Why buy a $50 card and/or a desktop to experiment with when you can just mine for a short time with your laptop to learn the ropes? It's fine to mine for short periods of time for educational purposes, but constant full load mining will cause parts to fail over time. After this, if you want to seriously consider mining, you can then buy parts for a standard mining rig.

If you're purely GPU mining, which is the option that makes most sense if you're going to mine on a laptop, your CPU shouldn't be going up to 75-100% usage. There is some CPU power required to mine, but it won't be a lot especially on a fairly recent i7 in the 17R4.  Paste should be regularly replaced every few months for best temps, and you should also clean out the fans and vents for air on the laptop regularly, ideally with compressed air or a microfiber cloth.

It's not ideal to mine on a laptop, but it definitely is possible if you want to give it a try- the 17R4 has decent cooling and the mobile 1070 (nearly equivalent to the desktop 1070) should he decent for mining, but temps are going to be the big issue. Mining on a laptop isn't ideal, and you need to keep the GPU as cool as possible for long chip lifetimes and best mining performance.

Most adblockers are also capable of blocking of blocking whatever PirateBay is using to browser mine. From what I've gathered, the Chrome add-on No Coin should block the miner as well, if you trust Chrome add-ons; just a few days ago the Hola VPN add-on was hacked and the add-on was modified to monitor a VPN user's MyEtherWallet activity.

They still supposedly need income to run their site, and PirateBay themselves stated that the entire reason why they started browser mining was because ad income wasn't enough to support the site. In this case, PirateBay does have thousands and thousands of users that all contribute to mine coins, and with enough users they're likely making a sizable amount of crypto. Pre-fork and ASIC XMR was GPU mined as well as CPU mined by botnets, and botnets still made a decent amount of coin even though a single Vega card hashed significantly quicker than any pre-ASIC GPU or ASIC.

Yeah, I don't know what you're trying to say with the $100-150 cards either- that's what 1050Tis and 1050s are selling for right now in the US, and they're significantly weaker than any RX 580 or 570 at any task. Even before mining really blew up, $150 RX X80/X70 cards were pretty rare to find even with rebates and all, and those cards sold out pretty quick. If I could find an RX 580 at that price I'd buy a crap ton, but that's not a reality at least where I and most people on this forum live.

You're incredibly lucky if you're successful in gambling even for a short while- gambling is supposed to be rigged against you due to house edges and such, so it's impossible to win in the long run but there can seemingly be small wins in the short term.

I haven't found success in gambling for the most part (though I am up in betting on esports matches), but I only gamble what money I have set aside for gambling and no more, and thus I keep my gambling habits under control and I'm not addicted to gambling. It's easy to become addicted because the main goal of gambling is to make money, but the odds are completely against you and gambling should ideally only be done recreationally.

I remember seeing the 570s or 580 4GB cards at near $200 yesterday on sites like Newegg in the US- that's a much more reasonable price for a card like even the Nitro + to be going for- I'd maybe consider it at $250, but that's still high. I wouldn't suggest investing into gear at this current moment as card prices are rumored to drop soon, and the next generation of cards should come out soon anyways which should cause this current generation of cards to drop in price. Break even time's an issue as well.

I only know a few people who invested in bitconnect (none of them invested significant amounts), and they said that the promise of gains possible with the coin was similar to gambling in a way, except it seemed less risky, which I can understand. I personally never considered it and told everyone I knew to stay away from it, but naturally not everyone will need your advice.

Didn't know that YouTube was one of the defendants in the lawsuit, thanks for the update on the case. I haven't heard about bitconnect in a while, so the case may be losing some momentum but I do hope that people at least get something back from the lawsuit. I also didn't know that Giga Watt was involved in a lawsuit as well- I thought they were legit since I took a look at them.

I'm here to say that this guy is legit. I bought PP from him recently for the exact same amount listed here ($115) and he provided the funds extremely quickly, faster than the other service that I used to exchange BTC to PP during the same time (Hiribi.com). The guy also replies to messages quickly and the entire experience of exchanging was pleasant.

Considering how things are unfolding right now I think it's extremely unlikely aTriz's account is ever going to get his reputation back, and his buyer knows that. Whoever's in control of his account's likely trying to milk as much money as possible out of his account, considering he's reopening his campaign service.

There's definitely people out there who would buy red-trusted accounts given they had some sort of presence in the community before being bombarded with red tags. Money's likely the motivation for this as I posted above if the account was indeed purchased along with multiple of aTriz's old contact methods, though I don't think anybody's going to purchase a campaign management service from a red tagged user who has seemingly completely changed in many negative ways.

The last and only bounty campaign I ever participated in was Iconomi a while back, and I'm glad I haven't participated in any since then because it's just an utter waste of your time if you happen to participate in the 99% of campaigns that are shit- ICO rating sites can be and are bribed by ICOs to make the reviewers give them a high rating, and I haven't seen a successful ICO in a very long time. Your best bet is just Googling 'ICO rating' if you want to be lazy, but keep in mind 'best' is subjective, and reviewing sites can be biased towards certain ICOs on top of that.

