Cryptocoin Mining?

[Zargon]

around 7-800 mhash

Can anyone briefly explain how addresses work? I'm used to PayPal where you sign in with an email address and then see your balance. So far all I have done is load up the bitcoin client, and it generated an address for me. Is this where I receive bitcoins at? How do I manage accounts or addresses? Any best practice tips for a newbie?

you are pretty spot on yes

technically everytime you do a transaction your wallet address changes, but you can still receive at the address you started with

 

[Chiropteran]

Well, one point still remains. The difficulty is going to double during 2012. So at some point here it will halve. This calculation includes cheap $0.07/kWh electricity, so it would take a long time to pay off a card.

The doubling is interesting (assuming you are taslking about when the bounty is reduced to 20 coins), because it's not the same as a difficulty increase. A difficulty increase is intended to keep the overall rate of coin generation the same, just accounting for new hardware on the scene. The halving of the bounty, however, will reduce the total output of coins by 50%, for everyone.

Thinking about this in a supply/demand sort of way, I see a few scenarios-

1- Mass miner exodus, as all the miners who were barely breaking even are now losing money to mine. Difficulty drops over time, eventually equilibrium is reached where if you are in an area with cheaper electricity you can make some money.

2- Coin supply cut in half, miners are selling half as many coins as before, coin value shoots up. Value might not double exactly, but coin value will go up enough to keep many miners in business, else it reverts into scenario 1 above.

3- Some combination of the two above.

4- Worst case scenario, all the miners who quit dump all their current coins on the market, saying "F this", market temporarily flooded so value of BTC goes down instead of up as I would expect. This causes more miners to quit, as mining profit is even worse, chain reaction, until only a small fraction of the original miners remain. With such a small mining population, it takes a long long time to reach the next difficulty change. When it's reached, mining becomes nearly profitable again, but it's too late, the damage has been done.


I don't think the 4th scenario is very realistic, but it is a small possibility and so I wouldn't bet the house on bitcoins.


In other news, I've installed a bitcoin miner on my llano laptop just out of curiosity as to what the APU can do. 32 mhash, about what I'd expect. I need to see how much power it draws from the wall while mining before I make a call on if it's worth mining with it or not.

 

[suklee]

around 7-800 mhash



you are pretty spot on yes

technically everytime you do a transaction your wallet address changes, but you can still receive at the address you started with

How do I manage these addresses? If I install bitcoin on another computer, I assume I'd get a different address. I would lose the original coin then?

 

[Chiropteran]

How do I manage these addresses? If I install bitcoin on another computer, I assume I'd get a different address. I would lose the original coin then?

You would still have the coins on your first computer, they wouldn't be lost. Each time you install the software on a new computer you are making a completely new wallet. If you want to keep your existing wallet, you need to follow a special procedure to copy your "wallet.dat" file. It used to be fairly simple, but now the program encrypts the files so I am not sure what it involves.

If you lose your system with your wallet installed, you do lose those coins- unless you have a backup somewhere.

 

[MrTeal]

I have a quick question. I've just tried setting up GUIminer on my work computer, but seems that the corporate firewall is killing port 8332 and I have no control over that. Is there an easy way for me to route though a different port and still connect to slush's pool?

 

[dajeepster]

I have a quick question. I've just tried setting up GUIminer on my work computer, but seems that the corporate firewall is killing port 8332 and I have no control over that. Is there an easy way for me to route though a different port and still connect to slush's pool?

if you value your job, i don't recommend doing it on a work computer.. imho

 

[MrTeal]

if you value your job, i don't recommend doing it on a work computer.. imho

I probably won't, my limited understanding is that the ~40Mhash/s I'd get from a quadro 600 probably aren't worth the time. I just want to try playing around with a couple miners on my lunch break and having the port blocked is making that impossible.

