Bitcoin mining

Soarin

Soarin

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 23, 2010
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So by reading up I guess this is a pretty neat. I looked up a 5770 "mining" power and it was something like 192.8Mhash/s is that good?
Because I read that a guy here makes like 50 of these coins a month just mining. Well I found sites that pay you coins for working and then mining on top of that could I really own say this card in maybe a month or two?? Just by letting my pc do some work.

http://www.bitcoinblaster.com/index...video-cards/radeon-7850-860mhz-2gb-gddr5.html
 
bigdaveberg said:
So by reading up I guess this is a pretty neat. I looked up a 5770 "mining" power and it was something like 192.8Mhash/s is that good?
Because I read that a guy here makes like 50 of these coins a month just mining. Well I found sites that pay you coins for working and then mining on top of that could I really own say this card in maybe a month or two??

http://www.bitcoinblaster.com/index.../video-cards/geforce-gtx670-gc-4gb-gddr5.html
Click to expand...

Factor in electricity costs. If you are lucky, you will break even lol. Its not free money, which is why it is not as popular as some hoped it would be.
 
bigdaveberg said:
So by reading up I guess this is a pretty neat. I looked up a 5770 "mining" power and it was something like 192.8Mhash/s is that good?
Because I read that a guy here makes like 50 of these coins a month just mining. Well I found sites that pay you coins for working and then mining on top of that could I really own say this card in maybe a month or two?? Just by letting my pc do some work.
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Even if you could get 200 Mhash/s on the 5770, at current Bitcoin difficulty that would give you about 1.8 Bitcoins per month, or about $20 gross.

However, Bitcoin tends to increase in difficultly every two weeks or so, and in a month or so, the number of Bitcoins that can be mined per hour will be halved. Bitcoin can help subsidize a part of your video card, but it's too late to have it pay it off.
 
Oh okay. Well anyways, I work off where i live by managing the network and helping out so i get free electricity. Also I changed the video card in question to a 7850 2gb
 
bigdaveberg said:
So by reading up I guess this is a pretty neat. I looked up a 5770 "mining" power and it was something like 192.8Mhash/s is that good?
Because I read that a guy here makes like 50 of these coins a month just mining. Well I found sites that pay you coins for working and then mining on top of that could I really own say this card in maybe a month or two?? Just by letting my pc do some work.

http://www.bitcoinblaster.com/index...video-cards/radeon-7850-860mhz-2gb-gddr5.html
Click to expand...

I'm currently using a 6970 and it runs at 315 Mhash/sec. I get about 1 bit coin per week. Electricity costs are really low where I live 8 cents a Kilowatt hour, and the graphics card consumes 150 - 250 watts an hour over and above idle (can't remember the exact figure) I'm one of few people who actually profit from mining bitcoins.

However if you are thinking of getting into Mining bitcoins, don't buy a graphics card... sometime this month Butterfly labs is lauching a 4.5 GigaHash/s, 60 Gigahash/s and 1500 Gigahash/s hardware. These things have preorders like no tomorrow. Once these get released the difficulty is going to skyrocket, effectively making GPU mining non profitable no matter your electricity costs.

If your serious about trying bitcoin mining out buy one of the products from butterfly labs. I bought mine but was in line at around 9015th place... I may not get my hardware for months.
 
Oh damn. Well thank you for the info. Honestly though, I was hoping to have my pc do some spare work while I am away and possibly get enough coins and cash combo to be able to upgrade my GPU, for better performance al around. Not just mining performance. I guess that would have been helpful to state.
 
ahhh bitcoin -- there can be some heated discussions here about it.

I'm running two 7970's and not paying for electricity and I'm only making about 3BTC (Bitcoins) per week. With the general "value" of bitcoins, that's (maybe) 100-130 dollars a month in my pocket for doing nothing.

No, I don't live with my parents, I'm just in a place that's "all bills paid", pretty sweet actually.

Not only is the cost of electricity something to factor, but all that heat has to go somewhere. If you are in a northern state, all you have to do is crack your window for most of the year. I'm in Texas, and running hardware for bitcoin mining is pretty impossible for about 1/3rd of the year thanks to texas heat. When it's 110F outside, you are screwed no matter what you do. (and you have to pay for the AC to cool things on top of that)

Ive soaked up as much knowledge on butterfly labs as I can -- and while the lure of 150 dollars for a piece of hardware that can turn 4000MHash/sec is tempting... at this point (if they ever do deliver) by the time you get your hardware the difficulty has already skyrocketed and while you still still net some money, the unit itself will still take a while to pay for itself. Ive heard different things from different people and while I don't think butterfly labs is a scam... I think they might have greatly exaggerated whats possible. (more in terms of delivery IMO)

It's all an arms race really -- the people who make out like bandits are always the early adopters. When bitcoin first hit, people would mine with their CPU's, then we moved to GPUs, now we are moving to ASIC miners. What's questionable to me is that if Butterfly labs was sitting on hardware that can do that kind of speed with that little power consumption. Running just ONE Jalapeno unit for 30 days would net them about $381 at current difficulty levels. The smart thing to do would be to make as many as you possible could -- run them each for a month or two and then sell them off. Effectively double or triple dipping your money.
 
