Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I'd like to get into altcoin mining, small at first, with an eye for learning and hopefully profit one day. But where are the legit sellers of hardware these days?

You've come at a great time ^^" Profits are at their lowest since I've started, over a year ago, and one could argue it might be a good time to learn the tricks before it (if ever) rises again.
My best bet? Learn to CPU mine or on the GPU you have ATM. If you're still interested, get a good but cheap GPU (nvidia 750TI), it'll get you into real GPU mining in no time for only a few dollars (and only uses up to 60W, mostly only 40).

Don't go around looking for asics. It's a world dominated by brute corporations, and might be even worse with the current BTC price decline.

So in a way these days it's all about the card you have and running it almost just on your laptop?

There's a lot of fluff concerning this; I'm looking for a simple honest tutorial for getting into mining.

Things like:

• What coins to mine
• What kind of setup do you need
• Can it be done on a laptop like a MacBook Pro
• Can I damage my hardware/what's the electricity costs

I've googled the hell out of this and info seems all over the place...

I feel you. Nothing but confusion out there at the moment.

1.  It varies hour by hour, day by day.  Coinwarz is a decent resource or you can try jumping on new alts hoping they end up being profitable
2.  Decent desktop with 1 or 2 GPU's at minimum, but it would be mainly for fun, not profit.  Look into ASICs if you want to make a more serious investment
3.  No.
4.  Mining does put more of a strain on hardware than it would normally receive gaming or whatever.  That being said, I still have the 7850 and 7950 I started out with almost 2 years ago, so they can last just fine if taken care of.

with a laptop you can mine xmg (cpu)...
I wouldn't advise anybody to mine with the gpu(s) of a laptop because yes it can damage it (there are a few story around  ;D especially with some dual gpu laptop).
Actually may-be if you mine VTC (the cards doesn't seem to run hot with that algo) it can work...

Is there any websites with the sole function to educate on every aspect of Bitcoin mining? I haven't seen any, just curious, this might be a good project for someone with the tech know-how.

You don't. GPU mining you can never be profitable at as there are private kernels floating around in the background you have to pay a few bitcoin for and are already distributed to the big miners, public kernels don't have nearly the same hashrate as those.

Putting that aside, there is no profit as Bitcoin just lost 1/3 it's value in the last couples days, which is essentially the mother coin. GPU mining is bust. CPU mining has private kernels as well. That just leaves ASICs as those you can at least see what's on the market, scrypt and sha-256 miners, but once again mother coin problems.

Shame, OK, let's say hypothetically you were a risk-taker. What sha or scrypt miner would you try to get on a budget? (Let's say you just came across a few hundred dollars but not so much).

Ooh, finally you acknowledge that it's because of BTC being down. You're starting to see the truth.

For everyones interest: It's not just private miners (which have always been here) that are killing the coins, it's the downwards cycle Bitcoin is bringing upon us. Bitcoin down, altcoins (mostly GPU/CPU coins) are going even more down: aka no profits left for miners. There's also the upwards cycle: if Bitcoin booms, altcoins boom even more :)
Altcoins are even more volatile than BTC itself, it's like their "intrinsic volatility" (eat that, buffett) is multiplied by that of BTC. And that's what makes this game so hard.
Deal with it like an adult, and either avoid this game or live with it, or just keep on playing the troll you are. But stop pointing at black sheeps that are just gray and aren't alone out there, and claiming it's all their fault.

This kind of thinking is also what causes the crypto-investors aversion against miners. When BTC is down, and they see that the volume is going down too, they also notice that the daily flood of BTC (2.5/min) is taking up more % in the sell orders. So they think it's clear: downtrend is because of the miners. But that's the same short sightedness as you're practicing: It has always been there, it's just becoming more noticeable. Didn't stop profits from going up though, so you might think about another reason instead of playing it off as the only truth.

FYI: I do not have private miners myself, just mining with the public kernels on 2x 750tis. I'm also a very strong supporter for open-source, have been actively engaging in such communities (mostly filesharing though) for the last 10 years.
But I also think that we should stop pointing fingers at those who don't have the same principles, yelling "but he started it :'( " like little children. It will get us nowhere. Instead, you should actively engage in getting people interested in crypto so the right people get to know about it too, and maybe they will give you your fancy free miners. 

Ooh snap, you got me there ^^" Yeah, that's gonna make me rich :D It was like a 10% boost? And a few months ago :P