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Bitcoin Discussion Thread Part 2

I have a low-powered server that I was thinking I might add a GPU to in order to do Bitcoin mining. However, after quite a bit of research it seems that the profitability is highly dependent on the exchange rate, and that even with an undervolted, very efficient AMD Radeon HD 7970 (4 MH/s/W), a profit is only made within a year if the exchange rate stays above ~$65/Bitcoin. Considering the extremely volatile market, I'm wondering why people bother.

Is it only worth it for people who don't pay for electricity costs or something?
 
It's only worth it if you plan on keeping your day job, paying for electricity / parts with your paycheck, and hoarding coins for the extreme long-term...

... so that when a currency does blow up (like the BTC), you'll be sitting on a mountain of coins and cash.

Yes, i know that i'm not "helping" the currency by hoarding, but who else here isn't in it for the profit?
 
Oh I wasn't implying it could replace a day job lol. I just mean that if I added an undervolted HD 7970, I'd only be only pulling in 0.036 Bitcoins/day. After a year that'd be 13.14 Bitcoins, but I'd have spent £320 on the GPU and £124 on electricity (and I'm on a fixed, cheap electricity deal that is better than anything on offer now).

So if those 13.14 Bitcoins aren't even worth £444 (£34/BTC required), it'll have been a loss-making exercise. I guess you're right, it's only worth it if you're in it for the long-haul and can wait for a boom in Bitcoin prices.
 
DragonQ said:
I have a low-powered server that I was thinking I might add a GPU to in order to do Bitcoin mining. However, after quite a bit of research it seems that the profitability is highly dependent on the exchange rate, and that even with an undervolted, very efficient AMD Radeon HD 7970 (4 MH/s/W), a profit is only made within a year if the exchange rate stays above ~$65/Bitcoin. Considering the extremely volatile market, I'm wondering why people bother.

Is it only worth it for people who don't pay for electricity costs or something?
Click to expand...

Back in the day (when I was living in university housing and not paying for electricity, and when GPU mining was relatively new), my friend used to be able to mine bitcoins fairly quickly. At the time, he was probably making $20/month doing it, so he stopped. If he would have done it the entire semester and held on to everything until now, I'd say he'd have easily made several thousand dollars. Even if he had to pay for electricity, it would have been an extremely profitable thing to do...So I guess if you got in early, and waited it out, it was well worth your time.

Because of the difficulty scaling, and the uncertainty of the current bitcoin exchange, I don't really think it's worthwhile to keep mining bitcoins now if you're doing it on a GPU. FPGA hardware seems to be good, though. It's a lot more energy efficient (lower power consumption per Mhash/sec) than using a GPU, so that might make it a lot more worthwhile. If your costs are a fifth as high, then the same reward becomes much more profitable.
 
atp1916 said:
It's only worth it if you plan on keeping your day job, paying for electricity / parts with your paycheck, and hoarding coins for the extreme long-term...

... so that when a currency does blow up (like the BTC), you'll be sitting on a mountain of coins and cash.

Yes, i know that i'm not "helping" the currency by hoarding, but who else here isn't in it for the profit?
Click to expand...

Wrong. Back when we were at $3.50-400 a coin (LTC), I was gonna be clearing (after electricity costs) nearly $2,000 a month. It's enough for someone that has a part time job going to school or something like that but even still, 2k its a lot of money for most people...when I had a job, I worked my ass off in the elements to make nearly that much. Now, at current apocalypse level values, im still gonna clear about 300 bucks a month, a nice chunk of change.

Hoarding coins doesn't necessarily hurt the currency as it would make it more scarce hence more valuable, but I understand where you may mean not spending hurts creating a sufficient marketplace that will accept them as payment.


Use the calculators guys, unless your paying outrageous electrical costs, its still plenty profitable to mine with a GPU.
 
Dogs said:
FPGA hardware seems to be good, though.
Click to expand...
Are there any good ones that aren't discontinued though? :/

USMCGrunt said:
Wrong. Back when we were at $3.50-400 a coin (LTC), I was gonna be clearing (after electricity costs) nearly $2,000 a month. Now, at current apocalypse level values, im still gonna clear about 300 bucks a month, a nice chunk of change.
Click to expand...
How does your income drop when the USD/BTC ratio has risen? Surely you're still pulling in the same number of BTC, which are now worth more than they were?

USMCGrunt said:
Use the calculators guys, unless your paying outrageous electrical costs, its still plenty profitable to mine with a GPU.
Click to expand...
I was using a Bitcoin Mining calculator. Power draw, and thus MHash/J is so important because electricity prices are so high, especially in Europe. My "cheap rate", which this extra power consumption would fall into, is 10.1p/kWh (~$0.16/kWh).
 
