Bitcoin Forum

I've been mining off and on for a while and I'm running 1.5gh/s across a few different cadaver rigs I've put together random parts.  Even with the spike in difficulty making it pretty much unprofitable, I can't even think of shutting them down.  The small amount minded could be worth a great deal at some point. On the other hand, money could be put directly into purchasing bitcoin if such a huge increase in value is to be assumed.  Just wondering if any other hobby miners have thoughts on the topic. I personally enjoy tinkering with miners, which is a advantage over a buy and hold strategy.     

Look into different Cryptos, there's tons of other potential coins out there. It's like a fresh start to mining pretty much :)

I was planning to resell the parts of my mining rig after the electricity bill got quite expensive but I was too lazy to make an auction of anything. Now that I live in a place where I don't have to pay for the electricity, I finally got the monster working again. So YES, Bitcoin GPU mining still exists :)

I believe that GPU mining is the most right now . But ASICs and FPGA are affecting

As long as you're covering your power costs, its still worth mining. But once the difficulty increases to the point that your power costs more than the BTC is worth, you would be better off just buying BTC on an exchange, rather than continuing to mine in the expectation that the BTC will eventually be worth a great deal more.

Could still be profitable if you find someone to cover your electricity costs - employer/workplace, solar power, etc. At 1.5 Gh, you should still make a decent return on investment though over next year or two, right?

I sometimes do hoping someday BTC price will go above 1k each and even the 1mBTC would someday amount to something

Im thinking of quiting, diff went from 12 mill to 15 in something like 2 weeks, whats it going to be in 6 months! Especially when there will be a ton of asic and fpga out there, zero chance for gpu dudes. If I sell my gear now I can probably get close to what I paid for it, so ya, I agree with the guy above, just take that same money and buy btc directly.

GPU mining is far more of a hobby than an investment at this point.

It seems that for everything, have you seen the difficulty jump, since the popularity of ASIC mining? It's sad really I have never really mined.

If you are living in the campus and don't need to pay the electric bill it's win win :)

I've been traveling for over a year, but when I get home I plan to set up GPU mining on my desktop with a 4 year old GTX 260 just for the experience. The computer is unstable and freezes randomly, so I'm not expecting much of a payout, or profitability... but I want to at least mine some fractions of coins!

Mine BTE-s (Bytecoins) with your GPU at pool.bytecoin.in !

Doing little GPU mining. Look into alt-currencies.

It makes sense to switch to Litecoins when GPU mining and sell LTC for BTC

I agree.  LTC seems to be the way to go for GPU mining.  The currency is still very much in it's infancy and has a lot of potential to evolve.  I plan to rebuild my GPU miner and sick it on LTC very soon.  Just waiting on parts.

Yes there is plenty of GPU miners

Or PowerCoin - it's still relatively new and mining should be easy; if the value goes up, you can exchange it for Bitcoins.

I got a 6870 running, but the money I get out of it aint much, maybe 20-30 $ a month. Im gonna buy a couple of ASICs pretty soon.

Are there any exchanges for PowerCoin?
The value of Chinacoin and Feathercoin rose the first week then it lost about 80-90 % of its value.
I dont think these altcoins will catch value if they are just copies of previous coins, they have to really make some good changes to the source code if they want to catch a bigger crowd.

GPU mining for fun and experience while waiting on ASIC to be shipped.

Even tried to mine on my laptop - i would not recommend it! DAMN it got hot :(

GPU will probably move to LTC and other currencies and the diff for BTC will skyrocket during the next months.

It is still too low as blocks are mined every 8 minutes.

I have been mining now for a month with 2 x 9750 on Slush's pool.

Although the total has rate of the pool has increased and so the difficulty, my reward per day has increased.

Why?

Because the total has rate of the pool has increased, the pools luck and the number of blocks found per day, has increased. Although my hash rate percentage of the pool has decreased, and thus the reward per block found has decreased, I get more rewards per day due to the higher number of blocks found. I am thus getting a higher return per day.

