Mining - is it really worth the effort?

[Teach]

Man, this stuff gets technical fast.  What;s to stop opponents of this medium of exchange from mining it into value-less-ness with a high frequency trading set up?

[Xephan]

Man, this stuff gets technical fast.  What;s to stop opponents of this medium of exchange from mining it into value-less-ness with a high frequency trading set up?

They'll need to have a lot more processing power than the entire legit bitcoin network I believe in order to mine enough coins to trade at high frequency and high enough volume to make a difference. And given that we might have the largest hashing capacity network in existence, that would take a fair bit of cash and hardware, which might drive the cost of hardware cheaper for legit miners and so make it even harder for them to crash it.

[bitcon]

if the price of bitcoins keep falling like it has been, its going to be a loss for some miners.  if the price starts to creep back up near the $20usd/btc then it might be worth it.  just mine and hold.... and hope the price goes back up to $30 or more if you want to see a ROI.

[damon1492]

Given the time and electricity cost, only those very high end card can generate a profit

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

well its kinda true i was working with hd5850 not so good,

not i did a major upgrade and doing 24Ghash/s and its kinda awesome thinking going solo!

[eraziel]

not rly to be fair, you can build a decent rig with multiple 5770 cards,
you can stack up to 5 on a simple 700w psu,
given that your mobo can accomodate them ofc, (3 regular slots + 2 on pci-e x1 risers is standard, i think)
So you have a 1ghash mining rig with a relatively cheap psu (2x5830+5850 would require at least 850w to run properly OC'ed)

Last time i checked, 5770 was one of the best at $/Mhash and W/Mhash
And it is as low-end as it gets.

[archer75]

Last time i checked, 5770 was one of the best at $/Mhash and W/Mhash
And it is as low-end as it gets.

According to the chart here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

It's still behind a 5830 and 5850 for $/Mhash

[johnyj]

Another problem is the rising difficulty each month, soon it will be only 0.1 BTC even on a machine with 1Ghash power, unless BTC rise in value quickly, I don't see a bright future

Anyway this is fun, I just bought a second hand 5870 which now runs 400Mh/s and testing