newbz is a nutshell?

[Koviali]

Hi!
I have a few questions that are still not entirely clear. I have a coinbase wallet, and my PC is in bitminter mining pool when it would be oherwise idle. I get around 25-30 mhash/sec.
Are these two services "good enough" for people, who are otherwise dumb to IT, and cannot setup a linux distro? If not, can anyone recommend something else?
Thank you in advance

[DannyHamilton]

I get around 25-30 mhash/sec.

At current difficulty I think 30 mhash/sec will get you about 0.13 BTC per month.  Difficulty is likely to rise as miners start taking delivery of ASIC devices, further reducing the amount of bitcoin you will mine.  If you don't have access to free electricity, you'll probably discover that it is cheaper to purchase bitcoin than it is to mine it.

[odolvlobo]

Those services are fine.

I want to point out that you are mining approximately $0.10 worth of BTC per day. I hope you are doing it just for fun. Here's the math: 25-30 MH/s is approximately 0.0001% of the network hash rate (30MH/s out of 30000000 MH/s), and that is about how much of the total mining income you will receive. 0.0001% of BTC 3600 per day is BTC 0.0036 per day, or about $0.10 per day.

Some pools have problems with such low-power mining. Your work might not even be registering. You may be able to improve this by a factor of 10 by switching to mining on your video card.

[DannyHamilton]

. . . I have a coinbase wallet . . . Are these two services "good enough" for people, who are otherwise dumb to IT, and cannot setup a linux distro? If not, can anyone recommend something else? . . .

Coinbase is ok for purchasing or selling bitcoin (they've had some issues recently, but seem to be getting them under control), but because you don't have control of your private keys with them, I wouldn't recommend them for storing bitcoin for any length of time.  If you are looking for advice, I'd suggest either Electrum or MultiBit if you want to install a wallet on your computer.  If you prefer a web hosted wallet, I'd recommend https://blockchain.info/wallet rather than coinbase.com.  I'd also recommend storing a backup copy of your blockchain.info wallet, so you can still access your bitcoins if anything ever happens to the website.

[Koviali]

Thank you all for your replies.
ATM, I'm doing this for fun and research. I've known about BTC for a while, but never really bothered to take a deeper look into it until I've heard about the ASIC rigs. I just want to be sure that this works before spending bigger money on mining-specific rigs.

Also, do you have any predictions about the effect of ASICs? I'm an economist, so I know that the exchange rates would drop significantly if many new sellers would show up, but what would happen on a long term?

[Koviali]

Ah. I haven't read about that.

[jrockfever@gmail.com]

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

This should help you out, this will give you an idea of how much bitcoin you will mine based on your hashrate. It would be a wise choice if you wish to profit from bitcoining to purchase a asic system.