How did you get in to bitcoin/altcoin mining?

[hotwired007]

Just out of curiousity how did you get into mining? how did you hear about it?

I started late in 2012 after doing some research into benchmarking PCs for gaming - i nated to test one of my performance PCs to see how much i could push the PC with heat and thermal testing and one person on a forum mentioned using bitcoin to to test the GPU.

I quickly did some research and downloaded GUIMiner and went from there... now i have quite a few USB BEs and a few GFX cards mining altcoins (plus dabbling in a few other 'mining' experiments)

I have also got a few friends mining and using BTC/LTC/FTC and now looking at XPM (Primecoin - still undecided on longetivity but it mines alongside my USB and GPUs with a slight profit so its all good whilst turning a profit

I've recently found a pub that accepts bitcoins so now am also drinking/eating a percentage of my mining profits whilst trying to expand my mining rig (and looking at my ROI disappearing) whilst having a blast working on 0 cost thermal reduction methods without reducing security

[Roger100]

A drug addict in front of a mcdonalds ranting on about how silk road ruined his life. I came home, googled silk road, had my brain in bits for days thinking about how payments are made, then BAM....bitcoin was revealed to me. Silk road isnt my thing personally, but the way BTC seemed to enable its existence just grabbed my interest and wouldn't let go.

[crazyates]

I had heard about Bitcoin from a few online articles and stories, and thought it was cool, but never really got into it. Months later, I read a Gizmodo article back in 2011 about how Bitcoin was dying because the price had dropped from $31 to like $2. Well I then got into googling a bit more, and found some really cool stories of people running a 5970 for a month and making $900. Now I knew I'd never be making that much, esp since the price had already crashed, but I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded Phoenix Miner 1.5 or something like that, and got it mining on Deepbit using my brother's Nvidia GTX 9800. It took some tweaking, but I got it up over 30MH/s. WOOHOO WE'RE COOKING NOW! It was more just to figure out how mining worked before I bought my first GPU, which was about 2 weeks later. Got one of those Sapphire 5830 Extremes off Newegg for $130. I went from 30MH/s to 300MH/s, and thought it was the coolest thing ever!

Thus continued the mining fever. Buying more GPUs. Switching from Phoenix to CGMiner. Switching from Windows to Gentoo and back to Windows. Researching everything that I could. Figuring out that if I undervolted, I could keep the temps down and CGMiner's auto-gpu function would keep them at a higher clock and mine faster. Buying BFL FPGA Singles. Selling GPUs. Buying BFL ASICs. Etc.

[eleuthria]

SecurityNow's comprehensive episode on Bitcoin.  I didn't listen to it when it aired unfortunately, I heard it around March 2011.  Early enough to get in before the 2011 bubble, but I can't imagine how much would've been different if I had gotten in just a few months earlier with all the GPUs I initially fired up.

[ajw7989]

I found out when torrentleech site started accepting bitcoins as payment then I did some research and once the ASICMINER usbs came out got into bitcoin mining as a hobby.

[os2sam]

https://media.grc.com/sn/sn-287-lq.mp3

[Hfleer]

Just out of curiousity how did you get into mining? how did you hear about it?

I started late in 2012 after doing some research into benchmarking PCs for gaming - i nated to test one of my performance PCs to see how much i could push the PC with heat and thermal testing and one person on a forum mentioned using bitcoin to to test the GPU.

I quickly did some research and downloaded GUIMiner and went from there... now i have quite a few USB BEs and a few GFX cards mining altcoins (plus dabbling in a few other 'mining' experiments)

I have also got a few friends mining and using BTC/LTC/FTC and now looking at XPM (Primecoin - still undecided on longetivity but it mines alongside my USB and GPUs with a slight profit so its all good whilst turning a profit

I've recently found a pub that accepts bitcoins so now am also drinking/eating a percentage of my mining profits whilst trying to expand my mining rig (and looking at my ROI disappearing) whilst having a blast working on 0 cost thermal reduction methods without reducing security

Learned of Bitcoin on the web several years ago, but didn't jump into it right away.  I got into it when I realized it's usefullness, and tried my hand at mining while GPU was still decently profitable.  Haven't mined BTC in a while, but have considered altcoins for mining purposes.

[18RATTT]

A drug addict in front of a mcdonalds ranting on about how silk road ruined his life. I came home, googled silk road, had my brain in bits for days thinking about how payments are made, then BAM....bitcoin was revealed to me. Silk road isnt my thing personally, but the way BTC seemed to enable its existence just grabbed my interest and wouldn't let go.

lol... it could be the MMORPG silk road

[hayek]

Hatred is my muse...


I hate the system that I am forced to participate in just to live. I want to be a part of anything that is disruptive just for the joy of knowing that any establishment that has taken measures to ensure I can only come to them for my needs/wants runs at a loss

[malevolent]

I had heard about Bitcoin from a few online articles and stories, and thought it was cool, but never really got into it. Months later, I read a Gizmodo article back in 2011 about how Bitcoin was dying because the price had dropped from $31 to like $2.

That article is from August 2011. Bitcoin price didn't drop to $2 until November that year and it was $7.5-8 when the article was published.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2011-08-06zeg2011-08-08ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

Nonetheless, the price drop was huge and many people who were new to bitcoin or who were into it only because of the "free money" they got from mining were disappointed.