I am not giving up on mining with a GPU. Once I can not keep up with the total pool hash rate, I am going to switch over to alternative coins.

I am not sure about the 8 minutes. The average time to find a block on Slush's pool is 1 hour. This was averaged over a day, over a period of 3 days, with an average of 17 blocks found per day.

yep i still GPU mine

I actually just recently got started in it. I figured I might as well do GPU mining while everyone waits for their ASIC vaporware.  ;)

I did realize that I needed at least 2 GPUs in order to make it worthwhile after the cost of power, but I still expect to have my investment returned within a couple months. For me, though, it's just the cost of the GPUs I'm worried about - I'm using an old P4 computer that didn't cost me anything.

I GPU mine fastcoins.

You mean 2 x 7950, right?  ;)

I tried Slush's pool last week when I still only had one 7950, and evidently I didn't get enough shares to get any reward at all - even participating in several blocks. I switched over to Bitparking, which is working a lot better for me (other than 1 block taking over 24 hours yesterday).

Mining for litecoins is worth it. It's a bit more profitable than Bitcoin with GPUs. I exchange them for Bitcoin whenever I have 40+ and the ratio is 0.024 or better. My rig is currently at 3MH and I'll probably add 4 more 7970s this week.

Greg

I'm mining LTC on a couple of 5870's, thinking of updating to 7950's.  Is it worth continuing to mine with the 5870's or sell them on fleabay and put the money towards the 7950's.

I used to mine TRC for a couple of weeks at the end of April but today TRC is not as profitable as it used to be back then...

I found the whole experience of first upgrading GPU in the desktop, than assembling first ever PC with 3 GPU, exploring linux for the first time probably as much rewarding as few coins I will be able to main before difficulty makes it uneconomical.

Yes, it is hard to say whether it will be worth it or not. According to the calculators out there, for a couple months it will be profitable for myself. I'm looking into alternative cryptocoins in the event that one of them takes off.

I'm still GPU mining .. but I switched to LTC a while back.

My leccy's free so I'll be GPU mining for the forseeable....

I still mine with my 5xxx cards, about the same proftiblity as it always has been.

Litecoins are rockin the GPU's right now.

Still running my GPU's and getting a whole bunch more soon :)

im hoping to set up a load of gpu miners

I'm hoping to setup a script at my office to run CPU miners on the weekends. That's not illegal, right? ;)

I get electric costs included in the rent in my office space and a few months back my friend convinced me to put a GPU ring in there..the heat and the noise was unbearable at first

Gradually got used to it and got a rig of my own...One rig turned into 2 and quickly turned into several more, although they are still turning over BTC I think I'm realising this is the point to stop GPU mining for bitcoin and either turn them over to litecoin or reinvest in ASICs

Lol btw my landlord has certainly noticed the increase in the rent, he keeps asking to have a look in my office everytime I bump into him  ;D

Good spot, I am also on slushs pool and noticed the reward per day was slighter higher recently

I currently gpu mine with 1 HD 7950.  It brings roughly .02 BTC a day.  I have the additional 4 HD 7950s and motherboard for the additional ones.  I've been waiting for my CPU to come in since May 22nd though.

I am mining with 7870xt and 6670, coming to about 670 Mh/s together, still earning money.

Running ATI 7850. My monthly outlook was holding at 0.35 btc until just recently dropped to 0.22 btc.  Is this because of the ASICs slowly coming online?  Or did BTC Guild hiccup?

Problem with the GPU is it heats up my entire room. So I ordered a Raspberry Pi to run ASIC with.

I found that on the PPS rate btc guild had a fairly low payment amount.  I have several other mining pools that I use in which pay more if you are interested.  I just recently switched to PPLNS mining pool and I find it pays substantially more than the PPS at btc guild.

Are you doing BTC or alt-coins? If BTC continues to rise in difficulty at current speed, it would take a really long time to break even for newly purchased GPUs.

Can you explain further? I'd like to learn how that would work.

