Bitcoin Forum

Don't take this the wrong way, I do not think mining is going to die out as soon as some on these forums say. But I do like to think of what we will do with the hardware "after" bitcoin whenever that may be.

Basically I'm looking for any other opportunities to rent out processing power, are there any out there? And if not perhaps there is a market to set up a system for brokering the trade of processing power for companies that could use it?

Not really, at least anything as profitable. Then again, if price does keep up with difficulty, bitcoin mining will be with us for a long time.
If it stagnates at $20 while difficulty goes into 8 million, then yep, it's going to die until diff. goes down again.

If you want to go in the grey market though, a nice BTC cluster could be useful for cracking MD5 hashes or various passwords.
Some people will pay for consistent daily performance.

Guys, please learn the way Bitcoin works, this thing is discussed to death. As long as Bitcoin will be a viable currency (which, as things look now, seems to be a REALLY long time) mining will exist. Mining doesn't only mint new coins and puts them in circulation, as most people here seem to think. It also verifies transactions and secures the network. If mining is done with, Bitcoin is done with. They won't exist one without the other. Also, miners don't get money from discovered blocks only. They receive the fees from transactions inside discovered blocks. This will more or less compensates the loss in income from reducing rewards over the years.

So the only way "after Bitcoin" exists is if Bitcoin dies. Which, hopefully, won't happen. And seeing the momentum it gains, this becomes more unlikely with each day passing.

I think of the people who were thinking this way back when BTC were worth pennies and decided not to start mining. Take a chance. At most, you will lose a few bucks.

As long as you're not scraping buy to begin with, I think it's a decent project for the average techie.

it is also possible for other internet coins to be appeared, thus mining will not die for sure ;)

Take on the Chinese @ WoW gold mining :)

I bought two 6950s (unlocked to 6970) and one 6970 lightning. When mining dies, well, eventually BC3 is coming so I don't really care. I will be happy if I can mine until November and hopefully pay off these three new GPUs that I bought.

If not, still a win-win situation for me.

 ;D

Haha I am with you.  Bought a GPU, will play games on it.  For the first time my hobby might actually pay for itself!

And there's the nub of it. Either bitcoin is:
a) A viable currency that will continue forever more.
b) Something that seems to be giving us free money.

Or to put it even more simply - are you mining coins to sell them for cash, or mining them to buy goods/services?
Now there are always going to be those people who will mine and sell them - but these people are only supported by people buying newly minted coins for cash.
So what motivates these purchasers? Either they want to buy/sell with them - or they're just hoping the price goes up and they can sell for a profit.
I dunno how this will all end up in the short term, but I just have a sneaky suspicion that 90% of people involved in this are looking at their bitcoins in dollars.

Say you are mining 2 coins a day. Say you can't just swap them for cash - how are you going to spend your bitcoins?

That's a good question.

When I first got a good chunk of coins, I looked at the forums to see what I could actually get with them. It turned out the answer was not much. I'd love to use them for something more than trading them for cash, but sellers aren't really jumping on board with this currency, and I don't blame them with the current exchange trends. I haven't looked at Silk Road yet, but this also bring up another problem: I'm not looking for anything.

I'm a rather minimal person. I have my computer(s), video games, some food, and a bed. I'm pretty content with what I have. Bitcoin was an excuse to myself to set up another machine (which I really enjoy doing). Hopefully there will be opportunities in the future to use bitcoin for something I actually need/want, but for now I think I'll be saving them away until that time come.

Evil Genius, bought for $3 on GoG, plays just fine on a 6870 at minor overclock and AGGRESSION=7

:D

So you're saying that mining will still make money after all of the coins are mined out? How will this compare to current profits?

My rigs will be used to drive personal video wall(s)

Got a big lot of 30 LCD monitors in january and I've been set on making a video wall ever since.

ahaha I like it ;D

Awesome, I never thought someone would find a way to get more heat output than we already have. :)

haha that game is so much fun. It's like SIM-villain

I suck at FPS games, but I'm still going to try BC3. It looks AMAZING from the Youtube previews I've seen!!!

Render farm.

Hehe ^^

Still hope my two HD5850 will be able to run BF3 when it comes out in october.

Like most everyone here, I bought a better GPU so I might as well game on it ;D The only reason I was mining was to get a platform upgrade for the desktop and now that I've don't that I will do a little bit of this namecoin thing and see if I can pick up a SSD to go with it. As for "After" I'll be gaming and enjoying all that high quality video that comes with it ;D

I'll just go back to crunching BOINC gpu projects.

If mining stops being profitable or I decide to quit, I'm going to do a nice system upgrade and then sell the rest.

I've been thinking that it's fair to calculate hardware at 50-60% resale value just as a safe estimate.  Some hardware will have better resale value of course.

Two words:
Space heater