New supporter and miner!

[ATC777]

Hey guys,

My name is Aaron and I am a newbie Bitcoin supporter and miner, and I believe (or at least have a good hope of) I can be a major asset to the Bitcoin community. Allow me to introduce myself and tell you about lil ol' me... I am a 24-year-old CEO of a new startup based in Louisiana -- we are a small conglomerate/holdings company that also engages in proprietary trading of risk assets (everything... stock, options, futures, FOREX, bonds/treasuries, et cetera). Personally, I have been in software development for over 7yrs+ and have been a professional day trader (individually) for around 3 years. If there is anything I know it is economics/finance and technology! Software is one of our company's biggest business interests -- we have a semi-complete and fairly polished platform/API-agnostic game engine to which there is no commercially viable alternative, peer or equal. And it is our hope, provided that our first round of equity sales raised the necessary $1M in capital, to have our engine completely ready for deployment on PC systems before the end of 2013. But Bitcoin has REALLY peaked my interest, and I'll tell you why...

For many years I have been highly critical of fiat currency, and I know (like many of you do) that it is doomed to crash and burn... Government should not control currency! Ideally, I would love to someday see a system similar to Bitcoin backed by real gold/silver (or some other asset... e.g., commodity futures). But I believe that Bitcoin is the first step to reclaiming control of our money and putting it back in the hands of citizens, rather than shady central bankers! Whether Bitcoin lasts forever or not is irrelevant. The market will deflate, and those of us who supported Bitcoin will, in the end, earn some ROI for our efforts. But most important is the powerful precedent we are setting and laying the ground-work for a future free of central banks and fiat currency! I am fully convinced that this is the powerful gift Bitcoin is giving to our world. As such I am now a hardcore supporter of the new currency.

I have just started my first mining operation today to begin learning how everything works. Everything about the BTC economy makes great sense to me because I have those many years of IT/software experience under my belt. I've only just been introduced to the computer science concept but already have a pretty good idea of how everything works and how we might be able to improve this system in the future. I am strongly considering launching a new Bitcoin mining firm under the control of my company (that's how conglomerates work), funding the purchase/setup of equipment and producing some profits for my shareholders (and myself) -- which also supports the Bitcoin economy. I have some great ideas about how we can use our company and capital to make a positive impact on the Bitcoin world and make some great money doing it. And I hope that I'll be able to find MORE investors and intelligent partners to work with to make this a reality.

Right now, I have a game dev rig with an Intel i7 CPU and an nVidia GTX-580 card. It's a fast/powerful card for rendering, but leaves much to be desired for mining... it simply consumes too much electricity -- great for pushing pixels but mediocre for parallel computing. What advice would you more experienced Bitcoiners give to a guy like me, considering my background and interests?

Regards,

--ATC--

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[evoorhees]

Hello and welcome to the community.

To be honest, my advice is to avoid mining entirely   The real profits, and the real excitement, for you as an entrepreneur will likely be in creating new services which specifically leverage Bitcoin's features. Mining is just a support system, and profitability of that will always tend toward zero in the long term. If that stuff really excites you, then go for it, but I think legitimate services and technologies built around Bitcoin are what you should focus on.

Want an idea? Figure out how to set up a useful btc exchange in Argentina, and then run an arbitrage operation to help Argentinians get Bitcoins while their currency is in the midst of collapse. 

[ATC777]

Hello and welcome to the community.

To be honest, my advice is to avoid mining entirely   The real profits, and the real excitement, for you as an entrepreneur will likely be in creating new services which specifically leverage Bitcoin's features. Mining is just a support system, and profitability of that will always tend toward zero in the long term. If that stuff really excites you, then go for it, but I think legitimate services and technologies built around Bitcoin are what you should focus on.

Want an idea? Figure out how to set up a useful btc exchange in Argentina, and then run an arbitrage operation to help Argentinians get Bitcoins while their currency is in the midst of collapse. 

