New miner

[fx0]

Hi,

after reading a bit about bitcoin and mining, I've decided to give it a go. The idea of decentralized money should rock anyone's boat when there's been inflation behind probably most great wars.

At the moment I'm giving my gaming laptop (ASUS G53SW w/ gtx460) a go but it's really slow - it works though, and it's fun to watch. But I want more.

I have some money to spare to use on mining hardware, and wonder what to go for, a pc or one of these ASIC devices. So I got some questions.

The ASIC devices - are these the ones to go for?

The 5GH/s device is at 274$ - how fast are these generating coins?

There is a 25GH/s device as well as a 50GH/s giving a little bit more GH/s per dollar - how much time is needed to have it repay itself? I can only invest in those one if I know I get the money back in not too long.

I have free electricity in my apartment and will most likely have it for close to a year - but I'm not loaded with money, so the two expensive devices need to promise something in return for buying them.

Or should I try get some used PC hardware from the gaming ppl?

What would be the wisest thing to do with a 300-500$ loseable budget?

My Wallet has stuck also. It had downloaded and synced, but I clicked a option on the network window to connect through the SOCKS proxy and I can't "unhook" the option and now it is stuck like that - can't figure it out. Any tip?

Noob questions, but thanks.

[vm1990]

it all depends there is a massive ?? mark over the bitcoin mining compunity at the moment because no ones really sure when ASICs will be deliverd (if ever)

if you want to get onto mining right now go with something like a cheap ati HD5870, 5850 or ever 5830 these are now classed as budget mining cards i use a couple 5870's putting out 700MH/s and they can also do others like litecoin

ASICS are only designed for bitcoin and sha256 currencys (theres a few but im not naming them all)

what i would personaly do if i was you would be invest in a cheap ASIC 5ghs (but odds are it wont be until late this year when you get it) and try to pick up a cheap older generation graphics card like i said anything from the 58** range is a pretty good deal right now. like i say theres alot of ?? over bitcoin mining if ASICs come out in the next month or 2 then GPUs will be very poor choice but if ASICs come out later then a GPU is a good choice

a 5870 for around $100 should pay its self off withing 2 months pretty easily aslong as ASICs dont get released

the ASICs if you get one early in the running will pay off withing 2-3 weeks but if your ordering now your looking at a payoff around 4-5 months depending how many ASICs get released if they do get released the 58** cards and a few later cards will still make a small profit for a while until it pretty much becomes an ASIC mining thing

BUT at the same time you could change the GPU over to litecoin (which isnt ASIC comatable) and make a fair amount of money off there

all in all you have 2 options
pre order ASIC and get a cheap 58** card for the time being ------this is what iv done
order a couple of GPUs and once mining on bitcoin isnt worth it change to litecoin

[Chrithu]

Well to give you a refference:

My Computer is mining with 2 Radeon HD 5750 GPUs which generate at 300 MH/s. In BTCGuild pool that get's my 0.015 BTC per 24 HRs.

So a 5GH/s miner would generate about 17x as much so you would end up near 0.255 BTC per 24 hours. So a BTC every 4 days.

You can do the maths yourself from here on in I guess. Imprtantly though: Allways keep in mind that a miner also generates cost to have it running.

[fx0]

Well, have to do some thinking, and pay attention to old hardware that runs those kind of cards. Have no desktop hardware at all these days, so have to buy everything from scratch, included the wireless card (got free internet also :p)

The general wisdom then, is that most hardware is of less significance except the graphic cards and the power supply, right? could I go with some old core2duo or the Athlon x2?

Thanks for the input.