Cryptocoin Mining?

[soccerballtux]

That's pretty damn insulting considering you don't know me or my current situation. I'll give you a hint, I'm currently unemployed as are several of my neighbors. To be blunt there are no jobs open in my area. So Bitcoins are my only stable revenue with the occasional temp job.

Right now it's taking me over 12 hours to transfer money to & from Mt Gox through Dwolla. I've missed several buying opportunities on hardware & when Bitcoins dropped down to $13 all I had was a stack of Bitcoins & no cash available.

Edit: And just because it annoyed the hell out of me my power was knocked out by a storm at 5am this morning. It was out for several hours so I'm not even going to earn a single Bitcoin today.

Sorry, I didn't mean what I said to be taken seriously. I would being pedantic about "quarters" vs "pennies" and calling you a noob, which is obviously stupid, because nobody has used the term "pinching quarters" before.

 

[soccerballtux]

None of this is going to end well.

I think I agree. Difficulty is going to jump and a lot of people aren't going to make nearly as much as they expected to make.

 

[soccerballtux]

Look at his sig:

Member of Nvidia Focus Group

/jk

lol that's pretty funny. Cause the nvidia cards are bad at it.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Can you people take this bitcoin shit to the Off Topic forum? It does not belong here.

The majority of this single thread is about the performance of various video cards in relation to Bitcoin mining ie has results. No one is forceing you to read this thread.

Sorry, I didn't mean what I said to be taken seriously. I would being pedantic about "quarters" vs "pennies" and calling you a noob, which is obviously stupid, because nobody has used the term "pinching quarters" before.

It's cool, you just managed to catch me at an off moment and the noob comment managed to annoy me. I’ve been on the net since the early 90’s so I’m usually pretty thick skinned.

 

[Chiropteran]

And isn't it sad that not even a third of the bitcoins have been mined and already its only going to be profitable for people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on complex mining setups? By july, a person mining with a card or two is going to be making peanuts.

It's a self regulating system, and your argument is somewhat flawed.

If it becomes unprofitable to mine for casual miners, it will also be unprofitable to mine for professional miners. You can't make up for a loss on each unit by increasing volume, you just get a bigger loss. Either you can be profitable with a single system, or there is no profit left in the game.

And beyond that, is the self regulation I mentioned. If it does become largely unprofitable, I'd expect miners to drop out, resulting in lower difficulty. Also, if mining is unprofitable, some casual miners who only mine because they want to have a few BTC would be forced to buy those BTC instead, this affect could result in BTC value increasing, bringing back the potential to profit from mining.


That said, I could see a hypothetical situation in the future where new hardware is unprofitable because of price increases and general lack of efficiency of the 6 series compared to older 5 series cards.

Nothing out there now beats the $109 5830 for MHash/s/$, so if it gets to the point where it's only profitable given a cheapo 5830 card, new miners will be unable to enter the market with a profit expectation.

 

[Desin]

Just picked up 2 sapphire 5830 from newegg. Gonna pick up a 6970 up from frys on the way home and I will have 1GH for less than 700$

 

[Red Storm]

Maybe I should sell my 5870, it doesn't get much use anyways...

 

[Desin]

Just picked up 2 sapphire 5830 from newegg. Gonna pick up a 6970 up from frys on the way home and I will have 1GH for less than 700$

Meh screw it....just got a third 5830 instead of the 350$ 6970. Two 5830's in CF beat the crap out of my current 260GTX-192. I'll just upgrade again with BF3 drops.

nearly 1GH for less than 350.

 

[chihlidog]

Just ordered myself a 5830 as well, jumped on it while they're still in stock. I give it another 20 minutes before they sell out lol

 

[v8envy]

It's not a Pyramid scheme. New Miners don't need to pay anyone anything. Neither to start nor to Acquire/Use/Convert BTC. IMO it's doomed, eventually, but not because it's a Pyramid scheme.

It is most certainly a pyramid scheme. The first ones in are rewarded with many orders of magnitude more coins than latecomers (say, people arriving 2-3 months later, never mind a year and some later).

