Be honest, do you miss CPU/GPU mining days?

[alumar]

I was an early adopter, assigning many good ole Q6600 quadcore's to the effort and getting in big with a mini farm (at the time 4 rigs, with 5870's) burning away on slush's pool ...

Now all that fun is with the onslaught of other alternative crypto currencies that seem to pop up every other day... and countless new individuals getting into the game. The gpu mining is stronger than ever and exciting. Building rigs with 6 and even 7 gpu's just to see what they can do is a riot (expensive) but least it feeds the need for instant gratification, i.e. I can go down to my local store, pickup hardware and hash the same night. With the ASIC market however it seems to take some of that fun out of it... Waiting 9 months for my BF lab 50g/h unit kinda killed bitcoin mining for me, pushing most of my operating revenue to hedge hard on alt currencies...

Just wondering how many old troops out there feel the same way? Miss the old times?

[unblock]

Using a 2010 nvidia card right now, and 650gt in a laptop. But yeah, hearing people getting 14x+ my combined speeds on their light mining rigs does make me wish Id've gotten more serious about it a few years ago, when I first considered it (other things took priority). Though I'm a newbie to mining, I have witnessed first hand the increase in ATI/AMD card's price, and drastic decline in availability especially these past few months. Things changed so fast so quick it seemed, and with Mt Gocks or w/e I'm happy with momma dollar and poppa dollar for now. Feels good to take it slow.

[franky1]

did the guy holding the stick of dynamite in the gold mines, miss simply using a bucket and spade a few years earlier?

the old days were days of sweat. by this i mean hot spare bedrooms and garages, heated by dozens of GPU's. now a single box can do 100x the job of a GPU at roughly the same price of a top end card.

[frankenmint]

you forgot to add = for 1/1000th the reward

[MysteryMiner]

Somewhat miss the CPU/GPU days but I'm proud to have lived and participated back in 2011. Command line GPU miners, solo mining in summer heat till seals and stickers pop off from computer case. Scamcoins are not worth anything to me. I want to get Block erupter asics or similar and be again mining.

[Dafar]

You must be rich

[mb300sd]

I miss the days when my xeons were actually worth something... All my 5850s/5970s burned out long ago mining litecoins and I haven't bothered to replace them.

[MysteryMiner]

You must be rich

I was rich. Made some purchases with bad timing, became unemployed, sold all my coins again with very bad timing. Now I have exactly 0.03 USD worth of coins.

I miss the days when my xeons were actually worth something... All my 5850s/5970s burned out long ago mining litecoins and I haven't bothered to replace them.

If the GPUs are dead are You willing to give away them to me? I'm learning myself how to reball BGA chips and could use them for training.

[corebob]

If the GPUs are dead are You willing to give away them to me? I'm learning myself how to reball BGA chips and could use them for training.

I'm using mine for coins that implement a diversity of hash functions, something that makes ASIC's inefficient

[-ck]

I only miss the rewards. Especially from the 50BTC block days.

[asciicat]

Yes I do, I wish I actually mined back then though

[sickhouse]

Still mining with my GPU on GTX760, why not make some altcoins and sell?

I've tried getting my CPU started but it's been futile - always end up mining with my GPU on cgminer/bfgminer even if the versions are old.. Need help with this!

[user311]

Reaper will use GPU & CPU at the same time, which helps me get an extra 40khs.

There are coins like Yacoin, Maxcoin, and the newly GPUcoin that will allow you to use your old equipment to mine with. Coins that focus on CPU don't seem to get much hype right now to drive the price up but that also means you get a steady payout compared to pump/dump coins.

[zvs]

I was an early adopter, assigning many good ole Q6600 quadcore's to the effort and getting in big with a mini farm (at the time 4 rigs, with 5870's) burning away on slush's pool ...

Now all that fun is with the onslaught of other alternative crypto currencies that seem to pop up every other day... and countless new individuals getting into the game. The gpu mining is stronger than ever and exciting. Building rigs with 6 and even 7 gpu's just to see what they can do is a riot (expensive) but least it feeds the need for instant gratification, i.e. I can go down to my local store, pickup hardware and hash the same night. With the ASIC market however it seems to take some of that fun out of it... Waiting 9 months for my BF lab 50g/h unit kinda killed bitcoin mining for me, pushing most of my operating revenue to hedge hard on alt currencies...

Just wondering how many old troops out there feel the same way? Miss the old times?

i rarely read this section of the forum.

asic companies make asics, they use them themselves, they sell them when they cease to be profitable.  

the only time it was worth buying an ASIC was during initial development period, and essentially everyone stunk it up there, too.. except for Avalon

just imagine all those dystopian corporate ruled societies from fantasy and science fiction

[-ck]

the only time it was worth buying an ASIC was during initial development period, and essentially everyone stunk it up there, too.. except for Avalon

Nah avalon stunk it up too when they saw everyone else doing it and wondered why they didn't think of it first.

