Hi. So I have a Lenovo y510p laptop. I recently learned about bitcoin mining and i hear people are making a lot out of it. especially when their electricity is free. which in my case doesn't really matters because my laptop is already running pretty much 24/7. Therefore i don't think I'd be adding to any costs.
The specs of my laptop are:
Intel Core i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.4GHz
NVIDIA GT755M 2 GB Graphics Card (Pretty decent graphics card as it smoothly runs most heavy graphics games).
8 GB RAM
1 TB Hard Disk
So what do you think? Will I be able to pull it off? Can i earn any money using bitcoin? An estimate on how much would if my laptop stays on roughly 20 hours a day would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
LOL.
Your 2.4 GHz i7 makes about 50 MH/s. That's good for a CPU but terrible compared to high-end GPUs and ASICs. In comparison, a used Block Erupter ASIC can be purchased for $5 on eBay and is capable of 333 MH/s. An Ice Fury ASIC can be purchased for $5-10 and is capable of almost 3,000 MH/s.
According to
this Bitcoin mining calculator, 50 MH/s can generate 54 satoshis per day, 1,540 satoshis per month, or 18,480 satoshis per year assuming that the network difficulty stays the same. 18,480 satoshis is worth just over 4 US cents. Since difficulty tends to increase, it's far more likely that you will get less than this amount.
Your GPU fares better but even so, GPUs are obsolete when it comes to mining and Nvidia GPUs aren't really suited for Bitcoin mining anyway (although they can be useful for mining altcoins - more on that later). The GT755M is capable of ~200 MH/s. This is roughly four times the hash rate of the CPU so you will get roughly four times the coins - i.e. ~16 US cents worth of BTC per year assuming that the difficulty stays the same.
The reason for this is because of ASICs. ASICs are specialized circuits that are engineered from the ground up to perform the computations required for mining bitcoins. General purpose computing hardware such as CPUs and GPUs can't compete with ASICs. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm which has ASICs developed for it. You can't mine other SHA-256 coins like Peercoin with CPUs and GPUs either. Litecoin's scrypt algorithm also has ASICs developed for it which means that other scrypt-based coins such as Dogecoin can't be mined with CPUs and GPUs.
However, some coins use algorithms that don't have ASICs developed for it (yet). For example, you can still mine Primecoin using a CPU. For a list of coins where mining with CPU mining makes sense, see:
http://www.cpucoinlist.com/Also, keep in mind that just because mining CPU and GPU mineable altcoins is less unprofitable compared to mining bitcoins doesn't mean that it's necessarily profitable after electricity costs are taken into account. Even if you normally keep your laptop running 24/7, the increased load on your laptop's components will increase your laptop's power consumption. Even worse, it could also stress your CPU/GPU and decrease your laptop's life expectancy.
Finally, if you do choose to mine altcoins then it doesn't mean that you have to be stuck with it. Don't like darkcoins? No problem. You can trade in your altcoins for bitcoins on any altcoin exchange that supports your altcoin. To find the most profitable altcoin for your hardware, use
Coinwarz. A good exchange to trade your altcoins is
Cryptsy.
