Buying mining hardware will never pay off now.

[Akauble]

The rate of growth is getting pretty ridiculous at this point.

[1680151168]

1680151168

[Hook^]

The rate of growth is getting pretty ridiculous at this point.

Which is the whole problem.  It doubles every 18 days.  Which means your output halves every 18 days.

[JTaBitCoinKing]

Difficulty is based on how meany nodes are on the network, correct? Growth will slow when miners realize it is unprofitable to mine, at the same time the value of the Bitcoin will go up thanks to increased scarcity.

It seems to me that the Bitcoin was not designed for stability. Oh well, just means you can make a ton of money real fast... but also lose it.

[Hook^]

Difficulty is based on how meany nodes are on the network, correct? Growth will slow when miners realize it is unprofitable to mine, at the same time the value of the Bitcoin will go up thanks to increased scarcity.

It seems to me that the Bitcoin was not designed for stability. Oh well, just means you can make a ton of money real fast... but also lose it.

Difficulty is the nodes multiplied by the average horsepower of the nodes. 

In a perfectly rational market what you say would be true.  But it already isn't profitable, and people are still joining.  I just joined because I bought hardware based upon a bitcoin calculator.  Anyway, will be a long time before every gamer that already has a system has joined the network.  And for them it is free.

It won't be unprofitable to mine in terms of electricity for another 60 days or so (assuming $20/bitcoin, which could go up or down).

So the gamers will still be piling on for at least that long.

All of this assumes that more and more people will be interested in using bitcoins, which seems to be true so far.

[Tx2000]

Being a recently introduced into the world of Bitcoins, I have no delusions that mining, certainly at this point in the game, will have a short-lived period of profits.  People who do their research and buy "equipment", if you will, appropriately will stand to make some positive gain as long as they are vigilant.  But again, the peak has been reached for mining.


As others have mentioned, this is profitable for all of us because more people are being introduced to Bitcoin and thusly, the bitcoin economy has a better chance of expanding and being adopted (which is already becoming more apparent as the days go by).

[Hook^]

Being a recently introduced into the world of Bitcoins, I have no delusions that mining, certainly at this point in the game, will have a short-lived period of profits.  People who do their research and buy "equipment", if you will, appropriately will stand to make some positive gain as long as they are vigilant.  But again, the peak has been reached for mining.


As others have mentioned, this is profitable for all of us because more people are being introduced to Bitcoin and thusly, the bitcoin economy has a better chance of expanding and being adopted (which is already becoming more apparent as the days go by).

Right.  The profitability is greater speculating on bitcoins than mining right now.  I do belive that bitcoins will continue to take off, which is why I bought a bunch of them on the market.  I did buy a miner rig, but before I took into consideration the difficulty growth.

[JTaBitCoinKing]

Being a miner is like being part owner of the Federal Reserve, you just keep taking little sips off the top and eventually you have a fortune.

However unlike the Fed with Bitcoin, all you need is a graphics card and you are part owner of it's Globule Reserve system. It's not quit equality for all, but it's a lot closer.

[Hook^]

Being a miner is like being part owner of the Federal Reserve, you just keep taking little sips off the top and eventually you have a fortune.

However unlike the Fed with Bitcoin, all you need is a graphics card and you are part owner of it's Globule Reserve system. It's not quit equality for all, but it's a lot closer.

To make the analogy complete, you have to say that the number of owners of the Fed are doubling every 18 days, as a parallel to the difficulty increase.  So your share of the sip halves every 18 days.  That becomes nothing in about 90 days.

[JTaBitCoinKing]

Well, right now I'm running the bit coin miner getting about 100mh/s on 3 Nvida cards. I'm not too concerned about losing money at this point (I'm not responsible for electricity), I'm more interested in getting Bitcoins. When the parts come this week, I'll be up in the 400 to 500 MH/s range using a bitcoin miner that is more economically friendly: but probably still won't be very profitable.

That's not what's important to me, what's impotent to me right now is helping to establish a currency that is something other then the dollar.

[Hook^]

Well, right now I'm running the bit coin miner getting about 100mh/s on 3 Nvida cards. I'm not too concerned about losing money at this point (I'm not responsible for electricity), I'm more interested in getting Bitcoins. When the parts come this week, I'll be up in the 400 to 500 MH/s range using a bitcoin miner that is more economically friendly: but probably still won't be very profitable.

That's not what's important to me, what's impotent to me right now is helping to establish a currency that is something other then the dollar.

The best way to do that is to do business with people that accept bitcoins.

[BitCoinsForGold]

why kinds nvida cards are you using? nvida sucks compared to ati, i learned this personally. In my personal pc has an nvidia card that cost me 250 bucks i got for gaming before i ever heard the word bitcoin, but only gets 68mhashs when i comes to doing bitcoin mining. ati > nvidia

[JTaBitCoinKing]

My experience with ATI cards is limited, I found Nvidia to be more stable. Obviously I'm going with ATI (Or AMD as it is now) for profit mining and my next upgrade, but those parts won't arrive until sometime next week. Until then all I have is the Nvida cards (3x9800gtx+SLI), so when I'm not playing games I'm letting it hash out.

On a related note, do you think a Bit Miner based on CUDA would boost the Hashrate of Nvidia cards? Or is AMD bitmining the only way?

[Swishercutter]

My experience with ATI cards is limited, I found Nvidia to be more stable. Obviously I'm going with ATI (Or AMD as it is now) for profit mining and my next upgrade, but those parts won't arrive until sometime next week. Until then all I have is the Nvida cards (3x9800gtx+SLI), so when I'm not playing games I'm letting it hash out.

On a related note, do you think a Bit Miner based on CUDA would boost the Hashrate of Nvidia cards? Or is AMD bitmining the only way?

Its all about the cores and shaders...ATI is physically better.

[Hook^]

My experience with ATI cards is limited, I found Nvidia to be more stable. Obviously I'm going with ATI (Or AMD as it is now) for profit mining and my next upgrade, but those parts won't arrive until sometime next week. Until then all I have is the Nvida cards (3x9800gtx+SLI), so when I'm not playing games I'm letting it hash out.

On a related note, do you think a Bit Miner based on CUDA would boost the Hashrate of Nvidia cards? Or is AMD bitmining the only way?

NVidia is missing a left shift instruction in their shaders which ATI has, so they are 3 or more times slower than ATI.  There won't be any way around that with a different API.

[Karen Palen]

Difficulty is based on how meany nodes are on the network, correct? Growth will slow when miners realize it is unprofitable to mine, at the same time the value of the Bitcoin will go up thanks to increased scarcity.

It seems to me that the Bitcoin was not designed for stability. Oh well, just means you can make a ton of money real fast... but also lose it.

"Never assume malice when it can be explained by incompetence" Heinlein

I doubt if it was "designed" to do any such thing - such are the hazards of exploring unknown territory!

HUGE profits and HUGE losses!