Bitcoin Forum

Been using bitcoin since December last year I've generated 114569 blocks 17210 confirmations and 1784 khash/s and only 0.05 of a bit coin which is from the bitcoin faucet. So after 3 months I'm a little disappointed at no bitcoins.  I've checked all the settings and they seem ok . Could you tell me how many blocks needed to generate a bitcoin as the readme says "you receive coins when you successfully generate a

block. "  Unless my blocks are different to yours, I seem to have plenty of blocks but, no bitcoins.

those blocks aren't generated by you. if they were, you would have gotten 50 btc.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block

The 114569 blocks are the blockchain (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blockchain) - the chain of all blocks generated to date, by everyone on the bitcoin network.

The 17210 represents the number of blocks generated by the entire network since you were sent the 0.05 BTC by the Bitcoin Faucet: every time a block is generated by anyone on the network previous transactions are confirmed (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation).

1784 khash/s probably won't generate any bitcoins (it might, but the chances are remote: according to this calculator (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) it'll take you 2123 days, assuming that difficulty (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty) doesn't change). You could try mining for bitcoins as part of a mining pool (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_Mining) - that way you'll share in every block mined by the pool. Your share will be small, but it will be better than nothing.

Then bit coins is not for me I shall not be wasting any more time on it.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I feel like you came to bitcoins with the wrong idea. Bitcoins are a decentralized digital currency, not a way to make money. Sure, if you're willing to put down a couple thousand dollars to build a mining box you could end up making some money. But the best way to make money with bitcoins these days is to sell goods and services, same as making money with dollars. The difference is that the bitcoins you receive aren't tied into an unsustainable economic model like dollars are.

You've also been CPU mining I'm assuming or mining with an older / not optimal GPU.
That's going to generate a hell of a lot less hashes. You could probably learn more from the wiki than I can explain but CPU mining is almost insignificant compared to GPUs

Ha-ha-ha. You should be named "Fed", not "Dai" =)))

OK, first make sure to send all coins you have currently to my address (1NLWBAD7ZD82fJDDawKfp5RAKSR8YWWYd3), since i guess you won't be needing them anymore.
Who would keep such a worthless stuff and waste time for it ? Come on, let me ease your suffering.

Remember my address: 1NLWBAD7ZD82fJDDawKfp5RAKSR8YWWYd3 , I'm here to help you.

Honestly I could see a lot of people having the same result because they don't know the ins and outs yet and they quit.
At this stage anyone that's willing to go to the extent of running BitCoins at all is 99.999% ahead of the world population and I'd prefer to embrace them and explain why it doesn't work than cause them to run off because "bitcoin sucks".  Day to day use of bitcoin isn't complicated. The internals can be complicated even for us that enjoy it.

A question to Dai:
What did you expect to get from Bitcoin in the first place? Why did you start mining, and why does the fact it's quite difficult to get bitcoins by mining make it not worth your time to bother with the currency at all? It sounds like you saw a way to get free money and now that you're told that's not how it works, you lost interest. Is that the case?

Most people (myself included) didn't realize how inefficient the CPU miner is. I figure I have a top end CPU I'm good.
I'm guessing he thought the same. I think mining brings a lot of people in that would hopefully become interested after they learn more.

I hope you don't mean this literally.

To be honest I expected it to do what it said on the tin. Give up some computer power and get rewarded for it. Well after doing this for 3 months and I'm on my computer a lot 8/10 hours a day but, after 3 months nothing. Now my computer is not a low powered computer nor is it a high powered one about middle so after doing this for a quarter of a year that's the time scale we are talking, nothing. So bitcoin seems to be having a hard time living up to it's basic premise. Now there are other ways of generating bitcoins but, I've not looked into them but, here is the rub it would seem you have to use real money to buy bit coins to start trading in them, sort of defeats the object of  bitcoins as an alternative currency (bit like buying shopping vouchers). This is what the FAQ states would take a year on average to generate 50 coins with a typical PC well after 3 months not a sausage and I have a typical pc. So this rings us back to trading. It would seem you (or a group of people) have to buy the bitcoins with real money to generate enough of them for the community to be able to trade as a community. We are back to the shopping voucher principal.

Question for you guys where do the bitcoins exchanges get there bitcoins from?
If it is from a computer my friend stonetz reckons he has a high powered computer that does little in the way of mining them so I'm just wondering what sort of computers the exchanges have to generate such large numbers of bitcoins.

I understand your disappointment Dai--I'm afraid that earning bitcoins through computing power is not really the main point of the system.  It is something that people have the opportunity to do, but that task (called "mining") has become quite competitive and technical, using specialised hardware to produce the greatest possible amount of security to the network at the lowest price--which was how that part of things was always designed to work so that it keeps bitcoins safe for us all.

Mainly, bitcoins are about earning, spending, and transferring money the same way you would any other type of cash:  only faster, cheaper, and more securely.  Bitcoins also maintain your saved value because there are a limited number that will ever exist and no one has the power to issue more.  Another advantage is that there's no central authority to break down or make bad decisions--the math is the only thing in charge and it's been very carefully worked out.  I understand if you thought that bitcoins were going to be something else, but it truly is an amazing, beautifully designed system.  One day it may replace Paypal, Western Union, and more!  Don't be afraid to leave bitcoin to the rest of us for now if you don't have a use for it yet.  As we all work on growing and building the bitcoin economy, we hope to make it the most effective way to do money digitally.  When it is, I'm sure you'll be back!

