Hi,
Thanks for all the points.
I have been looking at the pages here:
http://www.cryptobadger.com/2013/04/build-a-litecoin-mining-rig-hardware/http://www.coinminingrigs.comhttp://dustcoin.com/miningIt seems that mining scrypt based coins at around 2000 kH/s is similar to mining bitcoins at 50-100 GH/s.
I thought the value of bitcoins is increasing partly to keep up with the cost of mining hardware. But the scrypt based mining seems much more affordable for a similar income.
How is this? It seems that the value of litecoin is linked to bitcoin, how/why? And how are the rates set for all the other coins?How important is the motherboard and CPU for scrypt-coin mining? I already have an i7 based PC that is not used much, but without a good graphics card. Would buying one or two of the graphics cards mentioned (eg the AMD R9 280x) and just hooking them up to my current system be a good way to get going?
What considerations are there when choosing motherboard and CPU? Case considerations are of course due to airflow!
All alt-coins are linked to bitcoin . Because they are clones.
You can't do anything with smc,ppc, bbqc, cnc,mghts,hulalac , just exchange them to cash and bitcoin.
They have no practical use.
It's not that simple. There are some minor and major differences for most of the alt-coin designs.
As an example, the litecoin blockchain period was explicitly designed to have faster confirmation times than bitcoin. That alone is considered to be a practical use. I'm not trying to suggest that litecoin is automatically going to be more widely adopted or accepted, or that it is "the best alt-coin" ... I don't even like all these alt-coins, but it's important to note that aside from using a blockchain to store transactions & being distributed / replicated in a similar way as bitcoin, there are several alt-coins which aren't linked to bitcoin in their design.
Not just litecoin with the faster transaction confirmation times, and radically different (
harder to build ASICs for) scrypt-based proof-of-work system, but what about namecoin?
...bitcoin itself wasn't able to be used as an alternative to the world's globally resolvable DNS architecture... namecoin seems to show some real promise compared to some of the past attempts at creating alternative top-level domains (
I've never seen any of those projects catch on like namecoin has, at least not in a sustainable way, and certainly none which are completely zero-trust in design like namecoin)
That said, I don't much like namecoin either. It has it's novelty for now, but unless it somehow becomes globally resolvable, I won't feel comfortable adopting such a domain name system for anything mission-critical.
The only "direct" clone of bitcoin I'm aware of is ixcoin. It's basically an unmodified version of the bitcoin network, except for very minor changes like using a different TCP/IP port, storing the transactions in its own blockchain, and changing the addressing scheme (namely, starting with an "x")
As for the topic of this thread... yes, mining is viable. Most of the newer bitcoin mining hardware can remain profitable until the bitcoin network difficulty starts to reach into the tens of billions (
currently it's not even up to 1 billion) ... and if the exchange rate continues to stay close to or over $1000 USD (
or pick whichever currency you use to pay your electric bill) there is hardware coming soon which might even manage to remain profitable when network difficulty is in the 100s of billions.
I don't have a crystal ball though. I can't see the future so I can't say for certain how much profit a person will have at X electricity cost for X hardware with X efficiency and for how long they'll have that level of profitability until the network difficulty increases due to X even newer hardware coming out with even better energy efficiency...
It really comes down to considering how much energy it's costing you to run your mining... There are quite a few bitcoin (and alt-coin) miners out there who are still able to profit from mining.
Yes. It's viable, and over the coming years it will still be viable, but maybe not for any and all alt-coins. Do some research and check your math, and at least try to figure out your profit margin and what it'll take for your profits to drop to zero
BEFORE you invest into hardware, time, and electrical energy for mining a crypto-coin.