DragonQ said:
Are there any good ones that aren't discontinued though? :/


How does your income drop when the USD/BTC ratio has risen? Surely you're still pulling in the same number of BTC, which are now worth more than they were?


I was using a Bitcoin Mining calculator. Power draw, and thus MHash/J is so important because electricity prices are so high, especially in Europe. My "cheap rate", which this extra power consumption would fall into, is 10.1p/kWh (~$0.16/kWh).
Click to expand...

As a pure miner, if the value of a BTC goes down against the dollar then I lose money. Selling a bitcoin at $250 is more than selling a coin at $70...maybe im not understanding the question.

Im not looking at MH/J, I feel like that's breaking the stats down further then necessary. If I profit 500 a month and it costs me 100 in electricity, then im profiting 400, seems pretty simple. Now, if I was trying to compare different setups to find the one that squeezes out the highest profit, then I could see the point of MH/J. My electrical costs are quite a bit less then yours which could account for difference in opinion. I pay 5 cents per KW/h, significantly less.
 
Well, Grunt, i'm not saying that LTC mining isn't profitable - it clearly is, given affordable electricity.

I'm merely advocating that people need to (so long as they're at least breaking even) go from a short-term profitability mentality to a long term profitability mentality because the real payout is when prices spike down the road.
 
It seems as if ASIC could really bugger up most people's profitability too. Difficulty will increase massively. :(
 
DragonQ said:
Are there any good ones that aren't discontinued though? :/
Click to expand...

I don't know. I wouldn't buy one of those off-the-shelf FPGA bitcoin miners, though. If you're serious enough about mining to devote money to purpose built hardware, I'd say you should be serious enough to learn how to DIY a setup with some typical FPGA hardware.

DragonQ said:
How does your income drop when the USD/BTC ratio has risen? Surely you're still pulling in the same number of BTC, which are now worth more than they were?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't understand how that would work. If you're capable of producing $2000/month worth of bitcoins when they're worth $2/coin (so what, $1000 per month?), I don't see how this could have gone down to $300/month when they're bouncing between $100-250/coin. Why are you going from presumably ~1000 bitcoins per month to presumably ~1-3 bitcoins per month? The difficulty can't have gone up that much.
 
DragonQ said:
It seems as if ASIC could really bugger up most people's profitability too. Difficulty will increase massively. :(
Click to expand...

ASICS / FPGAs are paper tigers. People need to seriously stop hyping these things up and "what they'll do to the mining industry".

Where is the mass production of these devices? They can't even mass-produce the "little" designs, much less the 25gh/s+ machines i see on these adds. It's been years now. Where's the ASIC invasion?

Either way, rising difficulty is just the nature of the beast here. It's inevitable.

That's why you go for the long term: invest in the hardware, have some faith, turn off the exchange tickers, and come back in x years for a serious payday.
 
atp1916 said:
Where is the mass production of these devices? They can't even mass-produce the "little" designs, much less the 25gh/s+ machines i see on these adds. It's been years now. Where's the ASIC invasion?
Click to expand...

Well, take a little look at some of the time frame for this stuff. When they started taking pre-orders for those ASIC mining devices, bit coins were like $10 each. Suddenly bit coins are approaching $100+ per coin, and now there's some kind of delay and the ASIC miners aren't being shipped. If you were the company making these, why in hell would you sell a device for $150 when you could easily bring in that much per device by sitting on them and mining for pure profit? If you have 5, 10 or 25gh/s ASIC devices, wouldn't it be far more profitable to just use them than it would be to sell them? I think they're going to hold on to them until the bit coin price goes down, then finally ship them once having them isn't so worthwhile.
 
Dogs said:
Yeah, I don't understand how that would work. If you're capable of producing $2000/month worth of bitcoins when they're worth $2/coin (so what, $1000 per month?), I don't see how this could have gone down to $300/month when they're bouncing between $100-250/coin. Why are you going from presumably ~1000 bitcoins per month to presumably ~1-3 bitcoins per month? The difficulty can't have gone up that much.
Click to expand...

I think that he was talking about just earlier in the month and Litecoin, not Bitcoin. Since then difficulty has tripled and the price is a third of what it was! It's quite the double whammy when it comes to profitability.

EDIT: That said, that particular timeframe wasn't exactly `normal' as litecoin mining profitability has gone...
 
