Latest posts of: pheaonix

Since I had to manually learn all of this stuff I will make it easy on you and explain everything.

BFL started out as a scam until they figured out they would make more money actually selling a product. There is lots of lingering distrust towards them because one of their major employees was convicted of many many years of defrauding the elderly through the mail offering them "Guaranteed Lottery Winnings". Shady shady people. I wouldn't support them.

On purchasing mining equipment: GPUs really are dead. If you buy one now, you will be disappointed in your return especially a couple months from now. "Also I have a Gigabyte G41MT-S2PT motherboard (I'm not sure what video cards are compatible with it). " it will probably accept any of the PCI-e 16x cards i believe, I would google your motherboard and read its specifications.

on the grand scale of things for mining: CPU>>>>GPU>>>>FPGA>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ASIC. I have no idea why someone suggested FPGA to you in this thread, as ASIC will overpower them just like GPUs. FPGA are basically "programmable ASICs". They run a lot slower though. They served as the next step up from GPUs and a stepping stone into ASIC.

here is why you should get into ASIC instead of GPU/FPGA; a decent GPU will get you 250mh. a 150$ jalapeno will get you 4500mh (4.5gh). and also many others will get the technology as well, which means less rewards/mh, but the general consensus is that these things will pay themselves off easily and will continue to generate revenue! we just aren't sure how long that will take.

I also wanted to let you know about the mining process: there is solo and pooled mining. solo mining, you get your rewards in chunks of 50 btc, but these are REALLY spread out. you could be waiting on that block for a long time. also, we will soon approach the block reward halving, which means each block solved will get you 25BTC instead of 50. Anyway, just do pooled mining. They pay you for the work you do instead of getting one huge payday, you get paid every "share" (share = piece of work). step one: acquire ASIC. step two: download a mining program (guiminer is a good start, there are plenty of good programs to mine with). step three: join a mining pool and tell your mining program to do the shares of that pool. step 4: get a wallet program. step 5: give the pool your wallet address, they should automatically send payment, but every pool is different. you may have to manually send it every week or whenever you feel like it.

on which one to buy: if you have very little funds go ahead and go for the jalapeno. but if you are serious i would consider purchasing the 600$ unit either from BFL or bASIC. there are other companies pre-selling asics as well, go and shop around.

i hope i was able to help! please keep asking questions if you need to! bitcoin is complicated!