Is there any point mining these days?

[Shenanigans]

Hi!

I used to mine bitcoins some years ago, when they were worth nothing and it was relatively easy to get them.

Now, I've fired up a miner, and it seems to take 10 days to accumulate 0.01 Bitcoins. With those dedicated miners, do they even pay for the electricity? Cause my own PC surely doesn't with this rate.

Or is it simple enough that I've missed some parameter? I'm pulling ~120 MHash on my GTX680 card, CPU doesn't provide anything, of course.

Cheers

[JazzJackRabbit]

Hi!

I used to mine bitcoins some years ago, when they were worth nothing and it was relatively easy to get them.

Now, I've fired up a miner, and it seems to take 10 days to accumulate 0.01 Bitcoins. With those dedicated miners, do they even pay for the electricity? Cause my own PC surely doesn't with this rate.

Or is it simple enough that I've missed some parameter? I'm pulling ~120 MHash on my GTX680 card, CPU doesn't provide anything, of course.

Cheers

The difficulty has gone so high that GPU mining profitability largely depends on what you pay for electricity. If you live in an apartment and do not pay for your electricity then you can still GPU mine. If you are paying your electric bill, then right now you're losing money mining on your GTX680. AMD cards are still making profit, but just barely after you include electricity cost (which varies by market). Pretty soon, perhaps in the next few months even AMD cards will be unprofitable, which is why people are switching to mining scrypt coins such as Litecoins. If you want to mine Bitcoins, you'll have to get ASIC miners.

[kaz911]

As Jazz said - don't bother mining BTC with GPU cards - and absolutely not with NVIDIA cards.

If you want to mine - mine an alternative coin based on scrypt - which can't (yet) be done with FPGA or ASIC specialised hardware. There you can still make a slight profit. But not so much with your GTX card. But try it anyway - with cudaminer software you can get about 120-160 kh / sec - which could bring you about 0.003 BTC / day. With 1 Mh/s you would do about 0.025 btc/day on LTC - or more on other "alternative"coins - but then if you then need BTC you need to "exchange" from the Alt coin to BTC - and loose a bit in the conversion.