A friends son is into this with some of his mates, to the degree that they have a 4 grand machine dedicated just to “hashing” the codes to find bit coins. They seem to make a bit of cash out of it.

I don’t have 4K so spare on something like that but am thinking of going down the “cloud” route, but is it worth investing a few quid into it that way?

He wasn’t sure as he does more with the dedicated machine and only a tiny bit through the “cloud” route. Anyone out there with any experience of this? Interested to hear your thoughts.

There was a demo at the recent BlackHat of using free cloud instance accounts to mine, but I suspect their scripting skills for the build and tear down of the instances before they became chargeable were a little beyond you or I.

If you have an old desktop kicking around with a reasonable GPU I’d give that a buzz first, see how you go. A friend reckoned it could be iffy around reward vs. electricity bills as you ramp up 🙂 – but AFAIK he was making a bit of money.

My understanding was that the horse has bolted, all the low hanging fruit is gone and to make any money from mining these days is going to require corporate levels of hardware rather than a couple of teenagers with a posh graphics card or two. I wonder if their “bit of cash” has yet covered their hardware outlay or dad’s electricity bill…?

I’m far from an expert on the matter though and could be way off the mark.

His kit costs him around 30 quid a month in electricity and he recently bought himself a new motorbike (not massively expensive to be fair, but still a couple of K’s worth) from the proceeds despite him admittedly missing out on an early big earner. He still seems to be making a few hundred quid a month before expenses.

I’m just not convinced that paying for processing punch with a cloud provider (such as cex.io) is going to return enough to even cover it’s own costs.

Think Cougar has pretty much hit the nail on the head.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-soars-hashing-power-nudges-1-petahash/

Check the top graph – by time you have your machine up and running they will be twice as hard to get. You needed to get in early 2013.

The fact that this stuff has been in the press for the last 18 months probably means the main chance for anyone without significant resources to make any money has already gone…

Every time something comes up as ‘a great way to make easy money’ it tends to go horribly wrong once the masses get their hands on it.

Plus there’s a lot of international organised crime in online currencies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re pretty good at nicking other peoples’

I had pop last year and into the early part of this year then sold the equipment asap. As above the difficulty has rocketed. What I could mine in a hour would now take a month.! There is option of mining alt coins and trading them for bitcoin but unless you have free electric I wouldn’t bother.

Get yourself a shovel and head down to Cardiff…
Get digging
😯

Having read a bit more online now I’m suspecting that this isn’t for me. I think I would be paying more for cloud based processing power than I’m ever likely to earn back.

Oh well, on to the next money making idea 😆

You’ve got to compete with people like this

you could also mine for gold in raw sewerage.

My son built a few machines to do the digging but at 15p a KW so say 45p per hour running cost thats c.£10 per day/£300 per month it only seem to make sense if you get your leccy from a lamppost.

Apart from that have you ever been in a geek shop ? People who like that stuff have BO and no style, I would rather be poor.

Bimber,

That setup is now mining 14.6 coins a day. Back in november last year it would have been earning 144600 a day!!!

There is an online calculator that let’s you put in the specs vs electric prices or cloud costs. Unless you have solar or wind turbines your 5 years too late.

Sounds like the best way to make money from bitcoin mining is to sell the machines.

I’ve got the other half’s old Acer laptop…. vintage circa 2010 – I’ll do you a great price?

You’ve got to compete with people like this

Good article!

Was in Holland a while back. Actually saw a real bona fide cafeteria that actually accepted bitcoins.

If you really want to mine, then set up a botnet and do a distributed mining on other peoples hardware.

Or sell all your ebay stuff for Bitcoins.

If you really want to mine, then set up a botnet and do a distributed mining on other peoples hardware.

Given owning a botnet is a valuable commodity, you’d probably get a better return selling it for malware distribution etc rather than bit coin mining.

Friend has exactly 1 bitcoin.
Was one of those that went missing in Mt.Gox and may or may not be one of those that magically might have reappeared from down the back of the virtual sofa.
Keeps getting emails about how he may be able to do a claim in Japan (or wherever it was), for a share in the bitcoins they might have found, minus legal costs.
I think he just sees it as a novelty that cost him $20, is worthless, unusable anywhere, and the lawyers cut would mean any return would be less than the price of an envelope and a stamp.

I honestly don’t know how long it would take to mine $5000 worth of bitcoin on $4000 worth of kit and liquidate it, but I’d assume probably not very quickly.

That article on the Chinese bitcoin mine is amazing. A real eye opener!

As others have said, it’s a bit late to get into the mining game.

A friend of mine has been having some success playing the bit coin exchange against regular currency. With the currency being relatively volatile he says you can make a reasonable return (not setting him up for life or anything) by just selling on the days there’s a surge in the exchange rate and then waiting for it to have a ‘bad’ day before buying back in.

Bit chancy, but then again bitcoin seems to be that way too.

Another Chinese mining operation

Woah.

Shame they don’t say how many coins / month they mine….

1M USD per month in electricity.

No wonder the planet is in the mess it’s in.

1M USD per month in electricity.

No wonder the planet is in the mess it’s in.

+1

Best article I’ve come across so far on the subject:
http://brokenlibrarian.org/bitcoin/

Summary is:

9) Wait, does that mean that every advantage that people claim Bitcoin has is not actually true?

Yes. It’s not anonymous, it’s not free, it’s not instant, and it’s not convenient. It’s extremely difficult to make money on it, mining is useless, and it’s literally impossible that it will ever go into widespread use. Unless you have an ideological stake in the concept of Bitcoin (or want to buy drugs and/or child porn), there is literally no reason to get involved in it.

There’s actually one thing that Bitcoin supporters claim about Bitcoin which is true: it has no chargebacks. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. Whether this is actually an advantage or not probably depends on whether you’ve ever been ripped off before. If you haven’t, then getting involved in Bitcoin is probably a good way to fix that.

so like Paypal Gift? 🙂

But more sinister. Imagine if the button on PayPal didn’t say “I’m sending money to friends or family”, but said “I’m funding drug smuggling and child porn”.

If only Jamie was here!

Can you find Bitcoins down the back of virtual sofas ?

Interesting article although we’ve no idea of the credentials of whoever wrote it.
One thing we do know is that speculation on a new commodity tends to lead to boom and bust – dot com crash anyone?

Can you find Bitcoins down the back of virtual sofas

You can hear the shout: sell Bitcoin, buy virtual sofas!

I wonder if those guys who invented Bitcoins realized the environmental impact of this virtual currency? All that wasted electricity and generated heat! It costs real money and time to create this stuff – it just seems wrong somehow. I guess at least anyone can create their own money given the resources. Just like normal money then.

I wonder how it’s environmental impact compares per unit to a conventional currency?