Bitcoin Forum

Hello all, I am new to both the forums and mining.
Today I come to you with some questions regarding bit mining or altcoin mining.
Recently, I came across some spending money($5000) and am interested in mining, so I have some questions

1. Should I use a GPU mining set up or use ASIC?
2. Which would be the best graphics card or ASIC machine for mining?
3. Which OS would be the best to run on?
4. Should I use pci extensions to separate the cards for better heat dispersion?
5. How long would it take to make my investment back (Free power)
6. How long would the machine be good for at the rate difficultly is increasing?


Thank you for you time. Feel free to ask any questions if you need more information.

1. for Scrypt mining, you have to use GPU right now. For $5k you would be able to build an ~8mh/s rig. ASICs are not available yet for Scrypt.  For SHA-256 , you would be able to purchase an ASIC but the diff is skyrocketing, so its not as profitable as scrypt.
2. Best GPUs are AMD:  7950,  7970,  R9 280X  R9 290X. Search "Gpu mining comparison" in google and you will see.
3. OS is irrevelant, people say linux is better because it takes less operating power, but its maybe 2-3% imo
5. It's this kind of question no one will be able to answer for you. My guess with free power would be something around 2 months.
6. With the increasing difficulty, a $5k rig will work for long. Till the ASICs will take over I think you can show a nice profit for around a year.

Hope it helped

it's enough

buy btc, go and trade it on cryptotrader.org you may end up with a million of USD at the end of the year.
https://cryptotrader.org/topics/367450/best-strategy-for-2013-continued

is cryptotrader.org still work for trade bitcoin?

Instead of mining I would recommend actually buying BTC or select alt currencies directly. Mining is becoming increasingly difficult and you're not guaranteed to get a return.

i second this. unless you spend ~10 grand on a rig, mining is kinda tough to compare to just buying.

cryptotrader.org provide automated trading according to strategy you choose. It hosting your trading bots. You also will need accounts on those exchanges where you planing to trade: mtgox, btc-e, bitstamp.

Like others have said, buy BTC, nest it through LTC, XPM, etc, and then close spreads (market making) to get 10% per trade, 1 trade every 2-3 hours (if you're paying attention) then multiply 5% for each nesting level. If you know what you're doing, you can quant trade altcoins short-term and get 30% per day pretty easily.

With $5000 you might incur slippage, especially on heavily divided currencies, so you could diversify and just run 5 $1000 campaigns.

5000$ 's a lot of money

Invest a part of your investment into buying newly mined highly promising coin at the earlier stage and cash in profit later. This is best when compared to mining. But might not always be the same at all time.

It is best to buy alt coins at low price and sell at high price. Investing to rigs helps in the long run.

Where or which exchanges do you recommend to trade, please?

BTC-e.com a good exchange . with bot from 1bbot.com this is very porerfull profit

how about you go 50-50, build a 2500 rig and 2500 to trade in a solid market. btce.com is great currently trading ltc and btc.

You have very good investments. Very good questions.

My opinion is simple.

Invest a little by buying altcoins at low value and sell at high value.

Scrypt mining will be profitable until Q3 2014 since scrypt ASICs will probably be launched.

Buying GPUs is always safe as long as gamers game.
Do be aware of the fact that fine-tuning a mining rig can take some fiddling and they make noise since you push them to the max.

You should seriously look in to buying used asics from sites such as Ebay. Difficulty and Hashrate is increasing every hour or so. So more delay means more monetary loss.  ???

I prefer GPU mining while you start afresh. Learn about difficulty and practical technicalities on your own. Once you gather certain knowledge you can judge yourself.

5000$ in Bitcoins. No muss no fuss. Considering that Fortress Investment is going to launch a new BTC fund in 2014 you have a good chance to double that amount in a few months. My 2 cents.

yea, just buy btc. and hold. or at the min I would spread it out a bit maybe $500 in ppc. $1000 in ltc and $20 in the top 10 preforming new alts. and the rest in cold storage offline wallet.

Thats not far from what im doing  ;)

That sounds interesting but could you please clarify it for people like me with no background in trading or at least point us in the right direction? For instance nest, close spreads, quant trade etc - I have no idea what it means. You know - it' s a newbies board. I'm kind of on the same budget.

Thanks,

prolom.

Buy this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=391555.0
Install here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361613.0
best profitable pool: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=306975.0

Best to use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage

Doing this isn't easy or simple. You really need to have reserves in many different sites, and then still low volumes at certain prices limit the profitability of arbitrage.

For sure is not simple, but who know how to made it - are happy about. You not become rich in one operation.
Cryptocurrencies offers big volatility.

