Cryptocoin Mining?

[Chiropteran]

i'm being very generous with the electricity watts and cost here. this is for a new 3 card 5830 on a single m/b with a 800w psu and hd + os ~700$.

after 3 months you are down to half your btc rate, after six your are earning 1 coin in roughly a week.


You can expect ...

You really can't expect anything when it comes to bitcoins. You can take a guess, you can make assumptions, but predicting the future based on past performance is not very effective in this case.

Heck, if BTC value kept going up at the same rate it was in early July, we would be at over $100 per BTC today. Obviously that isn't the case. You can't predict BTC dollar value increases, nor can you predict BTC difficulty increases, not for more than a week in advance.

That said, I expect one thing to remain true. Difficulty and price must coincide to some limited degree. As I mentioned earlier, electricity cost is variable. Hardware efficiency is also variable. Difficulty is based on the total hash power of the network. For difficulty to reach a point where ALL 5 series cards are "not worth it", it must first pass the point where it's not worth mining in 3X electricity cost areas. When that occurs, those miners will quit mining, and difficulty will be pushed DOWN rather than up. If difficulty continues to climb despite that (lots of newcomers), we will reach the point where 2X electricity cost is a net loss. More miners quit, difficulty pushed down more. Than we reach the point where the 1X(average electrical cost) people start losing money and quit. Difficulty pushed down more. As you reach this point, it would be very hard for the remaining minority who get electricity for below average cost to have enough hardware to push difficulty higher. Even if they can, all that could happen is eventually we would reach the point where NOBODY can make a profit. People will quit mining, difficulty will drop.

Unless... a big unless... unless BTC value goes up to compensate for the difficulty increase. If that happens, mining remains profitable, everyone doesn't quit, and things continue.

I am not saying there is an absolute link between difficulty and price where increasing difficulty by 43% results in a 43% price increase the next day. I am saying that they are loosely linked, and if difficulty continues to increase unbounded for a long period of time eventually it will be forced to correct itself in relation to price, or miners will quit en masse.

7 series, upon release, will only be a toy for the early adopters. It won't cause an immediate paradigm shift because early adopter cost and the huge existing base of 5 series hardware isn't going to disappear overnight.



Disclaimer: this is all my opinion, it makes sense to me and I'll argue in it's defense, but I can't give any guarantee. If you buy some hardware today and you can't make back your money over the next 6 months, that sucks and I'm sorry I also think there is a small but non-zero chance that the entire bitcoin system fails or collapses for some reason. If this occurs all profit from mining will vanish.

 

[4ghz]

How long do you guys think it would take to recoup $1500 at 2000 MH/s?

According to this calculator, it would be six months. But that does not account for increased difficulty.

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

Do you think I could do it in a year?

IMO It woud be very risky to dump that much money into bitcoin mining right now. The biggest risk being the US eventually outlaws bitcoins. Yeah I know blah, blah, peer to peer, can't stop it... Sure uncle Sam might not be able to shut down bitcoins but they can definitely shut down Dwolla whenever they want (just look at neteller and off shore sportsbooks). If the ability to turn bitcoins into cash disappears I would expect the coins to be almost worthless.

 

[OCGuy]

IMO It woud be very risky to dump that much money into bitcoin mining right now. The biggest risk being the US eventually outlaws bitcoins. Yeah I know blah, blah, peer to peer, can't stop it... Sure uncle Sam might not be able to shut down bitcoins but they can definitely shut down Dwolla whenever they want (just look at neteller and off shore sportsbooks). If the ability to turn bitcoins into cash disappears I would expect the coins to be almost worthless.

I've been buying them with Paypal, you dont need Dwolla.

 

[4ghz]

I've been buying them with Paypal, you dont need Dwolla.

By Dwolla I mean all payment processors. There was a time you could fund sportsbook with paypal as well. The government leaned on them and they stopped all gambling related transactions in the US. Neteller continued to process gambling transactions until the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006. Several months later I believe Neteller's founders were arrested and Neteller stopped all business in the US.

http://lawvibe.com/neteller-founders-arrested-on-conspiracy-charges/

 

[OCGuy]

By Dwolla I mean all payment processors. There was a time you could fund sportsbook with paypal as well. The government leaned on them and they stopped all gambling related transactions in the US. Neteller continued to process gambling transactions until the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006. Several months later I believe Neteller's founders were arrested and Neteller stopped all business in the US.

http://lawvibe.com/neteller-founders-arrested-on-conspiracy-charges/

The place I buy bitcons with Paypal cannot be stopped. Paypal has no idea who I am sending the money to. It isnt an exchange that requires you to load money into...it is like a craigslist for BTC, but has a escrow-type system that protects the buyer. The sellers can accept direct bank transfers, which also cant be stopped.