Gpu mining's heyday is past unfortunately, though many people here made quite a bit of money out of it. It was fun, but going specialized bitming arrays is the way to go now since AMD haven't added more cores since the 5870, and nvidia was never anywhere close in amount of cores needed.
 
ASIC is right around the corner

by all means fire up every AMD GPU in your inventory if the electricity pencils out

I do not advise investment in new GPU hardware for mining at this time

If you want in on ASIC mining try butterflylabs
 
I'm still mining with 5850's and 5830's. Electricity cost is about $2 per day and I mine aprox a coin per day. It may be worth it If you own the cards already and have cheap or free electricity.
 
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master noran said:
I'm still mining with 5850's and 5830's. Electricity cost is about $2 and I make a coin a day. It may be worth it If you own the cards already and have cheap or free electricity.
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+1 basically any sort of "investing" at this point is worthless and you will lose money. Add in the fact that in about a month the block reward will be cut in half to 25 coins per block.

The combined with the ASICs showing up means anyone that pays for electricity and cooling will be SOL. At that point the only way I could see someone wanting to mine is if they 1) need the heat byproduct in their room and 2) have free electricity.

Until I see a video or detailed review of a butterfly labs ASIC miner... I will happily run my GPUs.

What really boggles my mind is that had I known what bitcoin was, and where it was going... I could have made tens of thousands of dollars. Getting in early generating tons of coins per day when the difficulty was damn near zero... and then selling them all right as the price crested 20$/coin... damn that's a fun thought.

I think I've netted about 300-400 dollars total so far out of bitcoin. Eh, it's free I suppose.
 
yeah ASIC's will destroy the GPU farming just as GPU killed CPU - difficulty is mental nowdays so all it does to single cards is wear them out faster :) - Sold my 30+ cards and all bitcoins cahsed out - was fun while it lasted. Might mess with some ASIC solutions if i get the bug to start again.
 
Wow o_O Alot of people posted. Tyvym for the info! I tried searching here but found little in the first 3 pages of results. Anyways I was hoping to do it enough to off set the cost of that card a little bit. Cause I am a cheap ass xD
 
Surprised the haters have not descended on us yet

ZOMG YOU RETARD TERRORISTS &*%#!!!! ITS A SCAMMM

I paid off 3@6950, or paid for my BFL single preorder...however you want to think about it
 
bigdaveberg said:
Wow o_O Alot of people posted. Tyvym for the info! I tried searching here but found little in the first 3 pages of results. Anyways I was hoping to do it enough to off set the cost of that card a little bit. Cause I am a cheap ass xD
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Well if you have free electricity and air conditioning (or live up north) by all means run your card, you might get 20 dollars after a month or two. It won't pay for your card, but it's a free pizza :)

Bitcoin isn't a popular topic here -- if you want to do some serious reading -- here is the spot: https://bitcointalk.org/

that will keep you busy for days if you want.
 
Im getting 220 m/hash at 1000 core on my 2 reference 5770's. My bitcoin rig heats my bedroom to near 80F with the door shut and keeps my apt. liveable right now. If it weren't for ASIC looming id build another rig to heat my whole apt. Before you say it, yes its not the most efficient but it is when your source of heat is late 1970's electric baseboard heat.

Btw how do you BFL guys liking that month+ pushback into Dec on your preorders.... :)
 
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qwksi1 said:
Im getting 220 m/hash at 1000 core on my 2 reference 5770's. My bitcoin rig heats my bedroom to near 80F with the door shut and keeps my apt. liveable right now. If it weren't for ASIC looming id build another rig to heat my whole apt. Before you say it, yes its not the most efficient but it is when your source of heat is late 1970's electric baseboard heat.

Btw how you BFL guys liking that month+ pushback into Dec on your preorders.... :)
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It is true, return of investment looms larger than return on investment at this point, but I knew it was a risk and it is all house money.

as far as your setup, absolutely, cheapest heat you will find
 
It's never to late to start as long as you have fast enough hardware and can overcome the cost of electricity. Bitcoins still go for $10+, every bit helps (*rimshot*). I'm also in the north like others mentioned and I'm also keeping my condo warm with some mining by raising my clocks and and using a small fan to keep the heat circulating outside my room.
 
difficulty is to high for the smaller cards to really do anything these days.

