V_RocKs

50 bitcoins on the wall, 50 coins of bit...

mayabong

New exchange just opened up to buy and sell bitcoins. So far as I've read its working pretty smoothly, easier to fund and withdraw, and will probably overtake mt. gox (the biggest exchange) but who knows.

Trader Hill

Serge Litehead

anyone selling their Radeon HD 6990, 5970, 5870, 5850, 5830 for cheap? ;)

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DVTimes

what is the bitcoin mining thing then?

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Boozer

good luck.. guys are snatching up those 5800 series quick

Serge Litehead

yeah, models I listed above mostly sold out everywhere
5770 will be gone next soon


- mining is a reward system for dedicating your processing power to keep bitcoin network secure. when you mine you are including new transactions and some random nonce - hash it up and result is compared to a number relative to difficulty and once its lower - you have found a block for which you reward yourself with 50 bitcoins and everyone on the network will validate it, and if there were any transactions that you encoded with fees attached you collect them as a nice bonus. that's it in a nutshell.
bitcoins use ssl encryption, sha-256 which in today's word impossible to break, it uses p2p networking same one torrents use and i think there was another important piece of technology i may be missing here

more
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Mining

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Spudstr

I have a dual 6990 gaming rig at my house. Wonder how fast this badboy can pump out data.

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Serge Litehead

according to this chart, single 6990 can mine anywhere between 670-835 Megahashes/sec depending on your overclock and miner settings

simple calculator
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

another one, more advanced one
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/

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fuzebox

Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if it was created by ATI to liquidate their surplus hardware.

Deej

That was my first thought when i read that you NEED to buy a better video graphics card... HOw in the fuck does the graphics card change the speed of your processor thats "solving these math problems"?

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Caligari

I Bitcoins

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Serge Litehead

like 3d modeling doesn't require processing power to render detailed hd quality imaging in gaming
GPUs are like work horses, they can crunch math problems all day long. CPUs are geared more towards multitasking and such but bad in number crunching, which is very obvious by overtake of GPU in bitcoining. ati's streaming processors kick nvidia's ass in mining

more info
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU...ter_than_a_CPU

now pass that reefer hehe

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rowan

That's for standalone mining, which I believe is getting a lot more difficult. A pool with an aggregate processing power measured in TERAhashes per second would have a better chance of cracking a block first?

More dodgy calcs follow...

If 57 Mhashes/sec can earn 0.06392876 BTC in 12h or 0.12785752 BTC in 24,
1340 Mhashes/sec should be capable of earning 3.00 BTC or about $74/day at current rates ($24.72/BTC)
1670 Mhashes/sec = 3.74 BTC = ~$92/day

The second URL has some interesting warnings. Will be interesting to see what happens in 2012 when the reward for solving a block halves from 50BTC to 25BTC... and if someone brings out a custom chip in the meantime, rendering the GPU solution half obsolete.

Deej

How Daaaaare YOOOUUUUUUU!!!!

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rowan

I purchased a 5570 the other day which although a low end card is a good compromise between power consumed and Mhashes/sec.

I'm now looking at a medium level factory overclocked 6870, which again has a good Mhashes/watt rate. It's about 4 times faster than the 5570 (which will go in my winbox and keep mining)

If the new card pays for itself then it might be time to move to the big guns.

I wonder if that would make an interesting blog, starting with $50 for a low end card and working your way up as each one pays for itself... it's a pretty conservative strategy but it could be fun.

mayabong

By the calculator this guy should be raking in 60 to 70 g's a month with this rig. lol.

http://youtu.be/eLt8Se3vVNg

Serge Litehead

its doesn't matter whether you are solo or pool mining, statistically over period of time it comes out to be plus minus the same. advantage of a pool that collectively pool solves blocks faster. also size of pool doesn't matter; larger pools gives you more consistent payouts with less amounts, smaller pools have more variance in solving blocks, give larger payout cut but less frequently. solo mining is not worth it unless you have over few GHashes or you are very very very patient

i bought 2 5830s (total 500-520MH) a month ago, if i were to cash out my bitcoins at todays rates, i would triple my gpu investment, that's just within first month of operation. Of course I don't know the future, tomorrow bitcoins might not worth anything, although something tells me I should hold on to them a little longer.

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rowan

Talking about patience... the calculator suggests that for my modest 0.057Ghash/sec setup it will take an average of 1 year, 129 days to earn 50BTC. (Hmm. If it did take that long then we might be down to 25BTC by then.)

Technically it's profitable, with the hardware cost (cheap card added to an existing system) being covered in 24 days, but waiting 1 1/2 years for the first sign of revenue - paying ongoing electricity costs in the meantime - would require a hell of a lot of patience.

And if you happen to solve a block in 5 days and get excited, what happens if the next one takes 2 years?

I'll stick with pools.

