this is an interesting thread. I thought I would share my bitcoin experience with the newer guys so you can get a feel for what I did and how I made it work for me.now I see a lot of people have invested a ton of their money into buying rigs but I a very happy the way I evolved my mining rigs. Basically I started out with $450 of my own investment and turned it into 3 mining rigs, 9 GPU's and 3.3 Ghash
[here we go]
I was fairly lucky to get into the bitcoin world somewhat early. Like the spring of 2011, right before bitcoin really took off - when I first heard of it bitcoin it was trading for 0.85 USD, and my best cpu was only getting like 5 m/hash so what I did was search on craigslist and I found a Saphire Vapor-X 5870 for $150. I bought that and installed it into my little tiger direct barebones I had built a couple years before. At that time the difficulty was at a low rate. That single 5870 was getting me 8 coins a day and that was before I knew about o.c. so it was really only running at 350 mhash.
[here is the back story of how I upgraded my rigs I find it kind of interesting - and you might too]
I do computer repair and I am always looking for stuff to buy and sell, in any case I found a great deal on craigslist and bought a 2007 Macbook Pro that had some problems for $300, I fixed it up and sold it for $600. Then I saw a guy on craigslist who had a brand new mac book air 2011 model, he was desperate for money and I convinced him to sell me the macbook air for $600.
I had that macbook air for about two weeks, when I saw this incredible gaming machine for sale, the guy was asking $1100 for it, it had the MSI GD70 board (five pcie slots!) liquid cooling, dominator ram, a corsair 1200 watt powersupply and two REFERENCE AMD 6870s! After texting back and forth for almost a whole day I convinced him to trade it for the mac book air!
So I got this machine home, and then moved the cards around and put my 5870 into this machine with the two 6870's now I was rocking over 1 Ghash! it was killer - bitcoin was at about $3.00 at that time and my gigahash rig was bringing me in over 30 coins a week! - Shortly after that bitcoin went up to $6, or $7 a coin - this was very exciting - I was saving my coins and then when it hit $10 I sold them all and built two more rigs
Adding in (2) more 5870's (2) more 6870's (1) 5830 and (1) 5850
I was doing very well for awhile man, the difficulty kept jumping but so did the price, When Bitcoin hit $30+ a coin I was really enjoying that, and of course the rest is history.
MTGox got hacked, (so did I for that matter) Bitcoin took a big hit, then the MyBitcoin scandel and now the Bruce Wagner saga(tom wiliiams et al) blah blah blah and BTC got stuck in the rut it is in now.
and here we are
the difficulty seems to have finally stabilized which is awesome
and I have a 3.3 Ghash mining operation
and Basically I only invested $450 total of my own money. Everything else was paid for with trading and with bitcoins that I mined.
It seems like its been such a long time because so much has happened but really this all happened in the last 6-7 months.
here are pics of my rigs. Enjoy!
btw, I know a lot of people like to build mining only rigs - open air systems etc. but my idea is to build something that doubles as a killer gaming machine as well that way when mining is over you still have a valuable and resell-able gaming machine.
