How many newbies are mining?

[jalidi]

First found out about this like first week of June.

Wish I had known about it earlier, but I've been running my 6970 since about the 8th when I figured out pool mining.

Sucks that the difficulty went up, I went from 2/3's of a coin just under 1/2 a coin a day, running about 380 Mhash/sec.

Even coming in at this late stage in the game should let you recoup at hardware investment costs. I'm building a new Crosshair V system with three 6970's (maybe 1.2 Ghash/sec) and I'm fairly certain that I'll break even on it and have a nice gaming system all paid for in the end if the market doesn't totally collapse between now and the end of the summer.

I was debating solo mining but I think I'm going to stick to pooled mining after the difficulty increase. And it's going to increase every two weeks, they say? The party is not yet over, but we're definitely late. Enjoy it while it lasts.

[Adiamante]

Yeah..I downloaded some of the software (Bitcoin,GUIminer) a day ago and set it loose, but I'm not sure if it even working. I know I have an ATI Radeon 4200 card, but not sure if it even being used.

[Phuimin]

I first found out about Bitcoin sometime during early winter, back in 2010. A friend at my university told me about it, and managed to get me interested. I put my server computer to work and mined for a while before I got too lazy about it, thinking it wasn't really worthwhile. Now I regret that decision.

Since then, I 'rediscovered' Bitcoin early this month, as the value had increased by quite a bit. I set two computers to mine, one with a 5870 and another with a 5850, but I was in a bit of a hurry to go visit my parents and attend a funeral, so I was unable to optimize the setup properly before I left town. Regardless, I can reach roughly 600 - 700 (5870 at 310 - 360, 5850 at 290 - 340) megahashes per second without a lot of optimizations, so there's that. Tomorrow I'll finally be returning to my own apartment, though, and I can start fiddling around.

I managed to set this up on 11.06.11, but there has been some downtime every now and then. Regardless, I've managed to acquire 2.5 bitcoins since then.

[Travis]

I'm not, don't have the proper hardware. Maybe I will in the future if I ever upgrade to a nice gaming rig.

[bentov]

I was planning on starting tonight, but I'm having a problem with getting diablominer to work with my mac pro...4 more posts to go...

--bentov

[88bitcoins]

I am mining.  Got two 5870s running 24/7 using free electricity! 

I just started mining too (with two 5830s), but have to pay for electricity :-(

Even so, imho it's still worth mining - at least for me I can always use the equipment for actual graphics work.

I've also ascribed to having multiple sources of income. At one point, all my little streams of income amounted to a decent monthly income. It's surprising how $100-450/month on multiple monthly incomes really add up.

I opted out of corp/mainstream work and lifestyle a while ago and have never regretted it. Bitcoin mining is just another (little) stream for now.

[Adiamante]

I have been mining about 40%? of the time for 11 days. Received .76 bitcoins so far.
I pool with mining.bitcoin.cz as it's not practical for hobby miners to mine solo.

My setup is a single GTX460 that mines when im not playing vidya games

I have spare boards and psu's, as well as a 8800gtx and a hd3850 from older computers that I have started to rebuild to mine.

http://i55.tinypic.com/fc430z.jpg

Also, I mine (process transactions) to contribute to the bitcoin community. It's a win/win

What is that compared to an ATI Radeon 4200? My window shows the same amount of blocks as yours but only 8 connections and nothing in the display. Mine just looks..well..blank. I have a feeling that I may have set mine up incorrectly.

[Phuimin]

... large image here ...

If you really are paranoid about those transactions, you should blur the dates and times as well. They could be used to track down these transactions on blockexplorer. It wouldn't be easy, of course, but it's doable. Still, if you want to remain safe. You know. You can never know who could be out to get you.

[Auspician]

Just started mining a couple weeks ago.  Finally got my duel non-reference 6950's set up, mining 555 Mhash/s.

[kuloch]

I've occasionally read about Bitcoin over the past couple months on Slashdot, so yesterday I figured I'd start playing around with it.  Conveniently, I have a Radeon HD 5850 that usually sits idle.  I have just over 0.1 BTC from slush's pool after mining most of today (with another 0.1 in estimated + unconfirmed), and nearly 0.03 from being on deepbit's pool for a while last night.  Not getting rich any time soon, but I'm curious to see how this all pans out.

I'm curious how many of the hardcore miners over the past several months have blown out their video cards.  I went with the suggestion of underclocking, dropping my memory speed from 1000 Mhz to 500 Mhz and the core from 725 Mhz to 550 Mhz.  Dropping the core speed gives me a performance hit, but is that worthwhile to further keep temperatures down?  I know that excessive heat is often what kills hardware that's pushed for performance.

[somebadger]

you can +1 since i'm a newbie miner

[Tim the Magician]

I'm planning to start mining this weekend.. I have a lot of computer parts laying around but I unfortunatly always favored Nvidia cards.. I've an ATX card and some fans coming from Newegg this friday so I'm going to try mining out.  Its too bad all the good cards are so hard to get. 

[Chimel]

Been mining for a few days only, since the recent media articles on bitcoin.
My Nvidia 8800GTX was the shit 4 years ago, at $500-600, but it mines at only 26 MH/s, miner software are optimized only for Radeon's stream processors, not Nvidia CUDA.

I was planning to build a new PC later this year, might as well do it now, using Radeon cards this time.
I'd love to use 2-3 6990s but they are out of stock, so I'll aim for 1 GH/s instead of 2.

[Tim the Magician]

I was planning to build a new PC later this year, might as well do it now, using Radeon cards this time.
I'd love to use 2-3 6990s but they are out of stock, so I'll aim for 1 GH/s instead of 2.

I know.. every card I look for is sold out everywhere.  I hope its not all bitcoin miners buying them all because the difficulty is going to go through the roof.

I'm building a mining rig now.. I already had a pretty decent gaming PC but with an Nvidia card so I am not even going to try mining with that.  Plus its got way too much CPU and hard drives I don't want to burn up.  It seems like purpose built miners where you downclock everything but the GPU to save watts is the way to go.

[seppohovi]

would like to mine

[Gdawg]

That is one way to do it. I just started too and hope to pay for my cards and maybe a little more. I was going to buy the card anyways so this is a win-win situation for me.

[Departure]

just bought 3 x 6990's(2000 MH/s) to start mining(haven't set it up yet), I think im too late tho' I just calculated with the difficulty increase it is going to take awhile to break even on the 3 cards .... plus of cause electricity costs. I would suggest to buy bitcoins instead of buying equipment for mining...

[computerparts]

just bought 3 x 6990's(2000 MH/s) to start mining(haven't set it up yet), I think im too late tho' I just calculated with the difficulty increase it is going to take awhile to break even on the 3 cards .... plus of cause electricity costs. I would suggest to buy bitcoins instead of buying equipment for mining...

That's been said for a while now but no one takes it seriously, thus the large difficulty increase.

[cartwright]

I started mining in May.

[Tim the Magician]

just bought 3 x 6990's(2000 MH/s) to start mining(haven't set it up yet), I think im too late tho' I just calculated with the difficulty increase it is going to take awhile to break even on the 3 cards .... plus of cause electricity costs. I would suggest to buy bitcoins instead of buying equipment for mining...

That's been said for a while now but no one takes it seriously, thus the large difficulty increase.

It seems like there would be an incentive for current miners to discourage new miners in order to slow down difficulty increases so I take all the doom and gloom predictions with a grain of salt