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Dogs said:
Well, take a little look at some of the time frame for this stuff. When they started taking pre-orders for those ASIC mining devices, bit coins were like $10 each. Suddenly bit coins are approaching $100+ per coin, and now there's some kind of delay and the ASIC miners aren't being shipped. If you were the company making these, why in hell would you sell a device for $150 when you could easily bring in that much per device by sitting on them and mining for pure profit? If you have 5, 10 or 25gh/s ASIC devices, wouldn't it be far more profitable to just use them than it would be to sell them? I think they're going to hold on to them until the bit coin price goes down, then finally ship them once having them isn't so worthwhile.
Click to expand...

Sorry chief, i don't buy the conspiracy theories. :)
 
snclawson said:
I think that he was talking about just earlier in the month and Litecoin, not Bitcoin. Since then difficulty has tripled and the price is a third of what it was! It's quite the double whammy when it comes to profitability.

EDIT: That said, that particular timeframe wasn't exactly `normal' as litecoin mining profitability has gone...
Click to expand...

Yes, sorry for the confusion, I see what you were asking now. Earlier this month before the crash with LTC hitting nearly $5 a coin and difficulty low enough that I was mining 483 coins a month, I was going to be raking in quite a bit of cash. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one seeing this and a lot of people jumped into LTC mining which in turn made the difficulty skyrocket. Now, with the price per coin hovering around $1.75 and my mining capability diminished to roughly 340 coins, you can see how much of an impact that can have.

Good news, the crash has caused some people to leave LTC mining (at least for now) and the difficulty estimate looks to be heading down slightly and the market appears to be recovering more quickly than I had expected.
 
Yeah Coinotron has lost 100 miners in the last couple days. Might be able to squeak out a few bucks after things return to mean, but a lot of people haven't received the components they ordered last week. Some will return them, others will need to generate some coin, cash it out, compare to their electric bills and then give up. Simple economics dictates that if there's no money in it, people will stop creating coin, which will lower difficulty until there's some money in it. Historically the time to see a return was about 4 months.
atp1916 said:
@ nitro: I'll take 293 vs 7673000.
Click to expand...
? One is Scrypt the other is SHA.
 
Thoughts on Ripple?

boasting a ~10 second transaction time

https://ripple.com/bitcoiners/

http://opencoin.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/introducing-ripple-a-bitcoin-copycat

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds...and_how_ripple_might_avoid_the_same_fate.html

Co-Founded by the creator of Mt Gox and backed by a bunch of "big financial organizations" (not that i would know any of the ones listed)


Do you think it will be just a negligible fee'd PayPal with a cryptocurrency twist?
Or will they actually succeed and create a global payment network that integrates all types of payment, payment methods, and currencies?
 
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Fooshnik said:
Yeah Coinotron has lost 100 miners in the last couple days. Might be able to squeak out a few bucks after things return to mean, but a lot of people haven't received the components they ordered last week. Some will return them, others will need to generate some coin, cash it out, compare to their electric bills and then give up. Simple economics dictates that if there's no money in it, people will stop creating coin, which will lower difficulty until there's some money in it. Historically the time to see a return was about 4 months. ? One is Scrypt the other is SHA.
Click to expand...

can you inform me of the difference between Scrypt and SHA?
 
How low can we go with CPU's and till get our GPU's processing at a good rate? Like an Atom + 7900? Undervolted first gen I5 with an SLI motherboard?

My primary computer is dual Xeon and 7770 but I'm installing XP on my I5-660 now with a laptop hard drive to be nice and low with power consumption but the only other video card I have is a 4890 which only does around 80M
 
A lot more memory intensive as well, uses about a gig of RAM on a 7950 which makes it difficult to create an ASIC to run the hash, since it would have to be paired with something like DDR5, in which case you'd have the complexity of a video card without the dual purpose of being able to game on it. It's unlikely anyone's going to bother mass producing a Scrypt ASIC anytime soon, if ever.
 
atp1916 said:
Sorry chief, i don't buy the conspiracy theories. :)
Click to expand...

Theories or not --- it makes sense and if I was the designer/owner of a company cranking out asics... what possible incentive would I have for releasing a product for $1500 dollars when the very product itself can generate that same income in the span of 30 days? I'd be more than happy to sit on inventory for 30 days if it meant I make 200% of my original sale price.

