All awesome pieces of advice. I don't think I'm in a position go mine bitcoin, but I'd like to experiment with other currencies just to learn more about computing.

Volatility is never a 'problem', it's just a statistic about the market. You can use it in one way or another. The south african dollar is volatile, and you could make just as much money trading it as you could mining bitcoins. The question is whether or not volatility will cause a decreasing market: aka, when the south african dollar goes up or down, do people move out of the country in fear? I think the OP is stating (and I agree) that even if bitcoins get volatile to the point of crashing, there are more than enough long-term and stable investors who won't pull out now that it won't reach insane record lows anymore.

Smart people have been doing this for literally thousands of years.

If you want a good analogue for what Bitcoin scams look like, check out the currency fraud scams going on in pre-1861 USA, the "wild west" and gold rush days. In a completely unregulated market where value storage and conversion is both highly unreliable and varied, those who control communication win the game.

Dumb people have been doing it to, but they just didn't know/understand the consequences of it and didn't profit.

I'm new at this, but here's my thoughts: Highly volatile markets will damper average growth and investment long-term as a currency, so big swings like that are something that long-term players should be 'worried' about. Short-term players who are going long or short on the slides and such will benefit more from a volatile market, provided that there are still enough buyers and sellers for them to dump into a more stable storage of value (such as USD, gold, etc.).

In the case of bit coin, or at least in the last week, increases in volatility do not seem to coincide with a decrease in the overall market growth, so its not really investor scare. More people are coming in despite the jumps up and down. This means that the market is attracting more players who are attracted by volatile "Get rich quick" plans, and they are finding some degree of success.

Which totally makes sense, if you look at the news. More serious investors, who don't know how to operate well in the environment and are struggling over barriers of entry, are going to Bitcoin, and their non-optimal decisions prop up its long-term value for familiar, optimized players in spite of these volatile changes.  These crashes are what happens when a big elephant in the room jiggles a little, and the many many mice (scared of the elephant) all overreact very quickly to it. But instead of fleeing the room en masse, they are actually just rearranging themselves.

It's impossible to be rational and worry about it at the same time because so long as the market is moving (up or down), there is always a way to make money. I think the only worry should be worrying about which side of the market you are on and when.

Would a decent CPU be better than an integrated graphics card?

Also, would a distributed system among a bunch of normal CPUs be better than a single good GPU?

I'm having a hell of a time just trying to figure out how mining software works to even begin thinking about hardware, but eventually I might want to upgrade. If I had access to a bunch of low-end CPUs, ( I mean A LOT of them) for basically free, would I be better off using them or buying a good GPU?

Hello, Bitcoin Forum!

I'm a student (economics) doing some studies on the effects mining has on the prices of various cryptocurrencies. Here's a problem: I'm not a programmer. I have no idea how computer programs are written, and while I know my way around windows 7, I can't make heads or tails of the different files, and most tutorials seem to be written for people who already have a strong  The extent of my network protocol experience is all hardware from 5 years ago (took a few CISCO courses), but I learned nothing about software. In summation, I know tons about Forex trading, stocks, stock analysis, arbitrage, derivatives, federal currencies, inflation, market making, etc. but nothing about how to actually access the cryptocurrency itself.

Or, in other words, I feel like an expert marksman with great aim, but has no idea how to load these guns.

I'm not in a position to go buy $2500 worth of computing equipment for a single paper either, so I'll be using my own laptop (Windows 7 Core 2nd gen i5 w/ radeon 5XXX graphics card) so I want to be able to tap into some low-difficulty currencies just to see how it works.

Here's my process so far:

I downloaded a mining client ("***-qt file, where *** is the name of the currency) and got an account on a pool for that client. I made a worker. The worker's username is my site username (on the mining site) with a period and then the worker's name. The password shows up as "x".

I downloaded a .zip file for cgminer.

I created a batch file for cgminer with the single line: (but not in quotes) "cgminer -o http://xxx.xxxxxxx.net:#### -u username -p password

I have done NOTHING else, no configurations, no USB sticks, no edits to files, etc. My network connection is strong and stable, and I get this error every time on my command prompt after running the batch file:

"Pool 0 slow/down or url or credentials invalid."

I've tried a million different combinations of passwords, usernames, urls, and ports but I keep getting the same thing.  I've tried both "x" and my profile password, both the profile username and the username of the worker as well. After a few seconds, the command prompt goes all black.

I'm testing it currently on a Windows XP netbook, and once I can confirm that mining is actually happening, then I can repeat the steps on my more powerful laptop. But it doesn't look like the mining is actually happening at all.

Is there some important step I am missing? More importantly, is there a general 'guide' to mining? Every tutorial I find is specific to JUST ONE currency, and doesn't explain how or what to do really, it just assumes that if you're in that far, you already know the programming jargon.



If you guys can help me out, you can be sure I'll stick around.