoin with an intent to make profit. Am I wrong, or are most people just mislead about the returns of mining bitcoin?

AMD 5800/6800/6900/7800/7900 series cards offer a lot more hashes per watt compared to almost any Nvidia card when it comes to mining.


There are also FPGA's people use to mine.. A year ago you could mine and make a great profit.

Yes, it's good old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism, but some Bitcoiners are in it for the philosophical principle. They will commit resources to Bitcoin for zero monetary profit, unless of course they're lying about that. :)

The truly early adopters (pre-May 2011 bubble) have been duly rewarded for their investments, but we n00bs now are still early adopters if Bitcoin grows to even a fraction of critical-mass adoption. (If it does, similar growth to the first few years would result in an exchange rate above $1000/BTC or $10/million satoshi within the next 3-5 years, but don't bank on it).

As everyone has said, Nvidia cards are extremely inefficient at computing Bitcoin hashes, so are CPU's. Right now you'll need an FPGA or an ASIC to turn a profit from mining (GPU mining has died as of earlier today).

Let me show you the hash rates:

1055T: 15.84 MHash/s
GTX 260: 35.91 Mhash/s
ATI Radeon 5870 (cheaper card, lower spec card than yours): 481Mhash/s

Your impression is right, most ppl mine for profit. But then yes, you are wrong. Miners are here for profit AND they do profit from it! Otherwise they would stop!

And yet they still mine.

5870 is not lower spec compared to a GTX260..... 

My mistake, I was thinking it was a different card, never bothered to actually Google and check, apparently the 5870 destroys the gtx260 in benchmarks (roughly 2x framerate in some popular games).

Anyways, you can still see it is capable of mining more than 10x faster, and its a $70 graphics card.

So in a year or two when the returns of mining bitcoin reach zero, what's going keep bitcoin alive when there is absolutely no [monetary] incentive to compute the hashes? I'm sure the guy who made bitcoin has some fail safe in mind?
Depending on the good will of people to continue mining for no return simply isn't reliable enough for bitcoin to be a dependable and legitimate currency.

The returns won't reach zero for decades. Not only are there transaction fees for the miners, the block reward will remain at BTC25 per block for about the next four years.

If mining becomes unprofitable, miners will invariably drop out and the market will adjust accordingly. Capitalism's really neat like that.

I don't understand why you think that the returns of mining would ever reach zero?  That isn't how mining works.  Perhaps you need to learn a bit more about the process.

If there were absolutely no financial incentive to mine, then mining would not succeed.  Fortunately the protocol is designed specifically to maintain a financial incentive.

Yep.

The difficulty is adjusted to maintain a timeframe of approximately 10 minutes per block. So as people stop mining (due to it being unprofitable for them) mining becomes more profitable for the remaining miners (same number of coins per minute distributed among less miners).  Eventually there is an equilibrium where only those miners who have the best equipment and lowest energy costs remain and they continue to mine profitably.

I agree.  Fortunately bitcoin doesn't require any such dependency

Incidentally, CoinLab will soon be releasing a client that performs scientific computing work and pays out in bitcoins.   An NVidia actually performs better than AMD GPUs for this type of work.  Currently they only are doing a bitcoin mining pool (95% PPS) but "soon" for the HPC client.

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0

For the love of god why do people never read the wikis, howtos, or at least search the very forums they're posting on?

There will always be incentive to mine. Bitcoin mining rewards consist of two things, the block reward (currently 25BTC) and transaction fees. Transaction fees are fees that are applied to transactions that are considered "spammy" and use lots of network resources, at the moment they're set to 0.0005BTC per KB on spammy-looking transactions.

Block rewards halve every 4 years, so they won't hit 0 for over another hundred years. Transaction fees will get bigger as Bitcoin gets more popular & the number of transactions per block grows so its hoped that transaction fees would help offset the halving.

Transaction fees are also voluntarily applied be people to their transactions if they want to speed up the processes of getting them confirmed.  Miners are able to choose which transactions they include and which they don't.  If there are enough transactions with fees, a miner is likely to leave out transactions with no fees (or low fees), so there is an incentive for individuals to include a fee with their transaction even if it isn't "spammy"

Absolutely. Myself, I've chosen BTC0,00025 at the moment (when no fee is required) but the client often requests BTC0,0005 and occasionally BTC0,001.

I'm curious why mining on nvidia cards is such a bad idea, is it simply because they are innefficient?

Yup. ATI 5xxx/6xxx/7xxx just happen to be better suited to the task at hand.