Cryptocoin Mining?

[airdata]

OVerLoRDI : I saw your posts on one of the main coin forums w\ pics of your rigs... made me drool

I just got interested over the weekend, about to have my first bitcoin today sometime w\ just a 4870 and a 4670 running. Have a 6870 and 2 5770's in the mail though.

 

[Chiropteran]

This is a neat little calculator you can use to determine profitability:

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

Just playing around a bit it's pretty easy to see that electricity cost isn't going to be an issue for awhile, even with difficult increases.

 

[airdata]

Overlord : Would you say this calculator is fairly accurate? How high do you think the difficulty will be going in the future?

 

[Dark Shroud]

Who would you guys recommend mining with? Or would I be able to do it on my own?

I'm a serious newb at this and I'm running on Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

 

[mnewsham]

I use slush's pool, but using a 5870m i only get about 140Mhash/s

 

[Chiropteran]

I use slush's pool, but using a 5870m i only get about 140Mhash/s

nm. I didn't see the "m".

I am also using slush's. 3% seems fair enough for a "tax", easy enough to setup and consistent gains rather than lottery style mining. Seeing 250-260 Mhash/s with my 5850 at stock.

 

[mnewsham]

Yea only problem is heat, with ambient temps around 28C here i am getting a load temp of 105C on the GPU

 

[brownstone]

Overlord : Would you say this calculator is fairly accurate? How high do you think the difficulty will be going in the future?

I think it gives an overly optimistic view as it does not take into account difficulty increases or mining pool reality. Just my .02

 

[tigersty1e]

How much money are we talking about? Say I take my 6950 (more like a 6970) and run this 8 hours a day (160 hours a month).

How much money would this gross on average? (not counting cost)

 

[Chiropteran]

How much money are we talking about? Say I take my 6950 (more like a 6970) and run this 8 hours a day (160 hours a month).

How much money would this gross on average? (not counting cost)

It's very random and variable.

Based on today's values, you can use:

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison says your "6970" might be 370 Mhash/s

Leaving defaults otherwise, except putting $250 for hardware costs, I get:

Revenue per time frame: 371.65 USD
Revenue minus power costs: 316.86 USD
Hardware break even: 24 days
Net profit first time frame: 66.86 USD

Removing hardware cost,

Revenue per time frame: 371.65 USD
Revenue minus power costs: 316.86 USD
Hardware break even: 0 seconds
Net profit first time frame: 316.86 USD

However, keep in mind these numbers are very random in reality, and the difficulty increase will reduce income, differing power costs will effect things, and differing usd/bitcoin conversion rates will change the numbers. It was $7.40 per bitcoin this morning, tonight it's $8 per.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Difficulty follows price.

Difficulty is a moving average, so massive difficulty increases follow massive price increase by a few weeks. Currently difficulty is catching up from the recent price rally to the $7-8 range, which is why we are seeing a 70% jump in difficulty tomorrow. I would not be surprised by another jump of the same amount after that.

How high will it go? As long as is is profitable for people to keep buying hardware and adding it to the network difficulty will increase. So it depends on a number of factors, what the exchange rate is, how much it costs to produce a block on average, etc.

For example, a 6970 will pull in about ~1.4 btc/day running 24/7 dedicated. However this number is changing, in 18 hours difficulty is forecasted to jump from 247k to 425k. This will reduce your generation to 0.85 btc/day. Assuming difficulty continues to increase (and I would bet all of my bitcoins on it) in about 2 weeks that number will be reduced again. By 70% again? not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another 40-50% increase in difficulty. So then you'd be making about 0.58 btc/day.

Unless you believe that price will continue to rise as it has, I wouldn't purchase hardware to mine bitcoins, because it would take you a very long time to recover you initial investment.

Also if you believe the price is going to rise as it has, just buy bitcoins on an exchange and sell them when the price goes up.

I bought most of the hardware in my signature back when difficulty was 1/10th of what it is now. I lucked out by discovering earlier than most.

 

[sandorski]

Bitcoins biggest problem is that there is very little to use Bitcoins for. Basically most of the activity is based around converting them into more established Currency. I highly suspect it will eventually fail, but until it does many people will make decent $ doing it.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Bitcoins biggest problem is that there is very little to use Bitcoins for. Basically most of the activity is based around converting them into more established Currency. I highly suspect it will eventually fail, but until it does many people will make decent $ doing it.

You are correct sir. The market is hugely based on speculation. People buy and hold coins purely to hope they will go higher. Press hits, forum hits and such cause people to buy up coins and drive the price higher. Because the value of them is so volatile it is extremely inconvenient to use them for any real transactions.

