Long time lurker jumping in

[pinkelephant]

Hello one and all

Currently in my final year of college, was first made aware of bitcoin April this year, did some very basic reading up on it all and dipped into mining for a short time.

I have a few questions for the bitcoin community which is what led me to joining here:

1. Which is the best mining application for a bunch of Macs with non admin rights?
2. Are auto switching pools best for mining?
3. Is mining worth it vs buying bitcoins?

Look forward to contributing to the forum

[1714186175]

1714186175

[1714186175]

1714186175

[faizaa123]

Hello one and all

Currently in my final year of college, was first made aware of bitcoin April this year, did some very basic reading up on it all and dipped into mining for a short time.

I have a few questions for the bitcoin community which is what led me to joining here:

1. Which is the best mining application for a bunch of Macs with non admin rights?
2. Are auto switching pools best for mining?
3. Is mining worth it vs buying bitcoins?

Look forward to contributing to the forum

I wouldn't bother using your school's computers to mine  (unless you have access to a supercomputer and are interested in wasting lots of precious computing power... hehe)

[endoc]

Hi pinkelephant,

I'm also a long time lurker of these forums - I bought my first bitcoins in May.

Questions 1 and 3 can be answered at the same time: probably not.  Normal computing power (even when using graphics cards) can not compare to the sheer computing power of ASIC miners that hit the market earlier this year.  I tried mining for a week back in May when the difficulty was 1/10th of what it is now.  After a week I didn't even mine enough to be able to withdraw from the pool :/

Regarding question 2 there are several websites that offer multi-mining pools/software but I haven't really used them due to my weak computing power.  Coin choose tells you what coin is the most profitable to mine and then sell when compared to bitcoin if you want to choose manually. http://www.coinchoose.com/

If I were you I'd spend a little money buying bitcoins now (but not more than you can afford to lose!).  Also, I wouldn't panic sell whenever the price drops significantly.  The value of bitcoins seems to always increase in the long run, like 1000% every year....

Hope this helps