Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone,
I am new to bitcoin mining and I have a question that hopefully you will be able to answer.

I am currently looking into ASIC Miner but I decided to try out mining software on my laptop first. I know this is not recommended but I am simply testing things out before I purchase a miner.

My laptop has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1 GB of GDDR5 SDRAM card and I am using MultiMiner as my software. When I first ran the program I was getting about 38Mh/s, now it dropped to ~600Kh/s

My question is why the huge drop? Could it be the heat?

Download a temperature monitoring program to see if it is over heating, I wouldn't recommend mining with a laptop as they are not designed for that kind of load and may kill your laptop very fast.

Will do, anything else that I should look into?

don't mine with a laptop, they usually overheat pretty fast because their fan is crappy, and accumulate dust easily, there is no room inside a laptop

Look into asic's the day's of GPU/CPU mining are long gone.  Not a chance at ROI on GPU/CPU.

What is your electricity rate?

I just don't get which point you want to test with your laptop. Almost all of today miner is stand alone miner. Mean it's come with controller, you don't need laptop/ pc to run the miner. Laptop or pc simply for configuring purpose.

Most of the ones that are not standalone use something such as a raspberry pi.  Avalon 4.1 can use them or the little router.

If you do buy a small miner that needs a computer look into raspberry pi.   It will let you run a pc on very little power.

I live on uni campus where I don't pay for electricity. I was looking at 5GH/s Butterfly Lab ASIC miners. As far as laptop, I want to set it up so I can just plug in the ASIC miner and go.

Only debating between buying 2 (5GH/s) miners or start with one.

Thoughts?

Butterfly 5GH/s is a crap & fire hazard, you should stay away from Butterfly Lab miner & Butterfly Lab.

It most likely is someone trolling us.  This is their first thread.

No one goes for BFL.

Doesn't really matter since we are on campaign :D

If you want to have a feeling of mining cryptocurrency and have a very tight budget, you can try mining other cryptocurrency (not Bitcoin) that have low difficulties. When you finally have confident that you will get a profit from mining, you should really buy one miner (scrypt based, so no Bitcoin) from ZeusMiner. Do also check Amazon for some cheap ASIC miner.

Didn't get you. You are suggesting someone who have tight budget to mine worthless coins to pay electricity cost for nothing? Isn't it better to mine Bitcoin because all of the good altcoins have high difficulty? At least, we can get a few satoshis to play around.

What coin are you trying to mine?  Did multi miner drop your GPU and is only mining CPU?

Thanks for the replies!

I have provided 2 screenshots of my results after leaving my laptop to mine overnight. After reinstalling MuliMiner, my hashrate didn't drop, but my worker kept going on/off (see #2) - still trying to figure it out ??? ??? (my guess is the heat - laptop is forcing itself to cool before beginning to work again)

1) http://imgur.com/QNmT1Py
2) http://imgur.com/LFxRGus

I appreciate the advice of not going with BFL - I have found an Antminer U3 (~60GH/s) that I will look into.

To answer some of your questions:
-I am mining bitcoin
-No I am not trolling you, I live on university campus and don't pay for electricity. I will be here until Apr 2016 so I figured I'd have something running 24/7 while I'm at school
-As mentioned, I am merely familiarizing myself with the software, pools, and everything about BitCoin Mining, hence using my laptop. Once I figure things out, I will purchase an ASIC miner (USB ideally) and start mining.

For a newbie, would that be a good miner to start with? I saw some USB ASIC miners that advertise ~1GH/s but pricewise it is better to go with the ~60GH/s one (at least IMO)

Thanks again for your replies!  ;D

The screenshots and the results they show are fine.  Your laptop is not cooling down and then starting again.  Slush's pool has a minimum share difficulty that it accepts and it estimates your hash rate based upon how many accepted shares you've submitted.  Your GPU basically can't keep up with the minimum share requirements, so Slush shows starts/stops.

As for mining at university, you definitely want to go with the smaller units (like the U3) simply because of noise/heat.  Most university living quarters aren't exactly spacious.  Understand that you're going to earn virtually nothing doing this (currently about $4.00 a month with a U3)... but don't let that stop you from having a bit of fun with it :).

Hmm I was hoping the U3 would give me a bit more return. Then again, I am competing with 100K farms...
I'm going to do more research on my own, but from what I'm getting it seems like I am too late to join the game in order to make some good profit. Even with one or two U3s, I'm going to be earning ~4-8$/mo....which in a year (assuming bitcoin does not drop) will only cover the cost of the hardware (~100$).

Are my approximations OK or am I still missing something?

there are many online bitcoin mining and ROI calculator
you can use them to calculate your mining and return for your investment

I tried a few, and I am getting ~4$/mo with one U3...unfortunately this does not make it worthwhile. Meaning my initial theory about me being too late in the game is true, so far it does not look like this is a viable option to make some money. :(

This.  If you're looking at getting into mining to make money, you're certainly going to need more than a few GH/s and university housing.  For example, I have 8 Antminer S3s at my home.  At ~3.5TH/s I would expect to earn about $8.50 a day with free electricity.  Unfortunately, my electricity is not free, so my earnings are offset by that cost.

Yeah unfortunately I don't see the benefit of joining the game today. I shall continue with Forex then haha

Thanks again everyone!

It all depends on your electricity cost.  Some will benefit from mining.

If you have higher electricity costs with tight ROI, you could be right no benefit for you.  All depends.

OP has free electricity from university housing, but even with free power he's limited on what gear he can actually bring with him to mine.  Not like he can throw a truck full of S5s :).  He's got to factor in limited space, potential roommates to deal with the noise/heat, etc.  Maybe he can throw an S3 in there... but even then it's only about $1.00 a day at current difficulty and price.

It depends on what it is I guess.  When I had a "dorm" I went with single could have done it, but was just to loud for my liking.  During my "apartment" days they had a max they would charge but since I had roommates I would have been a jerk to mine as we would had to pay the max penalty (25 a month ) each month.