If at all GPU might make sense if you go for X11 / X13 (also costs less electricity). Scrypt is a big "no", because of ASICs. I cannot recommend GPU mining for now.

If you want to go for scrypt anyway, you should purchase from a cloud service. Personally I like http://genesis-mining.com/ and betarigs (very short term contracts). 

Slightly offtopic: nyone knows if NXT daemon uses a similar interface like Bitcoin daemon?

I wrote about it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=444495.msg7015493#msg7015493

The short story is that the scrypt.cc contract is way more expensive and the residual value of the contract is likely not worth it.


Example: GM is like renting a car for 100 USD for 10 years. Scrypt.cc allows you to have the rental contract forever and the contract is 200 USD. This basically comes down to the question whether you believe that your car is worth 100$ after one year (probably it won't).

Result: if the difficulty of scrypt hash rate will double (or more) over the next 12 months  it is far better to go with GM. This is a mathematical truth.

Decision tree:
1) do I believe that the hashrate will be twice as high (or higher) in one year from now ==> Genesis Mining
2) Scrypt.cc

I analyzed the change of hashrate over time and the market. It will not grow as fast as Bitcoin difficulty, but it is very likely that it will grow by way more than factor of two. That's why I bought a package at GM (and btw: I love their interface!).

Hope this helps!

I imagine that is hard to do for economic reasons. For example, let us say they can sell the hardware at 14 cents, and buy at 10 cents. If you buy a contract they need to buy the hardware, i.e., they make a margin of 4 cents (but need to pay for electricity, maintenance, IT, support etc). So let's say this leaves a profit of 1 cent.

Now six months later, hardware prices drop to 5 cents (just to give an example). They will have to sell contracts for 7 cents by then (because of competition). They simply cannot compensate from their profit to upgrade old users to the new prices (at least to the same extent). However, old users were already mining for 6 months under lower difficulty, so they are partially compensated.

Mining is a risky game. Basically it is a bet on difficulty and price. If I have another 1000 Euro to invest I would again invest them in mining. Is it a safe bet? No, for sure not. It is a risky game that you have to enjoy. But so is buying BTC (if you bought at 1000$ you know what I mean . In any case it is fun to mine different coins and to support the altcoin universe.

This! 100% agree.

If I really believe in the value of a coin I sell 50% of it for the profit and keep the other 50% for the long-term. For other coins I do opportunistic trading only.

Hehe, I like their auto trader, too. However, I also want to support coins like Mega, so I will mine them with 20%, then 20% on Doge and the rest goes to the auto trader.

Yes, it is a bit more flexibile, but from my point of view the price is way too high. Why? The financial math is the following: if the difficulty increases by a factor of two mining output would reduce by a factor of two. So basically the value of the contract would be worth 50% less.

Roughly scrypt.cc costs twice as much as Genesis Mining. However, the GM contract only lasts one year. What does that mean? If the difficulty within one year increases only or less than a factor of two you would be better of with scrypt.cc (because the value of the contract would still be 14 cents). If it is more than Genesis Mining was the better deal. So basically, the bet between scrypt.cc and Genesis Mining is a bet on the difficulty in one year.

With this many ASIC producers coming to the market and watching the history of BTC mining it is a pretty safe bet from my point of view that the difficulty will increase by far more than twice within one year!

Thus, Genesis Mining is the better choice for now (at least for me ).

Good results. Do you think it would be possible to integrate the pool into genesis-mining.com? I bought a contract and would like to mine some black coin.

Looks good. Interested to see the results!

Just checked 10 MH/s offer and that would be 2,659$. This seems to be very expensive!

For example, genesis-mining.com offers me 10 MH/s for $1,600, this is 1,000$(!) less and down to 14 USD cents for larger packages. Reselling after one year is not an argument for scrypt.cc - in an ASIC scenario with exponentially difficulty growth there will not be much value left after one year of mining.