Serge Litehead

a month ago when i did my homework with calculations my estimate showed that I would barely cover my cards within a month or month and a half, - an everything was working out accordingly to calculation, difficulty and cost were rising more or less proportionally (although this is not a set rule, price can vary independently of difficulty) until last 1-2 weeks when after 16-18usd, btc soared to $30+, tripling my expectations.

next week should be fun to watch btc ))

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Cyber Fucker

I have better tasks for my cpu.

Mutt

i have no clue what this is - even after reading on Wikipedia about bitcoins i don't know what you're doing.

What are you doing with your computers to earn bitcoins and who is paying you the bitcoins?

why not just buy bitcoins with cash and speculate on your investment like playing the stock market rather than this geeky 'mining' stuff that i still have no understanding of?

making my head hurt

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B.Barnato

I just can't get my head around this whole concept

rowan

Mining is necessary in order to pace the uptake and prevent fraud because there's no central authority to release new coins.

If the value of BTC keeps trending upwards then yes, it would be more cost effective to buy them rather than mine them right now... but on the flipside, the ROI for a mining setup also improves as the BTC increases in value. The latter is lower risk because the hardware still has resale value if the entire bitcoin network collapsed tomorrow.

Nothing saying you can't do both.

Serge Litehead

i was at the same point when bitcoins peaked my interest. took me few days or a week reading about it to get what it is and how it works, the whole digital crypto-currency concept and how bitcoin operates in my view is brilliant. i'm not sure if i'm capable of explaining it well, i may give it a shot below.

there are 3 ways how one can obtain bitcoins:
- mine it, in essence it is transaction processing, encrypting new transactions and broadcasting it to the network to verify.
- buy on one of exchanges
- trade for goods and services

in order to understand what mining is first you need to understand Bitcoin concept and how it works. for that, you need to know principles how SSL works, private/public keys, what are certificates and how they're generated - it is part of bitcoin security; in order to understand bitcoin networking you need to be familiar how modern p2p networks work, in particular DHT.

There is a block chain, shared among all peers which is basically chained hashed collection of all past transactions each going back to 50btc rewarded for a solved block. all peers share new blocks added to block-chain and validate them with method called proof-of-work, which is bassically solves a problem how multiple entities can agree on a time-stamp of completed task of a single unit, who or whatever it may be. this proof-of-work concept as far as i understand has been succesfully emplyed by botnets and brute-forsing efforts, when each single worker has its own task and whole network needs to be able to validate it so it wont do double work.

all of this 'magically' blends in very secure transmitting network of simple transactions protected from double-spending, where each node verifies all new blocks solved (meaning added to blockchain with new transactions) - this also done in a very clever way, to verify you need to compare input values that will make same hash that is being passed, bascally verification is doing same work that a miner had to do to successfully solve a block. this maybe better explained on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin..._confirmations - this is what miners do they keep securing and validating new transactions, the ssl part i mentioned before used for generating wallet private/public keys where public key is being wallet address if i'm not mistaken. on top of it all there is a lot of different math that keeps system in balance. please feel free to correct me if i got something wrong or missed anything.

mining explained much better here
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=4132.0

sorry if it doesn't make any sense i'm not all well versed in this myself, i got overall picture how it works, but it doesn't make it any less fascinating.

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rowan

Here's a site which mixes the list of GPU performance along with some real-world averages to figure out how much you can net per day...

http://bitminer.info/

This is a per card estimate, so you can use multiple cards in the same computer, or going further multiple computers. Once you start scaling into the hundreds of watts heat and noise is going to be a problem.

It's also closely tied to the market value of bitcoin and other variable factors so you can't simply say "if I buy a card that nets me $20 a day I will make $7300 in a year"

Boozer

First thing is you have to stop thinking in dollars

Serge Litehead

regarding who is paying bitcoins
bitcoins are rewarded by yourself when you've successfully solve a block (es explained here) and whole network agrees to it. currently there are over 6 million bitcoins in existence out of 21million in total, why 21m - have no idea yet.
system is made way that each block to be solved approximately every 10 minutes (6/hr), if hashing rate grows with more users on board blocks will be solved faster, for this to counter balance speedy block solving there is a difficulty variable which tries to keep rate of 6 blocks in hour, every 2016 blocks difficulty is reset (recalculated) to reflect current hashing rate, this works out that on average difficulty resets every 14 days, in reality past few difficulty increases been happening every 10 days due to ever increasing number of new miners and hardware coming on board all competing to solve a block for a reward of 50BTC, every 210000 or so blocks reward is set to be 1/2 less, which works out to be close to every 4 years reward is going to be 50, 25, 12.5 until somewhere in 2130 system will stop rewards, but to keep network secure miners will be getting transaction fees of transactions included in solved blocks by them.

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Boozer

block 129905 1 second..lol

woj

so are you guys actually making any $$ from it? or are you just doing it for fun?

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Mutt

thanks for the explanations - makes some sense now.

would help if i knew what 'hashing' is exactly since the term is used so much.

