Bitcoin Mining - Home Setup or how else to Earn BTC...

[BTC Zebra]

Dear All,

I acquired my first bitcoins well over two years ago.

I am a strong believer that Bitcoin will prevail when it finds a role that the mainstream can identify with.

Putting it simply I want to grow my BTC and am happy to try to achieve this any way, I have tried loans (Unsuccessful) and I trade with small amounts on an exchange for fun and to accrue more BTC. I am not looking to make a quick buck, but more to secure my future with bitcoin.

I have a PC which is over three years old but it was a decent spec, I would not look for an instant return and wuld look to hold the coins longer term.

My Spec

i5 3570K 3.4 Ghz X4
16Gb Corsair Memory 1866 mhz (could double this)
Sabertooth Mortherboard Z77
EVGA Geforce GTX 660 SC 2GB GDDR5

This is a regular home use PC, underused and well air cooled in a large citi case with good fans.

What could I expect from a small pool for BTC and paying regular rates for electricity (UK based). If a graphics card upgrade would help yield I would consider the investment. Are the days of home mining effectively over? I would consider supporting the network a good thing too, any suggestions.

If anyone knows of any better avenues, I would consider accruing BTC in a number of different ways. I am considering selling items and requesting BTC as payment. Is there a buy sell swap on here?

Cheers BTC Zebra

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[-ck]

You cannot meaningfully mine bitcoin with just a computer; all bitcoin mining these days is done only with dedicated ASIC mining hardware.

[unholycactus]

The days of home mining with computers are long over just as you suspected.

As for your second point, there's a board on this forum that allows you to post for trades.
Here's the link for hardware: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0

[Iranus]

Take a step back and think about how you're going to do this if you are.

In the majority of cases, you will not make an easy profit from mining.  You need to think about your electricity costs, the amount that you can invest, future difficulty and the halving in four years, and whether you will be able to handle potentially noisy miners.

In most cases you'll need to put a significant amount of money in and wait for at least 1-2 years before making any profit, and even then it'll be unstable.  Mining is great, but you need to go through all of these threads first and think about how you're going to approach it.

[AUDREY23]

then you if it will mine with a regular computer I think, it will be left behind, because the others have mined using special tools to mine

[QuintLeo]

Your video card is old enough and inefficient enough it's not going to make much if anything on ALTcoins it's best at.
 Your current rig has ZERO chance of earning enough BitCoin to pay for electric usage, much less actually make a profit.

[swogerino]

Although your video card is old enough, I think it can be used to mine some altcoins, the Equihash algorithm , you can also use your CPU to mine cryptonight algorithms. Although it will not be profitable, you can exchange this altcoin to bitcoin and save it. Maybe the price of bitcoin will rise a lot in the coming years. In the bitcoin world the possibilities are endless, you just have to have good imagination.

[Qartada]

Although your video card is old enough, I think it can be used to mine some altcoins, the Equihash algorithm , you can also use your CPU to mine cryptonight algorithms. Although it will not be profitable, you can exchange this altcoin to bitcoin and save it. Maybe the price of bitcoin will rise a lot in the coming years. In the bitcoin world the possibilities are endless, you just have to have good imagination.

There are some altcoins that are okay to mine with a CPU.  You could mine some altcoins like Riecoin which are CPU-only and have moderately stable price.

[-ck]

Original poster has not responded since and the posts are getting more and more altcoin focused and increasingly post count raising for no purpose so I'm locking this thread.