I fear that I would not give the best example if I explain this as I'm no expert. But no for mining in a pool the entire blockchain is not required. If you are mining outside of a pool then you need some major hardware at this point. Pool mining is the way to go most likely.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.0 has some information. The Custom Hardware section https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=76.0 has group buys and some of the group buys also assemble for you.

I recommend spending a LOT of time reading all the different open and closed sales that are active or over and pay attention to the Rep of the person offering the sale and how they are doing it. If they are not using Escrow then be wary. Yes there are some that will work out fine but use Escrow


Escrow
Escrow
Escrow

If you push them right you can get 600+ MH/s out of them if you have good airflow and such. That is without pushing them too hard. I have two Sapphire HD 7950 Flex which do alright. But if you are looking to buy something you might want to take a look at a 16 chip Avalon sale or something. You'll get more hashing per dollar.

While mining you won't use all that much bandwidth. You don't need to download the entire chain to mine. You actually download very little information. Even if you had a 128Kbps connection to the internet you'd have more than enough.

It's a bit old but check out this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10860.0

Hey, so I'm asking this here while I'm still trapped in jail... But does anyone know the estimated power draw of a K16/K64 ASIC with the Avalon chips? I've see that the chips themselves take around 6w each, what about when they are on the board? What is a safe estimate for the additional draw with the rest of the components?


Edit: I'm going to answer my own question. According to this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.0
It looks like the k16 will draw 24A 1.2V, 1A 3.3V supply on board (~32W total). Hope this helps if others are looking.

Seriously... we welcome all!
Matter of fact I hear there is a guy giving out free hugs a few posts down.

See we are a loving crowd.

This...

All you are doing here is heating up your CPU and warming your house. Most CPUs won't give very many hashes at all compared to the ASIC devices that are in the wild now.

Hey Cryptograd, welcome to the forum. I'm fairly new too. This is my first post  . I joined about 2 days ago and just lurk and read a lot. Learned a lot in that time too.