Bitcoin mining

oulton said:
Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm fairly new to bitcoins. How would one of these fare:

http://butterflylabs.com/landing/landing-ls.php

How much could I expect to earn daily with 25GHash/second? And is that amount achievable?
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Bear in mind it could be years before you receive the machine, by which time bitcoin s will be a lot harder to find due to increased competition, larger pools, and everyone having better hardware. So while that machine would bring in loads of money if it were available now, it may not perform so well on release. By that time, GPU mining will have become inviable so everyone will be using FPGAs and ASICs, and your huge investment will just be par for the course.
 
SlyReaper said:
Bear in mind it could be years before you receive the machine, by which time bitcoin s will be a lot harder to find due to increased competition, larger pools, and everyone having better hardware. So while that machine would bring in loads of money if it were available now, it may not perform so well on release. By that time, GPU mining will have become inviable so everyone will be using FPGAs and ASICs, and your huge investment will just be par for the course.
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Bingo, as soon as any are ACTUALLY released, only the first people who get it will benefit, after that it won't be worth mining at all.

I thought it was a good idea at first also, but then realised it wasn't.
 
Im sure gaming machines are no good for Litecoins, xfire 7970 XFX @1125 -1575 getting 1279 khash/s.
Just wondering how long it would take to melt the whole rig with temps of mid 80`s 24/7, that was on (low usage) as well.
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litecoins are harder to mine that bitcoins apparently ASIC machines suck as mining litecoins so everyone mining with gpu's is switching to litecoin mining
 
I know a guy that has been mining since bitcoin started. I was going to get in to when it first started but couldn't afford a dedicated pc for the sole use of mining, but now with the price of bitcoin it may have paid off if i did.

When you mine you are essentially processing the calculations for the the market. Compared to a big commercial bank that has centralized processing, the processing of all the transactions in the chain are done by the distributed network of miners.

I read an article recently that said that the limitations of bitcoin are in the processing capacity of the currency. It could never take the place of a large national currency (this article said) because the processing power is far greater than the technology can withstand. Ie it was not designed to scale to the extent of an international currency. But there was arguments against, people were saying that when commercial mining becomes profitable and the likes of google or hsbc get in on the processing, then it will scale up to the level of modern currencies.
 
groen said:
I know a guy that has been mining since bitcoin started. I was going to get in to when it first started but couldn't afford a dedicated pc for the sole use of mining, but now with the price of bitcoin it may have paid off if i did.

When you mine you are essentially processing the calculations for the the market. Compared to a big commercial bank that has centralized processing, the processing of all the transactions in the chain are done by the distributed network of miners.

I read an article recently that said that the limitations of bitcoin are in the processing capacity of the currency. It could never take the place of a large national currency (this article said) because the processing power is far greater than the technology can withstand. Ie it was not designed to scale to the extent of an international currency. But there was arguments against, people were saying that when commercial mining becomes profitable and the likes of google or hsbc get in on the processing, then it will scale up to the level of modern currencies.
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I was under the impression the mining was just solving a set of algorithms that slowly released more bitcoins (and they get more complex as less bitcoins become available for release)....
 
Well i am not an expert but i have listen to fair amount of bitcoin related podcasts and read a lot or articles on it over the past few years and from what i understand, the mining is actually processing transactions in the block chain. This process results in the miner getting "rewarded" bitcoins for allocating this processing power for that task.

Also the rate at which bitcoins is rewarded decreases over time and the amount of bitcoins in circulation is fixed and decided upon by the agreement of the market. I may have this part mixed up.

https://www.weusecoins.com/

This website explains it all in basic form

The way Bitcoin makes sure there is only one block chain is by making blocks really hard to produce. So instead of just being able to make blocks at will, miners have to compute a cryptographic hash of the block that meets certain criteria. Bitcoiners refer to this process as "hashing". The only way to find a cryptographic hash that's "good enough to count" is to try computing a whole bunch of them until you get lucky and find one that works. This is the "lottery" that David Schwartz refers to, because miners who successfully create a block are rewarded some bitcoins according to a preset schedule. The difficulty of the criteria for the hash is continually adjusted based on how frequently blocks are appearing, so more competition equals more work needed to find a block. A modern GPU can try hundreds of millions of hashes per second, so to be competitive in this race to find hashes miners need specialised hardware, otherwise they will tend to spend more on electricity than they make in the "lottery".
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I think you are right.

