Cryptocoin Mining?

[Chiropteran]

You'd need a setup pumping @ 10-20Gh w\ hardware paid for to be thinking of making a profit.

I'm confused. Either I am misunderstanding you, or you are saying something which is completely wrong. You are saying he would make a profit with 10ghash, but not with 500mhash? Assuming his hash per watt is the same in either case, you either make a profit in both cases or neither. If you make a loss at 500mhash, scaling it up to 500ghash is just going to increase the loss by 1000, it isn't going to turn a profit

I have about 3ghash now, between 6 machines. I earn nearly 2 BTC per day. Electricity cost is about 1/3 that. However, if I was forced to go down to 1 machine and only had 600mhash, it would still be profitable. My income would drop to .4 BTC per day, but my electricity usage would drop similarly and profit would remain.


TL;DR: If you want to know if you are profitable or not, you need to know your mhash per watt, cost per kwh, and expected earnings. Total mhash value is irrelevant to the question.

Still wondering if I should bother getting my 6870 CrossfireX setup doing this work.

I'm just not sure that the value per bitcoin is worth the power cost.

What is your cost per kwh for power? Does the waste heat benefit you, or harm you?

 

[MrTeal]

Unless the difficulty level drastically drops, no.

When I first ventured into mining ( WAYYY late ) difficulty was ~200k. By the time I had my maximum setup going, it was at least 1,000,000. Current difficulty is 1,496,979 and supposed to drop a tiny bit.

You'd need a setup pumping @ 10-20Gh w\ hardware paid for to be thinking of making a profit.

Running 2 6870's full boar 24/7 is going to likely use more electricity than money made mining btc.

Also, at some point blocks will yield 25 bitcoins instead of 50... if this has not happened already. So at that point you're going to get 1/2 the yield for the same amount of work.

That makes no sense. Why would your absolute hashrate make a huge difference in your profitability?

His hardware appears to be paid for, the only question is whether mining with his rig when he's not using it creates more bitcoin than it uses in power. Even with my single 6870, at current rates I make $1 a day in BTC, and pay $0.39 for electricity. My actual cost is less than that, since I leave my computer on 24/7 anyway so it's not actually 180W from the wall, it's only an additional 120W over idle and the waste heat just goes to warm my house which I have to pay for anyway. Realistically my net is about $0.80 a day at the current rates. Not much, but it's enough to cover the cost of my 6870 in 5 months.

 

[Smartazz]

That makes no sense. Why would your absolute hashrate make a huge difference in your profitability?

His hardware appears to be paid for, the only question is whether mining with his rig when he's not using it creates more bitcoin than it uses in power. Even with my single 6870, at current rates I make $1 a day in BTC, and pay $0.39 for electricity. My actual cost is less than that, since I leave my computer on 24/7 anyway so it's not actually 180W from the wall, it's only an additional 120W over idle and the waste heat just goes to warm my house which I have to pay for anyway. Realistically my net is about $0.80 a day at the current rates. Not much, but it's enough to cover the cost of my 6870 in 5 months.

I second this. For those of us who run our systems 24/7 for distributed computing, the ~$1 day is enough to cover electricity costs plus a tiny profit. The heat is also nice, but I'm guessing my Bitcoin mining will be put on hold this summer.

 

[airdata]

That makes no sense. Why would your absolute hashrate make a huge difference in your profitability?

His hardware appears to be paid for, the only question is whether mining with his rig when he's not using it creates more bitcoin than it uses in power. Even with my single 6870, at current rates I make $1 a day in BTC, and pay $0.39 for electricity. My actual cost is less than that, since I leave my computer on 24/7 anyway so it's not actually 180W from the wall, it's only an additional 120W over idle and the waste heat just goes to warm my house which I have to pay for anyway. Realistically my net is about $0.80 a day at the current rates. Not much, but it's enough to cover the cost of my 6870 in 5 months.

When I think profitable I think about the $25-30 I sold alot of my btc for... I think about watching my btc pool page and see it crank out $5 every 15-20 minutes sometimes.

Heating is a fun thought though lol... I remember joking w\ other btc people about this last year in the early summer. That could definitely be a cost savings if you're using your mining setup to heat your house as well.

 

[gramboh]

When I think profitable I think about the $25-30 I sold alot of my btc for... I think about watching my btc pool page and see it crank out $5 every 15-20 minutes sometimes.

Then you don't understand what profit and margins are.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I run 1.5Gh to 2.2 Gh depending on how many of my rigs are going. At 1.5 I'm still making $25 a week not counting electrical costs. This is with paid for hardware, Another $200 and my last round of cards will have paid for themselves. Meaning I'll be back to pure profit in April.

Right now I'm making around $70 a month after electricity costs since I don't have to pay for AC cooling right now. My PC also doubles as a space heater so it's a win win for me.

 

[Elcs]

GUI Miner shows that I'm pumping out between 520 and 560 MHash/s from my 2x HD6870's.

Using bitcoin.cz, my stats page says I'm averaging 140 MHash/s in the last 10 rounds.

Got my next energy bill coming in soon so I'll know what my energy costs will be so I can work out if I can turn a profit or not. Looking at the MHash/s rates, then I'm guessing on the side of 'No'.

