BitCoin: making money with DC - literally!

[Rezin777]

Difficulty is a bummer. Our cards being sold out on NewEgg is a bummer. We will keep mining and building more rigs nonetheless. The profits are still here, they just aren't as crazy as they used to be.

Depends on how you look at it.

If you cash out your Bitcoins at the end of every day, and that is your definition of profit, mining today is more profitable than when I started.

But if you consider Bitcoins themselves as the profit, then yes, it's much more difficult to make profit now.

 

[petrusbroder]

Interesting read over at Ars Technica!

 

[YoungGun21]

Depends on how you look at it.

If you cash out your Bitcoins at the end of every day, and that is your definition of profit, mining today is more profitable than when I started.

But if you consider Bitcoins themselves as the profit, then yes, it's much more difficult to make profit now.

Profit for us is measured in USD, a currency that will not crash overnight.

 

[Ken g6]

Profit for us is measured in USD, a currency that will not crash overnight.

Well, that's a topic for P&N.

As for BitCoins, they did crash overnight!

 

[petrusbroder]

Well, BitCoin is going down.
MtGox (USD) from 23,94 to 17.26. That is -27.9%
BitMarketEUR (EUR) from 18.45 to 13.2, that is -28.65%

OTOH: it has really increased a tremendous amount during the past few days and this may be a adjustment which corresponds to the too big increase in value.
It may be that the air is let out from the past week's bubbling.
It may also be the first sign of a collapse, but I hope not, because then many will be much poorer and a few will be much richer ...
Only time will tell.

 

[YoungGun21]

That isn't a crash at all. Can't be too picky here, $30 was ridiculous. In a month it went from $2 to $30 and all the naysayers called it a scam. Now it drops from $30 to $15 in a couple days and everyone says it is over and done with.

Mind you that even at $15 per 1 BTC I'm still going to make about $125 this week. No tears here.

 

[YoungGun21]

Price was down to $10 yesterday, now back up over $22.

Every new market is volatile as hell. +-50% in one day is normal.

 

[Rezin777]

Mind you that even at $15 per 1 BTC I'm still going to make about $125 this week. No tears here.

I hear you. If Bitcoins trade for less than $2 dollars a coin, at current difficulty, I might think about shutting down my miners.

The volatility is bringing the trolls out of hiding though! When the price was dropping to the insane rates of the previous week, people were spamming bitcoin.org with "Wahahahaha, bitcoiners are fools" threads left and right. 9 out of 10 threads were gloating over the death of Bitcoin.

Quite exciting if you ask me. I haven't had so much fun on the internet since... well since the internet.

I don't think speculators will be able to kill Bitcoin. A technical failure or a superior replacement, that is what will kill Bitcoin.

 

[dmcowen674]

Feds are jumping on this quick:

6-9-2011

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20070268-17/senators-target-bitcoin-currency-citing-drug-sales/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Senators target Bitcoin currency, citing drug sales

Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency floating around the Web, is now being targeted by two prominent senators.​

Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have written a letter to both Attorney General Eric Holder and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Michele Leonhart expressing their desire for the organizations to take down an online marketplace known as "Silk Road," which allows customers to buy illegal drugs, including cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and marijuana.

The senators said this about Bitcoin in their letter to the government agencies:

The only method of payment for these illegal purchases is an untraceable peer-to-peer currency known as Bitcoins. After purchasing Bitcoins through an exchange, a user can create an account on Silk Road and start purchasing illegal drugs from individuals around the world and have them delivered to their homes within days
​

Hackers also commonly use Bitcoin for donations.​

​

​

​

​

 

[gorobei]

does downloading affect mining?

i get connection problems with btc guild every couple of shares, nothing major just idle for a second or two or ten. i set up another miner with slush that picks up the previously idle hashrate during the connection problem. is that just the pool server or does downloading affect connection?

 

[YoungGun21]

does downloading affect mining?

i get connection problems with btc guild every couple of shares, nothing major just idle for a second or two or ten. i set up another miner with slush that picks up the previously idle hashrate during the connection problem. is that just the pool server or does downloading affect connection?

Downloading should not affect anything. This uses very, very little bandwidth.

As for govt. going after BTC, they can try but....

 

[wbynum]

does downloading affect mining?

i get connection problems with btc guild every couple of shares, nothing major just idle for a second or two or ten. i set up another miner with slush that picks up the previously idle hashrate during the connection problem. is that just the pool server or does downloading affect connection?

BTC Guild is overloaded and has been DDOS'ed like the rest over the last couple days. Mainly the idles are from them being overloaded though.

 

[snor]

Volatility in the Bitcoin market is not so steady as seen by the fluctuations during the day. That being said, there is gigantic risk in every way imaginable in terms of investments.

