So who's mining bitcoins here?
 

I just downloaded a CPU based pool miner (for *nix) and each of the 2 threads is doing about 720kilohash/sec (so about 1.44megahash/sec total). It's an E8200 CPU on a FreeBSD server.

I see guys with GPUs talking in terms of gigahash/sec... a graphics card is more than a thousand times more powerful than my CPU. Am I just wasting my time? :1orglaugh

The pool I'm in seems to be doing 880Ghash/sec

I am doing 0.00144GHash/sec, which I think (if I got my zeros right) is 0.00016% of that pool

So for a block of 50BTC in the pool I get 0.0008 BTC

If each block takes 3 hours, I make 0.0064BTC/day... which works out to about $0.10? LOL. I think I've added an extra zero somewhere - that wouldn't even cover electricity.

skimmed cj traffic is worth more

Don't bother with bitcoins unless you got ATI cards. It's cheaper to just buy them if you don't.

Yeah, that seems to be the conclusion I'm reaching. Question is whether it's worth buying bitcoins on the open market, or investing in hardware to mine them.

You're wasting your time and electricity.

This guy has a cluster with 24 machines to mine bitcoins.

I watched an interview with the head guy in charge and he said it will take you 5-10 years to hit a stash of bitcoins with your typical computer today.

I bought some. Thought about doing the rig but don't want the headache.

Shit if you can just buy one it would be something to hold on to for the hell of it. lol

I dont know what its doing but ill stay far away from that thanks :thumbsup

This guy breaks it down... he paid $8000 for a 4 machine setup that does about 6Ghash/sec.

So in an 880Ghash/sec pool he would earn (6 / 880) * 49 BTC = 0.334 BTC, which works out to 2.67 BTC per day or roughly $USD40/day.

So if the value stayed the same and the difficulty of mining also stayed constant he'd pay off his investment in 200 days. (It becomes cost neutral sooner because if the currency died tomorrow the hardware still has second-hand value)

Still seems pretty risky, especially for the guy that has his cluster of 24 machines.

More impressive is the bitcoins he's purchased over time...

500BTC -> $135
700BTC -> ??? (Canadian funds, he doesn't say how much he spent. Let's say $200)
25,000BTC -> $20,000

His cash investment of roughly $20,300 for 26,200 BTC is now worth just under $500,000. :eyecrazy Whether he could cash it all out without seriously swaying the market is another matter... but at the very least he could probably get back his initial cash investment, at current rates $20,300 is less than 5% of his total BTC investment...

http://www.bitcoins.org/ Server not found

went to give it a look again just now

I think is http://www.bitcoin.org/

It's a pity that CPUs are so gutless in this application, I have enough parts (mostly unopened) to build a custer of 4 computers...

thanks

just downloaded, and put this on my chinese traffic
http://www.bitp.it/

How many hashes/sec do you get? 318 for me, which is miniscule. Assuming that's typical, with 100,000 visitors per day spending 30 seconds on your site you'd only be doing the equivalent of 10,000-12,000 hashes per sec, which based on my calcs above is about 0.1c per day...

Wonder if anyone's come up with a toolbar that quietly mines bitcoins. There's some toolbars that turn your PC into a huge crawler network - although the user installs it for something else, like cute avatars.

what exactly do they calculate? I don't get it, are they solving some mathematical problem, or are they just processing junk?

1650 8chrs

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

There's no real useful output from the processing, it's simply proving that it has been completed.

Would be nice if they were able to work in processing with real-world data and do something useful at the same time, like DNA typing or cancer research.

This gives you an idea of which video cards are fastest and/or the fastest per watt of power consumption.

http://pastebin.com/AvymGnMJ

Even a $25 5450 GPU card hashes 8 times faster than my CPU!

This does not make any sense, why would anyone pay for something that is useless. This is like a ponzy scheme, once there are no more idiots that actually buy the coins with real money, they will be worthless.

Yeah, something that does nothing is really worth a lot.

This shit is doing something, they just wont tell you what.

the end of point of this whole thing i predict will be the creation of some giant botnet and a pump and dump scheme which will reap the founders a fortune.

the social engineering aspects are brilliant as it is aimed at true believer libertarian, goldbug, sci-fi, free culture, austrian scchool types whose clever fanaticism and geeky gullibility will volunteer to grow this until it is time for the mysterious founders are ready to cash out.

Ended up getting an ATI 5570 card, which is 41X the speed of my E8200 CPU. Based on my above calcs it could mine roughly $4 a day on average. Not going to take over the world just yet, just a simple experiment to start with...

The organization don't pay you. If your computer finds the solution to one math problem, your computer will announce it to the network after it's been checked you are then awarded the price, a number of bitcoins. The only one "paying you" would be those exchange places, where people who need bitcoins for a transaction they want to make, need to buy them first and thus someone who mined them can cash out.

exactly the way i see it too.

This whole bitcoin scam is getting beyond a joke.

wtf is this :) where is all money located?