Before you can become a full member of this place, they require you to give them references from the internet....Ebay, Heat, etc.....this protects the sellers from the obvious "chargeback" paypal scams.

 

[DougoMan]

So I'm up and succesfully mining with a 6950 that I had on hand, and it seems like everything is working okay. I'm confused about the wallet though.

I'm running the software and have a Bitcoin address, but I do not get what happens when money is sent to it. It is stored on my computer until I upload it somewhere else?

What if my computer crashes and I need to reinstall windows.. Do I lose all the money stored on there?

And what about wallet websites like this: http://www.mybitcoin.com

Are there advantages or disadvantages to using it?

 

[YoungGun21]

So I'm up and succesfully mining with a 6950 that I had on hand, and it seems like everything is working okay. I'm confused about the wallet though.

I'm running the software and have a Bitcoin address, but I do not get what happens when money is sent to it. It is stored on my computer until I upload it somewhere else?

What if my computer crashes and I need to reinstall windows.. Do I lose all the money stored on there?

And what about wallet websites like this: http://www.mybitcoin.com

Are there advantages or disadvantages to using it?

Yes it is stored on your computer. So if you lose it, it is gone. You could store it in one of those sites, but they aren't as secure. You could leave it in your account at your favorite trading site, but history has shown us why that is a bad idea.

Basically it is not ever safe.

 

[Chiropteran]

You can make a copy of it. You can even remove it from your computer, or run it on a VM and leave the VM turned off except when you need to make a transaction. There is no need to run the wallet at all times, none at all. There are even services on the bitcoin boards to purchase an "offline wallet", where you just get the wallet's private key on a piece of paper and some sending addresses.

It's about as secure is regular cash money. You lose it, it is gone, but you are not required to keep it on your computer where it is easily stolen.

 

[dalamchops]

I have a code for dirt3 anyone wanna trade some btc for it?

 

[DougoMan]

How long does it generally take for mined unconfirmed blocks to be confirmed?

I'm using mining.bitcoin.cz and it seems to take forever. Almost all unconfirmed blocks do become confirmed, no?

 

[Chiropteran]

How long does it generally take for mined unconfirmed blocks to be confirmed?

100 blocks to confirm. Average 6 blocks/hour. 16 hours & 40 minutes on average.

 

[hdfxst]

btc guild is having the luck that deepbit was having a few days ago,overnight my unconfirmed rewards are .32 but it takes 3 day to confirm unless you donate 2.5%

 

[Aikouka]

Yes it is stored on your computer. So if you lose it, it is gone. You could store it in one of those sites, but they aren't as secure. You could leave it in your account at your favorite trading site, but history has shown us why that is a bad idea.

Basically it is not ever safe.

It doesn't really have a parallel in the real world to allude to, but the coins will still exist in the chain, but without the private key, you cannot lay claim to the coins. It's not like your wallet.dat file holds the money for you.

 

[Fhistleb]

How do you transfer the bitcoins into cash? or does it go to paypal?

I'm just wondering cause it seems like once you have bitcoins you can only really spend them on online stores who accept them.

 

[ghost recon88]

How do you transfer the bitcoins into cash? or does it go to paypal?

I'm just wondering cause it seems like once you have bitcoins you can only really spend them on online stores who accept them.

Sell them on tradehill or mtgox. After you have cash credit at those places, transfer to dwolla, and then from there transfer to your checkings account.

 

[DougoMan]

So I tried adding a couple of cards to my rig (2 6970s on top of the 6950 already in there) and holy crap -- those things make so much heat and noise it is just unbelievable.

I don't know how anyone could stand to use a mining rig as their primary computer.

 

[brownstone]

So I tried adding a couple of cards to my rig (2 6970s on top of the 6950 already in there) and holy crap -- those things make so much heat and noise it is just unbelievable.

I don't know how anyone could stand to use a mining rig as their primary computer.

It sucks...:thumbsdown:

 

[Mir96TA]

100 % GPU Usage is No Joke

 

[v8envy]

i'm being very generous with the electricity watts and cost here. this is for a new 3 card 5830 on a single m/b with a 800w psu and hd + os ~700$.

after 3 months you are down to half your btc rate, after six your are earning 1 coin in roughly a week.