How exactly? i plan on investing 3000 dollars. Do you mean by more trades, to buy low and try sell high each day?

buy BTC and trade it around to profit!

It's a good question, I think much depends on your objectives.

Mine (sorry about the pun) are as follows:

1) Have fun playing with hardware + software
2) Possible make some money
3) Maybe make a lot of money

I looked at some threads from 2011 and it is amazing how many people simply didn't start because of the perceived difficulty at the time. How wrong was that advice at that time! So now, how does anyone KNOW it's too difficult? What happends if BTC goes to $10k? Does that change things?? What about $50k? ANYTHING is possible. There's only 21m possible coins and some organisations are spending masses of cash on this - they MUST be expecting a return right?

This is not mainstream stuff yet. I can't speak to anyone that I know as they think i'm speaking a different language. Once my wife starts talking to me about bitcoins I will know it has hit the mainstream and returns from there may be limited!!!

Mine for enjoyment and if this is just the beginning in crypto then you are still in at 'the beginning'.

Cfx.

in that mode you risk to lose all your money

miner rig you lose newer.

How do you riskt to lose everything?

And if Bitcoin go to $1.00 and SexCoin to $150K?

"Ways to Lose Money Trading

Trading before you're ready (not taking the time to learn).
Trading based on news and emotions (or hope).
Trading with money you can't afford to lose.
Trading with insufficient capital (too small of an account size)
Trading based on "can't lose" tips, message boards and forum board "hot stocks", TV show "best buys", friends advice, gurus, junk email picks; Basically trading based on any info from someone else that doesn't have any real basis.
Using any "Green light = BUY, Red Light = SELL" simple, can't lose box trading system. These auto-mated "can't lose", made for TV, systems do not work. Nuff said.
Thinking that some magic technical indicator is the way to trade. Technical indicators provide information, but are not crystal balls.
Picking and choosing any strategy that you come across. Then using the next one you come across. Then...
Trading a system that is not right for your personality.
Over complicating trading. Really, simple works.
Ignoring money management (trade size, stop/losses, targets, etc.).
#1 reason how to lose money trading: Trading without a well thought out, thoroughly researched, thoroughly tested, rule based, trading plan. Without a plan, plan to fail."

Yeah but lets say i want do make short term profits. I buy at a price and hope it goes up but it doesnt, it drops a few dollars.
I wouldnt sell i would just wait until the price goes back up again.
So i havent really lost anything. The only way to lose there is if the drop is consistent and doenst really recover but how likely is that?

1. Prices can fall and newer going back. See tiscali history.
2. Trees don't grow to the sky.

But i mean NMC has been 10 dollars before. Its unlikely it will not reach at least 10 dollars again.

So soon!? Do you really ASIC manufacturers are going to be on time? Probably not, look what happened with butterfly labs.

What did you buy?

In my first week I have learned how to make my MacBook Pro get really hot with Asteroid, decided to load Xubuntu on an old unused laptop, worked out what a hash rate was and that 8kh/s is not fast enough! How to get cgminer to not work on a laptop with no GPU and how to get minerd doing the job very slowly instead. I earned so far almost 20,000 mooncoins and some DOGE and MNC (by accident) and have also enjoyed the process too!

You can't put a price on experience and for any newbie it's simply part of the necessary process.

I've invested today for scrypt mining hardware (it'll be here within 48 hours - can't wait!) and might dabble with BTC sometime but for now, my focus is on altcoins and trading mined coins to make further profits.

Whats the worst that can happen? Those R9's are still going to be needed by gamers, maybe I will suffer a 33% loss on the hardware? I'm 100% that I spend more down the pub over the course of a year than I have already on hardware :D

Enjoying crypto - Happy new year!

Not taking power into consideration.

ASIC mining (Available units at the moment)

5 x 50GHs ButterFlyLabs Miner $5,056.00 Will return ~$86 per day
1 x 230GHs Rack ButterFlyLabs Miner $4,603.00 Will return ~$79 per day

Scrypt mining:

8MHs Rig will return ~$65 if you mine LTC. But if you mine DOGE ~$95

Rates according to http://www.coinwarz.com/

Thank you all for your answers. I will probably go with a 80/20 route(Invest 4K to a rig, 1K to investments). My plan to to try to get a hold of some 290's(unless someone has better suggestions) and might invest in a small ASIC mining machine to run parallel with it.

Another noobish question, is there a way to make a wallet on an offline computer and have the mining machine sync with it through my home network? 

test profitability here http://switchercoin.com/

I believe it would be too much of a gamble to buy an ASIC miner. Everyone is doing it, and by the time you actually receive the rig, the difficulty could have shot up so much! I posted this calculator, that kind of put me off https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396078.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396078.0)