Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
I'm new to the world of cryptocoins, but find it extremly fascinating and fun to explore. My question to you guys, is if there still are any coins
that are worthwhile mining with "ordinary" computers, e.g. CPU mining with intel core i7 and/or GPU mining with Radeon 7850 ?

Thanks

depends on what do you mean with "worthwhile"...

If what you are looking for is profiting from mining, then it's most likely not worthwhile to mine sha256 coins (Bitcoin, Namecoin, etc..), but it may be still profiting to mine Litecoins (LTC).. again this can change after scrypt ASICs come out.

If you want to mine regardless the price/profit just to hold some.. it's still possible to mine very tiny amounts of any coins using pools.

There are different calculators available online where you can estimate the revenue knowing the hash rate of your rig

for bitcoins
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

for litecoins:
http://ltc.kattare.com/calc.php

Well, I would say mining btc now with CPU and GPU are worthless.

But until the scrypt ASICs do come out, you might get some LTC from mining with your devices.

Between the two, the latter would be at least more profitable.

Thanks,
I guess I'd pretty much ruled out mining bitcoin/litecoin because of the difficulty / the small amount I would expect to mine with my setup.

I was more thinking about mining a couple of "new" / more unknown alt coins, and take a gamble on that they in the future may be worth something on an exchange.
I'm not sure if it's the best strategy from a profit perspective though :)

In terms of "worthwhile", I was thinking about coins where you still have a possibility to solo/pool mine a reasonable share (even if the coins are worth next to nothing) withouth investing in ASICs.
I've been looking at the charts over at http://coinchoose.com/, but I struggle to see how I can calculate when I can expect to find a block solo mining by combining the difficulty/network hashrate / my hashrate.  Anyone know how to do this ?

The problem with the other altcoins is they aren't very popular or never will be, which means you'll be stuck with useless coins. I understand that people thought the same way about bitcoins a few years back, but there are only a few main coins.

Well there are tons of new alt coins out there.

But, they might (probably) not last.

One day they can be worth 10 cents a coin and the next day worthless.

Maybe you could take a look at Feathercoins.

They are worth 0.001 BTC right now (or $1) and they are still easy enough to mine : depending on your GPU you can get 15 of them a day with a single GPU.
So I guess that's more satisfying than getting 0.1 LTC or 0.001 BTC.

They are quite easy to trade for BTC at btc-e (there are also some lesser known exchanges allowing trading them directly for dollars).

Go for LTC and can double you earning in no time and its second most valuable coin.

its almost never worth it to mine solo unless you have tons of hash rate, even on alt coin. Im assuming you have under 30 kh/s or mh/s which means regardless pooling is way to go. Which coin no1 can say but I have my eye on alphacoin.