In addition to the hash criteria, a block needs to contain only valid, non-conflicting transactions. So the other main task for miners is to carefully validate all the transactions that go into their blocks, otherwise they won't get any reward for their work!
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actually i think we were both right. :D
 
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Okay, I've just yoinked the fraction of a BTC I've mined today and paid it into my bitcoin wallet. How do I convert that into real money? I've tried the MtGox exchange, but to deposit bitcoins into my MtGox account, it just tells me to send my bitcoins to some address. But how does it know to associate my bitcoin address with my MtGox account?
 
SlyReaper said:
Okay, I've just yoinked the fraction of a BTC I've mined today and paid it into my bitcoin wallet. How do I convert that into real money? I've tried the MtGox exchange, but to deposit bitcoins into my MtGox account, it just tells me to send my bitcoins to some address. But how does it know to associate my bitcoin address with my MtGox account?
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Every bitcoin wallet can make unlimited number of "addresses" to receive payments - so I presume that one is unique to you - I also had the same question!
 
Addicted said:
Every bitcoin wallet can make unlimited number of "addresses" to receive payments - so I presume that one is unique to you - I also had the same question!
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I think you misunderstood the question. When I send MtGox my bitcoins, how does it know to credit my account with those bitcoins rather than somebody elses? As far as they can see, they've just received some bitcoins from a bitcoin address, but how do they know who that address belongs to? I can't see any fields to include messages like my account name.

Edit: never mind, I'm being thick. That actually does answer my question, now that I think about it. Thanks.
 
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SlyReaper said:
I think you misunderstood the question. When I send MtGox my bitcoins, how does it know to credit my account with those bitcoins rather than somebody elses? As far as they can see, they've just received some bitcoins from a bitcoin address, but how do they know who that address belongs to? I can't see any fields to include messages like my account name.

Edit: never mind, I'm being thick. That actually does answer my question, now that I think about it. Thanks.
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I know you realise now, but just to clarify mtgox gives you an address to send your bitcoins to, and that address relates solely to your account.
 
I sense an impending crash as soon as these ASIC miners flood the market with coins and try to cash them out. And once it starts falling so the rest of the market will follow.

The value of BTC really has balooned to stupid proportions over the past month. But then I'm no economist so I could well be talking tripe. : )
 
A question - instead of mining bitcoins and the associated cost of electric etc, why not just purchase the bitcoins if you believe in the long term they will rise in value?
 
Just hijacked wife's and daughter machine getting 1573 KH/s, just need my sons now it has a HD 5970 in it.
All these machines are on 18 hours plus a day anyway, so just the extra heat and electric, should have done this from the start really.
Just for a bit of fun to see what its all about.
 
zuludawn said:
Just hijacked wife's and daughter machine getting 1573 KH/s, just need my sons now it has a HD 5970 in it.
All these machines are on 18 hours plus a day anyway, so just the extra heat, should have done this from the start really.
Just for a bit of fun to see what its all about.
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WTH does she have in it to get 1573? 3x 7970's ?

I'm trying to find somewhere to buy LTC/BTC from £/$ - no luck, jesus this stuff is hard to get.
 
Addicted said:
WTH does she have in it to get 1573? 3x 7970's ?

I'm trying to find somewhere to buy LTC/BTC from £/$ - no luck, jesus this stuff is hard to get.
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That is the total

2 x 7970 very under clocked, mine
7870 daughters
6970 wife's

Should do 8.202 LTC a day if i left them all on.

Settling at 1678 KH/s now
 
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