Bitcoin mining (turn your GPU into a slave)

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Raevinn

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I've been doing some research into bitcoin mining lately. Here's a cool video that explains it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

Basically Bitcoins are a new digital de-centralised currency. To release the bitcoins to the world they've created bitcoin mining which makes your pc do a certain amount of work to "mine" for a bitcoin. At current difficulty settings with a 5950 or 6990 you can mine around 1 Bitcoin a day. Current price is $22 a bitcoin. So thats like $660 a month which is like R4620 at R7 a dollar

I dont have a nice PC that supports the new radeon series, but I do have the cash for a radeon 5870 which seems to be the best bang for buck mining card. So if anyone wants to go into a joint venture where I buy a card and you put it in your pc and let your card and mine "mine" together using crossfire that would be cool. PM me :D

For latest bitcoin prices check www.bitcoinwatch.com , it's really volatile but mining allows you to pay off your graphics card within a month or two.

Bitcoin mining will not be profitable for very long as more and more people get into it so jumping on the bandwagon right now is the only option if you ever want to.
 
I can see the value of Bitcoins dropping very fast if this is really what it looks like to me.
 
yeah, it goes up and down really violently. It went down today due to the "silk road" network being offline
 
One question: Can a "bitcoin" be exchanged for actual real life items or real currency?
 
its apparently a pyramid scheme :P

would be interesting if it works ...
 
There are hallmarks of a pyramid scheme involved....

Simply due to it becoming more difficult to "generate" coins the more people are trying.. so the guys who started it all will have huge HOARDS of coins whereas the guys who start now will now.
 
Well I decided to try it out, see how it goes for a month, but I looks like the value of the coins have decreases quite a bit..
Joined a mining pool and doing a about 300Mhash/s on my little 5850 not to bad.. dual 6950's unlocked do about 690Mhash/s from what I've seen...
 
The market is trading at $15, down 50% of what it was on Thursday. After the 30% crash on Friday, the market has just continued to decline, and given that exchanges stay open 24/7, I can't see that stopping anytime soon. This is just a currency exchange market without any real controls, and if you think it is a chance for a quick buck, then you better polish up your skills/intuition/etc... because you would have needed to hoard up bitcoins and have sold them before the crash to make decent money. If you look at the long term performance of bitcoins, you'll see that $15 is a lot more realistic than the surge in value over the last couple of weeks.

These are also market prices, not for direct exchange, i.e. OTC to people who accept bitcoins, where bitcoins can be worth about 50% less.
 
nakedpeanut said:
Well I decided to try it out, see how it goes for a month, but I looks like the value of the coins have decreases quite a bit..
Joined a mining pool and doing a about 300Mhash/s on my little 5850 not to bad.. dual 6950's unlocked do about 690Mhash/s from what I've seen...
Click to expand...

Where did you get the program, i download bitcoin but it does not want to open hehe .
 
If anyone wants to sell their bitcoins please pm me :D I want to buy around 5.
 
Well I've decide to run this for a 2 weeks, and see what happens... On my card it seems it'll take be about 50hours to mine 1 bitcoin... since I was at 0.102 BTC after 5 hours...
 
nakedpeanut said:
Well I've decide to run this for a 2 weeks, and see what happens... On my card it seems it'll take be about 50hours to mine 1 bitcoin... since I was at 0.102 BTC after 5 hours...
Click to expand...

I did the math and decided it's simply not worth it at this stage. Maybe a few days ago when the coins were way easier to get and also worth more, it would've made sense but at the moment, wear and tear on hardware and power usage makes it... not really lucrative. One of the mining groups have someone who has mined ~1200 coins though. That's quite a bit of money if he has sold all of them, which I'm sure he has.
 
LOL, 2 weeks for 1 coin. A decent GPU uses around 200W of power, that alone will cost you more than 1 coin in a day.

It's a way for companies to get to use YOUR GPU and processing power with virtually no cost to them (or for bitcoin to get a lot of money from companies with no cost to them, scam anyone?).

The reality is, this currency is not backed by a large pool of assets (gold, platinum, diamonds, etc) like real currency and therefore it's value is completely artificial and likely to fall at the drop of a hat.
 
Gnome, just to let you know, none of the world's currency is any longer backed by gold etc (Bretton Woods system ended in 1971).
It's now all based on a bubble of debt and a half-hearted promise by our banks to keep our money safe.
Truth is if we all walked into the bank today and withdrew every cent in our accounts the banks could never supply all of us.
Not because they could never keep that amount of cash at one certain branch but rather because the bank just does not have enough actual money (our account balance is simply a bunch of numbers and does not mean that we physically have X amount stored in an account with our names). Banks would close and we'd lose whatever funds we in our account.

Not saying that the Bitcoin system is perfect but at lease there is no bank involved.
It's more or a barter system which IMO is a lot safer than currency.

Al
 
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