I just recently got into Litecoin the past few months -- I'm kicking myself because I put off mining litecoin so I could squeeze out the last month before huge spikes in BTC difficulty. I clearely remember mining LTC when the difficulty was so low I could get 2000 LTC in a months' time all on two 7970's

One interesting thing to keep in mind, litecoin has been the only coin to stay MORE profitable than bitcoin throughout the last few days and the crashes going on. I keep track of the profitability via coinotron (BTC is given always and forever as being 1.0, other coins are listed relative to that 1.15, 0.75, etc etc)

I'm glad to see LTC gaining back some of it's value. Funny (and somewhat sad) story is that to actually get cash into BTC-E.com it's a rather sucky process. Bank->Dwolla->-MtGox->BTC-E So I wanted to uncash out about 200 dollars back into various crypto. Took about 1 week to jump through all the hurdles, finally wound up buying right at inkling of the crash. Still did a double take when the next morning LTC was half of what I'd paid for it.

As I've said in previous posts it sucked to see, but I wasn't devastated by it, I still maintain that I've never sunk any personal money into crypto, I play with whatever I've cashed out in the past or just have laying around to experiment with. As they say -- only invest what you plan to lose. I'm cool with losing 200 dollars temporarily that I didn't even pay for in the first place :)
 
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XorCist said:
whats a good litecoin pool to join?
Click to expand...

I use coinotron.com I like the fact they do most crypto currencies - (BTC/LTC/etc) they have a nice interface, and lots of useful well placed stats on their page. (things like current difficulty, current profitibility (relative to BTC).

as a backup I'd say notroll.in is another good pool (most of the time).
 
collegeboy69us said:
I use coinotron.com I like the fact they do most crypto currencies - (BTC/LTC/etc) they have a nice interface, and lots of useful well placed stats on their page. (things like current difficulty, current profitibility (relative to BTC).

as a backup I'd say notroll.in is another good pool (most of the time).
Click to expand...

ever heard of http://wemineltc.com/?? seems the people on bitcointalk forums think its good...

also maybe u can help me..

im trying to get it working on there just as a test, but i get this

[2013-04-13 09:14:42] Started cgminer 2.11.4
[2013-04-13 09:14:42] Started cgminer 2.11.4
[2013-04-13 09:14:42] Probing for an alive pool
[2013-04-13 09:14:43] pool 0 JSON stratum auth failed: (null)


this is what im using to start it
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://eu.wemineltc.com:3333 -u username -p password -I 13

are they not the same username and pass that i use to login to the website?

thanks alot
 
@XorCist: The username and password are your worker names and password. Your site username and password are different (or can be).

Good luck :)
 
Should also mention i've been mining on give-me-ltc. Pretty consistent, good connections over a 48 hour span.

Edit: Good connections as in <3% bad shares
 
XorCist said:
I haven't used wemineltc, but if it's like other pools there will be a page where you can define `workers' for your account. Generally the worker name is your login name + a short string, which then is what you use as the username for cgminer (each worker also gets it's own individual password).
Click to expand...
 
snclawson said:
I haven't used wemineltc, but if it's like other pools there will be a page where you can define `workers' for your account. Generally the worker name is your login name + a short string, which then is what you use as the username for cgminer (each worker also gets it's own individual password).
Click to expand...

Can we get an example of what it looks like? Im having hellish problems with guiminer scrypt and may try out cgminer to see if that alleviates my problems but I can never seem to find a decent guide on proper syntax for multi-gpu worker setup.

Anybody mining on Linux and is it working as well as windows counterparts? Ive got limited experience but my problem could also be windows related...
 
USMCGrunt said:
Can we get an example of what it looks like? Im having hellish problems with guiminer scrypt and may try out cgminer to see if that alleviates my problems but I can never seem to find a decent guide on proper syntax for multi-gpu worker setup.

Anybody mining on Linux and is it working as well as windows counterparts? Ive got limited experience but my problem could also be windows related...
Click to expand...

I spent a few weeks googling and finally feel okay setting this stuff up. Mining on Xubuntu and Win7 here. The conf file makes it portable...I removed a bunch of stuff from the config but that should get you started with CGMiner. Do a cgminer -n to get the errors within the config :)

Console: cgminer.exe --config cgminer.conf
cgminer.conf file
Code: 
{
"pools" : [
	{
		"url" : "http://us.litecoinpool.org:9332",
		"user" : "username.worker",
		"pass" : "worker_pass"
	},
	{
		"url" : "http://litecoinpool.org:9332",
		"user" : "username.worker",
		"pass" : "worker_pass"
	}
}
],
"scrypt" : true,
"failover-only" : true
}

Note: replace the url, user, and pass with the pool you are mining with. Use multiple ones so your miners don't stop mining, should a pool go down.
 
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I just looked, I sold 13 bitcoins that I mined at $15/per

FUCK FUCK FUCK that could've been over $3000!!!!
 
Most people mining in 2011 when things took off sold hundreds if not thousands of coins for a couple dollars each.
 
ive been using notroll, without any issues for the past few weeks.
 
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