Okay YABCT

[digitaldurandal]

Okay so I am interested in the bitcoin thing that has been sparking here at Anandtech.

I was already thinking of switching to 3x6950 setup and with the summer coming next week I will have plenty of time off to take advantage.

My questions are:

Although it fluctuates what would be your prediction on how much money I could make per week?

Can I easily stop mining to play a video game for an hour or so and go back to mining or will this severely effect profitability?

Can I do simple tasks while the GPUs mine like surf the web/open pdf/ watch netflix?

 

[pcm81]

Your income is linearly proportional to HASH_RATE*TIME. Google hash rate for 6950, i think its around 250MHps per 6950. I get 2-3 bit coins in 24 hours of hashing at 1.5GHps. I can stop for 5 minutetes or i can stop for an hour...

If you set your miners priority to below_normal you can do other tasks while it mines, like watch youtube etc. My system was crashing during video playback of any type with miners on normal priority. $$ per day depends on price of bitcoins.

 

[Muyoso]

I only have 1 5850 mining and I can do everything short of watching HD video, which I have yet to try actually. According to:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

a 6950 gets from 272 to 432 Mhash/s. If you overclock you will probably get somewhere in the middle, so lets say 350Mhash/s per 6950, which is actually what I get with my 5850.

3*350 = 1050Mhash/s. According to deepbit, that puts you at 1.68 BTC per 24 hour period at the current difficulty level.

According to the bitcoin calculator, it would take you around 20 days to recoup the cost of the hardware at the current difficulty level, assuming 700 dollars for the 3x6950's. In reality, it would take longer than that due to difficulty increases.

Edit: IDK why those hash rates look so bad for those cards, but you would be MUCH better off spending $300 on 3x5830 GPU's. You would be running hash rates of 900ish Mhash/s if you overclock them and break even in 10 days at the current difficulty.

 

[gramboh]

How easy is it to convert bitcoins to real currency? Are there transaction fees to doing so? Do miners convert regularly or is everyone holding onto the bitcoins and not converting to a recognized currency (USD, Euro etc).

 

[Madcatatlas]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Scroll down about a page (on 1080 res) and you see a table with bitcoin exchange sites.

Some interesting reading if you follow the links to the sites. Not so interested myself.