Bitcoin Forum

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Because i do not have to pay for power.  :)

Because they mine when they aren't playing video games?

You can make 50 BTC or more per 24 hours with far less hashing power if you're lucky.

What's your point?

Don't you mean "how can the professional miners hang on?"

As a casual miners I don't care about the electricity cost, hell, most nights my girlfriend leaves the TV on all night but it's not going to break the bank.

"It takes a Minumum of 1.875 G/hps to make 1BTC/24hr"

That is just not true.

"At the current difficulty, it takes 1.875 Ghps on average to make 1 BTC per day"

Would be better.

(I'm not intending to be a dick even though it may appear the opposite)

I'm probably a "casual miner", and the computers do a nice job heating the house - at the moment I cover my electricity bill (for computers and other appliances), so it's ok.  However, I have more coins purchased with actual cash and watching the panic on the trading screens is fun.

Seriously, it's the "professional" miners who this is going to affect. Those of us who just do this for fun haven't really lost anything. Electricity is the same price and our hardware is paid off so we can keep going pretty much forever. I personally could afford to power my Bitcoin mining rigs (or folding@home rigs should things change) indefinitely without it really costing me more than I care to spend (assuming 0 rate of return on my mining). The electricity isn't really that much money, although I live in a place where the power is $0.08 kw/h so your mileage may differ.

The real problem is trying to turn Bitcoin into a business. Only for one shining moment did this make sense and it looks that that time is long gone.

And with something like micro combined heat and power, bitcoin mining wouldn't cost any more than heating the house. At least in the colder season.

you forget one thing Topic creator,


many people with high end comptuers or video cards already left their machines on 24/7 for torrents or seedboxing or what have you... i never turned mine off before so i dont lose any money at all mining compared to my previous (wasteful) habits

My PC uses 120W when not mining and 480W when mining... The 'I always leave my pc on' argument only goes so far.

Will

depends where you pool. ex: coinotron took >1month to mind a block, so it took far longer for my 3.5ghash (at that time) to generate 1BTC, however at Deepbit my 4Ghash (approx current +/- 10% dep on stales) generates >2.5BTC/d.

i notice about a 7 dollar increase in my power bill per month from mining and i leave 2 750watt PSUs on 24/7 ... my point is 300 watts or whatever for a casual person is like leaving a few lightbulbs on without turning them off... its nothing at all

not to mention electricity costs less at night time than day time or w/e the peak hours are

Um, I spend about $500/month on electricity (and at a minimum half of that is computers and probably closer to 70%).  Also, I am down a  few thousand dollars in the bitcoin market based on the current cash-out price.

But I do this for fun and that's the trade-off.

Wow, you're idea of fun is quite expensive.

At the current prices you'd need to make 8BTC a day to reach minimum wage in the US.  What kind of machine would you need for that?  Probably not worth it.

Yes, but then I expect the current mayhem to die down, and in a couple of years it will be "normal" again and the paper losses will turn into profits.

My other hobbies are also expensive, that's why I have a day job.

Yes, it is totally not worth it, please, everyone shut off your rigs.

(damn I hope the difficulty goes down   ;D )

If that person with 1875MHash/s was pool hopping he would make 1-2.5 BTC a day depending on luck.

The cruddy prices don't really effect me. I mine in minecraft on my minecraft server on my bitcoin mining rig.  8)

Im running about 2Ghps and average just over 1 BTC a day.  I consider myself a casual miner.

I hang on by not changing anything?

Also day trading BTC as the market swings.  The action this weekend was better than EUR/JPY during the financial collapse.  I should say the 2008 financial collapse.

Did anyone else see those $50k trades back and forth.  Good stuff.

With luck, I would make 50 BTC from every block and create 1000 blocks per hour - with luck.

Without luck, or something akin to the  law of large numbers (can't recall if it's the weak or strong version, but read average) you will on average get around 1/day.

My mining rig costs about 0.8 GBP (about 1.3 USD) a day to run and makes about 0.4 BTC a day.  I can 'hang on' by selling my BTC on the market and pocketing the difference.

I guess the trick is to avoid mining with CPUs and stick with GPUs or FPGAs.

Your title has reminded me of a fact useful for quickly mentally converting kh/s into BTC/day:
At a difficulty of 1`000`000, 1GH/s is worth very close to 1 BTC/day.

Also, where I live electricity costs are such that wattage is almost exactly GBP/year so I have a very easy time with the figures. :)