I've found this calculator:
http://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate

I find it more interesting, because most other calculators tend to either assume constant difficulty, or make simple linear projection (each month, N more GHash/sec that the month before).
The current progress seems rather exponential (with each passing months, a bigger quantity of ASIC hardware is shipped and put into production, and these machines are each more powerful than past models).

Well given the current trend of BTC, this *is* going to happen.

Saddly, the other certainty is that, with the current production of ASIC ramping up, the difficulty will also be exploding.
Currently you have a time to share of 1.3 days (which is not bad, and once you hit this share, P2Pool starts to pay you constantly based [more or less] on your hashrate [I'm over-simplifying])

But in a few weeks, they'll be so many people hashing overall, that the difficulty is going to explode and your time to share is going to climb up to a week or more.
(Each time with payment spiking after a share is found, then gradually fading out).

P2Pool is even more complicated, as its shares are quite difficult and you spent long time with no share and no payment if your own hashrate is too small compared to the whole P2Pool network.


Currently, ASIC mining is hard. The only way to be successful, is to predict in advance which company will be good at bringing next crop of mining hardware the first, with the least delays and least performance problems, and then manage to order among the first and get it delivered soon enough, so you can reap a few bitcoins before the whole difficulty explodes as next generation floods the market. If you picked up the wrong horse (like Butterfly labs, in the current generation :-P ), by the time they ship and you receive, you'll have bought an expensive and noisy space heater.

On the other hand, I you don't mind that much, and aren't interested into making a fucking crazy amount of money, but are more interested into contributing to the network, keep hashing, even if you have a small hashing power, you and all the poeple with small hashing at home, help avoiding that all the hashing power gets concentrated in the hands of a few data-center owner, with cabinets full of 10'000$ ASICs)

You need to take 2 things into accounts:
- There are a lot of other coins beside bitcoins. As Kronus87 suggested, it might be more worthy to mine other SHA-256 based coins and trade them.
- Price of alt-coins is constantly going in up. The 0.01 mentioned are currently worth 10$. Next year, these might by worth 20 or 30$.


Depends. Smaller USB-key sized miner (like block errupter) are mainly targetting efficiency. They don't output a lot of MHashes/sec. But on the other hand, they consume only a very small amount of Watts.
For serious mining, miner tend to use a big quantity of them on a big multi-port hub.

Well at least we miners validating your blocks are producing usefull scientific data, instead of serving as glorified space heaters 

For the newbie around who wonder: Nope. Not a chance to beat ASICs.

(The SHA256 hashing done in bitcoin is relatively simple. In an ASIC, absolutely every transistor is dedicated at this simple task. And as the task is relatively simple, you can cram tons of core computing SHA-256 on a single chip. Whereas a GPU would "waste" a lot of silicon space for transistors working for all the other important task that a GPU has to do that is of no use to do for mining. For starter, a GPU needs to push around a lot of memory and compute a lots of maths. But bitcoin mining has no use of a complex big-bandwidth memory controller nor of floating-point arithmetic units.

The story is a little bit different when you consider Scrypt and Prime mining)

Note: Above numbers are for mining coins using SHA256 hashes (Bitcoin, PPC, Namecoin, etc.)

For coins using Scrypt hashes (Litecoins & co) the numbers are quite different:

• CPUs: kilohashes/s - between a few k/s up to a few dozens of k/s for the most high range CPUs. A hundred of kh/s possible on really big servers with lots of cores.
• GPUs: kilohashes/s, still - between a dozen kh/s for embed/laptop/small business desktop, all the way up to several hundreds of kh/s for high range gaming rigs with powerful card. Note though that Nvidia are notoriously bad at the kind of math (integer and logical bit operation) used in hashing, AMD are mutch better.
• ASIC: none in productions yet. Again, don't expect jumps in performance as huge as with SHA256 - Scrypt uses memory and on a Scrypt ASIC a lot of the space will be used by the embed memory and thus wasted/not used by the Samba cores. You will probably see first more success with general purpose many-core chips that have lots of small lightweight cores, each with its own memory buffer. (Like Parallella boards) before Scrypt ASICS.

Also note that other hashes exist (Yacoin and Quark use various variants of SHA-3, or SHA-3 candidates. They should operate somewhat in between. But I don't have numbers for CPU and GPU for them).

Also note that Primecoins and co operate on a completely different way (they search for chains of prime numbers of specific length, instead of hashes of specific difficulties).
CPU give you usually hundreds to thousande primes per second. GPU aren't really functionnal and stable yet.

