I'm pretty green to Bitcoins and mining but I think we had a window of opportunity that is now closed for mining for profit. Or better said, mining for profit much over the break even cost of the hardware.

For example, I don't believe there will ever be a day you will be able to buy from BFL (or any other vendor) a machine such as the Jalapeno for $249, that will generate $400 in BTC in a month. That's a 61% rate of return on your investment in 1 month! When banks at paying 1% on a CD, that makes zero sense. It would be same as Amazon selling $20 bills for $10 with free shipping. Basic supply and demand principle would kick in and drive up the price of the hardware to the point where you would have to pay an amount that would result in you only being able to make something close to a normal rate of return on your money. You are going to have a shortage, as in more people ordering than the company can ever supply, and a few lucky people reselling the products at a price so high that your rate of return will much lower and closer to what other traditional investments pay.

So none of this is making any sense at all to me. It makes zero sense that someone like BFL would sell any of their products at all. Anyone with capacity to build powerful miners should be mining with them, not selling them. Something fishy is going on.

I basically turned $100 into $3,000 over 10 months mining but it was pure luck. My used GPU that cost $100 mined 8 coins. Ordered a Jalapeno last year that cost me $249. It arrived and I sold it for over $2K. Now I can't find anything in stock that can be purchased that has even a remote chance to pay itself off, much less make a profit. I'd like to mine again but everything I explore seems like a loser to buy now.

Have 0.79 BTC in Slush's Pool. They pay out when you hit 1 BTC. I sold my Jalapeno couple days ago. Wondering if a simple way to get the 0.79 BTC paid out from the pool now that I don't have a miner?

So here is my dilemma... I have a 25% off coupon for any purchase amount at Butterfly Labs this month. I was thinking about spending $1,000 to buy 5 more Jalapeños. Would that be a wise move? My 8570 now only breaks even with electricity cost. I'm guessing it may take 4-6 months for the new Jalapenos to arrive. In 6 more months could the Jalapenos already be almost obsolete? Right now they make about $400 a month (1 coin per week.) I don't know how often the payout is reduced and the difficulty increased to make an intelligent decision. Would I be better off to buy some other type of mining gear with the money?

This is what I am using to know if my miner stops working. The Sterling heat engine runs off the temperature differential. When the Jalapeno is not running there is not enough heat to turn the wheel. When I was mining with a GPU I used a more elegant method where I set an alarm to go off in Speedfan if the GPU temp fell below a certain level.

Anyone know of any software I can use to alert me if the miner shuts down? Although I'm starting to like the Sterling engine on the Jalapeno now. ;p It's a good conversation piece. Running BFGMiner 3.1.3 on an old PC laptop with Windows 7 Pro 32bit.

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZbpC9bULo

I'm guessing my little Jalapeno in a few months may become obsolete for mining bitcoins much like my graphics card has. So is there life after mining for these units? For example, can you use them to hack passwords, etc? Just curious if there are other uses than just mining.

Been mining a few months with my PC's GPU and up to 8 coins now. My Jalapeno arrived today so I should be getting coins much quicker. Now that I'm actually starting to get some decent cash, I don't want to lose it.

I'm wondering what is best way to manage the coins. Now the coins I mine I simply have the mining pool send to my account at Mt.Gox. Is that a bad idea? I figure there is a much higher chance of me screwing something up on my end with a bitcoin wallet than Mt.Gox screwing something up.

Appreciate any advice on using a bitcoin wallet vs just keeping coins at an exchange place. Thanks!

My 7GH Jalapeno arrived today! Ordered in October 2012 so it was a nice surprise. I loaded the Butterflylabs Easyminer software. It is running and saying I'm earning $421 a month but I have no idea if I'll get the money. I didn't configure Easyminer so I'm surprised it is mining. By default it appears to be pool mining to Eclipse MC. But it also has Eligius and "Others" listed on the Pool Priority list. I only have a pool account at Slush's Fund.  I have been mining with my GPU for about 9 months now so I am not totally clueless. But I feel pretty dumb now not knowing what this thing is doing.

The options to check off I see on BFL Easyminer are:

- Hold funds at pool (Working but how does it know to send money to me?)
- Pool Worker (How would it know from what pool is the worker?)
- Bitcoin Wallet (Picked this & entered my bitcoin address for my Mt.Gox account. Hope that will work.)
- Bit Instant Wallet Number (Whoever they are they charge 5% so not interested.)
- PayPal Email (Hate PayPal. Will not use this option plus they charge 8%.)

Before I got the Jalapeno I was mining with GUIminer and I had it configured with my Slush's Fund info and worker info. So I'm kind of lost not having an Eclipse or Eligius account set up how this works, or if I will get paid. For all I know I'm mining for Butterfly Labs now. LOL.

Now that the tempertures have started to dip my mining operations are paying off. My Radeon 5870 puts out a nice flow of hot air that keeps my home office nice and comfortable. While the rest of the house is in the 60's, my computer room stays perfectly comfortable in the low to mid 70's!   

If I was not mining I'd have to run a small room heater. Instead it is like getting free electricy to mine using the computer to warm the room. Getting a coin about every 5-6 days to stay wam. LOL

In the summer I don't think I will mine. With crazy electricity costs here, I'm now barely making more than the cost of electricity. If I have to run an A/C to cool the room in the summer it would not pay off to keep mining. (Unless Butterflake Labs finally ships my super duper vaporware per-order mining CPU.)

Any ideas what I should buy at the end of winter with my coin collection?

So the mining place says you can mine Namecoins simulatneously as I mine bitcoins. But I need a namecoin wallet. I've looked and found info on everything but how to set up a namecoin wallet. What is the easiest way to get a namecoin account set up?

