Silk Road forums

Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: TheNewDude on February 20, 2012, 02:06 am

Title: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 20, 2012, 02:06 am
Does anyone else mine for coins?

I got into it a couple of months ago... I don't make a ton of coin but it's pretty fun.

I am pretty pissed at the moment though. I got lucky and found 2 blocks in 2 days. If I was solo mining that would have been awesome... But since I'm in a pool I only make around .9bc a day. :(
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: username456 on February 20, 2012, 04:56 pm
I always wondered why central government never put their "super computers" to mining and bust the market.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: IgnorantFuck on February 20, 2012, 06:35 pm
Does anyone else mine for coins?

I got into it a couple of months ago... I don't make a ton of coin but it's pretty fun.

I am pretty pissed at the moment though. I got lucky and found 2 blocks in 2 days. If I was solo mining that would have been awesome... But since I'm in a pool I only make around .9bc a day. :(

I'd actually really like to get into mining, but I've got no clue what I'm doing.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: bleep on February 20, 2012, 09:36 pm
How do you set your BTC client upto mine? there use to be an option to generate coin when i first downloaded it, before the option to encrypt your wallet. How do you make the client mine now? I'm not very technical so a slightly detailed bit of information would be good
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 20, 2012, 10:24 pm
How do you set your BTC client upto mine? there use to be an option to generate coin when i first downloaded it, before the option to encrypt your wallet. How do you make the client mine now? I'm not very technical so a slightly detailed bit of information would be good

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=14.0

You can find pretty much all the information you need there.

Certain pools allow you to mine using TOR also... Which is really cool, IMO.

Solo mining isn't a very good idea unless you have a lot of GPU power. (Multiple dedicated mining boxes with a lot of hashing power)

It's easy enough to join a pool, run a program, and get free bitcoins. (Well, free if you can avoid using your own electricity)
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: MailMaxDev on February 20, 2012, 10:36 pm
Be careful to keep power consumption low if you have drugs in your house.
http://techland.time.com/2011/05/23/report-police-confuse-bitcoin-miners-power-use-for-weed-grow-op/
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 20, 2012, 10:43 pm
Be careful to keep power consumption low if you have drugs in your house.
http://techland.time.com/2011/05/23/report-police-confuse-bitcoin-miners-power-use-for-weed-grow-op/

No drugs in my house and 2/3 rigs aren't in my home. :)
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TravellingWithoutMoving on February 20, 2012, 10:47 pm
...where do the mined bitcoins come from, nothing comes for free?!
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: MailMaxDev on February 20, 2012, 10:54 pm
There's a reward or "bounty" for solved blocks. It's designed into the bitcoin system itself.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 20, 2012, 11:00 pm
...where do the mined bitcoins come from, nothing comes for free?!

...where do the mined bitcoins come from, nothing comes for free?!

Simple explanation : Every 10 minutes or so, 50 bitcoins are created and someone gets them.

If you're in a pool, those bitcoins are split between everyone. The amount you get is based on your hashing power and your pool is much more likely to get the coins if they have a lot of hashing power.

This is how bitcoins are made.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: johnwholesome on February 20, 2012, 11:34 pm
honestly, if you don't have massive computing power (as in AT LEAST 2 new ATI cards) combined with very cheap electricity it's really pointless.

A regular desktop rig contributes so little to the pool that you get less back than you pay for the juice your rig needs and the depreciation of your graphx card by running at like 70°C for prolonged periods.

And god forbid you have an nVidia card, now you can completely forget it. It just dun pay off.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 21, 2012, 04:51 am
honestly, if you don't have massive computing power (as in AT LEAST 2 new ATI cards) combined with very cheap electricity it's really pointless.

A regular desktop rig contributes so little to the pool that you get less back than you pay for the juice your rig needs and the depreciation of your graphx card by running at like 70°C for prolonged periods.

And god forbid you have an nVidia card, now you can completely forget it. It just dun pay off.

Yep. It's only a good idea if you have good ATI cards and free/cheap power.

Stashing a box or 2 at your place of work works pretty well. :)
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TravellingWithoutMoving on February 21, 2012, 07:26 am
...investment in processing power, extra elec bill Versus return ?!

Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: midas on February 21, 2012, 03:57 pm
I've heard that mining bitcoins get more complicated as time passes? Before you could mine with a simple computer. Today you need a heavy rig.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 21, 2012, 07:24 pm
I've heard that mining bitcoins get more complicated as time passes? Before you could mine with a simple computer. Today you need a heavy rig.

Yep. You need at least 2 good ATI cards to generate a decent amount of coin. You'll never get your investment back though... It's only worth it if you already have a gaming PC.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: rise_against on February 21, 2012, 11:50 pm
i generate about .11 bitcoins per day mining with deepbit. just using 1 rig w/ a 5770 card.  not getting rich, but its helping keep my house warm thru the winter.   i will stop mining once summer arrives like i did last year.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: FiveSeven on February 22, 2012, 10:35 am
I always wondered why central government never put their "super computers" to mining and bust the market.

Supercomputers are so known because of their massive CPU processing power. Bitcoins mined purely with CPU power would be absurdly inefficient,even on a supercomputer. You need GPU power to mine effectively.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: profspudhed on February 22, 2012, 03:31 pm
yep i mine too, its a nice way to supplement your buying on here, i currently have about 1.2GH/s on my setup and i pull in around 6-7 coins a week. ive said it before about the power thing though as long as you already have the hardware or dont mind shelling out on a new graphics card then even if youre just breaking even on the power bill then its basically the same as buying your coins slowly only without the hassle of the exchanges and if the value goes up youre laughing. oh and if you want to eliminate luck you can always go to a pay per share pool like elgius or btcguild etc

@midas you are right difficulty increases roughly every 2 weeks or every 2000 blocks, but it can go up or down, if network power is low then difficulty will drop, if its high then itll go up, its all to do with the fact that there will only ever be a finite amount of bitcoins made, when we get to the point where about half the coins are already in circulation then payouts on each block will halve from 50btc per block to 25btc (so expect a jump in value on the coin when that happens, it should be autumn/winter this year if network power remains around the same)

@fiveseven youre kind of right but also not, bitcoin mining is a supercomputing task, it doesnt NEED to be a gpu its just that they currently happen to be the best thing for it, current graphics cards have thousands of stream processors which kind of act as multiple processors, essentially your graphics card is a mini supercomputer, but all are not created equal, to highlight that lets take the example of 2 graphics cards, in the ATI corner we will use one im familiar with, my HD5850 a card now 2 generations old and which cost me £99 new, it pumps out 400MH/s. now in the nvidia corner we will put the top of the line GTX590 which weighs in at £600, result 193MH/s less than half that provided by the ATI card. so its not so much that you have to use a gpu for it more that currently atis gpus offer the most mining power for your electric. so technically the government could use their supercomputers to seriously damage the market should they write a reasonably efficient mining app and had no concerns about power usage (which i doubt they have) but soon gpu mining will die as fpga boards become cheaper and more widely available, currently fpgas based on the spartan6 chip can pump out around 200MH/s but will only use a very small amount of power. also there are plenty of people out there who have botnets setup for cpu mining, a single cpu may not produce much (my laptops i7 only makes 11MH/s) but if you can infect a few hundred or even few thousand systems then you could stand to pull in a lot of coins and again thats what a supercomputer essentially is, lots of processors working on the same task.

oh and for those saying youll never get your investment back you may be forgetting that if you decide youre through mining you can sell your graphics card on (theyre still fine for games) and at the moment we are still above break even point on the power side of things, my cards have all more than paid for themselves already (sure i spent most of it here but id only have bought drugs with cash otherwise) so if i sell them on im still making a profit, that said now its pretty difficult to get hold of a decent 5xxx series card at reasonable prices so im not sure itd be as worthwhile to buy a full setup now (newer ati cards arent as good for mining)
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TravellingWithoutMoving on February 22, 2012, 07:34 pm
i generate about .11 bitcoins per day mining with deepbit. just using 1 rig w/ a 5770 card.  not getting rich, but its helping keep my house warm thru the winter.   i will stop mining once summer arrives like i did last year.

