Bitcoin Forum

Hello everybody!
First off, yes, this is my first interaction with BitCoin mining.
No, I am not a semi-autistic twelve year old barely able to function at basic tasks.
I am a semi-autistic seventeen year old with a very high IQ and a knack for patterns, computers, and grammar.
I have been building, repairing and just fucking around with computers since I was eight. Just got around to building one for myself (Money. Built plenty for clients)
Please do not dismiss this topic based on my age and my status as a BitCoin noob. I will pick up on it quickly, and if my torrent seed record is any indication, I will be contributing quite a bit (Over 120gb uploaded some months).

Now, I was doing a little bit of research on BitCoins before I actually started asking questions.
While I know I don't really need a lot of this hardware for a dedicated mining rig, I use my computer for gaming and just about everything else.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/m4xl
Please note that the second 8gb of RAM is not yet purchased, but is on the list, right after I upgrade from my 1984 IMB Model M and my $15 wireless laptop mouse.
This only matters for wattage calculation.

Operating systems I have installed: Vertex 4 / CavBlack: Windows 7 Ultimate. 80gb Scorpio Blue: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. 80gb Seagate Momentus (PS3 HDD): A broken copy of Mountain Lion.
CPU is overclocked to 4.6GHz.


The actual question:
As you can see from here (http://tpbitcalc.appspot.com/?difficulty=3054627.5269&hashrate=650&exchangerate=10.94&bitcoinsperblock=50.00&rigcost=0&powerconsumption=518.00&powercost=0.10&investmentperiod=355), I would be making about ฿6.5 / $70 each month at 24/7, assuming the highly unlikely full system load.
Given that people are dicks and would just leave an old Pen4 running the mining on the CPU and taking a full share of the coins (Tempting, but no thank you. My old Pen4 is too loud to tolerate), would I be better off in a large pool (Like this one), a small pool of friends who would mine part-time, or better off on my own?

I figure at $70 a month (Probably closer to $50, since I could only definitely mine 18 hours / day, though I can mine and play Minecraft, which I find hilarious), I could pay off a second 7970 in ~seven months, but if I can make more from helping you guys out, I'm okay with that. Killer gaming system, pocket money, and my parents will blame the extra $20 per month on the new air conditioner.

Welcome to the community, btw helluva introduction  :)

Thank you.
Sorry about the long post. As a tech, I've kind of learned I'd rather have everything I need and a little I don't up front than struggle to get the little I need later on.

Don't worry about it, I like reading allot. For how long you've been lurking in the community?

Not really lurking on a community, per say.
A lot of wiki's and FAQ's. Occasionally I'll pop in on an IRC and no one will be active / pretend not to be active.
I'll refer back to the first paragraph. In all fairness, I made this username when I was a semi-autistic twelve year old. XD Personality and knowledge has evolved; name has not.

Got it, so how old are your really? I'm 29

Don't buy anything for GPU mining with the expectation of breaking even. There is no longer a prayer of that happening.

GPU solo mining is also pretty pointless.

Welcome to the forum.

As mentioned, now with the release of FPGA and the upcoming release of ASIC's, GPU mining is dead.

Once the ASIC's are released the network difficulty will be so high that it will be impossible for GPU miners to mine enough to cover the power costs, its already difficult as it is.

Sixteen.


Also, I wouldn't buy it unless I already had the money.
But, if I make a bunch of coins before the difficulty goes up, won't those coins be worth more than $10?
And I don't plan to make a living off of it or anything. I really just want to fund Steam, so if I make $30 a month with hardware I already own by running it when I'm not using it, I don't see why not. I have sufficient cooling.

Also, the pool I'm currently using (The GUIMiner default) is a group called http://bitcoin.cz
I have no loyalty to them, as I have only made ฿0.01 so far. If there is a more lucrative pool that would welcome a 1.1GHz 7970 ~18 hours a day, I would love to hear it. If not, Slush's pool seems pretty decent. Nice site interface.

How does seeding torrent files have ANYTHING to do with you being a good member of this community?
Ram has no impact on how well you mine bitcoins hope you know that.