Effort is constantly being made to spread their use beyond speculation, but it is slow going. Do I think bitcoin will fail? I'm not sure, but I'm holding onto a shiny pile of coins just in case

 

[Dark Shroud]

I think BitCoins will fail eventually especially if none of the big sites will accept them. If Amazon or Newegg accepted BitCoins I would be very happy. Also the main client sucks pretty badly; I wasted a week using that thing. How can it not have an option to run on the GPU at this point in time? These things are going to get too hard to produce. So at a certain point we’re going to need super computers or even larger mining pools to start generating BitCoins.

Right now I only have 3 so far. If I had discovered mining at least a week earlier let alone a month I’d be in a very different position. This is the first time I’m wishing I had waited to buy a video card and purchased the HD 6970 Asus DirectCU version instead of my normal one.

 

[mnewsham]

I think BitCoins will fail eventually especially if none of the big sites will accept them. If Amazon or Newegg accepted BitCoins I would be very happy. Also the main client sucks pretty badly; I wasted a week using that thing. How can it not have an option to run on the GPU at this point in time? These things are going to get too hard to produce. So at a certain point we’re going to need super computers or even larger mining pools to start generating BitCoins.

Right now I only have 3 so far. If I had discovered mining at least a week earlier let alone a month I’d be in a very different position. This is the first time I’m wishing I had waited to buy a video card and purchased the HD 6970 Asus DirectCU version instead of my normal one.

unless you run multiple boxes joining a pool will probably get you a steadier income.

 

[theAnimal]

I have played around with distributed computing stuff before, but lost interest mainly due to there being no real point other than bragging rights.

If the only point to DC were the points, I think most people would lose interest. There are a large variety of projects available which most people participate in for personal reasons such as finding a cure for a disease that has affected a friend or family member, or else something related to a hobby. The points help some to measure their contribution and of course create friendly competition.

 

[Cuhulainn]

You guys definitely missed the bus on this one. Difficulty is destroying miners profits pretty effectively. I used to make ~30 bitcoins/day with my dual 6970s in February. Since then difficulty has increase from 25k to 250k and difficulty is about to jump by over 70% in the next ~24 hours.

I just found out about bitcoins and just spent 5 days to earn 1 bitcoin with a GTX460 (60 Mhash/s). I'm turning it off now. That difficulty bump will put me into the red as electricity here in Brasil is about twice what it costs in the US. I was at least paying my electric bill and making a few extra bucks before.

 

[Dark Shroud]

unless you run multiple boxes joining a pool will probably get you a steadier income.

I joined the deepbit.net pool. I'm tempted to convert my old P4 into a mining box but the thing drinks a lot of power.

For around $300 I could set up a AMD Brazos box with a decent video card just for mining. My goal is 70 Bitcoins that I can convert to USD to reinvest into my hardware.

At my current rate I'm earning roughly 10 coins a week. If that doesn't drop below 7 coins a week after tomorrow my goal will be ok.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I just found out about bitcoins and just spent 5 days to earn 1 bitcoin with a GTX460 (60 Mhash/s). I'm turning it off now. That difficulty bump will put me into the red as electricity here in Brasil is about twice what it costs in the US. I was at least paying my electric bill and making a few extra bucks before.

Were you mining with a client that supported OpenCL on the GPU?

 

[wahdangun]

I think there are easier one, compute for cash. Just google it

 

[airdata]

Getting into bitcoin now feels something like if microsoft was just going public and they were giving stock away for free just a few months ago lol


As far as the talk of bitcoins failing... remember, the US dollar is backed by nothing more than debt and our belief that the paper is actually worth something. Which it's not really worth too much if the federal reserve can just go out and print up billions of dollars out of thin air.

 

[DominionSeraph]

As far as the talk of bitcoins failing... remember, the US dollar is backed by nothing more than debt and our belief that the paper is actually worth something. Which it's not really worth too much if the federal reserve can just go out and print up billions of dollars out of thin air.

The US dollar is pretty well insulated from currency manipulation. With bitcoin you can create artificial scarcity or just manipulate the published value.

It rather screams "Ponzi scheme," just with a novel introduction.

 

[GaiaHunter]

The US dollar is pretty well insulated from currency manipulation.

Nice joke.

Which it's not really worth too much if the federal reserve can just go out and print up billions of dollars out of thin air.

They don't even need to print - just type numbers in a computer.

 

[Madcatatlas]

This is very likely illegal in Norway, and it sounds seriously flawed on so many levels...

 

[Madcatatlas]

You are correct sir. The market is hugely based on speculation. People buy and hold coins purely to hope they will go higher. Press hits, forum hits and such cause people to buy up coins and drive the price higher. Because the value of them is so volatile it is extremely inconvenient to use them for any real transactions.

Effort is constantly being made to spread their use beyond speculation, but it is slow going. Do I think bitcoin will fail? I'm not sure, but I'm holding onto a shiny pile of coins just in case

HOLY cow... you really have that many Radeon5870/50s?....