[dell123]

It was a no brainer to begin with when the ASIC's started coming out. Had a few quid floating around and nothing better to spend it on than a machine than would make more money lol. Never looked back since, certainly one of the wisest decisions I've ever made. It can be quite difficult at first if you're not 100% sure what you're doing but once you get the hang of it it's actually really fun. Steep learning curve to get the most out of the equipment you may have but worth it without a doubt.

Long live mining!

[crazyates]

I had heard about Bitcoin from a few online articles and stories, and thought it was cool, but never really got into it. Months later, I read a Gizmodo article back in 2011 about how Bitcoin was dying because the price had dropped from $31 to like $2.

That article is from August 2011. Bitcoin price didn't drop to $2 until November that year and it was $7.5-8 when the article was published.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2011-08-06zeg2011-08-08ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

Nonetheless, the price drop was huge and many people who were new to bitcoin or who were into it only because of the "free money" they got from mining were disappointed.

Right. I read the article in August, but didn't start right away. By the time I had a few coins to start looking to spend, the price was $2.

[ISAWHIM]

Funny thing for me... I was introduced to bitcoins (had known about them before), by a friend who I was planning a minor gold-mining expedition with. I took a second look at the coins, and honestly didn't know the details of it, but my gut said stay away. Major red flags, and lack of info at the time... (Went with silver instead... Which was just as wise a choice. More reliable and better possibility of an actual return, which it did give a return on.)

One year later it went from about $14/BTC to $250/BTC, and I was kicking myself in the ass for telling him, and myself not to get involved in it.

To not miss the boat again, I jumped in, but not fast enough. Spent about $4000 on equipment, made about 25% back before BTC just wasn't worth mining, a month later when all the ASIC's started pouring-in.

Now I happily mine a long list of alt-coins. Making roughly 300-500% more than if I were mining BTC. (Mining and trading.) Sadly watching as BTC lowers in value, per hash, making everyone less money, except those few with major machines. Essentially blowing the majority of initial investors out onto the streets.

Now the streets are littered with tons of other options that mine with more reward. Even with all the variety and redistributed miners, they are quickly smothering BTC, faster than the greedy few ASIC miners in the ASIC war for our money. In the end, they will have all the coins and can trade them with themselves. We will continue to use alt-coins, since we are the majority with the majority of the money they want.

My life in BTC was short and uneventful and a waste of time. Once I hit my ROI, I will be investing in a more realistic and less sloppy transaction processor that doesn't kill GPU's and waste my time processing nothing for nearly nothing, when a simple lotto would have sufficed for these types of coins. So much bulk, overhead, over-complexity, and short-sightedness in design. But for most here, it is all they know, and they just accept what it does, as being acceptable. So sad.

Sea-shells reinvented as digital rape. Funny part is, you are doing the banks work, for essentially free, at your own costs. Except you are doing it 10,000-times more inefficiently. The ones making all the real money are the electric companies, your ISP's, the exchanges, paypal, credit-cards, banks, governments through legalities, and those using you to launder transactions for free. Everyone but the actual miners.

The hype is gone, the reality still sucks, and the rewards are reserved for only a few. (Rewards created by making others loose, as opposed to rewards created from anything other than theft and loss... like substance or actual payment for doing something... anything... other than finding a lotto-ticket. You can't win if you don't play... Well, you can't lose either, if you don't play. There are more losers than winners. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out... only stubborn hope to ignore the obvious.)

[bflmarket5]

Coworker mentioned it. Been intrigued ever since.

[tiger129]

I forgot how. 

[Cluster2k]

In early 2011 I saw a headline on slashdot about bitcoin's price crossing $1.  I didn't take much notice then, but a few weeks later was puzzled as to why the cracking rate on Distributed.Net's RC5-72 challenge was dropping off.  Where were the GPUs going that were previously used on that?  That's when I did some digging around and saw they could be used for bitcoin.  Been following and mining bitcoin ever since.

[Cluster2k]

Now I happily mine a long list of alt-coins. Making roughly 300-500% more than if I were mining BTC. (Mining and trading.) Sadly watching as BTC lowers in value, per hash, making everyone less money, except those few with major machines. Essentially blowing the majority of initial investors out onto the streets.

Bitcoin was always about making a bank free transaction system, not about making people guaranteed double digit returns.  The former is the feature, the latter a side effect that can cease to exist.  There are already more than enough bitcoins out there for the few businesses that use them to adequately transfer money.  Users of bitcoins don't care one bit how much processing time, hardware, or power was used to create the bitcoin.  To the end user it doesn't matter whether they're using a bitcoin generated on a Pentium 4 in 2010 or an ASIC today. 

There are more than enough hobbyists, true believers and people with vested interest in bitcoin to continue mining long after it's no longer profitable to do so.  Mining didn't cease in late 2011 when the price collapsed 90% from its bubble.

[Buster]

10 February 2011
SecurityNow Live stream
Browsed around here and saw many posters claiming that mining is dead.
I ignored them

[hayek]

I got out of tech at one point in early adulthood. I joined the military.

While I was out being a storm trooper for George Bush/Barack Obama apparently a lot of crazy awesome stuff happened. I was skeptical/depressed when I got back and missed the first couple years. I didn't even take bitcoin seriously. Around January was when I seriously looked at it and started getting involved.

[atlosas]

I read an article about tor and decided to check it out. Best decision ever