 

[dajeepster]

I probably won't, my limited understanding is that the ~40Mhash/s I'd get from a quadro 600 probably aren't worth the time. I just want to try playing around with a couple miners on my lunch break and having the port blocked is making that impossible.

honestly... i'd leave it at home.. unless you own the company

there's been a few high profile cases of poeple getting fired from thier jobs for running seti@home on work computers.

Let me google that for you

 

[IGemini]

So 40 Mhash probably isn't worth your time (it REALLY isn't, you'll net less than 1 cent for every hour spent crunching, and that's assuming no cost at all), and you probably won't lose your job, but you want to try anyway just to "play around?"

Just don't. There's nothing to gain from it, ESPECIALLY if you own the company. You'll expend more in power cost than you'd make crunching bitcoins.

 

[MrTeal]

So 40 Mhash probably isn't worth your time (it REALLY isn't, you'll net less than 1 cent for every hour spent crunching, and that's assuming no cost at all), and you probably won't lose your job, but you want to try anyway just to "play around?"

Just don't. There's nothing to gain from it, ESPECIALLY if you own the company. You'll expend more in power cost than you'd make crunching bitcoins.

Jeez, you guys are a tough crowd. Perhaps I should have been more clear. I just got a new card at home, and figured I'd use it to mine BC while it's not in use. Since I wasn't at home and I just started reading up on mining, I tried downloading a couple miners while at work to fiddle with during my lunch break. They don't work through the firewall, but I figured if there was an easy workaround I'd still give it a shot. Since apparently that isn't the case, I'll just wait until tonight to play around with them.

 

[Vesku]

Not knowing your employer, people are just giving you some cautious advice. Companies can be quite sensitive to such things, as has been linked.

 

[Smartazz]

Yeah, it'd be a shame to get fired over something so stupid.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Is it worth it to do this anymore? How much time would it take for the card to pay for itself and actually give me money back ? I'm looking at the bincoin site and the best deal for a new card is the HD 6770. I will not be buying used, so would that be a good deal for $100 or would you recommend something else? I could get one of them now and another one in the future since my motherboard has two physical PCIe x16 slots free. Something to keep in mind is that electricity costs here are astronomical at around 22 cents/kWh

 

[Smartazz]

Axel, it only makes sense if you already own an AMD card.

 

[Vesku]

Doesn't make sense at your electricity cost, at 10 cents/kWh one of the popular bitcoin calculators said it would take over a year to recoup initial hardware costs. If your interested in playing with bitcoin it would make the most sense to buy some with dollars when it's on a low swing.

 

[MrTeal]

Is it worth it to do this anymore? How much time would it take for the card to pay for itself and actually give me money back ? I'm looking at the bincoin site and the best deal for a new card is the HD 6770. I will not be buying used, so would that be a good deal for $100 or would you recommend something else? I could get one of them now and another one in the future since my motherboard has two physical PCIe x16 slots free. Something to keep in mind is that electricity costs here are astronomical at around 22 cents/kWh

According to this site...
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/
that setup would be pretty marginal at that electricity rate, especially if you're using AC down where you are.

For the rest of you out there, do you mine in the summer? For me, the electricity cost really isn't that bad in the winter. I pay about CDN$0.12/kWh including taxes, but that's converted with 100% efficiency to heat. Even with only 80% efficiency on my furnace that's still almost 4x the cost per megajoule as natural gas, but it's still not all wasted. I would have to imagine that the profit you make is pretty marginal if you not only have to pay for electricity to mine but also have to pay to move that heat out of the house.

 

[mak360]

hi, just wanted to ask if the procedure is different for UK bit-coins e.g. what company do i register with, can i go with matgox usa (think its called that)

Does it matter who you go with.

 

[Chiropteran]

According to this site...
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/
that setup would be pretty marginal at that electricity rate, especially if you're using AC down where you are.

For the rest of you out there, do you mine in the summer?

Depends on the profit.

