• Bitcoin isn't shit - The Economist
    51 replies, posted
[QUOTE=mblunk;37874732] Depends on your local power price, but in all but the most extreme cases it's still profitable. [/QUOTE] Until you need to buy a new video card because it self-destructs from being run at max capacity 24/7
[QUOTE=Mr. Smartass;37874830]Until you need to buy a new video card because it self-destructs from being run at max capacity 24/7[/QUOTE] I ran Furmark on my 3-year old 5850 overclocked by 175MHz for about 4 months last winter to keep my room above freezing, and now I'll be doing the same by mining bitcoin. Since electricity to heat conversion can't be made more or less efficient (power draw is exactly equal to heat generated) it's like having a mini 200W heater running all the time, which is just enough to keep my room in the corner of the house bearable. Integrated circuits don't simply "wear out" so long as they're not [url=http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/23179.aspx]mobile Nvidia 8xxx series chips.[/url] [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] Oh yeah, you can also sell all those extra TF2 items you never use [url=http://www.tf2wh.com/]for[/url] [url=http://www.tf2whx.com/]bitcoin.[/url] I made about 1.7 bitcoin ($20) from selling old preorder bonus items.
yeah maybe I'll mine once winter comes so I can have a space heater [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=mblunk;37874732] Mining is still certainly profitable, it just depends on how long you're planning on doing it. [/QUOTE] are you in a mining pool?
[QUOTE=mblunk;37874732]There's so much ignorant misunderstanding here that it makes Fox news look like they know exactly what they're talking about. The source is NOT infinite, there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins and 50 are given out every 10 minutes to a random miner (or share among a pool of miners if you join one, which is they only way to actually earn any at this point.) Bitcoin miners are freeware, and many are open source. The only thing right about your post is that getting bitcoins is as easy as mining, it's just that you need a hell of a big shovel in the form of fast hardware to make a decent amount from it. Most miner rigs can pay themselves off in a few years, which isn't very promising but it's still a profit if you're in it for the long run. Then you don't understand cryptographics. Mining is still certainly profitable, it just depends on how long you're planning on doing it. Anyways, I actually just bought a new 64GB UHS-1 MicroSD card (among other things) from Amazon using bitcoins through btczone.com. I mined the ~8 coins required in a little over 2 months with an HD5850. [img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-tvmRtNKDKAQ/UGoX62rmDRI/AAAAAAAADUI/LVB8QkMQLeI/s0/2012-10-01_18-23-35.jpg[/img] [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] Depends on your local power price, but in all but the most extreme cases it's still profitable. [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] Also, this belongs in every bitcoin thread[/quote] that's a clever use of notepad. i might get into this bitcoin thing one day just so i can have some extra cash (or coin?) to waste around. or do you have to have some sort of special rig?
[QUOTE=ShazzyFreak0;37875071]that's a clever use of notepad. i might get into this bitcoin thing one day just so i can have some extra cash (or coin?) to waste around. or do you have to have some sort of special rig?[/QUOTE] yea you need a nuclear reactor to supply enough power to your brand new quintuple sli GTX 690 and dual i7's at full capacity to mine 1 bitcoin/day
[QUOTE=ShazzyFreak0;37875071]that's a clever use of notepad. i might get into this bitcoin thing one day just so i can have some extra cash (or coin?) to waste around. or do you have to have some sort of special rig?[/QUOTE] If you wanna mine efficiently you gotta have a major computer or you won't get shit. I have been thinking about treating bitcoins like stocks with the way it fluctuates value constantly. I just don't know where to start.