Have you got your ASIC yet?

Cheers,

DC.

He is gonna use the raspberry pi to control the ASIC so instead of having to keep his desktop on all the time while mining, he can just have the raspberry pi running.

GPU mining is worthless ASICS are the future.

Not while ASICs are still shipping to the people who ordered. And for those who dont have to pay for electricity, as long as they have the gpus, they can make money off of them.

Yep, its still profitable to mine the most profitable coin on coinchoose.com , everyone is scrypt mining for $$$

I'm selling my brand new 3x 7950 rig on the forums https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226748.0

i still say switch to LTC or another coin..

I'm doingg it out of interest at the moment because my gpu is old (Radeon mobility hd 4670 1gb)

I am thinking of doing a usb asic setup in the near future.

One question, is CGminer the best for these different cryptos or are they all different?

GPU mining got my foot in the door on Bitcoin. So far it's still cost effective for me, but the difficulty increase is about to make my poor GPU irrelevant in the next couple cycles. Even so, it's a decent way for newbies to get a few mbtc to start playing with and pique their interest.

I understood that.  I wasn't sure how ... via SSH or ... how?

The thing is, most people have switched to mining litecoins with their gpus due to their easier difficulty and lack of ASICs. So if you arent one of the people with rigs dedicated to mining, you should probably mess around with litecoin.

Can you recommend a good miner for lte? cgminer caps in the kh/s when bitminter caps at 26 mh/s so id like to avoid bitminter

GUIminer only produced stale work

You're probably right that mining alt coins (litecoin) is more efficient for GPU miners, but many newbies just won't be interested in the added complication. Personally I can talk to friends about bitcoin, but with alternative coins it starts to become tedious. For many people one cryptocurrency is enough. For me, you're right, I should probably switch.

mine LTC and dont convert to fiat...convert to BTC.

Of course! I hope I didn't imply I'd convert to fiat. So far I've mined bitcoin, converted fiat to bitcoin, paid friends for things using bitcoin, bought asicminer shares with bitcoin, but one thing I haven't done is converted any coin to fiat.

Looks interesting.  Higher ultimate coin count and new enough to be ASIC resistant.  If it catches on, it could be really good, but it's got some tough competition in litecoin.

The exchange rate between LTC and BTC is such that it doesn't really matter which one you mine for...

It's not the age that matters, it's the algorithm. ASICs can't do scrypt.

This is what I've found at the moment. I've got 3 7970s running right now, and I find that if I switch to Litecoin I've made about the same as I would have in BTC in the same time period if I sell it.

I have a BFL pre-order from March this year, so if/when that arrives, I'll probably switch my GPUs to Litecoin to keep things a bit more diverse.

Does that mean that, in the end, ASICs should be let dominating the Bitcoin mining world whilst 'regular', PC-based miners should mine alternative currencies such as LiteCoin (which from what I've heard, is optimized for GPU).

If that is so, I might just as well start mining LiteCoins!

I've mined LTC and BTC and the results work out almost exactly the same when converted to fiat or each other.  I'm mining BTC now mainly because it's easier than converting. Once ASICs come on-line in big numbers and BTC difficulty spikes I'll switch to either LTC or another alt coin.  My 7950 rigs are energy efficient enough that they're still making a small profit, though once it gets hot on the east coast I'll have to shut them down since my A/C is pretty lousy unless an alt coin is making a significant amount of money.

LiteCoin was actually designed to be hard to mine on the GPU, due to the memory requirements of the algorithm. Of course, people are smart and managed to figure this out. Eventually, somebody /might/ be able to come up with dedicated hardware to mine LTC, but it's likely to be much more expensive and difficult to produce than the BTC ASIC hardware, and the value of LTC is nothing like high enough to make that a profitable thing to be trying to do at this stage.

Aye, thanks for the explanation. I'll stick to BTC for a while then, but I do have to admit I'm a bit jealous when I see all those ASIC war machines that I can't really afford ;D

Look there:

http://dustcoin.com/mining