Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I heard about bitcoin last August, installed the basic client from bitcoin.org and ran it on two Windows machines.  I racked up a small balance but the last batch generated was in November.  I wasn't paying any attention to the app but just recently found that my version was obsolete. 

So my first question is, did I stop generating bitcoins just because the population of users exploded or was it because my version was out of date?  (I'm assuming the former.) 

The new version of the client (0.3.22-beta) doesn't seem to allow me to turn generation on and off and doesn't seem to give me the option to set the maximum number of cores to consume.  What's up with that?  First, am I actually generating at all?  Then, where did those functions go? 

Also, I see people referring to their hashing speed, and I recall that I knew where to find that last year -- like it was obvious on the GUI, but now I don't see it at all.  How do I determine that?

Finally, the first version of the client was a CPU pig -- as one would expect given the work to be done.  But this client doesn't seem to be doing anything with the CPU at all.  Have I used the wrong client?  Have I misconfigured something?  Am I thinking about this all wrong?

I'm sure all these answers are super-easy and I think you for your time in addressing my issues.  I searched around the wiki and through forum posts, but didn't find this stuff.

You shouldn't be using the generate bitcoins option in the client, it's very outdated. You probably stopped generating blocks because the difficulty skyrocketed. Grab a miner like poclbm, phoenix, or diablo and use that.

No you havn't misconfigured anything, the client was using your cpu to generate bitcoins, and cpu's suck at that compared to gpu's.

Both are partially correct. 1) As more bitcoins have been discovered due to the increase in miners, the difficultly of mining new blocks has increased significantly. 2) All the serious miners are now using GPUs instead of CPUs to mine blocks. GPUs are approximately 100 times faster at mining depending on the CPU/GPU.


The most recent version of the Windows client removed the option to generate coins. A typical CPU might do 2Mhash/sec, which means on average it would now take 14101 days to generate one block of 50 BTC. If you want to do CPU mining, I suggest joining a mining pool.