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Boozer

I just do it for fun.

I am far from a big player but started relatively early. Got a little over 86 BTC in my wallet. Seriously considered cashing out the other day when it hit 30 usd

CyberHustler

Boozer

I guess you could but each individual worker would need a unique ID

Serge Litehead

hashing is a one way encoding, there are various hashing techniques in existence such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and tons of others. here's a simple example of using hash: suppose there is a site with sign up form where user password is collected and stored, storing passwords in open text is not a good way of doing it, you would apply some one way encoding function using some made up or generated key and storing this hash value in the database, this way unless you have exact password value and exact key the hash value most likely won't be the same (there are possibilities of collisions when different values may produce same result, example: 2+2=4 & 3+1=4 although odds are nano-tiny of that ever happening). with such system when user signs in same encoding operation is perfomed and compared against password hash value in the database. when user forgets his/her password you email newly generated password and store new hash value in db, and user later can change to anything he likes. sha-256 practically impossible to brute-force today with modern computers and supercomputers.

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Serge Litehead

google for web based bitcoin miner js/ajax there's something out there like that, not sure if they could utilize 100% surfers gpu tho but may be able to get some cpu juice this way, it could work as a nice donation for watching videos on tubes (in theory) - as long as its fully disclosed ;) I didn't research this area

also flash miner, think i sow it being mentioned too, don't know if exists

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martinsc

I'm actually thinking about doing some mining... I have a 5770 and most of the time it's idle - showing a screensaver...
I guess I'll let it run a few weeks and see what it does....

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Chris

i still dont get where the money is coming from lmao

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Spudstr

I can actually hit 1.2Ghash/s so it runs 900M-1.2G it seems

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Serge Litehead

running 2 6990's? you could probably tune them up to 1.4-1.6Gh's if you have sufficient PSU power for OC'ing and if heat is not an issue

join a pool and watch making couple BTC each day )

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Spudstr

yeah but i have to be idle for it to work, if i turn up all 4 GPU's it goes crazy, if i'm doing anything else my pc eventually just locks up, i'm assuming the thermal check kicks on and shuts everything down.

Tempted to just buy a few 6990 systems and throw them in our datacenter. Not like we don't have resources/cooling/etc for this type of stuff.

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fuzebox

seXXXhub

i still have no clue how to start mining , u just install program and click generate coins ? (noob here)

CurrentlySober

i cant afford to mine bitcoins...

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Serge Litehead

don't bother with that "generate coins" button in the official client, it's built-in CPU miner, with CPU mining it will take you at least year or few to solve a block and will cost you more in electricity. same applies for Nvidia cards, they are faster than CPUs but relativity slow compared with ATI Radeons. that "generate coins" button will be gone in next upcoming version of the client.
there are separate miner software which can utilize your GPU and connect to pool of your choice, most of them command-line based. there is one called GUIminer which is windows based, very easy to use

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rowan

I installed a bitcoin client last night (finally ), 0.3.22-beta was the one offered for download, no sign of a button to generate coins. Pretty cool to see that my client is helping, in a small collective way, to look after around $100m worth of bitcoins floating in cyberspace.

Got my 0.37BTC payout too, although it took several hours to appear in my client. Not sure whether that was because it was still meshing with the network, or that the trans hadn't been verified? Does a transaction that is pending and still needs to be verified still appear in the client?

BTC-USD down to about $16 now, still trending downwards, probably as speculators panic and sell off. Then it will level out and we'll start over?

Serge Litehead

huge drop from $34 to $10.5 in less than two days. and back to $15 within minutes. more or less steady at $11+ now. what a wild market!

Rowan, the client doesn't contribute to the safety of the network, that's what miners do.
when you get your payout sent from pool, it goes to all unsent transactions which are picked up by miners for solving next block. in this case you may see funds appear in your wallet as unconfirmed, and once more blocks being solved transaction will be confirmed by more and more nodes. very low transactions 0.01 and below have default fee attached to them, in a new client (0.3.22-beta) it is set to 0.0005 btc i think and on older version it's 0.01 btc

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TubeKing

bitcoin is dead

Serge Litehead

came across interesting article, it explains Bitcoin from monetary and "is it a commodity" perspective, comparing it with gold and how Bitcoin works in non-technical terms
http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/...-market-money/

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rowan

I've heard about people printing out the contents of their wallet for safekeeping, but all I can't find any option for that... or even saving a copy somewhere.

I want to move the client from my C: drive (which is standalone/not often backed up) to my NAS (which is RAIDed and regularly backed up with multiple copies) but I guess if I just move the files some of the config may contain absolute paths, so I'll end up with a big mess that may not work.

How do I save my wallet somewhere so I can remove, reinstall, then re-import my wallet? What am I missing? BC 0.3.22-beta

Agent 488

anyone know of / care to share some basic and advanced guides to bitcoin mining?