Do you remember where you read that? If so, we can make sure it's properly worded so it doesn't set false expectations. For each person like you who takes the time and effort to write, there are probably dozens of people who just get frustrated and write off Bitcoin as a waste of time. Or worse, as a scam.

Ah, there's a point that should be clarified. The 50BTC isn't spread out through the year. Each time you generate a block, you earn 50BTC. A typical computer can generate one block per year. And that's an average - some people will be lucky and generate 2 or 3 coins right off the bat, others can run for a couple of years and not generate anything. And that average, by the way, assumes you're running a mining computer 24/7.

Side note - is the FAQ still accurate? It seems to me that, with the current level of difficulty, the average should be around one block every 3 years.

As you mentioned, 114569 blocks have been generated. Each block is worth 50BTC, so that's somewhere in the neighbourhood of five and a half million bitcoins in circulation right now. It is possible that someone (most likely an early adopter) who has a lot of Bitcoins set up an exchange, but the exchange probably doesn't generate the bitcoins itself.


By the way, if you do decide to abandon Bitcoin, please consider returning your coins to the Bitcoin faucet. The address is on the web page.

You seem to be admitting that the basic premis of bitcoins being generated by computer power is not worth using and that's fine all I ask is don't promote this way.
The other thing is could you answer my queation:
Where do the bitcoins exchanges get there bitcoins from?


Again the exchanges would of had to generate from a computer the above statement says so

It's true all bitcoins were generated at some point, but this is just the way they are initially introduced into circulation, like when dollar bills are printed.  After that they are bought and sold many many times.  So the exchanges, like many of us, have bitcoins because they bought them from people who bought them from people who.....and so on.  It's like the paper money in your pocket--do you know exactly where it came from?  You know it was printed by the government at some point, but since then it's most likely been passed around quite a bit.

I am very confused by what you mean with the phrase "the basic premise of bitcoins being generated by computer power".  The generating being done on computers is essentially the generation of security for the bitcoin network, which works precisely as designed.  In order to reward miners for their contribution to creating this security, the set number of bitcoins are being distributed in a way that rewards them.  Since mining is a task many different people can freely invest in around the world, this is much fairer than the method of most governments or banks where they simply own all the initial coins and get to spend them however they wish.  Everything in bitcoin is working precisely the way it's designed to, because competition keeps the level of security appropriate for the value of the coins.  This would be like if one dollar's worth of security measures went into each one dollar bill--it would be way more secure and difficult to counterfeit than it is currently.

Bitcoin security is created by the free and open competition of miners around the world.  For this work, they are rewarded with small portions of the pre-defined quantity of bitcoins, according to a decreasing schedule (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png) enforced from the very beginning.  This is the premise of bitcoin, and it works beautifully!

People who have bitcoins sell them to the exchange for dollars.

Where did those people get their bitcoins? These people either sold goods or services for Bitcoins (a large percentage) or generated them themselves (a small percentage)

Correct, mining with a CPU (as opposed to a GPU) is worthless, and solo mining on a CPU with the client (as opposed to with a pool on a dedicated mining program) is even more worthless.
We don't. We mention it as a technical implementation detail. If you tell us where you got the impression from, we can try to rephrase it in a less misleading way.
The exchanges are just matchmakers, you trade with other people. Those people either mined when the network was small, mined them recently with a GPU, received them for goods and services or exchanged other currencies for them.

Unfortunately Dai's situation is probably not too uncommon. The bitcoin site still guides new users to enabling "generate coins", and the software has the tickbox in an obvious place in the GUI. Reading the site, it's not surprising people think bitcoin is all about mining.

We should really try to write a new introduction for the main bitcoin page that puts less emphasis on mining and more on the trade aspect. Also, remove mining from the official client!

I would still call GPU mining computational power or whatever we used but I'd clarify that CPU mining is not efficient.
He's not the only one to make this mistake and I'm not going to blame him.
Whoever said "taking the time to write and not think it's a scam etc" was dead on, most people would just give up and walk away.

Edit: I'm with DSG, just remove mining from the official client, it won't do anything to benefit realistically.

+1
Way too many people think mining is the whole point, or even the biggest point, of bitcoin.

I agree with dsg and stonetz. To summarize the required changes to the site:
 - Remove the suggestion to turn on bitcoin generation.
 - Remove the estimates for the time taken by a CPU to generate a block. They will always be outdated and it's useless information (as Jim said, it already takes several years instead of what's on the site).
 - Emphasize that generation is done on a GPU by a separate software.
 - Add discussion of trading and references for possible places (Forum/Marketplace, otc, mtgox, Coincard+Coinpal...). Especially shops and organizations who consider accepting Bitcoin need information on easy ways to exchange them for fiat currency.

And, of course, the bitcoin generation should be removed from the client. It was nice for a while, but now it does little more than mislead.

Now, for the most important part - who should be contacted about all this? I'm guessing Gavin is one option. Are there any others in control of the site?

I made  a poll http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4828.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4828.0) and quoted you in it because you laid it out clearly and perfectly.