[zvs]

the only time it was worth buying an ASIC was during initial development period, and essentially everyone stunk it up there, too.. except for Avalon

Nah avalon stunk it up too when they saw everyone else doing it and wondered why they didn't think of it first.

Ah, it could be confusing, I imagine there are quite a few Avalon batches now... I was just referring to that very first batch of Avalons..

Those made the 50 (?) or so people that got them $1000 a day for a couple of months..

The second batch of Avalons I think made ppl a decent amt, but not near as much as first?  Then the third batch was priced too high & crap... I guess all subsequent ones are the same as 3rd

Oh, I do recall that you could sell that 2nd batch Avalon to some crazy people for around $15k or so...   and they were priced around $1500, right?

[MiningBuddy]

I miss mining 5btc per day from a single 5870 yeah.

[film2240]

I do miss the days when my Radeon HD6950 can make me a lot of money mining in 2011 and the really low difficulty compared to now.If BTC does lose a lot of value (seems to have a boom-bust cycle) the difficulty will simply have to drop meaning that I can start mining BTC more easily again (except now my HD6950 and my Ant miner/DualMiner combo will hash a lot more when put together) until difficulty skyrockets again.

It was a lot simpler software wise as I didn't have to contend with all the ASIC setup stuff that's more complex on PC/Mac as you have to go to the trouble of installing drivers and a lot more complex stuff vs simply installing catalyst (Open CL needs to be there for a GPU to mine) and running GUIMiner on my PC and I off I go.

I think that the difficulty's far too high,things are too complex setup wise now (since there's no standardization with 1 driver/software to use with the ASICs like there was with a GPU setup,catalyst and GUIMiner was all I needed to mine) and there are too many alt-coins that can't be all mined the same way which I find confusing (Sha-256,Scrypt,Scrypt-Jane,Scrypt-Adaptive N,Blakecoin,etc) and frustrating.

[philipma1957]

I do miss the days when my Radeon HD6950 can make me a lot of money mining in 2011 and the really low difficulty compared to now.If BTC does lose a lot of value (seems to have a boom-bust cycle) the difficulty will simply have to drop meaning that I can start mining BTC more easily again (except now my HD6950 and my Ant miner/DualMiner combo will hash a lot more when put together) until difficulty skyrockets again.

It was a lot simpler software wise as I didn't have to contend with all the ASIC setup stuff that's more complex on PC/Mac as you have to go to the trouble of installing drivers and a lot more complex stuff vs simply installing catalyst (Open CL needs to be there for a GPU to mine) and running GUIMiner on my PC and I off I go.

I think that the difficulty's far too high,things are too complex setup wise now (since there's no standardization with 1 driver/software to use with the ASICs like there was with a GPU setup,catalyst and GUIMiner was all I needed to mine) and there are too many alt-coins that can't be all mined the same way which I find confusing (Sha-256,Scrypt,Scrypt-Jane,Scrypt-Adaptive N,Blakecoin,etc) and frustrating.

for now I do btc and ltc and I have a lot of heat in my garage.

 come may or june the gpu's will have to go.

I started  aug 2012.  I used to be 11gh in gpus on bitminter a solid top 20 miner.  Now at 900gh I am not in the top 100 on bitminter.

[zvs]

I do miss the days when my Radeon HD6950 can make me a lot of money mining in 2011 and the really low difficulty compared to now.If BTC does lose a lot of value (seems to have a boom-bust cycle) the difficulty will simply have to drop meaning that I can start mining BTC more easily again (except now my HD6950 and my Ant miner/DualMiner combo will hash a lot more when put together) until difficulty skyrockets again.

It was a lot simpler software wise as I didn't have to contend with all the ASIC setup stuff that's more complex on PC/Mac as you have to go to the trouble of installing drivers and a lot more complex stuff vs simply installing catalyst (Open CL needs to be there for a GPU to mine) and running GUIMiner on my PC and I off I go.

I think that the difficulty's far too high,things are too complex setup wise now (since there's no standardization with 1 driver/software to use with the ASICs like there was with a GPU setup,catalyst and GUIMiner was all I needed to mine) and there are too many alt-coins that can't be all mined the same way which I find confusing (Sha-256,Scrypt,Scrypt-Jane,Scrypt-Adaptive N,Blakecoin,etc) and frustrating.

Hmm, are setting up ASICs really that difficult?  I've always been under the impression that it was much more difficult to set up an efficient & effective GPU farm rather than just buying some $5000 ASIC