Bitcoin Blogger: Is It Better To Buy Or Generate Bitcoins?

[FreeMoney]

I set up a Kill-a-Watt to my computer and calculated with 2200 khash/s, I was using 140 watts (monitors off). According to the calculator, I should produce a block every 14 days, 2 hours, 3 minutes, or every 338.05 hours. It would cost me 47.327 Kwh to produce a block, at 12 cents per Kwh, thats $5.68 per block, a net loser.

What is interesting is the reports of the people producing 25,000 khash/sec with their video cards in the CUDA thread. If they are using less than 1000 watts (and should be), it would be profitable again to produce, electricity wise.

Difficulty level 1000 by year end.

2000 at least imo, but my guess is 8500.

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[BitLex]

What is interesting is the reports of the people producing 25,000 khash/sec with their video cards in the CUDA thread. If they are using less than 1000 watts (and should be), it would be profitable again to produce, electricity wise.

Difficulty level 1000 by year end.

i just did a short test on the lately released cuda-client, here's the results

AMD X3 @2.8ghz
->stock client
~3800khs ~150Watt


GTX260
->puddinpop's cuda client
~33000khs ~200Watt

cpu-work isn't profitable for me anymore, i already shut down most generators at the latest diff.step,
gfx-crunching would indeed be profitable again,
i don't really wanna trust a client that fondles with my balance on it's own though, so i don't use it.
hopefully we'll see an open source client some day.


but your joking about that 1000, arent ya?
end of the year?
maybe end of the week.  

[TTBit]

using seconds from 12/18/2009 3:56:01 as base 0 (the last time difficulty was 1.0000), A y=mx+b linear regression of the log of difficulty levels:

m=2.87698e-07
b=-0.611057

use b=-363.4351 for the seconds you programmers use.

example: block 46368 was generated at 1269212064. exp(1269212064*2.87698e-07 - 363.4351) = exp(1.71409) = predicted level of 5.551602 vs actual level of 4.565162.



The correlation factor was 0.957 between the date and log of difficulty level.

This predicts future difficulty levels of:

9/30/2010 : 677.7963
10/31/2010 : 1,464.7148
11/30/2010 : 3,087.5334
12/31/2010 : 6,672.1461
1/31/2011 : 14,418.4781
2/28/2011 : 28,919.2776
3/31/2011 : 62,494.4307
4/30/2011 : 131,734.6149
5/31/2011 : 284,677.9188
6/30/2011 : 600,084.4486
12/31/2011 : 58,149,375.6523

If the trend continues, it will be quite difficult to generate coins in the near future 

[Immanuel]

I don't like the total cost of the computer. You could do without the keyboard, mouse, monitor. In addition, get the cheapest RAM stick you can find, a cheap 8GB SSD (energy saving) then install Debian 5. Access it through SSH and turn on bitcoin. You could easily do it to $300-$500 less and cut power costs by getting a high-efficiency PSU.

[Anonymous]

Someone should set up a newegg affiliate program and recommend the best bitcoin generation gear.

[Immanuel]

Someone should set up a newegg affiliate program and recommend the best bitcoin generation gear.

Once the GPU client gets perfected, I'm going to get a GTX 465, throw in a cheap dual-core CPU, 512MB RAM, and a case/cpu combo; then I am going place it in a closet and let it print Bitcoins for a year or two. It's about a $500 investment but with patience and careful energy management it might profit.

[satoshi]

AMD X3 @2.8ghz
->stock client
~3800khs ~150Watt

Did you try -4way?

How many hashes can I expect with a 24 core machine? I have a quad-core generating 4,300 hashes-per-second, so I am estimating a 24-core machine could mine bitcoins at 25,000 hashes-per-second.

AMD Phenom (I think 4-core) CPUs are doing about 11,000khps with -4way, about 100% speedup.  24 cores should get 66,000khps.  AMD is the best choice because it has the best SSE2 implementation. (or maybe because tcatm had an AMD and optimised his code for that)

There's been so much else to do that I haven't had time to make -4way automatic.  For now you still have to do it manually.
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=820.0

[BitLex]

AMD X3 @2.8ghz
->stock client
~3800khs ~150Watt

Did you try -4way?

not 'til now,
i just did, no difference at all with or without the switch it seems,
tested systems
AMD x3 720 winXPx64
AMD x2 5000+ winXPx32
AMD x2 BE-2350 win7x64

[LZ]

Afaik, -4way is for *nix only.

[BitLex]

i guessed that, that's why i never used it before,
but satoshi asked (after me posting cuda-WIN-client-results), so i just tried.