Bitcoin Forum

Hi there,

I found out about you through the Flattr community and thought I'd give it a try. I've been running your Windows application on my laptop (dualcore 1.3 GHz) for 708 hours now, with no coins generated. Is that to be expected or is something wrong?

nothing wrong,
if you are generating on a CPU only, don't expect to get any coins within a year.

you can calculate an average time here (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php),
just put in your khashes/s and you'll know how long it takes for your CPU to solve a block.

you can however join the mining-pool (http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/), to get at least a few coins, or cents a week or so.

Actually, don't expect to generate coins on that system ever.  The total network has been growing at an incredible rate, and if it keeps up, the average time between individual generation will be well beyond a year long before that year is up.

It is little discouraging but that is the truth.

It's actually reassuring that free money isn't very easy to get :)

Sad but true, it's gotten incredibly hard to generate coins, which can be frustrating to new users. I think the Pooled mining effort is a really good idea :-)

Oh come on, if you really want to generate get yourself a nice Radeon 5970, you still generate a block a day with that

Ah you get around 0.52GHash/sec on one of those... so it already is over a day.

That's out of the box performance.
Overclock them with a twist of a commandline and you easily reach 600mh/s.
I reach 620mh/s at the price of having to stay around since it loses some stability (perfectly stable at 600mh/s)

Add 10mh/s from the i7 CPU and you can redo the math :p

Generated 2 blocks today, yay!

I know what I'm asking for this Christmas.

Just watch your electricity bill. 5970 is a mighty bitch and consumes around 300-400 watts ?
Also, i think that the miner also uses one core, but i might be wrong since i only tried CUDA miner which uses 100% of GPU plus 100% of one of my 4 cores.

So yes, the electricity bill will hit you hard. Also, you need a new power supply, since usual power supply of usual Desktop PC will not be enough.

m0mchils OpenCL miner doesn't use much of your CPU at all, maybe up to 5%,
not sure about Diablo-D3s, but i guess it's somewhat close to that.
it's only the cuda-miner that runs that bad.

your right about the power-consumption though, 5970 is maxed at ~300W, would be a bit less when just mining.
someone on irc mentioned a HD5970 setup running on an Intel Atom at ~330W, not that much for ~600M,
my oc'd HD5850-system needs ~230W for ~300M (+50W/65M with HD5570).

ArtForz just did the math for you http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2196.0
It is very profitable. Even if you take my 700W power unit consumption as basis.

The miner uses both GPU cores, each one crunching at +300mh/s
There is a problem /w ATI SDK 2.2 that prevents from running on both, but 2.1 works perfectly

Oh, mine is running for ~1400 khash/s, several orders of magnitude slower than your systems. I thought I could spare a laptop crunching some numbers since it doesn't draw a lot of electricity. But dedicating a power consuming gfx card for the crunching would lead to a noticeable cost. So I'm out for now and wish you good luck with your crunching. Perhaps I'll use your monetary system some time in the future though, even if not generating any new coins personally. Thanks for your explanations!

The idea of bitcoin is not to generate money and get rich... if you want to use bitcoins you can just buy them, like you buy currency on paypal or any other online system

....or you can simply use bitcoin for money transfers worldwide.

Has anyone tried a N580GTX with CLMiner? Fermi was supposed to be the cat of Nvidia. Let me know.

Of course not.


The same is valid for gold mining, early birds got to mine big amounts easily.
Putting coins into circulation doesn't have to be "fair".


People who are still massively generating invested money into hardware and man-hours into converting the CPU miner to a GPU miner, you should be thankful to these people that they shared the GPU mining code for free.


Conversion fees are market-regulated and are bound to go down.

Ok, here is my controversial opinion on this:

Casual Bitcoin users should not be encouraged to do any mining at all.

They are wasting their time.

Leave the mining to the experts.

Mining is an essential aspect of Bitcoin. That does not mean it's the most useful or even  interesting aspect  for the majority of users.  

Newcomers always seem to get fixated on the (relatively minor) mining aspect, and this distracts from what Bitcoin is really about, an exchange tool. I feel that if all this effort, time, and passion that so many newcomers devote to mining, was devoted to improving the exchangeability of Bitcoin instead, this project would be a lot more successful by now.



If I want to acquire 1g of gold, there are several ways I could go about this.

1) I could head to the mountains with a gold pan and wade in the river all day every day, and after half a year of panning I would find a nugget (if I am lucky).

2) I could join a collective of 100 panners and head to the mountains for just a weekend. Then whoever is lucky enough to find a nugget agrees to divide it equally amoung the other 99 panners.

3) I could do what I am good at, be it programming or hairdressing, for a few hours, earn some money and then invest in a professional mining company that sends its heavy machinery capable of extracting thousands of nuggets per day.

4) I could buy the gold from someone who already owns some.


Anyone who did 1) IRL would be considered nuts, unless it's purely a hobby that they genuinely enjoy. But that is a good analogy of what you are doing when you attempt to mine Bitcoins with a CPU.

Option 2) would be considered slighly less nuts IRL, yet still highly inefficient and silly to say the least. But that is essentially what a pooled mining effort is.

Option 3) is smarter but still too cumbersome for a casual gold user because it requires detailed industry knowledge and investing experience, and because you have to wait until you get your gold.

