Considerations choosing mining platform

[murrekatt]

I'm new to Bitcoin and mining and would like to get an understanding regarding the major differences in mining platforms (hardware and software).

I've been reading about CPU, GPU and FPGA as well as ASIC mining, but I'm having difficulties understanding what to expect and what to consider in each setup. Also there are of course other currencies than Bitcoin, but let's leave that aside for now.

So say one can choose between OSX, Windows and Linux OS. Is there anything to be aware of choosing one or the other? Does it depend if one plans to do CPU or GPU mining or some other feature in the software available for mining on each platform?

What about hardware - is there any way to make money with CPU mining at the current costs/prices? What about GPU mining? Are there any important considerations about hardware? ASIC seems to be a hot topic, but unclear what really is available to buy right now.

I'd be very grateful if someone could give a high-level overview of the current state, considerations and other things to be aware of (right now) choosing one or the other setup.

Thanks a lot on advance!

[evilscoop]

cpu mining = dead or mine yacoin, dont bother with cpu mining
gpu mining = nearly dead, or mine litecoin (or other scrypt coin) - some are still holding out...but not many
fpga = proven track record, can be bought here and there....best to be technical savvy, expensive to buy (can only mine sha-256 atm)
asic = v.v. expensive atm, hard to get an actual piece of hardware in the hand (evan harder if you have no btc atm) (can only mine sha-256 atm)

If your going asic/fpga route, your prolly best on linux (or raspberry pi host, my fave)
fpga and asic are (roughly speaking) dedicated mining hardware, built to do one job
^{(yes guys i know fpga's have other uses, but not with a mining bitstream)}


see :-
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
http://dustcoin.com/mining


Personally I love the fpga's, you can still get masses of gh/s out of them in a farm, if you have the money
But i do have investments and pre-orders in asics too....

[Rannasha]

It's basically a matter of going from more general purpose computing hardware to more specialized hardware.

A CPU is a general purpose processor, it can do a lot of different things. The tradeoff is, of course, that it's not that fast at doing these things. A GPU is already somewhat different, it is specialized in performing certain types of operations in a massively parallel way (certain models can run thousands of threads in parallel). These design-limitations make a GPU less all-round than a CPU, but if you have a task that matches the strength of the GPU, it'll be much faster than on a CPU.

FPGAs are chips that can be programmed ("FP" in the name stands for Field Programmable) to behave in a certain way. You can program an FPGA to process Bitcoin hashing functions and once that's done, it can do that and only that until you reset it and load it with a new programming. This makes FPGAs very inflexible for general purpose use, but rather fast if you load an efficient program onto it.

ASICs are at the far end of the spectrum. These chips are designed and manufactured to perform only specific tasks. In the case of Bitcoin, ASICs will only compute hashes and nothing else. However, that means that the design can be completely optimized for this purpose, which makes them very fast.

For Bitcoin, CPU mining is dead and buried (and has been for some time). GPU mining can be profitable, but it largely depends on how much you pay for electricity (and initial costs of the hardware if you don't own any yet). A card (or several) running at full power constantly can up the power bill quite a bit. There are many profitability calculators out there that let you input values such as your electricity price, hash-rate, exchange rate of BTC, etc... and then come up with an estimate of earnings per month.

ASICs are the future of BTC mining, but they're hard to come by and somewhat expensive. The demand is very large and the supply not so much yet. The added concern is that once ASICs hit the field in larger numbers, the network hashrate will go up and therefore the difficulty will rise, lowering the profitability of all mining endeavours.

[Chrithu]

Can't help with all your questions. What I can say is that GPU Mining is still on the edge of being able to yeild SMALL profits. But a lot of technichal voodoo is needed to keep electricity costs at the bare minimum.

Part of that voodo is the OS choice. If the machine in question is only used for mining, then linux (real console based linux without graphical user interfaces) is the way to go since you can choose to install only the bare core plus the drivers and programs needed for mining and that's it. Probably fits even on the smallest USB sticks and thus saves you the initial and upkeep cost for a harddisk. Also such a specialised linux install will save you a lot in regards to the CPU.

As far as I understand it though: Once the ASIC miners become truely common, graphics cards will be completely out of the game as their power consumption is just too big in relation to their hashrate.

Let's wait what others say. But I imagine that the consensus will be: If you already own GPUs capable of mining at hasrates of a least 300 MH/s then go for it and set them up. If you're looking to invest into new hardware probably look into getting started with ASICs right away.

Where to get ASICs? I can't tell, as I don't have the money for that yet so I haven't inrformed myself much about it.

[evilscoop]

ill add, if you go gpu route, DO NOT buy nvidia cards

[murrekatt]

Thanks a lot guys for the good overviews and explanations! Very much appreciated.

It's clear that once ASICs are available in larger volumes, there is no other option if you want to mine (unless there is a better option). Looking forward, mining will at some point also stop, because there are no more coins to be mined or the decimals left are not worth the effort at least. As I understand, "mining" will then move to handling transactions for a small fee. Is this the same type or computation or another type?

[KennyH]

 CPU mining is dead and is too slow. GPU mining and FPGA are starting to get too slow now with the increasing difficulty.
The only thing that nowadays is worth mining with are ASICs, but they are very difficult to get hold of.

[evilscoop]

its the same...
they process transactions and get fee's now...but they are tiny

there will be an asic killer come along, or faster/cheaper asics...its a never ending cycle in computers...we should all be used to it

id not be so fast to rule out fpga's yet, there are some deals to be had as ppl dump for new shiney overpriced tech....
but gpu's are def on their way out

bear in mind most fpga's are 850mhs and run as cluster farms....so 5 run at about 4.5ghs

[morinaga]

linux is the best

[murrekatt]

@evilscoop, do you mean that anyone mining is also at the same time processing transactions or what did you mean?

[evilscoop]

yes miners process the transactions
this is the whole point of the miners.....they dont just try to find coins in a pot luck way, their actually doing something

Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm waiting transactions by including them in the block chain.

[murrekatt]

How is processing transactions related to creating new bitcoins? I thought these were distinct activities. Could you explain high-level how these relate? Thanks!

[evilscoop]

read http://bitcoin.org/en/how-it-works
and
https://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide

[murrekatt]

Thanks for the useful links!

Taken from: http://bitcoin.org/en/vocabulary#mining

"Bitcoin miners can collect transaction fees for the transactions they confirm, along with newly created bitcoins."

"newly created bitcoins", how do these come into existence in the process and how will that slow/stop as we reach 21 million bitcoins?

[evilscoop]

its a lottery system on the new block generation, current block award is 25coins+fees
the coin reward in the block is halved every 4 years

see
http://bitcoinclock.com/

and more details
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks

[murrekatt]

So the more work a miner does the more tickets in the lottery or how does that work?

[evilscoop]

its one way to look at it...

The more hashes, the more chance to solve the block problem
If you think of each hash as a ticket in the lottery, and the block as the winning numbers

tbh its all rather complex to understand in a theoretic view point....
fire up a little cpu miner, join a pool, do some trading on an exchange (evan if its only 10$ worth)...
play some satoshi dice...etc etc

[murrekatt]

I understand. Thanks for your help!

[netCoins]

Sure GPU mining bitcoins will very soon be not profitable but there will be alternatives in the future.  Not all these current get rich quick coins.