bitcoin mining?

[Joepublic2]

Originally Posted by dajeepster

that's my point... it's not 100%.. i did explain it better in my last thread... but you one posted up on me.. but if you actually read my post that your are refering to.. there's no thesis there (just that i took the thesis route for my masters)

It's all good I didn't realize were were having an engineering minded argument. We are the best kind of correct; technically correct.

[dajeepster]

Originally Posted by Joepublic2

It's all good I didn't realize were were having an engineering minded argument.

that's why i normally just crack jokes around my family and friends... otherwise i get these blank looks. I'd much rather hear their laughs than their silence.

[allenk09]

I made 0.013 bitcoins in 5 hours, not worth it.

[Chiropteran]

Originally Posted by allenk09

I made 0.013 bitcoins in 5 hours, not worth it.

Sounds about right.

[Crisis!]

Bitcoin mining would have been a lot more profitable for early adopters, but from now on the value is just going down quickly as the difficulty increases, it isn't worth it anymore.

[Chiropteran]

Originally Posted by Crisis!

Bitcoin mining would have been a lot more profitable for early adopters, but from now on the value is just going down quickly as the difficulty increases, it isn't worth it anymore.

Unlikely. There would be no incentive to mine if difficulty increased and value dropped beyond a certain point. If the miners quit mining, difficulty drops.

I'm not saying bitcoins can't fail, I could see the downward value trend continuing hypothetically- but if it did difficulty would not continue to rise indefinitely. A real "failure" would lead to bitcoins going down to less than 1 penny each, and difficulty dropping to 1/100 of what it is right now. It can get worse than it is, but there is an eventual limit where miners quit in droves and things turn around.

[MrTeal]

Originally Posted by dajeepster

don't get me wrong.. I think he's basically right also... except the 100% power is converted to heat part

Now if he said that 100% power is converted to one form of energy or another, such as heat, light, kinetic and whatever else i'm forgeting right now. then i can find no fault in that statement.

If you want to claim that it's not 100% efficient, you have to provide a viable path for energy to exit the system of your home. I will give you that it is likely not actually 100% efficient, but it's probably five 9s or so. Keep in mind your computer might generate noise, which is a pressure wave and not directly heat, but the vast majority of that would still be absorbed within the confines of your house. The heat of the tower could emit blackbody radiation, but hopefully the outside of your tower isn't more than a few degrees above ambient. You could argue that the bitcoin traffic causes a loss of energy from your house system when your cable/dsl modem is transmitting, but I would guess even if that case the effect is vanishingly small. You could say the same about light; if you have a crapload of LEDs on the outside of your case, and there's a window nearby and some light escapes, you might lose a few microwatts at best, but that's about it.

Really, the wear and tear argument is totally valid, especially if you're running at full fan speed and elevated temperature. The noise being annoying is also very valid. That claim that bitcoin mining is wasteful of energy when the home is already being heated by electricity is completely wrong though, from an HVAC perspective it's just as efficient as a baseboard heater and you have the bonus of doing useful work at the same time.

nope... that's completely wrong.. unless it's on fire.. then you'll also get that caustic smoke too.

Originally Posted by dajeepster

heat from a computer is wasted energy... if you're converting 100% of that power from the computer to heat.. i'd be calling 911 NOW...cause it's on fire.

That makes no sense. If your rig was on fire, you would be converting chemical energy into heat, not electrical.
You're an EE, so this should be a fairly easy example. Do a mental energy balance on a hypothetical system. It consumes 500W. At the start, it is not expelling 500W of heat as it's cold. Some of the energy is used to raise the components above ambient and is stored in the system. As the system warms up, it eventually reaches equilibrium with the environment and temperatures stabilize. You're still pumping 500W into it, so where is that energy going?
1) Heat
2) Sound
3) Light
Nothing to do with lighting anything on fire.
2 is vanishingly small. If your system is producing 60dB@1m, the total power of the pressure wave is 12.6uW. Almost all of that would be absorbed be the air or walls before it ever exited the house.
3 is also tiny. The system will emit blackbody IR, but even if there are a lot of windows in the room any kind of coated window is designed to keep that in the house. The actual amount of energy that will be lost to light will be tiny, and wouldn't actually be much different than a baseboard heater anyway.

[dajeepster]

Originally Posted by MrTeal

That makes no sense. If your rig was on fire, you would be converting chemical energy into heat, not electrical.

caustic smoke is a reference to a chemical fire

and you also missed the joke

[Chiropteran]

Hmm, this might be the beginning of the end for GPU mining.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65752.0

Not sure if these are FPGA or ASIC or what.

For $600, you can buy a BFL single which does over 800mhash at around 80watts. That beats the 7970 for efficiency and cost. Some older cards are still a better deal in the $/mhash measure but over time the electricity usage will make them more expensive.

Still, 7970 has a huge advantage in that you can also use it to game, and it would be a lot easier to resell if this whole bitcoin thing fails. I'm not really in a position to upgrade my mining operation in any way at all right now, so it's not a huge concern for me.

Just something to think about long term, eventually these sort of devices may make it unprofitable to GPU mine.

[airdata]

Oh wow...

$600/800+mh and very little power usage. Indeed a game changer for mining.

They also have another listed that does 50,000MH but no pricing or anything on their site.

[MrTeal]

Originally Posted by airdata

Oh wow...

$600/800+mh and very little power usage. Indeed a game changer for mining.

They also have another listed that does 50,000MH but no pricing or anything on their site.

