Bitcoin Forum

First off, hello everyone, new to this whole bitcoin thing but it seems quite intriguing.

Now, on to my question, I already understand that ~300 khash/s is pretty bad when I see so much discussion in the low to mid hundred Mhash/s.  However, I don't particularly have much choice, currently the only computer I have that is in working order is an older ASUS Portable desktop with a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor, and for some reason the only mention regarding my video card is that it's a VESA: 6325 driver (Note, running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) so GPU mining seems to be out of the question as far as I can tell.

With that all out of the way, I still want to participate in mining, but I am rather curious how small of an amount of a BTC I can expect to make in a day.

electricity costs more than you mine.

0.00009822 on PPS pool
But with hash rate so small, it can be 0.00000000 on some pools.

Thank you. 

And yeah, I've noticed that the pool I've been using, Bitcoincz also denoted as Slush's Pool, doesn't seem to be giving me any credit for any shares, so I am guessing that means it's giving me the 0.00000000, no?

You don't have a video card in that system?

It's pretty easy to compute what you will theoretically make. The total hash rate is about 23.5 TH/s. Your share of the block rewards is 300,000 / 23,500,000,000,000, or 1.28x10^-8. 7200 BTC is mined every day and your share of that is a whopping 0.000092 BTC.

Aha! Just figured out how to find the actual driver via Terminal. I apparently have a "Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 65x/M650/740 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter"

Slush's pool is the example of pool on which you are not going to mine anything. On Pay Per Last N Shares pools, the shares loose it's value over time. If you do not send any share in small time frame before the block was found, you will not get any reward.

Better not to do mining with that rate. I am at 250 Mhash/s which is also too low to gain something...

Correct. Better would be to use a PPS pool such as http://50btc.com/ (http://50btc.com/).

Plus the amount you pay for the electricity your computer uses would be significantly higher than the number of Bitcoins you mine.

Thanks for the recommendation to switch to a PPS network instead.  And yeah, I don't mind that the rewards are outweighed by the cost, I'm doing it mostly for fun and out of an interest in participating in a young technology to see where it goes.  I would, however, prefer to get something back rather than nothing.

I was mining at about 500 MHs/s and wasn't worth it anymore months ago (in fact, it should probably be closer to a year now). This should give you a good perspective.

edit: checked when I stopped mining it was july 2011.

Try your chance in Litecoin  ;)
http://litecoin.org/