1. Market risk: This is inherent in any investments. It is enormous compared to any mature market.
2. Liquidity risk: There is not a wide enough market breadth to trade easily enough to prevent loss or simply cash out.
3. Operational risk: There is some minor legal risk of trying to use this and exchange for government issued money. It also assumes the encryption cannot be broken.

If one were to use these uneven risks to his advantage, one can profit by currency arbitrage. But at the end of the day, some large company has to accept it in order to prevent people from just cashing out instead of using it.

 

[VinylxScratches]

I am confused as to how to mine? I downloaded the client but I don't see a Mine setting... any ideas?

 

[Rezin777]

I am confused as to how to mine? I downloaded the client but I don't see a Mine setting... any ideas?

Mining with the Bitcoin client is CPU mining and basically pointless. Mining is done these days with AMD GPUs, usually in a pool.

I would go to bitcoin.org and look for stickies in the mining forum.

 

[Rezin777]

Feds are jumping on this quick:

It amazes me these people get elected to office. Brilliant, outlaw the tool instead of going after the criminal. I'm shocked air travel wasn't banned after 9/11.

Anyway, good luck to them, they will need it.

 

[YoungGun21]

You can also check out the thread we have going in the Video cards & graphics subforum

 

[petrusbroder]

A Bitcoin miner claimes that a hacker has stolen his coins. Here is the article. Here is the link to the bitcoin forum.
Now it is getting even more complicated: check here! And here is some more info.

This could of course happen to any currency which is purely electronic, or real or what ever.
So you can't hold that against BitCoin, rather against the miner who has had insufficient computer security (proven by the fact that the money was stolen).

 

[YoungGun21]

That sucks! 25,000 BTC....

Just more negative press that people will use to try to shut this down, even though like you said, it is just as easy to steal physical money.

 

[petrusbroder]

Unless BTC is outlawed in most countries, this can not be shut down (if I understand BitCoin and the way of doing transactions correctly).

 

[Ken g6]

That sucks! 25,000 BTC....

At current prices, that's 1/2 million dollars!

:hmm: If I'd started mining BitCoins when I started this thread, I could have 1/2 millon dollars! :'(

 

[Rezin777]

Is all this worth doing? Well, that's the 64,000 BitCoin question, isn't it? :hmm:

:hmm: If I'd started mining BitCoins when I started this thread, I could have 1/2 millon dollars! :'(

I assume you answered your original question incorrectly?

 

[dajeepster]

I know i was a nay sayer at first... but now that there is more information out there and more articles to research... my interest is now sparked.

and since all my hardware is payed for, but just sitting idle, i'm going to start up a few of my rigs and play with this for a little while, although i won't be running this on my main rig, not until i get a warm fuzzy feeling about the security of the system.

I've run it on one system so far for 8 hours, until i lost internet connectivity (stupid thunderstorm).. got .25 BC so far in the deepbit pool... and the system isn't optimized yet... appearently there's some optimization programs out there.

but the system i'm running it on is:
i7 940 with (3) 5850 all running on water all at stock speeds.

 

[petrusbroder]

Now that BitCoin has a big value malware tries to steal it:

Article @ ars technica
Symantec's summary
blog from Symantec
from Bitcoin Miner

Please keep your computer security up-to-date!

 

[Wangstang]

If I understand this all correctly, bitcoin minning is a bit like leasing your computer's processing power to a third party but in a competitive manner. By competitive I mean that you only get paid for providing results first...or one of the first if they use a second or third party/group to "proof" the solutions.

Multiple people are given the same question/task to complete but only the first person to find the solution gets money for the task. If you join a "pool" you are given a more difficult problem for the group to process but your group may not be the only group tasked with the question so if your group can't process the problem and find the solution before another pool, your pool doesn't get paid.

Is all of that right?

Questions:

One thing I don't get is how or why CPU processing power doesn't have as big of an impact or cotribution to finding the solution compared to an add on video card.

Another thing I don't get is what makes one video card more succesful at this than another. I've heard mention of ATI being the only ones that work and other posts indicate that NaVida's cards can do the work 2-3 times more effectively than ATI.

If there is something that makes a video card more effecient at the job of processing the problems, why hasn't a card been rolled out that works through PCIe 16x slots that does nothing but BitCoin mine instead of actually outputing video?

Or for that matter, is there a way to configure a multicore computer to do nothing but BitCoin Mine full time instead of just at "idle" times in a way that's more effecient than using your video card?

Heck...would configuring something like a Tivo or Roku work better than a standard desktop?

On the pools...How many people are in each of these pools? Would an average size pool be 50-60 people or are we talking thousands? Can I start my own pool with 4 computers I have at my house? Can I join a pool and use the 4 computers to get a larger share compared to someone using just one?

Thanks
Wes