Those things are precisely what I hope to do. Our company has plans for launching a brokerage firm which will also deal with FOREX (currency), and perhaps we may be the first "mainstream" type of broker that offers a legitimate USD/BTC pair -- this could provide tremendous liquidity in the Bitcoin monetary markets which is something we really need. I also have a lot of other great ideas (esp. micro-economic ideas). Mining does excite me though because I'm a computer geek, and I think I can figure out how to profit at it -- I just have to build the right setup. If I fail at that then oh well... I'll have helped the BTC economy to some extent.

[ATC777]

I have some questions about mining too...

Today I setup Bitcoin-QT and GUIMiner to get an easy first experience... I joined the Eligius mining pool, as it was the only one that seems to work. I gave them my address and let my GPU chug away for several hours until it said I had gained nearly 620 "shares". It's my understanding that a "share" is a portion of mining profits. But I've yet to recieve even a tiny fraction of a penny, thus making me wonder if I just wasted my time and electricity with Eligius (and someone else profiting from my GPU-work). What's the deal with this? And might I have LOST what I made? Suddenly the miner process disappeared from the system tray... but was still showing up in taskman.exe! I had to do a forced shutdown because there was no way to restore the application and click the "Stop mining" button. If such a thing happens do you LOSE your work, or does the pool remember what you did? And did I totally screw up or will I be paid some fractions of a Bitcoin for the work I did in the near future?

Another question is: why doesn't solo mining start? I properly configured a solo miner (I think), but clicking the start button does nothing... It doesn't do anything and nothing changes -- no mining occurs and no changes to the GUI. Seems like it's a dead button... What's going on?

My last question... I have access to a lab full of medium-end rigs with flat-rate power bill (the property manager pays the bill and it's free through my lease). Let's suppose I want to combine the computational power of all these rigs and have the "gold" all sent to my wallet on my work PC. It seems to me that this should be as simple as running the miner on each system and giving the pool we join my wallet address. Is this notion correct? I also have friends who are willing to run their rigs for my benefit, and I'd like to know what I need to have them do... just run the miner and enter my wallet address?

Thanks,

--ATC--


EDIT:: Is it wise/recommended to run a miner app with higher Window's system priority? For example, running the app with "above normal" or "high" priority as opposed to "normal"?

[Fjordbit]

I don't know much about Eligius, but for a single video card, 620 shares in a few hours is about right. It's also pretty common for video card miners right now to be near or below profitability. Really, your profitability is something you should figure out how to calculate, even if just using an online calculator.

The pool will remember what you did. You should see your shares in Eligius somehow. If you don't see them, then you might have a problem.

I can't say on the solo mining for sure, but did you configure an rpcuser and password and start bitcoin-qt with the "-server" option?

I think it's fine to run GUIMiner at Normal. Also, GUIMiner isn't the process that actually mines. It spawns a child process based on your settings. I can't really recall what they were, pheonix or poclbm or something. I use cgminer now because I find it's easier to administer.

On the flat rate power bill, that seems fine for now. If the difficulty goes up, keep an eye on your profitability. Don't have your friends mine unless you're sure you're making money and you should pay them for their power use. If you do have them do this, you should have them mine against your pool account. You could have them mine against your bitcoin-qt, but you could run into some trouble with that. It's a security risk.

[ATC777]

Thanks guys! 

ASIC chips are exactly what I want to experiment with. I can risk a couple $K on the venture, and will consider risking more if the results are pleasing enough. Depending on what I feel the long-term future of mining and Bitcoin itself may be I am considering the launch of a fully-fledged mining subsidiary to add to the portfolio of my company. At this point it seems a good speculation because the nature of Bitcoin almost ensures they will deflate and rise against the USD. As a software engineer and "financially sophisticated" day trader (I've traded currencies, futures and just about everything else for years) I'm in a unique position to profit from the rise of Bitcoin. But not one to make rash decisions I want to spend a lot of time in research & strategy dev and make wise choices with my investors' money...

@ Holliday ::

Yes, those are basic questions... but I'm in a new set of forums I know nothing about, and dealing with a new piece of technology I know nothing about. I did already figure out how to get started and mine Bitcoin in a pool on my own. But I've literally been at this for a day, technically. Just trying to get a fast start. And you'll notice I threw those questions into my pre-existing thread instead of creating a new thread and asking n00b questions, so hopefully it was not a nuisance to anyone. ;-)