The price is listed on their site, $25000. That's 2MHash/$, which is crazy. I'm supposed to be picking up four 5850s today for $430, but things like this make me rethink it. Two BFL singles would give me slightly more MHash, but with 1/5 the electricity cost.

[airdata]

Originally Posted by MrTeal

The price is listed on their site, $25000. That's 2MHash/$, which is crazy. I'm supposed to be picking up four 5850s today for $430, but things like this make me rethink it. Two BFL singles would give me slightly more MHash, but with 1/5 the electricity cost.

Exactly.

When I had my mining set up... my house was rather rediculous. My office was a piping 90+ and super loud.

With these I could have a more efficient setup than what I had before just sitting on my desk. I don't plan on sinking any more money into btc at the moment though. Surely these guys have thousands of these on back order.

[dajeepster]

Originally Posted by Chiropteran

Hmm, this might be the beginning of the end for GPU mining.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65752.0

Not sure if these are FPGA or ASIC or what.

For $600, you can buy a BFL single which does over 800mhash at around 80watts.

i want one... just to play with..

[airdata]

Originally Posted by dajeepster

i want one... just to play with..

I'd consider buying a couple if difficulty were lower.

If they use 85w for real that would only be around 25-30 cents per day in electricity usage. When I had my set up going I had a couple $600 electric bills

Pretty risky to invest in hardware. I'd think this would be worth if if you had existing mining hardware to sell in order to buy these. But the current estimated payoff on one of these is 278 days.

[dajeepster]

Originally Posted by airdata

I'd consider buying a couple if difficulty were lower.

If they use 85w for real that would only be around 25-30 cents per day in electricity usage. When I had my set up going I had a couple $600 electric bills

Pretty risky to invest in hardware. I'd think this would be worth if if you had existing mining hardware to sell in order to buy these. But the current estimated payoff on one of these is 278 days.

i want one to reverse engineer, and then build a cluster.

if i had one in hand, i know i could reverse engineer it.

[Darkstar757]

Originally Posted by dajeepster

i want one to reverse engineer, and then build a cluster.

if i had one in hand, i know i could reverse engineer it.

YGPM!

[Joseph F]

Originally Posted by Darkstar757

YGPM!

I see a plan in motion.

[Minjin]

Originally Posted by allenk09

Is it even worth it to mine right now on a GTX295? Heating my room with my GTX295 is cheaper than using my old 70's electric base heaters.

Only getting 100Mhash/s

This is exactly why I'm mining. For the heat. I can either turn the space heater on to the left of me or turn up the work on the computer to the right of me. I'm even CPU mining because I don't care one bit about "efficient" mining. Of course, when I stop needing heat, the mining will stop. I OC the computer and game in the winter. I UC the computer and minimize gaming in the summer. It's all about those laws of physics...

I get ~243 from a 6850 and 16.1 from 3 cores of my 2500k while surfing.

[Smartazz]

Originally Posted by Minjin

This is exactly why I'm mining. For the heat. I can either turn the space heater on to the left of me or turn up the work on the computer to the right of me. I'm even CPU mining because I don't care one bit about "efficient" mining. Of course, when I stop needing heat, the mining will stop. I OC the computer and game in the winter. I UC the computer and minimize gaming in the summer. It's all about those laws of physics...

I get ~243 from a 6850 and 16.1 from 3 cores of my 2500k while surfing.

I was about to ask why you would mine on a CPU until I read the later part of your statement. You should come run some BOINC projects with us. We're doing quite well on the World Community Grid leaderboard and your 2500K would be a nice help!

[Chiropteran]

Originally Posted by blastingcap

It's not a panic selling because of TH. Get your facts straight. Paxum backed out of bitcoins and TH used them to process transactions. Anyone who was using Paxum is now screwed.

How long before Dwolla and others follow suit and cave in to government pressure?

Once you knock out Dwolla and Paxum, the value of bitcoins will be zero.

If there were a way to short bitcoins I'd short so hard right now.

Hum. Value has been bouncing back up, high of $5 today. The rumor of bitcoin's demise has been greatly exaggerated.

[Lonbjerg]

http://bitcoinmedia.com/compromised-...et-and-others/

[railven]

Originally Posted by Lonbjerg

http://bitcoinmedia.com/compromised-...et-and-others/

Makes me glad I cashed about when they were going for about ~$16 a pop.

Outside of power costs, I made huuuuuge profits from my little trip down bitmine lane.

[Elcs]

Still wondering if I should bother getting my 6870 CrossfireX setup doing this work.

I'm just not sure that the value per bitcoin is worth the power cost.

[MrTeal]

Depends on the value of BTC and the power cost. Based on some conservative estimates from my setup (I get 320MHash@180W using a single 6870), if you got 600MHash@300W and paid US$0.20/kWh your breakever point would be about US$3.6/BTC. Realistically you could probably do better for MHash/W, and if your power costs were lower that would help as well.

[airdata]

Originally Posted by Elcs

Still wondering if I should bother getting my 6870 CrossfireX setup doing this work.

I'm just not sure that the value per bitcoin is worth the power cost.

Unless the difficulty level drastically drops, no.

When I first ventured into mining ( WAYYY late ) difficulty was ~200k. By the time I had my maximum setup going, it was at least 1,000,000. Current difficulty is 1,496,979 and supposed to drop a tiny bit.

You'd need a setup pumping @ 10-20Gh w\ hardware paid for to be thinking of making a profit.

Running 2 6870's full boar 24/7 is going to likely use more electricity than money made mining btc.

Also, at some point blocks will yield 25 bitcoins instead of 50... if this has not happened already. So at that point you're going to get 1/2 the yield for the same amount of work.