Because of this, I highly suggest doing your own research to find ICOs that you think might be successful. It's really not hard to take a few minutes of researching through a browser and Bitcointalk, and it pays off in the end if you want to participate in lots of bounty campaigns.

Haven't checked in on this thread in quite some time, but I'm just letting you know that I'm fine with a £50 joining fee- really isn't a problem for me even though I don't have access to my main cold wallet atm, though I should regain access by early August. I'd go in more if I weren't so bad at sports betting and sports predictions in general, haha. I'll get some practice here.

It's not even your net speed most of the time (in Mbps or MBs, Gbps if you have fiber) that's affects how quick a site is. Once you get past dial-up speeds and can actually view a site without buffering, ping/latency, which is usually measured in milliseconds, matters more. There's hundreds of factors that determine your latency to a web server, like ISP routing (which is an issue the ISP usually won't fix that can absolutely kill latency), WiFi (naturally has higher latency than a wired connection through ethernet), and many more. I tend to find that fiber connections usually have better latency than traditional DSL or cable lines, but that's not always true.

Bitify.com is a nice Bitcoin market that I've used for purchases and some sales. It's perfect for digital sales as there's escrow on the site, fees are low, and you can accept either BTC or LTC on the site (no announcement of more coins in the future yet). There has been a report of a buyer fraudulently requesting a refund on the site and the seller was concerned that he'd lose his money, and the site support was slow to get to the seller regarding the issue, but the seller did have sufficient evidence that the issue was on the buyer's side so I expect the seller will get out okay and such issues are rare on the platform.

This is exactly why I don't run Chrome with any extensions at all, especially on computers where I'm storing any amounts of crypto- the risk for a hack or shady application logging my information and a resulting loss of funds is just too great. Still a good job from the MEW team for reporting this issue quickly, as every minute could mean a wallet getting its funds emptied without the owner's permission.

I don't trust free VPN services for this reason as well. I'd much rather pay money for a VPN, or better yet make a Socks5 proxy by hand than save money at a cost like this.

Here's the link to the miner on Bitmain's shop page. Interestingly enough for the miner, Bitmain's only accepting up to $420 coupons just like with the Z9 Mini right now. The miner specs aren't finalized yet so we could indeed be getting better performance out of the miner and possibly also some decent OCs as you said, but Inno's still looking pretty nice with power consumption. Also seems like Bitmain's really digging the E3 miner design because the miners look visually similar except for the sides on the Z9.

I only mine BTC with my miners to avoid the hassle of having to switch my miners to another pool and algo and the fees involved in exchanging the coins to BTC. There are SHA256 alts that are occasionally more profitable than BTC to mine, but I find it's really not worth the trouble to mine them. I'm fine with what I'm making with BTC.

I did mine a small amount of BCH in the past when the difficulty adjustments were making BCH more profitable to mine than BTC, and also some PPC when profitability on PPC was slightly higher than BTC's for some time.

I agree with the VPN suggestion; I've personally gambled with VPNs and proxies on various online crypto casinos with a few hundred dollars per site and I haven't been caught yet. There's definitely some risk involved with using a VPN, but I dont think it's incredibly high and I'm willing to take that risk. KYC's really the bigger issue with casinos now as it really takes away your options if you don't want to verify yourself. Searching's your best friend when you're trying to find what sites require KYC- some sites require it on withdraw or something of the sort to prevent winners from withdrawing.

As for 777coin, I've never had any issues with the casino but I also haven't played on their platform a lot. I'm also a US resident for reference.

It's suboptimal but it does work for mining. I put a WiFi adapter on an old Spondoolies SP20 miner and the adapter worked fine without causing an explosion or fire, just some more stale and rejected shares. The adapters don't use much electricity and they shouldn't cause such catastrophic failures unless you buy an adapter that's just absolutely shit. I've also used them on computers without built in WiFi connectors and they ran fine 24/7. Just be aware that latency is a big issue with wireless connections in general, and every millisecond counts in mining. If possible in the future, try to get a wired connection.

ForkDelta claims to fix some of the issues that EtherDelta does while using the same ETH contract and I suggest looking at their site if you're still interested in DEXes, but it's still not very user-friendly, and Googling information is still needed for some features on the site. It's a shame most of the DEXes out there are so complicated to use; I would personally use them a lot more if they had more users, volume and a more simplified design- but not so dumbed down that important features are missing. Perhaps we'll get more adoption of DEXes if more and more exchanges start utilizing KYC. I guess only time can tell.

There's hundreds of other proof methods of generating blocks out there in major cryptocurrencies besides the common Proof of Work and Proof of Stake methods- for example, NEM utilizes Proof of Importance, and Bitshares utilizes Delegated Proof of Stake. There's even subcategories in PoS like Peercoin using Coin Age Selection. If you're looking for more information on these methods of proofing, this Steemit article should get you started.