0.11 btc's per day = +- 35 pence per day

whats the point?!
zzzz
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: profspudhed on February 23, 2012, 04:17 am
i generate about .11 bitcoins per day mining with deepbit. just using 1 rig w/ a 5770 card.  not getting rich, but its helping keep my house warm thru the winter.   i will stop mining once summer arrives like i did last year.

0.11 btc's per day = +- 35 pence per day

whats the point?!
zzzz

well its only pretty much the same cost as running an electric heater which rinse your electric hard and you get something back from mining, not sure that something only generating 0.11 btc will be pumping out that much heat though.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: johnwholesome on February 25, 2012, 06:09 pm
... not sure that something only generating 0.11 btc will be pumping out that much heat though.


...ROFL so true, I ran a miner on an i7 gaming rig with an nVidia gtx580, after less than 20 minutes the case temp was up to 60C and the gpu was like 85C......how's that for wear and tear lol...
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 26, 2012, 02:59 am
... not sure that something only generating 0.11 btc will be pumping out that much heat though.


...ROFL so true, I ran a miner on an i7 gaming rig with an nVidia gtx580, after less than 20 minutes the case temp was up to 60C and the gpu was like 85C......how's that for wear and tear lol...

My GPUs stay at around 78c. My cases are open... No idea on the temps.

Energy is free on all but 1 so I'm not really worried about it.

Been mining with a new pool.. making about 1.3 coin a day. Pretty sweet.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: johnwholesome on February 26, 2012, 04:54 am
1.3/day with no power to pay is sexy shit...
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: couchman420 on February 26, 2012, 05:01 am
I've been mining for a little under a year. I started when the price was about $3-$4/btc. Right before the big crash when the price was @ $30/btc I sold all my coins on virwox and bought a used motorcycle.

I got really lucky, When i found out about bitcoins and silkroad I had just built a new gaming pc with 2x AMD Radeon HD 5870, so I didn't have to invest a dime. I started out making ~6 btc/day; now I'm down to .5btc/day. Sigh... oh well, at least it limits how much drugs I buy.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: Laughing Man on February 26, 2012, 05:09 am
FPGAs are the new way of bitcoin mining. They get over 300MH/s and only use like 20W of power.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: TheNewDude on February 26, 2012, 05:37 am
FPGAs are the new way of bitcoin mining. They get over 300MH/s and only use like 20W of power.

They're definitely sexy... But not worth it in my case.

It's cheaper to mine with GPUs when your power is free.

Can't see the point in shelling out ~$500+ for a measly ~200-300MH/s.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: profspudhed on February 26, 2012, 03:40 pm
maybe so but if you want to expand youre mining setup you have other things to consider like power supplies and powering extenders for extra cards as otherwise itll kill your mainboard or just not start (some power is supplied on the pcie, so you have to cut 4 cables and wire them to a molex or something) with the fpga setups you can have as many as you have usb ports. i hadnt realised that theyd got it up to 300Mh or are you talking about the dual chip one? (would make sense as ones with a single spartan6 are usually 8-10w)
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: jmoney113 on February 26, 2012, 03:42 pm
I haven't seen my gpu go past 64c on Prime 95, so I think I'll be ok in that aspect. I've heard that the 580gtx lightning isn't a good card for mining though. Any thoughts? I'd be willing to join a pool, or preferably mine on my own if my GPU is suitable for mining.
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: profspudhed on February 26, 2012, 07:42 pm
sadly any nvidia gpu isnt really suitable for mining, you can mine with them but itll cost you more in electric than just buying coins would im afraid, you can get a good idea of what your hardware will do on the comparison chart on the wiki, in your case its only about 140MH/s heres the link to see what everything else pulls in:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

oh and unless you have a monster of a setup solo mining is pointless and by a monster of a setup were talking tens or hundreds of GH to your name, so unless you have a house full of video cards you need to join a pool. theres nothing to stop you going solo if you want and if you get lucky youll find a block and collect the full 50BTC but the chances are you wont and as such wont get a thing for your mining efforts
Title: Re: Mining for bitcoin
Post by: Winland on February 28, 2012, 10:14 am
Lmao, i was mining like 1mhas speed. I was mining like 2weeks and didn't get any btc =D how fast are you mining?