While there is no mandatory pay-in with cash, the electricity and equipment costs are balooning nicely. A CPU miner for a month in early 2010 could accumulate 1000 coins in a month. It'd take dozens of machines and thousands of KW/hr to do that now. $20 in power a year and a half ago vs $3000 in power just 9 months later for the same reward.

Since people will rationally sell only for their cost+, each bitcoin grows in value mostly due to the input of more people coming in at the bottom. So long as the pyramid keeps growing the people at the top see their wealth increase by leaps and bounds. The bitcoin is not designed to be deflationary, it's designed to be hyperdeflationary.

I see this with namecoins. With the difficulty being low now I got in to generate a bunch. It's a gamble -- if that pyramid also grows (read: difficulty increases quickly) my low investment will be worth much, much more.

Moreover, bitcoins show the same pricing behavior you'd expect from a Ponzi scheme. Value relative to stable currencies drops over the weekend when new cash deposits are unavailable.

It's quacking, walking and swimming like a pyramid variant. I'm treating at such, you're welcome to do otherwise.

 

[v8envy]

If it becomes unprofitable to mine for casual miners, it will also be unprofitable to mine for professional miners. You can't make up for a loss on each unit by increasing volume, you just get a bigger loss. Either you can be profitable with a single system, or there is no profit left in the game.

Incorrect, economies of scale apply. Industrial power is cheaper than residential power. Pros can build custom case rigs with 6 GPUs and 2 power supplies, a cheap mboard with sufficient 1x PCIe slots, single core lower power CPU, next to no RAM and no disk running Linux. Their hardware and power costs over and above the GPUs would be much lower than someone using a general purpose computer with a consumer OS.

Professionals can also re-locate their data center to where power costs are lowest.

But this is academic. If it becomes unprofitable to mine bitcoins the pyramid will stop growing as people become uninterested. When that happens the gig is up.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Well I managed to snag a HD 5830 from Newegg. Damn I'm going to have to spend the next two weeks mining just to pay this off. Maybe my HD 5777 will show up by then, Superbiz's order processing is garbage.

Edit: And they're gone, that might have lasted an hour this time.

 

[gorobei]

i ordered one of the 5830's. also bundled a pantone huey pro for 40$ more. hopefully it will arrive.

 

[Muyoso]

The 5830 is an amazing overclocker. I wonder what it would be like crossfired to my 5850 for gaming? Anyone done something like that?

 

[hdfxst]

The 5830 is an amazing overclocker. I wonder what it would be like crossfired to my 5850 for gaming? Anyone done something like that?

I'll be trying it tomorrow when my motherboard gets here

 

[artvscommerce]

what's the best utility for overclocking the 5830? I haven't had much luck searching. Most people seem to point to afterburner but that is limiting me to 960mhz

 

[hdfxst]

what's the best utility for overclocking the 5830? I haven't had much luck searching. Most people seem to point to afterburner but that is limiting me to 960mhz

http://www.sapphiretech.com/ssc/TriXX/ it's the only utility that has voltage control for the 5830 and 5850 xtreme

 

[Muyoso]

Just be careful with the voltages. Don't go too high as I think Trixx reports them lower than they actually are. Leave yourself a nice buffer between your voltage settings and the max allowed by the card.

 

[Idontcare]

I don't think the goal of bitcoin is to provide sustainable income to people with high-end video cards.

Truth.

It is most certainly a pyramid scheme. The first ones in are rewarded with many orders of magnitude more coins than latecomers (say, people arriving 2-3 months later, never mind a year and some later).

You are an investment minded person much like myself. I happen to be in foreign currency exchange, so this BTC stuff hits close to home for me.

I had my initial gut-reactions as well, and they were similar to the viewpoints you have expressed here in your posts.

What I have come to realize is that this is no more a pyramid scheme than is an IPO and the rush of open-market trading thereafter.

You've got the guys who are "in" pre-IPO. They are sitting on a buttload of BTC's watching their virtual wealth go up and down on a daily basis.

And you got all the other people who are jumping into the game like mad, both as speculators (day-traders) and as miners.

What happened to GOOG after the post-IPO hype and bubble? Or any other stock for that matter? It doesn't implode, well sometimes they do but you get my point. Eventually they all reach some degree of stable sideways (range-bound) trading.