...

Day 195: +0.142 BTC, Difficulty: 7.063M, 63.926 BTC

Why would you need an HD and OS? There is a USB stick mining linux distro. If you have more than one machine the others can network boot.

Also, Linux supports up to 8 GPUs per machine. Could become important if 5770/6770s get cheap enough (PCI to PCIe adapters can be had for $20/slot, so 8 GPU mboards don't have to be gamer ones. $55 mboard + extenders/adapters is probably a better call).

Anyhoo, that box will use $30-$60 per month in power, depending on where you live. So over 6 months you're talking $180-$360 in power, in addition to the upfront $700. Let's call it $900.

At $13.50 a coin, you'd get... 66 bit coins. Or roughly the same amount you'd get after mining for 6.5 months. So the question is: how much is that $700 rig going to be worth in 6.5+ months after ebay, shipping and paypal costs? My guess is: not a whole lot. Having the BTC on hand from day1 means being able to cash out when the price spikes, which may be more return than cashing out slowly over 6 months and trying to offload obsolete, undesirable hardware.

Buying or mining boils down to the same thing: expecting $/btc to go up. Way up.

 

[v8envy]

7 series, upon release, will only be a toy for the early adopters. It won't cause an immediate paradigm shift because early adopter cost and the huge existing base of 5 series hardware isn't going to disappear overnight.

I was fortunate enough to get into bitcoins in June, selling them as I mined them. This means my 5830s have *already* turned into a 580GTX over about 2 months -- and likely a pretty nice 7 series card in the fall. If difficulty only increases about 1% a day on average and BTC remain over $10, my .046c/kwhr power means I'm looking at a possible $700 + whatever I can get for 2 5830s as a video card budget come Thanksgiving. I promised myself I'd spend bitcoin winnings on GPU, and it's looking like I made a great gamble buying the 5830s instead of a 560.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

i shouldn't have waited til july to start. i saw the markets in late may and i exclaimed "ehh this is just hype"

by the time i watched it go crazy in june i was gone in asia. i figured by the time i came back the difficulty would be through the roof. instead i watched for 2 weeks and i finally pulled the trigger. stupid me.

 

[helpme]

I should have gotten into this earlier too...

I don't have any video cards that work well with this, only an old 8800GTX. However, I have 6 FPGA dev boards at work, all with PCIe interfaces, and a PCIe switch dev board (that has a ton of slots).

I modified the open source FPGA code for mining to run on the PCIe bus, loaded 2 cores per card, wrote/modified some software to feed them... and 1500MH/s @ 60 watts (total for all the cards, not including the PC). I'm trying to get them up to 3 cores per card, but the chips are freezing due to heat or power issues. They should be fine, but I haven't figured it out yet. That would get me up to 2250 MH/s and probably 13w per card.

Cool side project, too bad I didn't start this at the beginning of the year.

 

[YoungGun21]

I should have gotten into this earlier too...

I don't have any video cards that work well with this, only an old 8800GTX. However, I have 6 FPGA dev boards at work, all with PCIe interfaces, and a PCIe switch dev board (that has a ton of slots).

I modified the open source FPGA code for mining to run on the PCIe bus, loaded 2 cores per card, wrote/modified some software to feed them... and 1500MH/s @ 60 watts (total for all the cards, not including the PC). I'm trying to get them up to 3 cores per card, but the chips are freezing due to heat or power issues. They should be fine, but I haven't figured it out yet. That would get me up to 2250 MH/s and probably 13w per card.

Cool side project, too bad I didn't start this at the beginning of the year.

Those are the way of the future. Whoever can get their hands on boards like those will have the upper hand in mining.

And yes we are also kicking ourselves everyday for not finding this before May.

 

[hdfxst]

when i first heard about this the first thing that popped into my mind was nigerian scam and was to good to be true,now i wish i didn't just brush it off

 

[helpme]

Those are the way of the future. Whoever can get their hands on boards like those will have the upper hand in mining.

And yes we are also kicking ourselves everyday for not finding this before May.

I wish that FPGAs were the way to go, but the cost is pretty prohibitive. They are way more efficient when it comes to power, but the cost of each of my boards is $2,000! Since they are just sitting around at work (I already used them for some experiments, and will again in the future), I decided to put them to use.