Option 4) is by far the most sensible choice for the majority of people.

Want some Bitcoins? Trade them! That's what Bitcoins are for.

Option 2) might be the most fun though.

It's not a democracy, but an agreement!

I believe that a split network will continue to operate independently of one another.

there's no such thing as exclusivity,
anyone, yes, you too, is able to buy some decent hardware and start mining immediately.
i myself just ordered a new gfx-cad today only for the good of the bitcoin-network (and maybe, if i'm lucky, some coins for myself).

and how would you tell, if that person has an "account" and got his 100btc already, or not?
there's no way you can tell, how many bitcoin-clients i installed, should i get 100 for each instance?


and those "early adopters" took a high risk by investing (energy,time and money) early,
when they'v been able to generate the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands of bitcoins, those coins had almost no value at all.

take your risk now (it's still high) and invest (in coins, or hardware+energy), or don't, but don't blame those who did and will do.

No, it doesn't.  Monetary policy doesn't have to have an ideology.  Is it fair that you were born naked?


I don't think that you are going to like it here.


I'm certain that most are very thankful.


What is "real" money?  Have you ever held real money in your hand?  I would wager that you have not.


Then don't get involved, if it doesn't favor you.  It favors some, which is why it trades.

Frost, the reason gold is valued is not because it is useful but because others value it. The reason gold can take this role is because it is rare.

Currencies like the US dollar were valued because they were backed by gold. However after the gold standard was abandoned, the US dollar was still valuable because others valued it. The rarity of the US dollar is managed by a central source, the government.

Bitcoin is trying to provide an electronic decentralized version of the US dollar. Its rarity maintained by the increasing difficulty of creating a bitcoin.

The people who helped create the currency (the early adopters) were able to print money like the government. It may benefit them enormously but rarely are things equal (the world isnt fair, get over it).

The issue for you is that bitcoins may never be valued by other at all. Right now using bitcoins is like walking into a town that uses monopoly money and tries to convince you to convert at an exchange rate of $10 US for $50 Monopoly. In this analogy the early adopters would have warehouses of monopoly money, just hoping it catches on.

Update: Currently there are 5 million bitcoins, with an exchange rate of $0.25. Clearly there is hording, artificially raising the price of a bitcoin. Classic pump and dump.

Might we get a definition of hoarding? And some examples of currencies that aren't hoarded and/or are a classic pump and dump? I'd like to understand where you are coming from.

Fairness and democracy have nothing to do with one another.
It's fair if you are rewarded proportionally to what you contribute. The more hashing power you add to the chain, the more you contribute, and the more you are rewarded. This is fair.


What are you talking about? There's no "core issue" with capitalism being denounced here. There's a core with issue with governments (money monopoly, central banking..), which bitcoins are designed to bypass.


Oh boy, we're dealing with a watermelon here...


It's not free, and you do have the convenience, just buy GPUs and install the proper software.


There are many people trying to establish such services, it's just not easy, due to credit card charge backs.
There is one service where you can buy bitcoins with an US credit card. They perform several checks on your identity before allowing you to buy.

Excellent! I lived for few months with Bitcoin without single bitcoin mined. Agree that mining is just part of whole idea, exactly like in real-world gold. I don't know why people are angry when somebody invest large amount of $$$ and start mining itself. Everybody can do that!

And I'm doing that because I'm geek and it is fun for me, not because of whole financial reward (by the way, my investments will be back maybe after half an year, which is my personal risk and mining reward so-so cover it). But if you are not interested in programming and hacking, simply buy bitcoins on market. It is faster and cheaper (because you don't take any risk of investment).

The core understanding of libertarianism is that the government is a monopoly by force, and of force. It is the initiation of aggression that is the issue here.

One could of course have a natural monopoly in a free market, but this isn't the same as hiring people with guns to enforce position in the market against all future and current competitors.

With governments, they do not provide the rule of laws, but unpredictability.

Here, we have a protocol that enforce a kind of rule of law. Violence on the internet is almost impossible by the virtue of actors being distributed far away, and the protocol provide a ruleset that is very clear in how it operate and completely predictable in its outcome. (21 million bitcoin, irreversible transactions, and so on)

That is not simply possible with a democratic legislative process that care about everything in your life and wish to dictate rules on things that they don't know anything about, or their mind is tied to the fickle emotions of democracy.

This is complete utter nonsense if the system works as designed. Satoshi designed it that way. There's also no currying of favors here, at least as far as I know.

Also, block generators serve an important purpose in the bitcoin economy, such as securing the integrity and as well processing transactions. They need incentives to do it.

Frott, people who find out about bitcoin and start earning them 6 months from now are going to be early adopters from a wide perspective. If you think there is no risk being taken by amassing coins then you should be glad at this opportunity.

Frott seem to think the success of bitcoin is inevitable or something.

Yes, but curiously the guaranteed riches do not seem to excite him.

Everyone starts off within the Bitcoin economy with the same amount, also.

Zero.


Those aren't grey areas.  They're called "life".


That is a definition that is entirely subjective, and relative to the observer.  It's entirely useless in any civic context.

It's also false by any accepted definition.


That's not even true, much less obvious.  It may be true for you, but it probably isn't. You can't possibly know if it's true for anyone else, much less everyone else.