BTC will end up there as well. What is amazing to me is not that folks line up to mine bitcoins, but that the price stays "up" instead of collapsing in the face of an ever increasing float. Everyday there are more bitcoins available in the float than there were the day before.

When a stock undergoes a split and the float increases, usually the stock price takes a commensurate decline in valuation. Not so with BTC's, or at least it doesn't appear to be a first-order effect. That is what surprises me. Sure more and more people have bitcoins and they want to sell them, but there are an equal number of buyer pressure out there that keeps soaking up the increasing money supply.

We could call it a pyramid scheme, but it is no more a pyramid scheme than any other IPO of an asset-free .com tech company that only has/had value because at the time of their IPO they had an investment bank telling wallstreet that it (facebook anyone?) was worth billions just "because".

 

[thilanliyan]

My 6950 was going unused most of the time.

I've started bitcoin mining. We'll see where it goes. I've been taught by my parents that money doesn't grow on trees lol...so I'm very wary.

 

[v8envy]

We could call it a pyramid scheme, but it is no more a pyramid scheme than any other IPO of an asset-free .com tech company that only has/had value because at the time of their IPO they had an investment bank telling wallstreet that it (facebook anyone?) was worth billions just "because".

There are some very fundamental differences. But the biggest reason this is a pyramid and IPOs may or may not be (well, greater fool theory is pyramid-ish at its core) is the "stock" is meant to be hoarded, not traded.

7200 bitcoins are produced each day. Far, far fewer than that are sold. Most are kept by miners because they know each coin will be much harder to obtain in 9-10 days. No other stock has hyperdeflation built in quite like this, no other stock value is predicated completely on continued hyperbolic growth caused by new investment.

I stand by my pyramid assertion. We'll see a stampede for the exit as soon as the influx of new computing power (read: fresh meat for constructing the pyramid) tapers off. The successful IPOs are not the ones designed to fleece ignorant and greedy investors before imploding (netscape, all *iant web firms during dotcom boom). The successful ones have a sustainable model for income growth (google).

Right now bitcoins don't have a sustainable growth model outside of greater fool.

 

[Keysplayr]

Look at his sig:

Member of Nvidia Focus Group

/jk

I'm not laughing. Class act.

I mean pyramid schemes don't end well. And that is basically what this is.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I can't believe people are wasting their time with this. If you need extra money get a part time job that pays real money. I'm not even going to waste the electricity it would take to visit the website.

 

[Chiropteran]

Incorrect, economies of scale apply. Industrial power is cheaper than residential power. Pros can build custom case rigs with 6 GPUs and 2 power supplies, a cheap mboard with sufficient 1x PCIe slots, single core lower power CPU, next to no RAM and no disk running Linux. Their hardware and power costs over and above the GPUs would be much lower than someone using a general purpose computer with a consumer OS.

Professionals can also re-locate their data center to where power costs are lowest.

But this is academic. If it becomes unprofitable to mine bitcoins the pyramid will stop growing as people become uninterested. When that happens the gig is up.

I know what economies of scale means, but it doesn't apply here. Most casual miners already have a computer they use for other tasks. The opportunity cost of adding a single video card and starting up a miner is much much less than the per unit cost of a professional miner with an industrial location, electricity prices be damned. Not to mention overhead of leasing an industrial space. Could a professional build up 1 unit cheaper than a casual, probably. But the casual miner doesn't need to do that, thus it'll always remain profitable for the casuals until it reaches the point where it is profitable for nobody.

I mean seriously, electricity? If you ever get to the point where electricity costs are he most important detail determining profitability or not, nobody is going to mine, because the time required to earn back enough to cover the hardware investment will be huge. In the scheme of things, cost of electricity is minuscule here compared to hardware costs and setup labor.

 

[Zargon]

I can't believe people are wasting their time with this. If you need extra money get a part time job that pays real money. I'm not even going to waste the electricity it would take to visit the website.

I've mined 3 BC's in the last week

cost estimates for the electricity is a few bucks so far, current street value is ~45 bucks at the moment.