anyone do it?

if so what kit do you use? and is it worth it?

No. Seems pretty pointless now given the hardware required. An ex-colleague runs a hosted mining service using hardware built by his brother’s company. He’ll be a millionaire by the time he’s 25….

unless you “steal” your electricity, apparently it’s not worth it no that the bitcoin algorithm has evolved so far.

That and the fact that bitcoins have little or no security as a monetary unit…….

i fear you may have missed the boat somewhat mate. wont be financially viable again for a while. unless you mean mining the landfill in Newport for the missing hard drive of course

people are mining litecoins now, if you don’t pay the electricity bill and have a few grand to spend on graphics cards it might be worth a look still

ahh.

so i’ll need my entire server farm running mining hardware 24×7

give that a miss then!!

So what do you guys think about buying bit coins as an investment?

unless you mean mining the landfill in Newport for the missing hard drive of course

I live about 2 miles away from the landfill site (lucky me) think about getting a metal detector and HASMAT suit every time I drive past…

So what do you guys think about buying bit coins as an investment?

Try the horses.

I live about 2 miles away from the landfill site (lucky me) think about getting a metal detector and HASMAT suit every time I drive past

i know some people willing to work for £30 a day……been thinking about getting a posse together 😆

What we need is to spend a few grand on a JCB as an investment 😉

Would be worth it if you got £3 mil out of it. Knowing my luck I would spend months searching and as soon as I find it the bitcoin bubble bursts and it becomes worthless.

Worth looking into ive got several rigs (miners) mining litecoin 24/7 makinging good $ personally Id recommend mining litecoin (LTC) and converting into bitcoin or just holding litecoin altogether.

The market is super volitile though, to mine LTC you need high end AMD cards starting at realistically £150 and they kick out alot of heat and noise..

If your tech savvy with atleast £500 to spend on hardware give it a go. If not buy some through localbitcoins.org and see where they end up.

Anyway good luck

Joe Rogan is doing a Bitcoin special podcast thingy now on the JRE podcast if you’re interested.

My son has just built an AMD graphics card machine and intends to use it as you describe, how much should I charge him for electricity?

IanW – Member

My son has just built an AMD graphics card machine and intends to use it as you describe, how much should I charge him for electricity?

Find out the PSU maximum output, and charge him that. It probably won’t actually be quite that much, but you might as well electricity-mine him.

Graphics cards can pull a lot at full tilt, it depends on the card though. Some decent looking info here: http://forum-en.msi.com/faq/article/power-requirements-for-graphics-cards.

Thanks,

Its a 750w PSU (I saw that arrive from ebuyer), presuming its not running at full tilt say 500w that would be 7p per hour at our tariff?

It this bitcoin mining a long term task requiring the machine to run for several hours?

I suppose three hours a day if the above calculations are correct would be roughly £1.50 a week which could live with, especially if I turn the heating off in that part of the house 🙂

a long term task requiring the machine to run for several hours?

24/7 for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Mmmm… so maybe £50 a month plus the £500 initial investment.

Considering the moneys already spent on the hardware is there likely to be any return from the actual mining, odds etc.

No.

I mine alternative coins and exchange them for BTC. I used an Asic miner for BTC before the difficulty got ridiculous. I made a few hundred pounds before selling the miner for what I paid for it. I then put that money towards bike bits. BTC mining is next to impossible unless you have serious money to invest.

Here is my “rig”… 😀

More of a hobby than a serious income but the kit will pay for its self after a couple of months then the the rest is potential profit. The thing kicks out a fair bit of heat but then again I have not puts the radiators on the house for months now.

Thing is, they get exponentially more difficult. We’re heading into the realms now where you’re going to need server farms, patience and a lot of luck.

If you put a penny on the first square of a chess board, two on the second, four on the next and so on doubling each time, your last square would have a pile of pennies 7,609,281,930,405km high. For reference, the moon is 384,400km away. Mining bitcoins is kind of a similar principle.

So, at the risk of sounding stupid, erm, what is this mining y’all talk about? (Briefly)

Love your PC case there!

Love your PC case there!

£3 from Homebase.

So, at the risk of sounding stupid, erm, what is this mining y’all talk about? (Briefly)

Bitcoins are an apparently random number, a bit like the serial number on the back of a microsoft windows CD case. There’s an algorythm which produces them but you have to guess a number, then check it, and try again untill you find one. Hence they get more difficult to find over time as the algorythm gets harder to satisfy.

So you need a computer capable of checking millions of numbers an hour, running 24/7, for months, to stand a chance of finding any at all. A bit like digging a hole in the ground looking for gold, hence ‘mining’.

Bitcoins are an apparently random number, a bit like the serial number on the back of a microsoft windows CD case. There’s an algorythm which produces them but you have to guess a number, then check it, and try again untill you find one. Hence they get more difficult to find over time as the algorythm gets harder to satisfy.

So you need a computer capable of checking millions of numbers an hour, running 24/7, for months, to stand a chance of finding any at all. A bit like digging a hole in the ground looking for gold, hence ‘mining’.

Ahm oot.

BTC and LTC are poo now, it’s all about dogecoin.

so how do you know when you’ve found “gold”? 😕

Please, the kidz are down with Coinye Wests now…

so how do you know when you’ve found “gold”?

The number fits the algorythm. Litteraly like sitting at a PC and typing numbers into the windows serial key untill one fits.

It’s slightly more involved than that (otherwise you could reverse engineer the algorythm and start churning out winning numbers). But essentialy it’s a combination of random chance and computer speed.

Why is to stop someone making up another internet currency then? like stwcoins?

I’m not a thick person but I do struggle with the concept….

Nothing, in theory, other than for it to hold value people would have to accept it. If I offered to buy your bike for 10,000 STWcoins, would you accept? That’s all money is really, a restricted token that we’ve all agreed to use in lieu of every transaction being like Multi-Coloured Swap Shop.

Is finding the number solving something useful or is it just finding a made up number?

Can they be turned into hard curreency?

Just visited this conversion site and it looks too good to be true?!

What happens if you come up with a number that has already been found by someone else? Will the algorithm tell you?

is the bit coin number a fixed character length? ie there are a fixed number of bit coins?

Can they be turned into hard curreency?

From the little I know about this, yes. There are bit coin exchanges on the web where you can buy a bit coin using normal money.

s the bit coin number a fixed character length? ie there are a fixed number of bit coins?

Yes there’s a fixed quantity.
Once bitcoin 2.0 comes online bitcon classic will become worthless though.

There is fixed quantity but once all the coins have been mined then the mining machines will carry on with calculating the transactions. A bank uses vast server rooms to track all the transactions, bitcoin uses the miners to do this. There is no central bank like server room for bitcoin. At the moment the reward for “solving” a block (a packaged of transactions) is 50 coins. At present these are new coins. When all the coins have been mined then a miner will earn money from a transaction charge of 50 coins per solved block. As long as the coins are spent and exchanged then the system will carry on.

From the little I know about this, yes. There are bit coin exchanges on the web where you can buy a bit coin using normal money.

Getting your money back out can be difficult though. A lot of exchanges are relatively cash poor, so when people who are rich in Bitcoins try to cash out, it doesn’t really work.

Mining is becoming less worthwhile now the difficulty is increasing, though people have been working against that by specifying optimised hardware (the plastic crate is a nice touch neilsonwheels :)), and/or joining mining pools, which kind of work like lottery syndicates. If it stays as volatile as it’s been over the summer, you’d probably have a better chance by speculating rather than mining.

So it is all a bit like a pyramid scheme then? 🙂