Bitcoin Forum

Is there such a thing? To the maintainers of the official bitcoin miner: Can you please consider making the mining application 64 bit and utilize all 4 cores that are on my i5-2500k? I would like to be able to run this program the fastest I can possible. Thanks

http://ufasoft.com/open/bitcoin/
You still won't mine very fast with a CPU.

nonono I mean as in a solo mining tool, not a pool miner. Sorry

Doesn't matter.  CPU mining died months ago.  There is no CPU arch that can come close to the worst of the available GPGPU's.

Solo mining tool or pool miner, it's all the same. The only difference is if you link the miner to a pool or your own instance of bitcoind.exe

As for the 4way SSE2 CPU miner going around, it performs SSE operations on 128bit integers, so I'm pretty sure that'll fill your 64 bit bus.

oh ok. what do you mean it died months ago though? Is it really just absolutely pointless to run a solo bitcoin miner? :S

No, it's pointless to run a cpu miner, because the efficiency is so poor compared to that of gpu mining that there is practically no way to break even.

Ok, at the moment I run a GTX 460 Hawk that runs about at 915 MHz so I can do some other things. This allows me to be at about 55 Mhash's. If I bought another GTX 460 OC card, and SLI them, would that make any profit at all, or just a waste of money?

edit: also, is it better to mine in smaller pools such as bitcoins.lc or bigger pools such as slush's pool (I currently mine in that one)?

I think mining bitcoins is more expensive than the electricity you're using.
55 MH/s will give you circa 0.11 BTC/24h according to deepbit stats (Though it may take a long time until you get the block)
How expensive is electricity in your area, and how much of it does your computer use?

Sell your NVIDIA card and get a used HD 5870 (you can find some for as low as $150 off craigslist, if you're lucky... I got mine months ago for $175).  ATI cards kill NVIDIA cards for mining.  I'm pulling off 360Mh/s with mine (or .75BTC/day according to deepbit stats).

CPU mining costs more than electricity in general. It's not viable at all. On an i5 you will probably be consuming 90-95w and generating a couple mhash/s. It's a lose/lose.

It will take about 5 years to CPU mine a block at the current difficulty.

it makes no dirrents for you.
but it best for the bitcoin community, if you choses the small pool, so we don't get a monopoly on mining.
an attack against the network can be done if you have 50% of the hashing power.

I switched to bitcoins.lc just because there is no fee and it pays less often. Slush's algorithm to reward later submissions with bigger value then first round entries meant by sheer luck I would get way too random results.

I agree!
I've been doing some pool shopping lately.
Deepbit  Do to the number of miners, your "cut" of a block is smaller/more frequent, *usually* fees.
Slush's  Roughly 16hr wait to validate BTC, larger/slightly less often reward.
This applies to all the smaller pools:
Infrequent rewards, but are usually much larger. You could be mining for 2 days before you get a block! That block may yield 2BTC+.

I've checked my 24hr averages from 4 pools (2 small/2 large), and what I see, is that whichever pool you go with, your rewards vary, very little, and balance out over time.