You could sure get a better graphics card to get better graphics on your computer. You can perform tests and bench marks to test out your card. You can play a first person shooter game. Take a look at ratios such as Frame Rate per Second you are getting in your game. A better graphics card will achieve a higher frame rate.

bit coins are in motion

Thank you, foobot.

Finally got Linux and the miner software working. Now cruising along at 57 megahashes per second.

I'm curious to find out whether the card needs to be in a 16X PCIe slot for these calcs. Would be cool if it works just as well in a 1X slot, no need for expensive and hard to get server boards with a bunch of 16X slots...

Maybe I'll buy a new card each time I pay the last one off. :thumbsup

I'm going to build a new program that gets everyone to send out spam for me by mining my ass tokens. But I'm going to get thousands of people to do it for free by telling them it's really just not doing anything and after they send out so many spams I'll issue them an ass token and tell them they can use it to buy shit but only from people that accept ass tokens and those people determine the real value.

When all these people get hooked on mining my ass tokens I'll make them send out more and more spam for me before giving them one. This will give them the illusion that my ass tokens are going up in value and all of these ass miners will spend their real money building racks of machines to send out more spam for me. More and more miners will compete for mining my ass because the tokens will get harder to dig out and all the while I'm getting richer and richer for free while all these ass miners are really getting shit but I'll have them convinced that it's actually worth something for having their computers sitting around solving math problems that actually serve no purpose.

This is how stupid people in real life really are.

I suspect that bitcoin will be illegal in the US soon. This reminds me of e-gold.

interesting to read up on the "founder" of bitcoin.

You'll pay more for the electricity...

in my pocket

Egold was centralized, Bitcoins are not. Unless the government shuts down the world wide web it will continue. The only weak spot are the exchanges which I hear will somehow be P2P also soon.

eat your hearts out

http://i.imgur.com/7haHO.png

Probably a ploy to sell hardware.

bitcoins on NPR
 

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/24/136620...t-are-bitcoins

sounds unwise to get into just due to all the possible attention coming from US Gov et al

a rig like that shouldn't use more than 500W...
500W*24hours = 10kWh/day or so

1kWh=10cents or so [ http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity...able5_6_a.html ]


so he will spend around $1/day, and in theory will make $4/day... 400% return...
not bad actually... :thumbsup

Electricity costs more here. Based on current exchange rates I'm paying about $USD0.20/kWh.

My m/b+CPU+RAM+GPU draws around 70W when hashing, so it costs about $USD0.35 per day.

My earlier rough calcs were based on flawed reasoning - each round varies in duration (until someone breaks it), and the reward I receive for being part of it also varies (depends how many others were part of the pool), so I can really only work out average income by actually doing it... there's also the calculation difficulty changing and market value of BTC to consider.

It's been about 12 hours since I got the GPU going, in that time I've earned 0.06392876 BTC: at $18/BTC that's $1.15; at $23/BTC (price just took a big leap on mtgox) it's $1.47. Extrapolate that to 24h and you have $2.30/$2.94. Not quite $4 a day but still effectively profitable... just at pretty pointless levels. I'm doing it more for geek fun rather than to make oodles of $, which is why I'm not building a ridiciulous rig. More fun to spend $60 on a GPU and fiddle with software than spending 5 minutes to buy $60 worth of virtual BTCs...

I was thinking that with all these variations in pools that with a bit of programming you could figure out a regularly updated rank of the best performing pools, and either switch 100% of processing to the #1 rank at the time, or apportion GPU power over multiple pools. I'm sure someone's already done it. Maybe that's why they vary so much from round to round.

I was thinking about BTC value yesterday and was going buy $100 fun but they dont accept paypal. In theory the value has room to go up. The guy who paid 1=1. made a killing cause 1btc=$23us now. If I understood right at some point there is no more btc mining and they get divided to increments.

The price can still be artificially inflated like pump and dump.

BTC value = determined by free market

I found out about it when it was like when each bitcoin was worth .0005 us dollars. I brushed it aside thinking it was like paypal. After it reached 7 - 10 bucks I bought 500 bucks worth for shits and giggles, cause I like the idea. I think the price will be harder to inflate by pump and dump once the market gets bigger but who knows. As far as this run up, I'm not sure how long it can be sustained. Its healthy for things to drop back instead of crashing like a brick.

Paypal was the reason for that, I think it's in their T&C's that you can't use them for currency exchange or something similar.

I was also going to put in $100 PP when it was at about $3.50, but I put it off for a few days, then PP pulled out! If I'd done it a couple of days earlier my $100 worth of BTCs would be worth $600+ now

Yikes trading for over 28 bucks, I've never quadroopled my investment in less than a week before..

Might be time to cash out a little of that, you know, risk-reward. :)

I'm thinking I should probably buy some too; the value is going up too fast compared to how quickly I can mine them myself.

Only catch is that mtgox has multiple "in" payment methods but only a few "out"... as an Australian I can easily buy BTC, even in AUD, but when it comes time to withdraw there's no way to get cash back to me.

Funny thing is I haven't even set up a bitcoin client yet. Guess I should do that soon. :1orglaugh

49 bitcoins on the wall, 49 coins of bit, one fell down...