To answer your question, DON"T MINE, IT IS A WASTE OF TIME, YOU STARTED TOO LATE, unless your ready to purchase an ASIC machine then you shouldn't ask that question.

For someone with a very high IQ you don't do good research. I would go back to that person that test you and demand a refund.

Well, that would make sense and be a valid point if it was a dedicated mining rig and not just a way to make a little bit of pocket money to fund games for said gaming rig.
But seeings as I already own the hardware, have sufficient cooling, and the part where my build is not overkill for what I need it to do in the time I use it, your post was a useless to me, if not a little insulting.

The torrent seeding was merely to show that I don't leech off of other's work.

I don't know how torrent seeding shows you don't leech LOL your downloading copyrighted stuff obviously right there your leeching off of someone else's hard work for free. Also when it halves and even now you will not make any pocket money, you wouldn't even break even. Save your money buy a $13k asic machine and then you be making pocket change.

You're forgetting that electricity costs money. Once ASICs are out, unless you generate your own electricity (and even then, unless it's too much to sell back to the grid), you (or rather, your parents) will be paying more in electrical costs than you'll make mining with a GPU.

Now, I'm not a miner, so I don't know if what I said above is completely correct, but that's my understanding.

As I understood from what he is saying he is actually not buying anything and just wants to mine with his pc that he already uses for gaming.

He could mine with it in a pool for a while before it is not profitable anymore.

Even pool mining is dead for GPUs unless he is buying a game for like $1 he aint going to make much, like I said before or maybe I was speaking another language. I feel like no one wants to admit that mining is for the big dogs now, but it is sorry your late get in line.

Being a bit of a gamer myself, I run my 7970 full blast 24/7, and as far as I can tell, at least until December, the 7970 makes a bit of profit, but in the meanwhile I can run recent games triple display (but turn off the displays in the daytime, >_>)  Even if it isn't going to be effecient mining in the long haul, at least for the next few months I can stash a decent amount of bitcoin.

Mind, power in my region is about the cheapest in the nation as well, so I do profit a good $60/mo atm with a 6850 and 7970 together pushing out 900 MH, plus an extra about 70MH when I am at work, on free power, so my situation might be biased.

At the same time, mining for the hell of it is nice even while mining elsewhere in MC during boring workdays. ^^

As for the pool: yeah, use one.  Unless you are lucky as hell (and don't expect to be even average lucky) you won't make a bitcent for another few years, and that's only if the ASICs don't make 1GH payout about .01/day, which will probably be likely within the next half year.

I'm actually holding my coin, so I'm going to run my 7970 and my 6850 and my AMD A8 APU work computer until the ASICs make GPU mining go bust.  If you want in before that, a good pool is the way to go.

My 7970 even OC'ed + the 6850 and my work APU (which does help, albeit little, since I don't pay the electric at work) got me about $50 in bitcoin more than I paid in electric for my rig.  It's certainly dying, but if you stick it out to the end, you'll still pocket a good number of coins.

Break even?
With power costs, I'd make $35 a month, and that's assuming my computer is at it's full 518w draw (Which it wouldn't be. It'd be closer to 320w).
IF I wanted to, it could buy a second 7970 GHz (At current price) in less than eight months. But, considering I'd probably get a PhysX card instead, that would certainly help with funding Steam games.
More money in real life to put towards gas and shit.
Oh, and I don't pay for power, so I'd be getting closer to $70 per month.
I could also, if I really wanted, mine on Ubuntu on a 2.5" laptop HDD (Or buy an 8gb SSD on ebay for $20 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kingspec-8GB-2CH-2-5-SATA-II-SSD-50MB-S-MLC-NAND-Flash-Solid-State-Hard-Disk-/230787609887?forcev4exp=true&forceRpt=true)) and unplug all other disks and underclock my CPU to 2.5GHz and lower power draw to around 280-300w.

Late or no, I'd be making a profit, no matter how you look at it.