I think James A. Donald was not included in the recent linguistic study:

http://cointelegraph.com/news/111179/what_s_in_a_name_linguistic_study_identifies_nick_szabo_as_the_real_satoshi_nakamoto

It would be interesting to see how close he is to Satoshi compared to Nick Szabo.

I know the people behind "Genesis Mining" (so call me "biased" if you like), but can assure you that they are legit. They are a bunch of smart people with excellent connections. Personally, I have signed up a  contract with them and it works as expected (their user interface is great but needs a few smaller fixes).

Hey Marco! It was good talking to you and meeting you in person. And thanks for the cookie!

Basically, I agree with you that BTC mining is likely going to burn money (the exponential growing hash rate makes winning this game very unlikely).

However, I recently started to take an alternative path to mine BTC that works extremely well, so far. Instead of directly going the sha256 mining route I invested in scrypt mining. Well, at the end of the day I am only interested in BTC. Therefore, I use a multi-pool that mines different types of altcoin and automatically converts them back to BTC (for example: middlecoin and clevermining). The advantage of altcoins is that the hashrate does not expand like crazy, it seems the hashrate is much closer to the equilibrium, e.g., see http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty .


My thought is as follows:

http://clevermining.com/profits

For the last months clevermining returned about 0.011 BTC on an average day per MH/s. I rented 25 MH/s for ca 28 BTC and will likely get a bit more than 7 BTC this month, which is a good value. If the hashrate goes a bit up I am still fine (but for the last three months it was pretty stable). As long as the hashrate does not increase like in Dezember (which is unlikely as GPUs are hard to get these days) I am fine. And even if this happens, this likely means that BTC / LTC prises soared and in this case I am happy for my saved BTC.

First I built a mining rig on my own, but later I found that "genesis mining" is cheaper than building my own rig (and no noise and heat at home).

Sorry for reviving an old thread, but is there any news on this issue?

It is also completely unclear to me what the basis for the USD distribution will be.

Quote: "We have not yet determined the method for the distribution to creditors/investors, as we do not yet know the composition of the frozen accounts (ie the number of bitcoins held and balance of USD funds).  However, it is likely that any distribution will be made in USD.  Once we have the account information, we will notify investors of the process for which the Liquidators intend on distributing funds.  If there are insufficient funds to make payment in full to each investor, then distribution will be made on a pro-rata basis (ie funds are distributed in proportion to each investors claim)."

The critical part here seems to be the fixing for the BTC price. If they fix it to the price at insolvency that would be a desaster for everyone holding BTC at Bitcoinica (BTC trade >$400 now).

Is there an interest group of creditors of Bitcoinica which I could join?

Would it be possible to generate charts for

* "My Wallet active users" - users that at least did one transaction (send or receive) in the last 30 days
* "My Wallet users with saving accounts" - user that have an account with > 0.01 BTC

Also it would be interesting to have the equivalent of "number of transactions excluding popular addresses" for My Wallet users.

With this data it should be possible to give a good estimation about the active number of users in the Bitcoin universe.

Fully agree. When I introduce people to Bitcoin I completely avoid the mining topic (it is not relevant for beginners).


I hope that the WeUseCoins video will be updated. The video is the best introduction into Bitcoin I am aware of, but the mining part is confusing.

Economically it does not make sense. In general you want to cut big orders into smaller pieces ("iceberg order").

This is the first time after the whole disaster that I am confident that things (slowly) move into the right direction. It seems to me that the whole thing is now in professional hands (thanks Mr. Seale!). Furthermore, it is a good sign that at least Patrick is finally willing to cooperate in order to bring this to an end.

From the financial statements (assets vs. unsecured creditors) I understand that there is some hope to recover a substantial amount of the claims. I would expect something in the area of 60%-70% of the claim. However, this very much depends on

(1) the amount of the "other creditors" position
(2) how many of the creditors will make a claim
(3) liquidation costs

Let's see....