Was mining with my single 6970 on my main PC at about 380mhash for 360 watts. At .1216 electricity cost, I was making about $25/month on average. Absolutely worth it now in the winter, in the summer not so sure, as my AC adds a lot to the electric bill.

However...

I've finally decided to dump guiminer, it's lack of support and updates made me wonder what I was missing, and have been trying Diablominer. I'm getting 460mhash, instead of my prior 380. Seems too good to be true, but it's been going at this rate and over 100 shares accepted, so maybe it is the true potential of my card. This is completely default settings on diablominer, card OC to 950 GPU memory at stock.

Given this higher hash rate, it might be worth mining over the summer after all. That is still months away though, and the BTC value and difficulty could change drastically by then.

 

[Smartazz]

Thanks for the heads up! Going to download it when I'm back at my computer.

 

[Acanthus]

hi, just wanted to ask if the procedure is different for UK bit-coins e.g. what company do i register with, can i go with matgox usa (think its called that)

Does it matter who you go with.

bitcoins are not recognized by any central authority.

It doesn't matter where you are from, bitcoins are the same.

The only thing that would be different is the currency you would want to convert it to. (Pounds or Euros instead of USD)

 

[MrTeal]

Depends on the profit.

Was mining with my single 6970 on my main PC at about 380mhash for 360 watts. At .1216 electricity cost, I was making about $25/month on average. Absolutely worth it now in the winter, in the summer not so sure, as my AC adds a lot to the electric bill.

However...

I've finally decided to dump guiminer, it's lack of support and updates made me wonder what I was missing, and have been trying Diablominer. I'm getting 460mhash, instead of my prior 380. Seems too good to be true, but it's been going at this rate and over 100 shares accepted, so maybe it is the true potential of my card. This is completely default settings on diablominer, card OC to 950 GPU memory at stock.

Given this higher hash rate, it might be worth mining over the summer after all. That is still months away though, and the BTC value and difficulty could change drastically by then.

Wow, that's quite an increase. I just downloaded GUIminer as a first one to try, but maybe I'll load up diablominer. I'm getting 296MHash/s on a 6870@1GHz core, which seems pretty reasonable compared to what's listed out there already. Not bad out of a $90 card.

It seems that this would have been something much better to get involved with in spring of last year though. Way more profitable. Now it's something that might earn a couple extra bucks in the 98% of the time my computer is sitting there idle.

 

[Zargon]

started mining with my 5870 again. that room is a bit chilly all the time anyways

 

[Magic Carpet]

If you lose your system with your wallet installed, you do lose those coins- unless you have a backup somewhere.

So.. unless you have a backup... a simple power outage could kill all the effort?

I would imagine there would be an online BC repository or something...

 

[Chiropteran]

So.. unless you have a backup... a simple power outage could kill all the effort?

I would imagine there would be an online BC repository or something...

Only if the power outage corrupted your hard drive.

Nope, that is the whole point- it is a distributed non-centralized system. A repository of some sort would kill those advantages.

You can always back up your wallet. You don't even need to run the PC with the wallet- you can create it on a VM, suspend the VM, copy it to a flash drive, put it in a vault. Send BTC to it's wallet every week, and then 10 years later you get the flash drive out of the vault and run the VM and you see all the coins you earned in the meantime.

 

[Neon001]

Hi all, hoping for a bit of help here. I tried to give bitcoin mining a whirl last night, but I ran into a snag. I loaded up the wallet app, got my wallet code, registered at bitclockers and got a worker name. Then I downloaded the SDK APP for my Radeon drivers, installed them, and downloaded and setup Phoenix Miner (recommended by BitClockers here: http://bitclockers.com/gettingstarted for GPU mining over GUI Miner).

I created the shortcut with the script to start Phoenix miner, but when I ran it, it gave me a "Fatal Error: Could not load OpenCL kernel!", or something similar.

I double checked that everything was as it supposed to be in the guides, but no joy.

Any suggestions regarding what I did wrong?