I also have two old Pentium 4's I can set up to mine off the CPU in a pool. All I need for them is a wNIC. If the pool is based off of time spent mining, and not how much you contribute, that'd be a great deal for me. In addition to the two I own, I have access to another thirty or so (Probably twenty working) I could do the same thing on, and that's without doing Black Hat mining, which I know is popular among RAT admins (Infect my school. Every computer running a useless contribution, all forwarding the coins to me?)

I perfectly understand what you are saying, but what I am trying to say it didn't happen yet.
He could do it for a little while, what if even a week if it makes him happy to make even $2.
If someone wants to try, they should. Of course it would depends on the electricity costs too.

I also just found out I can play Fallout New Vegas at max graphics and several HD retextures at 55fps while mining.... :|
I think it'll be more than 18 hours / day if I can still use the GPU. I might also hijack my computer at the community college to mine 24/7.

At this point it is hard to earn money mining. Although many are anticipating the release of ASICs, I have my doubts they'll see the light of day for at least a year (if not more). That said, it doesn't hurt to just set up a miner to give you some 'trickle-in' BTC, just don't expect to make a ton of money.

Also, be really, really careful with your wallet. Your wallet is golden, store it safely, and securely, and as much as possible, offline.

Really? What information do you have to back this up, pyramining, will have an ASIC within the next 2-3 months. Remember BFL doesn't make the only ASIC in town. Check your facts.

See that's just the problem, there is a lack of factual information, just lots of claims (ever heard of vaporware?). There are several "businesses" that have all claimed they are coming out with an ASIC, but have yet to provide any solid evidence. People are dumping their btc into these preorders with no guarantee they are going to get anything.

Research litecoin, that is where you are going to want to point your rig when ASICs roll in to town.

Nice to hear that, but always make sure you ask for permission before using anyone else's computer for mining bitcoins  :)
Consider yourself whitelisted, so now you can use the forum like every established member around here.

Btw, you have your bitcoin address handy?

Thanks for the whitelist, and yea, assuming it's the one entry in the address book.
If not, then I'm set to send my coins to some other bloke. xD

The twenty computers in the shop are owned equally by me and two other friends who have a sort of join repair service, and sometimes clients decide it's not worth repairing.
The one at school might lack the cooling to run it on, but the teacher would be more interested in how it works than anything. And I've only done just enough Black Hat activities to be a better White Hat.
Or light gray.
No worries, I won't be amassing an army of BTC slaves.

Heh, I won't  :)

Paste your address here then, you never know when someone decides to give you a hand with your projects

What  ???
What full share are you talking about? Pool or no pool, CPU mining barely get you anything at all, lol.

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I am not sure how pools are divided. If its divided based on time spent mining, and not just a way to be steadily paid the same amount you would make solo mining, it could be exploitable. Mine 24/7 at 400KHash and get paid the same as everyone else....

Got it, here you go 73ddc8... (http://blockchain.info/tx-index/31201166/73ddc8a4545729636cec8d71b2acdca015eaf0219d6d5032b1a22e18d3020e0e), spend them well  :)

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time a newbie calculated profit per month based on the current difficulty and projected earnings for the next x months.  ;)

Unfortunately for GPU miners, (with the exception of 2 weeks ago) the difficulty has been increasing approximately ~8-10% every ~12 days for the last several months due to more FPGA hardware coming online. Your calculations assume no new power will be added to the network - this won't be true even without ASICs, which are expected to ship within the next month. When ASICs mining truly begins difficulty will increase incredibly quickly and GPU mining won't even be worth the wear on your equipment.

If you want to buy a card for gaming, go for it - just don't expect to break even. It's not going to happen.

Oh, OK! You see, the pool money is not divided based on time spent mining, otherwise people would have to run a bajillion of miners on a single PC to have a chance of getting anything. :)

The pool earnings are distributed based on the number of solved "shares", where "share" is just a block with reduced difficulty. Most of the shares are useless to the pool because they do not solve the block. However, they are used to demonstrate the effort spent so that when the winning share is found, the winnings can be distributed fairly.

._.
Thanks, man!

I never really expected to make an insane amount, but I was told the same thing about GPU mining being dead two years ago when I briefly looked into it and found my FX 5200 wouldn't do anything.

Are you for real?  :o