How much Bitcoin can I expect to make with this setup?

[nobbynobbynoob]

So in a year or two when the returns of mining bitcoin reach zero, what's going keep bitcoin alive when there is absolutely no [monetary] incentive to compute the hashes? I'm sure the guy who made bitcoin has some fail safe in mind?

The returns won't reach zero for decades. Not only are there transaction fees for the miners, the block reward will remain at BTC25 per block for about the next four years.

If mining becomes unprofitable, miners will invariably drop out and the market will adjust accordingly. Capitalism's really neat like that.

[DannyHamilton]

So in a year or two when the returns of mining bitcoin reach zero,

I don't understand why you think that the returns of mining would ever reach zero?  That isn't how mining works.  Perhaps you need to learn a bit more about the process.

what's going keep bitcoin alive when there is absolutely no [monetary] incentive to compute the hashes?

If there were absolutely no financial incentive to mine, then mining would not succeed.  Fortunately the protocol is designed specifically to maintain a financial incentive.

I'm sure the guy who made bitcoin has some fail safe in mind?

Yep.

The difficulty is adjusted to maintain a timeframe of approximately 10 minutes per block. So as people stop mining (due to it being unprofitable for them) mining becomes more profitable for the remaining miners (same number of coins per minute distributed among less miners).  Eventually there is an equilibrium where only those miners who have the best equipment and lowest energy costs remain and they continue to mine profitably.

Depending on the good will of people to continue mining for no return simply isn't reliable enough for bitcoin to be a dependable and legitimate currency.

I agree.  Fortunately bitcoin doesn't require any such dependency

[Stephen Gornick]

I'm at an apartment so it doesn't matter if I use $1 of electricity or $10000 of electricity. But I think the wear to my rig would still cost more than the $3 I might make.

Incidentally, CoinLab will soon be releasing a client that performs scientific computing work and pays out in bitcoins.   An NVidia actually performs better than AMD GPUs for this type of work.  Currently they only are doing a bitcoin mining pool (95% PPS) but "soon" for the HPC client.

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0

[enmaku]

For the love of god why do people never read the wikis, howtos, or at least search the very forums they're posting on?

[Blazr]

So in a year or two when the returns of mining bitcoin reach zero, what's going keep bitcoin alive when there is absolutely no [monetary] incentive to compute the hashes?

There will always be incentive to mine. Bitcoin mining rewards consist of two things, the block reward (currently 25BTC) and transaction fees. Transaction fees are fees that are applied to transactions that are considered "spammy" and use lots of network resources, at the moment they're set to 0.0005BTC per KB on spammy-looking transactions.

Block rewards halve every 4 years, so they won't hit 0 for over another hundred years. Transaction fees will get bigger as Bitcoin gets more popular & the number of transactions per block grows so its hoped that transaction fees would help offset the halving.

[DannyHamilton]

So in a year or two when the returns of mining bitcoin reach zero, what's going keep bitcoin alive when there is absolutely no [monetary] incentive to compute the hashes?

. . .Transaction fees are fees that are applied to transactions that are considered "spammy" and use lots of network resources, . . .

Transaction fees are also voluntarily applied be people to their transactions if they want to speed up the processes of getting them confirmed.  Miners are able to choose which transactions they include and which they don't.  If there are enough transactions with fees, a miner is likely to leave out transactions with no fees (or low fees), so there is an incentive for individuals to include a fee with their transaction even if it isn't "spammy"

[nobbynobbynoob]

Transaction fees are also voluntarily applied be people to their transactions if they want to speed up the processes of getting them confirmed.  Miners are able to choose which transactions they include and which they don't.  If there are enough transactions with fees, a miner is likely to leave out transactions with no fees (or low fees), so there is an incentive for individuals to include a fee with their transaction even if it isn't "spammy"

Absolutely. Myself, I've chosen BTC0,00025 at the moment (when no fee is required) but the client often requests BTC0,0005 and occasionally BTC0,001.

[athomas1]

I'm curious why mining on nvidia cards is such a bad idea, is it simply because they are innefficient?

[nobbynobbynoob]

I'm curious why mining on nvidia cards is such a bad idea, is it simply because they are innefficient?

Yup. ATI 5xxx/6xxx/7xxx just happen to be better suited to the task at hand.