n00b pool mining question

[Mythodrome]

Greetings all —

Last night I decided to take the plunge and see how mining bitcoins works. I'm on a Mac Mini w/NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GPU. I set up Diablo & rpcminer, set up my account & worker at miner.bitcoin.cz, got my box off the table, and have basically just been letting 'er rip since about 11 or 12 last night.

Earlier today my account said I had "confirmed reward" of 2.65-e.5 btc. Now, several hours later, I have "confirmed reward" of 0.00027342 btc, but there has been no recorded payout.

I checked the block explorer for the blocks that are marked "confirmed" in my account, but did not find my btc address listed on any of them.

I'm wondering if someone can explain what I'm seeing here? What does that "-e.5" mean?

Also, is 0.00027342 btc a normal amount for almost 24 hours straight of mining? I guess I thought it'd be a couple more decimals over by now.

Your insights are much appreciated! Thanks in advance,

—Paula

[SeriousWorm]

Basically, as evidenced by the Mining hardware comparison, you are probably paying more for the electricity than you'll ever get out of mining BTC. Your gfx card is pretty much worthless for mining, maybe slower than a fast CPU. Sorry.

The (something)e^-5 means (something)*10^-5.

You probably need a minimum amount before you can do a payout.

[Kuber]

Maybe the transaction fee is higher than your actual amount of BTC.
As the serious worm said, your GPU isn't exactly the best choice - 0.00027 BTCs are 0.00459 $ atm.

[BouerBouer]

Unfortunately Myth that is probably completely not worth it.

I have a poor graphics card too, but my fast CPU makes up for it and I'm making about 0.02 BTC daily, so that balances out the electricity costs. If you can't at least get to a third decimal point by 24 hours of mining, forget about mining or purchase a better computer.

[Mythodrome]

Ah, thanks you guys! That helps a lot. I figured mining wouldn't be an efficient way to actually make any money but I can't let something so cool pass by without checking it out! But yeah my electric costs more than that. Almost seems like you'd need some kind of independent solar getup to make mining cost-effective.

Nevertheless, I love bitcoin     <3  <3  <3  Bless all you folks doing the mining work. You're heroes as far as I'm concerned.

—Paula