[QUOTE=ShazzyFreak0;37875071]that's a clever use of notepad. i might get into this bitcoin thing one day just so i can have some extra cash (or coin?) to waste around. or do you have to have some sort of special rig?[/QUOTE] Any gaming video card will do, although in cases of otherwise equally-performing AMD and NVIDIA cards, AMD cards tend to mine about 5x faster thanks to some perks of their architecture. Create a wallet with instawallet, join a pool like BTCguild, then get GUIminer and point it towards your pool account and you'll be making bitcoin in no time. For reference, my 5850 makes a little under 1 bitcoin (~$12) per week. [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=legolover122;37875135]If you wanna mine efficiently you gotta have a major computer or you won't get shit. I have been thinking about treating bitcoins like stocks with the way it fluctuates value constantly. I just don't know where to start.[/QUOTE] [url]http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html[/url] Those are all of the buy and sell order for bitcoin at various dollar levels on MtGox. If someone bought all of the "ask" orders up to a given price, anyone could ask for up to that much for their bitcoin and if someone wants to buy some on the spot, they'll have to pay the lowest asking price, which means that the price of bitcoin goes up as more people buy them, and down as more people sell. Buy before everyone else to buy low, sell before everyone else to sell high, and you've just made a profit trading on the bitcoin market. [QUOTE=rampageturke 2;37875101]yea you need a nuclear reactor to supply enough power to your brand new quintuple sli GTX 690 and dual i7's at full capacity to mine 1 bitcoin/day[/QUOTE] Actually, a single 7970 would mine faster than SLI GTX 690s. A 7970 mines at about 700 MH/s, good for about 2 bitcoins per week, while a GTX 680 only hits about 120 MH/s, so a GTX 690 would do no better than 240 MH/s.
[QUOTE=mblunk;37875143]Any gaming video card will do, although in cases of otherwise equally-performing AMD and NVIDIA cards, AMD cards tend to mine about 5x faster thanks to some perks of their architecture. Create a wallet with instawallet, join a pool like BTCguild, then get GUIminer and point it towards your pool account and you'll be making bitcoin in no time. For reference, my 5850 makes a little under 1 bitcoin (~$12) per week. [editline]1st October 2012[/editline] [/QUOTE] oh cool. thanks for the info. [QUOTE=rampageturke 2;37875101]yea you need a nuclear reactor to supply enough power to your brand new quintuple sli GTX 690 and dual i7's at full capacity to mine 1 bitcoin/day[/QUOTE] 1 bitcoin a day sounds pretty nice actually!!
[QUOTE=legolover122;37875135]If you wanna mine efficiently you gotta have a major computer or you won't get shit. I have been thinking about treating bitcoins like stocks with the way it fluctuates value constantly. I just don't know where to start.[/QUOTE] I thought about getting Bitcoins when they were about 3$/bitcoin. Never did it cause transferring money would've taken some time. But then again it isn't a very fast way to gain profit since it isn't that volatile.
[QUOTE=mblunk;37875143]Actually, a single 7970 would mine faster than SLI GTX 690s.[/QUOTE] This is because of AMD's OpenCL cores which perform better than NVIDIA's CUDA cores, in case anyone was wondering.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/pt9Jm.jpg[/IMG] those were the days :(
[QUOTE=Hattiwatti;37875221]I thought about getting Bitcoins when they were about 3$/bitcoin. Never did it cause transferring money would've taken some time. But then again it isn't a very fast way to gain profit since it isn't that volatile.[/QUOTE] It isn't fast to go through the process probably, but it's better than nothing for people like me that can't get a job due to age. (that's gonna change for me on friday though)
[QUOTE=Van-man;37874496]Scrubs [IMG]http://sparklingspur.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Credit-card-reader-for-iphone.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE] Doublescrub [img]http://www.knowliz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Square-Accept-credit-card-payments-with-your-mobile-phone.png[/img]
