Bitcoin Forum

Tonight my underage son asked me if he could start lite mining and/or NMC mining, in order to make some extra money. I called our tech support and they had no clue what I was even talking about. I'm aware there is money to be made in this, but I am concerned whether mining will affect my internet bill (how much bandwidth are we talking about here?). Can ya all help a mother out?

you will be paying a lot for electricity. Just let him to mine during 24 hours, after that look how much kW he spend.
Mining is extremely profitable business if you will spend coins in several years

Well if the electric bill is the major cost, that isn't a problem because he only has two laptops and charges them first. Thank-you for the heads up and advice.  :)

You should not mine on a laptop. It will not generate any value at all.

Mining on a laptop is not recommended. Laptops are not designed to run 24/7 under high load. Sooner or later your hardware will fail because of high temperature levels. It's not profitable either because most laptops doesn't have enough calculation power.

Mining on laptop is not profitable and not recommended. If you want to mine Litecoins, Dogecoins etc. then you should build a desktop with three or more AMD Graphics card. More info: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2013/12/09/litecoin-101-how-to-build-your-own-mining-rigs/

Yeah, it will cost you money in electricity if your son doesn't know what he's doing. Your internet bill should stay the same. Good luck!

laptop mining wouldnt do much imho ..

with much laptops yes... :D

Sure, I'd say you should let him go for it. It won't be profitable on a laptop and it will likely cost more in electricity than he'll earn in coins, but it will be an educational experience and should play an overall positive in his life. The small negative ROI (I can't imagine it costing more than $10 a month in electricity to mine on a laptop) shouldn't be a that big a deal.

If you or him has the money though, building a real mining rig would probably be a better idea though. This way, it will actually be profitable and he will be able to earn a much more substantial amount of coins.

How old is your son?  It is true that he will not make much mining with a laptop, but there are certain coins that can't only be mined with a CPU, but I would probably not do it with a laptop.  He will most likely  overheat and burn it out.  GPUs are WAY overpriced right now because of all the hype, so this "hobby" does come at a cost.

Haha well yeah maybe, but that sort of would ridicule the entire idea of mining cost versus power cost.
Running god knows how many laptops would be weird and expensive would it, i am certain though that some people still do it lol, i imagine stacks upon stacks of thinkpads out there lol.
Oh well, whatever floats peoples boats i guess.
Some like weirdnes more than others hrhr...

mine velocity or protoshare with cpu..

Not sure if a troll thread, but do you have unlimited bandwidth? If you do, then you wont be paying any extra.


I'd advice against mining on Laptops. It's ok for some of the newer coins, but not with LTC or NMC and won't be profitable and you'll just end up burning the laptops out.

Don't ever mine for the short term or on a full time basis, it's fine if you want to earn some extra cash or get some coins to stash away for awhile but you won't make money if you mine the way a lot of people do on this board, I would argue that Litecoin mining and Namecoin mining aren't profitable enough if you're going to go long term because the difficulty is so high you won't be able to stash many coins for the long run but this is something people have bickered about since Bitcoin came into being.

i think you have to read about on internet and have an idea of costs of hardware and difficulty level.. About litecoins I think dedicated servers is the best way

Wait, your son thinks he can just switch on a laptop and start making money?

Err..no..

Typically a properly set up miner using stratum to a pool will use less than 100 bytes a second, which adds up to about 10 Megabytes a day or under a third of a gigabyte a month. Basically the same as watching one streamed movie a month. So unless you have a really tight cap, like one of the rural wireless providers of 2GB or so, you would barely notice. (And even then, the video watching is gonna eat into it more) Typically caps are in the 10s of gigabyte range for DSL or cable.

Since laptops are unlikely to contain a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) I'll assume that he would (eventually) look at mining a CPU friendly coin such as primecoin. The current economics of this would be something like this...

If the laptops are recent and quite powerful, it might be possible to mine 1 primecoin, symbol XPM per day between them. This would be worth around $5. The electricity cost (charging them up still uses electricity) for two 50W laptops would be around a dollar a day for really expensive electricity (0.40 per kW/h) or around a quarter a day for reasonable priced electric (0.10 per kW/h). If they are less powerful, then half a primecoin a day is more likely... still $2.50... but if they are 5 year old models then we might be down to only a couple of primecoins a week... so a potential for positive profit is there, but will probably require patience. Also the values of coins rise and fall, quite dramatically on occasion, so it's possible that the week you want to sell, the stash of 50 or so primecoins is worth only $50 instead of the $250 he thought he could buy a new console with or something. Best pool for primecoin mining IMO is ypool.net There are setup instructions there also.

Other coins using the scrypt algorithm may be briefly profitable to mine with a CPU, before the difficulty rises out of practicality for CPU mining (hashing) speed. However, many new scrypt coins have only a brief period of interest before being essentially worthless, so they might not be worth holding onto long (But a few weeks of holding them may be necessary to see them establish any value on an exchange.)

Though as others have said, laptops may not be the best machine to run heavily loaded for long, some have inadequate cooling. This can be mitigated somewhat by propping them up so they have plenty of air underneath and cleaning them out with an air duster regularly. But there is still a risk that this will shorten the life of them.

regards,

Flash

you will make money if you mine the way a lot of people do on this board

dont mine with laptops

+1

Nothing to add, just let him mine a bit and if you have spare money, build a rig. There are worse hobbies imaginable a kid can have.  :D

it's not going to hurt anything.  just make sure he goes outside once and a while.  your basement doesn't get enough natural light.

I have let my two underage sons mine Molecules respectively on a laptop and a MAC. I think they have been making up to 500 molecules each, every day since Christmas.

On the MAC they had to compile the miner from a guide we found by googling, and they learned a lot from it. Much better than playing computer games all day during the entire Christmas holidays...

I truly believe MOL will become worth real money in the future, given the parameters it has and the situation being not preminted. In addition it hasn't been ruined by being introduced on an exchange too early, and the early-miners/profit-takers factor will hopefully be stabilized before it happens.

The energy costs can be neglected if it's winter where you live and you use electricity to heat up the house anyway.  ::)

I would have him draw up a business plan and let him run it like a real for-profit business. You can let him finance the cost of equipment through you, put a kill-a-watt meter on his computer and let him pay for the electricity he uses, etc. He's young enough to learn to be an entrepreneur without it devastating his lifestyle if the business fails. Who knows, maybe he will enter adulthood as a millionaire.

+1
It will be a great learning experience at many levels.