Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I'm looking into mining crypto, just for fun and to learn a bit. I work in IT so I have an interest in the technology. I have a few questions:

+ are there people still GPU mining and can it be profitable? I realise that being in Australia the cost of electricity is a big part of the equation.

+ what platform are you running? Most of the guides I found are a few years old, so I'm not sure if they're still current.

I'm in the process of setting up cgminer on Xubuntu. Is that still a valid choice?

I'm planning to buy a new PC soon, and the hardware I choose will depend on my experiences now.

My current PC is Core2 E7400 @ 2.8Ghz, Nvidia GTX 750 2Gb DDR5.

+ will my GPU be able to produce any "fruit", or am I wasting my time?

+ which currency could I mine with my GPU? I know that Etherium requires more than 2Gb (something to do with DAG), so are any good alternatives?

Thanks for reading!

If you're thinking of mining Bitcoin with your GPU, you're out of luck. It's been impossible to profit off Bitcoin mining without an ASIC for a while now. You may be able to make a money out of mining alts though.

I see you mentioned Ethereum specifically, so to know whether you can mine it profitably:

1) Find out the hashrate of your GPU using a site like this (https://miningchamp.com/).
2) Use a mining calculator like this (https://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/ethereum-mining-calculator) and fill it in with your GPU hashrate and other required info.

I don't mine Eth so I can't vouch for the accuracy of these sites, but that's the general idea. You should be able to find similar tools for other alts.

Yes you can certainly make a small amount of money from mining with 1 gpu from your home pc. However, to make any serious money you need many gpus.

Take a look at https://whattomine.com/ to see how profitable certain coins are to mine. Something like nicehash is very newbie friendly, and whilst you won't earn strictly the highest possible level of profits you should earn very close to optimum.

Now is a bad time to buy GPUs in terms of ridiculously high prices of gpus and ram AND low crypto prices. If you were going to build one anyway, go for it. 1070 & 1070ti are good choices for mining, or 1080ti if you want all out maximum performance. Take a look at nicehash expected earnings and divide your local gpu prices into your expected returns and see which card gives the best ratio

One of the main reasons I signed up to BCT is to learn about mining as well.  I guess after reading a bunch of threads, it appear that mining is no longer profitable.  But I guess I could move on to another venture which I think could still be profitable which is bounty hunting.  Oh yeah!

Certainly you will not end up with fruuits. If you want to learn, you can try cloud mining too.

i wanted to start mining myself but i hit some financial issues so for now, that is on pause. but from my research i found that there are quite a lot of information online which you can find. for example 99bitcoins has a lot of these "Mining Guides" such as this: https://99bitcoins.com/guide-ethereum-mining-how-to-mine-ethereum/ or http://www.coinminingrigs.com/
basically you have to start reading a lot of these stuff to gather all the information you need to know about how things work. also check the altcoin mining board https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0
and then start doing some calculations for profit using coinwarz website to see if it is profitable for you based on your electricity bill. and also remember to have the "volatility of the altcoins aka the pump and dumps" into consideration.

Remind you that if you're using your own personal computer, you might experience lag and bogs, so think carefully!