Message to other users of this forum with the same level of knowledge:
Maybe we should start providing easy-to-use pre-packaged virtual machines?

VM software like Virtual Box are available: free and easy to install.
There are also standard for "Virtual Appliances" : pre-packaged virtual machine that ready to add to any compatible VM software (like Virtual Box, VMWare, etc.)

With correctly signed images, containing verifiable linux components, it should be made easy to help the "lay persons" isolate their not-so-trusted alt-coins QT wallets.

This is already done to deploy some Linux research software (available as a VMWare image for non-Linux users), or to deploy testing tools for developers targeting Linux-powered devices (Android, WebOS) but running on Windows, etc.

Altcoins could be added to the list, too. Only we must pay attention to make the images themselves trustable and verifiable.
(Like done with the deterministic build on the distributed executable).


For those who don't know: If you know what an emulator is, (like the thing used to simulate old machines like Amiga, Gameboy, etc. so you can play their games on a modern computer) that's a good starting point. Software like VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels, etc. are softwares that simulates a whole computer. You can then install what you want inside this "imaginary computer".  This is routinely used by people using Mac OS X (or Linux) on their laptops: they install such a software which simulates a PC and they install Windows on this imaginary PC. That helps them then run windows-only software on the windows installation running inside this imaginary PC (= that's the virtual machine).
It could be used to have Linux running inside such a virtual machine and then installing the Wallet inside that linux. If anything bad happens, the malware is hacking a machine that doesn't actually exist, its only hacking a virtual machine running under the control of VirtualBox/VMWare/etc.

Note that, because Bitcoin and all AltCoins are decentralized and distributed, all node on the network end up with the whole transaction history in their local copy of the blockchain.
So most cryptocoins can get tracked any way. (Except laundry protocols like Zerocoin).


It's not possible to both *regulate* the inflation and at the same time remove the banks and politicians out of the picture.
If there's central control, you've just replaced the name of the regulator, you've juste renamed "banks and politicians" into "centralized regulation of cryptocoin".
If there's NO central control by design, not only have you kicked banks and politicians out, but you can't regulate anything on the coin, you just let it float around almost on its own autonomous life.

the only influence the community can have is simply indirect effect by its size (and regular economic phenomenons like demand/supply)
e.g.: currently bitcoin's price goes up, because there's a constant influx of new comer who buy to use them. They're are investing money into it (or if you prefer, the demand for bitcoin has gone up, while the supply follows the strict mathematical progression of its mining rules). Nobody takes decision. Only the massive increase of community has an indirect effect. The same happened recently with the other major crypto currencies (Litecoin) once it got the media spotlight. The same is happening currently with the minor cryptocoins as newcomer are currently hearing about them too (although I suspect that lots of the minor coin will end-up busting eventually).

If there was someone influencial on the coin, if the critical decision you mention (deciding inflation, cost, etc.) were taken by anyone instead of algorithmically/by supply/demande economic rules, that would be a single point of failure: that would be a entity or a group of person that could be targetted by government wanting to ban the cryptocurrencies, by shady groups wanting to manipulate the economics, etc. You would be back into the "bank and politician" scheme, only with a different name.

Primecoin use a different type of work, they compute prime numbers (instead of computing SHA256^2 hashes like regular bitcoin).

To use them, p2pool would in addition a plug-in that enables it to compute the primes (just like adding support for litecoin to p2pool required adding a library to enable it to compute Scrypt hashes).

As far as I've searched, there aren't currently any such plugin written for P2Pool (and myself, I lack the python skills needed to write it, I only program in C/C++).

But don't despair, as XPM rises in popularity, someone with the correct skill set will eventually step-in and write the necessary plugin.

Hello everyone!

I've been lurking for quite some time on this forum (and I wish to take the opportunity to thank the userbase for all the various advices posted here. That has helped me getting into alt coins, pools, etc.)

I think time has come for me to create an account and get a little bit less passive toward the community (and thus make my on-line voice heard).

By the way: I have tons of experience as admin on Linux machines. So if anyone has a question, feel free to ask me.

Bonjour!


If you are specifically interested into obtaining bitcoins, http://localbitcoins.com/ is also a nice starting point. This platform allows you to meet other people into bitcoins (either face-to-face or online) and buy/sell bitcoins with them (the platform has an integrated wallet with confirmations and escrow, etc. also a review system to know how much other users are trusted). I've had positive experience with this platform for now.

Using an exchange is the best options.

Myself, I've had positive experience with https://mcxnow.com/.
The typical rate there seems similar to BTC-e's.