So I finally got my PC hardware working where it is reliably crunching a consistent 400MH/s. The reward on Slush's Fund varies from 0.0100 BTC per round to about 0.005 per round. It seems like it's either close to 0.010 or close to 0.005 but seldom somewhere inbetween like 0.050.

Why is there such a variance in the rewards?

Wondering if that HD 3000 on the mobo can be put to some use...

I'm using GUIMiner with default settings. I finally got everything working with my Radeon HD 5870. I ran the AMD OverDrive utility and it lets me adjust the memory clock between 900 and 1300 MHz. That made no difference in speed so I put it down to 300 HMz. The GPU clock can be set from 600 to 900 MHz. At 900 MHz getting ~270 MH/s. I've read where people are getting 450'ish MH/s with these cards. So I downloaded AMD GPU Clock Tool and played a little with that. With clock set to 950 increased MH/s to 285. When I got much over 950 the card seems to have issues. Do you need to boost voltage to get more speed? Should I be happy with 270 MH/s with my card or is there a way to safely get in the 400 MH/s range?

I don't want to burn out the card prematurely. For now I'm sticking to just 900 MHz clock speed with the fan on manual control on high so the card stays cool.

Appreciate any tips and advice on overclocking my 5870.

Thanks!

I picked up a used 5870 video card to play around a little with mining and also to have a card for an occasional video game. I tried to run it on an older Asus motherboard and the mobo would not even post with the card plugged in. Not being familiar with these cards I don't know if the card is bad or if my mobo doesn't support it. The mobo is an Asus P5PL2 which as a PCIe x16 slot. I have a 500w PS but with only one of the 6 pin connectors. By what I read it sounded like only 1 connector was needed if not using the crossfire setup but I'm fuzzy on that.

When the video card is plugged in the mobo just maked an infernal loud solid continous beep sound and does not post.

I think this mobo is about 7 years old. I updated the bios to the latest bios from about 3 years ago and still no go.

So my questions are:

1) Should the mobo boot up with this card?
2) Do I need to connect a second power cable to the card?
3) If yes to #2, how do you combine a couple of the regular power cables to make an extra 6 pin? I heard of peple doing that but no details on how.

MoBo specs:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_775/P5PL2/#specifications

Thanks!

Ok, I've managed to get my PCs to mine, and to get my Macs to mine when running Windows 7 on the Macs, but I have not been able to figure out how to mine in OS X.

Can someone here please give me a link to Mac software that works for you, and how to set it up? Please explain as if you were talking to a clueless newb, which is close to what I am here. I am using Slush's Pool so if you can make it specific to that pool it would be great.

Thanks!!!

Windows crapped out on me so I reformatted the HD and installed a fresh copy on Win 7 Pro (32 bit). I installed GUI Miner and now when I run it it says "DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found." It then never gets past "Connecting..." mode. Is there some other component to Windows that needs to be installed for it to work? Just messing around and using the CPU for mining for now. Firewall is tured off. Can't figure out why on fresh installation of Windows it won't run.

Console info:

2012-10-20 04:30:44: Running command: poclbm.exe xxxxxx.worker1:password@api2.bitcoin.cz:8332 --device=0 --platform=0 --verbose
2012-10-20 04:30:44: Listener for "Default" started
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": Traceback (most recent call last):
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": File "poclbm.py", line 3, in <module>
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": File "BitcoinMiner.pyo", line 11, in <module>
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": File "pyopencl\__init__.pyo", line 3, in <module>
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": File "pyopencl\_cl.pyo", line 12, in <module>
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": File "pyopencl\_cl.pyo", line 10, in __load
2012-10-20 04:30:45: Listener for "Default": ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

LOL. At least I got it to work. But I spent $0.48 to mine the $0.12 cents on my old PC using the CPU. I used the excuse to mine coins to get an ATI 5870 card. Card was not very expensive. I think with that video card I can earn more than the electricity used to run it. If not, at least I'll finally be able to play Battlefield 3 on my PC with the new card. : ) Trying to keep this fun...

I do not have any coins and would like to wet my feet and get started experimenting doing commerce with them. If anyone is interesting in trading a factory sealed copy of OS X Snow Leopard Server 10.6.3 for BTC please PM me. (Or if you prefer it could be the single license or family pack version of Snow Leopard.) If the price is right I'd like to give it a shot. Since I'm a newbie here I can let you buy it from my eBay auctions so you know I'm legit and have the product in stock.

I'm a newbie to mining and was rather disappointed to find out my PC would cost more in electricity to run than my hardware could mine. So I set out to see what I could buy to make money mining this rather strange currency.

I found a company taking pre-orders for devices costing $1,300 that will perform 60 GH/s. If my math is right, the device would pay itself off in just a week or so of mining. Have I completely miscalculated the payoff or is this pixie dust machine the cash cow of the century? I did see a topic on the CEO of that company having a criminal past so no need to get into that here. But I'm curious if anyone here has gear that actually has produced real money for them in more than just a token novelty amount?

This entire BTC thing is not very user friendly. I have better than average PC skills and it took me a while to get one of my PCs to mine. But it is so slow I don't know if I'm actually getting any payoff yet. I wonder if it is intentional that it is not a user friendly thing so only the more geeky people participate in mining and using BTC currency? It would seem like if the BTC community wanted this to spread and become a thriving alternate currency there would be a number of GUI apps so that Mac and PC users could easily start mining even with minimal PC skills.

Still trying to decide if I should buy a graphics card that allows me to theoretically make money, wait until the new generation of mining processors come out allegedly near the end of this year, or just watch from the sidelines a while longer. Any real world stories of making money without investing a large sum of cash would be appreciated. This all sounds intriguing but I'm a bit skeptical on the entire alternate currency thing. I hope it thrives as we sure need something that is not manipulated by dishonest politicians.