General question about mining

[neotenie]

Hi dear people,

is it so, that for mining btc you need a desktop PC with Linux installed? It is not working on a macbook isn't it?

It is an absolute hypothetical question because I hardly understand the principle, so I guess mining is reserved for computer freaks.

That gives me this strange after taste, that if btc become the normal money, people who have no computer knowledge (or no computer at all!) will end up under the bridges and the world will be ruled by computer freaks... until the moment where electricity collapses...

I'm not extremely stupid with computers but obviously see this btc world to be highly complicated. I understand about 1% of the posts here and wonder how much my parents would. Probably nothing!

Greets!
Neo

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[u.MP]

Im new to Bitcoins too, but its a process you have to go through, i know.. it sucks not to understand what other people say.

[OlgaA524]

Not that difficult even if you are not a geek... You can mine using windows, use GUIMiner for starts - it has User Interface. All you need is a "decent" graphics card.

In the future (when and if Bitcoin becomes widely accepted currency) there will be fool proof applications. Imagine that your salary is paid in bitcoins

A lot of potential market in development of user friendly and safe applications around bitcoins which would be aimed and people who do not want to even understand how that stuff works. Think of computers - you don't have to be a technology guru to use it.

[nitrous]

Whilst I don't understand much about mining myself, I think I can help you with some of your questions.

Because the bitcoin protocol is open source, and clients are available on most platforms, you can definitely mine bitcoins on any platform, including your macbook. Mining is quite computationally expensive however, so the only way to make more money than you put in is to obtain a dedicated mining rig, usually with efficient FPGA hardware, and you would then need to strip the OS down to focus purely on BTC (bitcoin) mining, which is only really possible on linux. So yes, if you want to make money, you need a linux machine, though a typical desktop will not suffice.

No, if BTC becomes the main currency it certainly won't mean that any group of people will start ruling the world. Mining only exists as a side product of BTC's inflationary model, and by 2140 it won't be worth mining at all (as all possible bitcoins will have been mined by then). If BTC becomes a major currency, then you will see a lot more user-friendly methods of manipulating bitcoins (though many do exists even now, Electrum, for example), and it will still be those in finance who will control the majority of the money.

And if electricity collapsed, we would have a lot more problems than just bitcoin mining. The entire modern-world infrastructure relies on electricity - we would be pushed back to the middle ages!

You don't really need to understand all the technical details behind bitcoins and how it works, but you do need to understand some stuff, like bitcoin addresses, transactions, security, etc, as otherwise you risk losing your money.

[wonderbash]

With GUIminer (graphic interface miner), you don't need to know all the underlying works that is going on. Just find a mining pool and register yourself as a worker, then input your login details into GUIminer and you can start mining right away. If bitcoin gets popular enough (it is already on it's way), people will start accepting and using it like paper money. Just as paper money, you don't need to understand how feds are printing and controlling the paper notes in order to use the paper money.

[Gabi]

That gives me this strange after taste, that if btc become the normal money, people who have no computer knowledge (or no computer at all!) will end up under the bridges and the world will be ruled by computer freaks... until the moment where electricity collapses...

If electricity or internet collapse, then the traditional banking/financial/economy system will be the first to collapse. They totally depend on these things.

And mining isn't required to use bitcoin, as for having a computer or a smartphone to use bitcoin, in these days you can buy an android smartphone for like 50$ or so.

[neotenie]

Thanks for your replies and interesting thoughts,

of course the electricity collapse would affect more than the bitcoins. It was just a side-thought.

I've been reading the all afternoon through the forum to try to understand this new currency a bit better. I found one sentence "mining is now for rich people only"! That was a bit colliding with the also spread idea that bitcoins are democratic. For now, the people who had advantage of this currency were the ones who understand computers and now, the ones having money enough to create new money and people around them understanding how to do it if they don't understand themselves. Probably more men than women are involved, I guess. It's actually not a critic of this system, just a thought.

I heard about bitcoins the first time about 2 years ago from a linux freak and it gave me a bit of headache :-) The same guy sold me my first half of a btc a few weeks ago and made me aware that it would be a good idea to give the possibility on my site to the people to buy my artwork with btc. For now, I accept it officially in the gallery I'm exposing in but until today nobody chose that option. Anyway, just for you to know why I'm here.

What I also noticed is that there are so many different possibilities to handle wallets that it feels really confusing. I checked this electrum but the explanations was too high for my actual knowledge. It feels like I would need months of reading before I can understand it. I think this may be a real problem to make this currency become popular. The burden of having to sit down for days to find out which software you need to install between so many possibilities is kind of scary.

Of course with open source projects, it is surely difficult to develop one software only as anybody can write a different / eventually better one. "Time is money". I feel this very strongly here. It is a real job. Give time to become an expert and earn some money for this effort.

Still, a very interesting adventure.

Dear greetings to all of you!
Neo

[Gabi]

Mining is not and never was a get rich quick scheme. Yes, if you mined a year ago today you would be rich, but not because you mined, but because one year ago you risked and invested in bitcoin (buying or mining is the same, in the second case you buy the electricity...). You can buy an ASIC for like a thousand or so of dollars, i don't think it is "for rich people". And anyway, to use bitcoin, you don't have to mine.