 

[Smartazz]

Elcs, why are you getting so few MH/s? My one 6870 averages over 250MH/s on BTCguild.

 

[Elcs]

Elcs, why are you getting so few MH/s? My one 6870 averages over 250MH/s on BTCguild.

No idea. GUI Miner is showing each card is exceeding 250 MHash/s but Bitcoin.cz stats aren't reflecting that.

I posted on the offchance that someone would spot this and be able to shed some light on it.

 

[Smartazz]

Have you tried another pool? I personally recommend BTCguild since I think it's worth a 5% fee for no variance payouts.

 

[MrTeal]

Have you updated to the latest version of GUIminer after the issues it had a month back?

 

[Smartazz]

Good call, I haven't been using guiminer, I forgot about that issue.

 

[Minjin]

I was about to ask why you would mine on a CPU until I read the later part of your statement. You should come run some BOINC projects with us. We're doing quite well on the World Community Grid leaderboard and your 2500K would be a nice help!

Actually, I decided to switch my CPU mining over to the even-more-certain-to-fail-than-Bitcoin...Litecoin. I can make between 15-20 Litecoins a day. If you look at the conversion rate between Litecoins and Bitcoins, just mining Litecoins and converting puts me at nearly twice as many Bitcoins as the more direct route. Of course, we're still talking chump change, but now instead of a shiny nickel every day, I am making a shiny dime.

 

[Elcs]

Alright gents...

I was using the latest version of GUI Miner. I found this thread after all of the problems.... and yes, I double checked

Switching pools to BTCGuild, my stats are coming out rather normal now. Since I run two different brands of HD6870, one stays quiet under load and the other is noisy. Ran one of them overnight and averaged 262 MHash/s with one card. Pretty normal from the sounds of it.

Hopefully when the 12.2 Cats come out, the official ones, I'll get a little boost.

EDIT: Namecoins. After reading about these, I probably don't want them other than to use as trading fodder for Bit Coins. Is there a wallet I need to put them into like the Bitcoin Wallet?

EDIT2: After ~24 hours on BTCGuild, I've earned ~0.25 Bitcoins and ~0.70 Namecoins with 1 of my HD6870's going for the full 24 hours and one of them doing ~12-16 hours.

 

[Smartazz]

Have you guys typically been noticing appreciable MH/s gains with the newer Catalyst drivers? I usually don't update drivers that aren't problematic.

 

[Smartazz]

Actually, I decided to switch my CPU mining over to the even-more-certain-to-fail-than-Bitcoin...Litecoin. I can make between 15-20 Litecoins a day. If you look at the conversion rate between Litecoins and Bitcoins, just mining Litecoins and converting puts me at nearly twice as many Bitcoins as the more direct route. Of course, we're still talking chump change, but now instead of a shiny nickel every day, I am making a shiny dime.

I'm making almost a buck a day which I won't complain about since that's greater than the depreciation rate of the card. Btw, I'd be careful mining alternative cryptocurrencies. Don't quote me, but I think I remember reading about some of those alternatives being loaded with malware. If this isn't true, someone feel free to correct me.

 

[Elcs]

Have you guys typically been noticing appreciable MH/s gains with the newer Catalyst drivers? I usually don't update drivers that aren't problematic.

As they're pre-certs, I'm not trying them. Heard not so great things in general and as I run CrossfireX, I'm thinking my system is more temperamental anyway.

I think I recall someone on here saying they got a boost of 10-20 MHash/s with the 12.2 pre-certs on a 5xxx radeon.

 

[Mir96TA]

so where people are trading ?
I heard most of them are close (Trade hill)

 

[hdfxst]

i think mtgox is the only game in town.I'm selling my last coins this week so i expect the price to go up next week.I've been lucky with bitcoins but my gut is telling me to get out now

 

[Despoiler]

i think mtgox is the only game in town.I'm selling my last coins this week so i expect the price to go up next week.I've been lucky with bitcoins but my gut is telling me to get out now

Campbx.com

As far as profitability, I make 2.75-3x what I pay for electricity. I have a fairly inefficient setup too. There is definitely no doom and gloom on the profitability front.

 

[Smartazz]

Campbx.com

As far as profitability, I make 2.75-3x what I pay for electricity. I have a fairly inefficient setup too. There is definitely no doom and gloom on the profitability front.

Making a nearly 3x profit/cost is pretty good.

 

[Joepublic2]

Campbx.com

As far as profitability, I make 2.75-3x what I pay for electricity. I have a fairly inefficient setup too. There is definitely no doom and gloom on the profitability front.

Yeah that's a good ROI by any standards. Good excuse to buy a new video card to replace this old 8800GT at least!

 

[Elcs]

Using 12.2 Cats. No improvement.

 

[Chiropteran]

Using 12.2 Cats. No improvement.

Yeah, I don't even know. I installed it on my first miner and saw a significant increase, and then none of my other systems showed any noticeable benefit.

 

[Smartazz]

Reinstalled graphics drivers and now diablominer uses the wrong video card to mine. What do I change to tell it to use card 2 but not card 1. I'm back ti guiminer to temporarily fix the problem, however diablominer is much better and I'd prefer to use it.