Too Late to Join the Party?

[leeloulee]

lol

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[CRYPT]

....
It would be in a miner's best interest to deny profitability because any additional computing power added to the network decreases the bitcoin income of the existing miner.

Yes! I also lost thousands of dollars on mining. Everyone should quit. The police will raid you for growing marijuanas. It's a fact!
 and the ozone from my overclocked 5850 gave me lung cancer.

yes, quit so the difficulty will be lower.

From what I understand... It's now ILLEGAL to mine bitcoins.  The government is sending out bots to gather IP addresses of anyone running *bitco*.* anywhere in their system. 

LEAVE NOW, SAVE YOURSELVES... I will stay on long enough to detract them.  Like the designated drunk driver, I'll lure the fed's off your trail, BUT YOU MUST LEAVE THE BITCOIN MINING WORLD NOW!!!

[AssemblY]

Never too late to try, especially when the subject is bitcoin.
Today he is worth 10, tomorrow could be worth 100.

 

[pennytrader]

Never too late to try, especially when the subject is bitcoin.
Today he is worth 10, tomorrow could be worth 100.

 

or worth 0.1

[legolouman]

Never too late to try, especially when the subject is bitcoin.
Today he is worth 10, tomorrow could be worth 100.

 

or worth 0.1

That certainly was a great laugh at the end of the thread. Crypt has a point, you need the cards, why not have fun and dabble with electronics.

[Wildy]

I have to say, a couple months down the line from making this thread:
Initially I thought it might be possible to use mined BTC to fund part of my gapyear travels later in the year, but it dawned fairly quickly that this is pretty unrealistic. Yet I'm still mining BTC now. Why? Because it's a bit of fun and a challenge I guess - I've cobbled together an assortment of old parts lying around to reduce the costs as much as possible, and I've had a great time trying to get 110% out of this pile of shite!

So although it's not at all profitable (at least for me), the vibe here is just great, and I'm very much looking forward to spending my hard-earned BTC @ BitBrew.net.

[Cluster2k]

Mining is only really profitable if you don't have to pay for power (directly or indirectly).  Children living at home may read this and think 'sweet, dad pays the bills not me', but dad is likely to notice a few hundred dollars of extra power use on the quarterly bill.

Don't forget to factor in the cost of air conditioning, hardware and opportunity cost too.  If you would not be setting up the mining PC and taking care of it, could you be doing something more useful?  If bitcoin is fun for you then great, but don't expect to learn a lot from it.  Downloading free command line software and getting it running isn't exactly highly educational.

The BTC exchange rate is hovering just over $8 and is on a downward trend.  Unless something makes bitcoins very attractive I don't see that changing in the medium term future.  Others may disagree and think we'll return to the party days of $30 bitcoins.  If so, mine away.

And no, I don't have dozens of mining PCs therefore I would be trying to turn away new miners from mining.  I sold off most of my PCs a month ago and turned the last one off a week ago.

[Wildy]

If bitcoin is fun for you then great, but don't expect to learn a lot from it.  Downloading free command line software and getting it running isn't exactly highly educational.

I guess at the end of the day it's whatever you make of it. I thought it would be worthwhile setting up an Arch install specifically for mining (I'd only had limited experience with "Linux" (Ubuntu) up until that point) - I learnt a great deal about the internals of Linux from doing that, and it's definitely been worthwhile as I am now using a fresh Arch install for just about every project that I've done since then.

[wknight]

I myself did it for the learning. I know people keep talking about downloading command line software and off you go.

However, What about the research you do in your purchases. GPU's, CPU's. etc. Trying to keep up to date on what is coming out. Flashing a Bios. Writing your own scripts for linux for monitoring and setup.

Sure these might be small things but I will tell you this. Being in the I.T. business knowing whats hot in hardware and linux scripting is VERY valuable!

So if your looking at doing the minimum.. read what to buy only.. set it up and leave it. Well I know I wouldn't have bothered.

But if you like a challenge and will further read on how to tweak your rig just 10 more mh/s find ways to auto reboot after a power outage and run all scripts.. over clock and change fan speed.. (linux) then sure why not.

[mike678]

Don't forget to factor in the cost of air conditioning

This is less of a factor for some us now. The temps where I live are starting to drop. Right now its 65 degrees so I've been able to use a window for the majority of the day and I'm running 3 ghash which is a lot of heat.

[pyroman83]

I think its not too late as long as your electricity costs are low.