7950 or 7970 are your best bet for gpu mining. However things are getting rather crazy as of late ad when the asic units hit peoples hands you can basically forget about GPU mining. On the upside When the difficulty skyrockets, one or two things will happen. Bitcoin value will go through the roof, or it will fall in price. I don't think anyone knows exactly what it will do quite yet.

But 4000 m-hash a second for butterfly labs lowest end unit and the bigger ones pumping out some stupid hash numbers you best believe the difficulty is going to increase big time.
 
qwksi1 said:
Im getting 220 m/hash at 1000 core on my 2 reference 5770's. My bitcoin rig heats my bedroom to near 80F with the door shut and keeps my apt. liveable right now. If it weren't for ASIC looming id build another rig to heat my whole apt. Before you say it, yes its not the most efficient but it is when your source of heat is late 1970's electric baseboard heat.
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I don't bitcoin mine, but my virtual machine farm does a nice job keeping my warm at night now. The air coming out of the back of that computer is so warm and toasty. Computers do work well as room heaters. Especially when they pay themselves off. :)
 
In terms of efficiently heating ones place -- I can think of no better way than computer heat.

A watt of energy is a watt of energy -- it all costs the same. Whether you use that watt to power a 1970's heater, or a bit mining rig it's all the same. Only one of them though offers any sort of return financially :)

As for the difficulty rating we are currently sitting at mining -- I'm expecting a 10-20X increase in difficulty once ASIC's take a good hold. As to the value of BTC itself once most people shut down their GPU rigs? I've thought about it some, and the sucky conclusion is that long term I think the price will drop. if you have 100,000 people that were casually and hardcore GPU mining, once asic's hit what if 90% of them cash out and move on to something else? These were the people that used bitcoins to buy/sell/trade to begin with. If suddenly you only have 10% of your former population using bitcoin, that's bad for the long term value (dollar wise)

There are many factors that will be pulling the price both up AND down, which one will come out on top is anyone guess.

I take the approach that's it's all extra and free money for me, I'm not going to risk my own personal money betting one way or another, I mine 2 or 3 coins and then cash out on a weekly basis. I've been squirling all that money away into one place and it will make buying $1500 dollars worth of tires for my car a lot easier at the start of next year.
 
It would be very interesting (if we had the ability) how many units butterfly labs pumps out over a time period, and how it relates to the difficulty rating.

Another way to think about is that let's assume most GPU miners turn off their rigs and sell off their hardware because its (mostly) useless at that point. If a mostly equal amount of computation power is added back into the system in the form of ASIC minig - all that's really happened is taken the total network power and put it into the hands of much FEWER people. Never a good thing when your whole system is designed to be distributed as much as possible. In the end prices and minting rates will stabilize right back to where they have been for a while, only difference is a smaller pool of people will be using or collecting any benefit vs now.
 
I am not convinced that ASIC will centralize mining that much. I am a small time miner running 3 cards and I am making the jump to a BFL single, the jalapeno is entry level cheap...less than $200 iirc. We have to keep moving to stay ahead of governments and other bad actors. It is a shame to lose the dual use of the hardware, best possible scenario would be if AMD had a clue how much this has driven sales for them and busted out some serious optimization for the 8K series, but the chance of that is pretty slim.
 
jojo69 said:
I am not convinced that ASIC will centralize mining that much. I am a small time miner running 3 cards and I am making the jump to a BFL single, the jalapeno is entry level cheap...less than $200 iirc. We have to keep moving to stay ahead of governments and other bad actors. It is a shame to lose the dual use of the hardware, best possible scenario would be if AMD had a clue how much this has driven sales for them and busted out some serious optimization for the 8K series, but the chance of that is pretty slim.
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I was totally onboard with the price point of the jalapeno, $150 dollars for a 4GHash/sec unit.... and only using something like 80W? Of course we don't know if that's what the final number will be -- the deal breaker for me is the fact butterfly labs has routinely slipped release dates, and overinflated numbers in the past. Combine that with 10000 something pre-orders means I might not get my hands on a unit till middle of 2013. By then what would be the point? Difficulty would have skyrocketed and even with all that power I'd be only making 0.2BTC a day.

Just like everything else bitcoin related its the early adopters. Once the units start getting into the hands of the public, the first two weeks will be some serious banking in terms of $$$ anyone outside of that initial window loses more and more advantage as time goes on. At todays difficulty/price of bitcoin just one Jalapeno unit can pull in almost $400 a month, that makes it sound like a miracle worker until you realize once difficulty adjusts you will be lucky to get $100 a month.
 
yes, see my earlier post, the slippage is disappointing

I am still skeptical of all the centralization doomsaying
 
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