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;37875276]This is because of AMD's OpenCL cores which perform better than NVIDIA's CUDA cores, in case anyone was wondering.[/QUOTE] To be more precise... [quote][h2]Firstly[/h2], AMD designs GPUs with many simple ALUs/shaders (VLIW design) that run at a relatively low frequency clock (typically 1120-3200 ALUs at 625-900 MHz), whereas Nvidia's microarchitecture consists of fewer more complex ALUs and tries to compensate with a higher shader clock (typically 448-1024 ALUs at 1150-1544 MHz). Because of this VLIW vs. non-VLIW difference, Nvidia uses up more square millimeters of die space per ALU, hence can pack fewer of them per chip, and they hit the frequency wall sooner than AMD which prevents them from increasing the clock high enough to match or surpass AMD's performance. This translates to a raw ALU performance advantage for AMD: AMD Radeon HD 6990: 3072 ALUs x 830 MHz = 2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second Nvidia GTX 590: 1024 ALUs x 1214 MHz = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second This approximate 2x-3x performance difference exists across the entire range of AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It is very visible in all ALU-bound GPGPU workloads such as Bitcoin, password bruteforcers, etc. [h2]Secondly[/h2], another difference favoring Bitcoin mining on AMD GPUs instead of Nvidia's is that the mining algorithm is based on SHA-256, which makes heavy use of the 32-bit integer right rotate operation. This operation can be implemented as a single hardware instruction on AMD GPUs (BIT_ALIGN_INT), but requires three separate hardware instructions to be emulated on Nvidia GPUs (2 shifts + 1 add). This alone gives AMD another 1.7x performance advantage (~1900 instructions instead of ~3250 to execute the SHA-256 compression function). Combined together, these 2 factors make AMD GPUs overall 3x-5x faster when mining Bitcoins.[/quote]
I'd only mine for bitcoins if electricity was free / really damn cheap. Though FPGA miners are more effective than GFX cards now, though the initial price of 'em are [B]MASSIVE[/B]. [url]http://bitcoinfpga.com/[/url]
my condo charges everyone a flat rate for electricity, so theoretically I could mine a lot and the rate would just go up a little for everybody instead of a lot for me
[QUOTE=mblunk;37875143] Actually, a single 7970 would mine faster than SLI GTX 690s. A 7970 mines at about 700 MH/s, good for about 2 bitcoins per week, while a GTX 680 only hits about 120 MH/s, so a GTX 690 would do no better than 240 MH/s.[/QUOTE] $25/week sheeeet high roller
[QUOTE=rampageturke 2;37875474]$25/week sheeeet high roller[/QUOTE] I don't think that's bad at all for people who already have the card, not to mention you can also use the thing for, you know, playing games like it was meant to. The $25 is just bonus change in the short run, and an investment in the long run.
I read a thread on bitcointalk about a guy who used his cards as a floor heater for his bathroom, pretty damn clever if you ask me. During the winter you could save a shit-ton of money if you mined instead of using your heater, because in the end its the same thing. Bitcoins are extremely simple to change to USD lately too, [url=https://fastcash4bitcoins.com/]this[/url] is one of my favorite services to date.
[QUOTE=Period;37876317]I read a thread on bitcointalk about a guy who used his cards as a floor heater for his bathroom, pretty damn clever if you ask me. During the winter you could save a shit-ton of money if you mined instead of using your heater, because in the end its the same thing.[/QUOTE] It also gives a peek into what could happen in the future with people using home servers in their basements to heat their homes. Bitcoin itself is a pretty cool concept if you ask me, but other than last year's boost and the one that's going to happen with this article, it isn't really worth it to mine yourself.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;37876403]It also gives a peek into what could happen in the future with people using home servers in their basements to heat their homes. Bitcoin itself is a pretty cool concept if you ask me, but other than last year's boost and the one that's going to happen with this article, it isn't really worth it to mine yourself.[/QUOTE] "Worth it" is subjective and context-sensitive; I find it completely worth it to simply keep a command prompt miner running for a few months to get a free $60 SD card.
[QUOTE=Period;37876317]I read a thread on bitcointalk about a guy who used his cards as a floor heater for his bathroom, pretty damn clever if you ask me. During the winter you could save a shit-ton of money if you mined instead of using your heater, because in the end its the same thing. Bitcoins are extremely simple to change to USD lately too, [url=https://fastcash4bitcoins.com/]this[/url] is one of my favorite services to date.[/QUOTE] Watercooling system tapped into the floor's heat exchanger.
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