Joined: Nov '11
Location: Poland
Age: 37 (M)
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I know what the TOR is, I know SilkRoad, but I don't mine for buying weapons, grenades or some illegal stuff. Yes, you have pretty right with mine, that it consume energy, etc... But on this site http://bitcoinx.com/profit/ you can check if your cards has profit etc And I mine with computers at work, so it's pure profit for me
Thanks, went there and got info including a security update. Now my new question, is my ATI RADEON Xpress 200 series display adapter good enough or must it be upgraded.
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Australia
Age: 40 (M)
Posts: 6483
Posted by Mysik86: Not good ;( Radeon Xpress 200 is a integrated GPU - so for mining you should have not-integrated GPU.
Definitely not. Mind - it's pretty much a moot point, the days of mining bitcoins on desktop PCs has long since passed. If you want to mine in any meaningful way you need proper server equipment, from what I understand most people mining successfully these days are using their work servers, etc.
I'm pretty sure it's probably going to cost you far more in power bills running your PC attempting to crack the algorithms than you'll ever get back in bitcoins..
The algorithms continue to get harder to crack, the idea was that at the beginning they would allow people to create new bitcoins easier to essentially build up the market, as time continues they become harder and harder to crack (mine) and at this point, it simply isn't worth bothering - even if your desktop PC is a 'beast' gaming PC - it's still no where near as powerful as the sort of multi-CPU (not multi core) servers that are used to farm the bitcoins these days.
That answers that ...just put my miners cap away. Thanks Jess your answer gives me the proper perspective...not as easy as one might figure. Would cost more that it's worth not just in power...the set up sounds too expensive and out of reach for the average person.
Joined: Mar '11
Location: Canada
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Now hackers on the other hand, who control thousands of zombie computers via a botnet, don't need to worry about power consumption.
To be honest, the concept of bitcoin mining is sketchy anyways. I mean the algorithms they've got miners cracking could be anything. Bank encryption, millitary communication encryptions, or countless other things that shouldn't be cracked. People could be put to work, cracking things illegally, all in the hopes of generating these "bit coins".
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Australia
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Posted by retribution: I mean the algorithms they've got miners cracking could be anything. Bank encryption, millitary communication encryptions, or countless other things that shouldn't be cracked. People could be put to work, cracking things illegally, all in the hopes of generating these "bit coins".
heh - I'd never thought of that - I'd say it's pretty unlikely, still though, it's an interesting thought!
Posted by retribution: I mean the algorithms they've got miners cracking could be anything. Bank encryption, millitary communication encryptions, or countless other things that shouldn't be cracked. People could be put to work, cracking things illegally, all in the hopes of generating these "bit coins".
heh - I'd never thought of that - I'd say it's pretty unlikely, still though, it's an interesting thought!
can imagine a combo of agencies with swat swooping in on some miner(s) because they cracked algorithms that were classified....make for a good movie.
Joined: Nov '11
Location: Poland
Age: 37 (M)
Posts: 1090
It's insane... the algorithm are only for not too fast mining bitcoin. It's like World Bank, and it regulate volume of Bitcoins. The target amount will be 21 millions and it will be end of mining (theoretically). We are in half of this way, but the difficulty (algorithm) is still increasing, so the target are far far away... The more power = the more difficulty = the slower speed of mining
And the cracking algorithm are use also to secure and encrypt/decrypt the transation. Each transactions are valid only after 6 checks, so this is one of reason of mining.
@jessthehuman - I wrote here earlier that mining has nothing to do with processor. So even 4 Intel Core i7 high-end CPU will be slower than one ATI Radeon high-end GPU. Yes, you had right, when you said that the most powerful are people with servers, but they create servers from putting many GPU cards together There are lot of movies in YT.
Second - If you have powerful high-end ATI card, the cost of minig will be less than power consumption... One guy in YT show his server with lot of ATI cards, and this generate pure profit - $150 per day! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLt8Se3vVNg
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Australia
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^ Interesting stuff, took a look on wikipedia but they don't have much to say about it "Bitcoins used to be mined through Intel/AMD CPUs. As of 2012, mining has gradually moved to GPU and FPGA hardware.[45] ASIC-based hardware for Bitcoin mining has been announced by several manufacturers who intend to ship products from late 2012 to early 2013" other than that.
To be honest, I haven't really followed bitcoin news much in more than 12 months - makes sense that, GPUs are pretty fantastic for a lot of things.
Did some research myself and now can see why one can't use a PC to mine. The options are to build or buy a miner because it's a whole different animal. The other thing is unless one can write off the expenses associated with the component purchases and operational costs incurred...then forget it as a hobby. Best way would be to set up some computer business for the write offs and have miners set up on the side. They set it up so less Bitcoins are released over time instead of more and there is a cap. So long term, demand will set the price relative to hard currencies and in the end the decimal shift will be to eight places because of the cap. Those that have mined early and acquired whole number Bitcoins will be rich relative to its fractional usage. Can see why most involved are asking for coins as donations however fractional they receive them. They will be worth more down the road. There is opportunity here...the conditions must be right.
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Australia
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About a year ago or so, somebody who worked for the ABC (kind of like british BBC - it's our government news/tv/radio/broadcasting) was caught mining bitcoins using idle CPU power at the ABC offices..
See that is a pretty clever way of doing it; if you're able to hijack idle processing power in a large workplace - that would be awesome.
Joined: Nov '11
Location: Poland
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He's not fired, because he doesn't do anything illegal... I don't know ABC politics, but this is idle power... so I'm pretty sure that big corp, like ABC can mine from their servers
As of 2012, mining has gradually moved to GPU and FPGA hardware
Normal thing - in mid 2011 the price of bitcoin was over $35 and it was rapidly discovered by market. If hashrate increased, the difficulty increased rapidly too! So the CPU mining wasn't good for it... CPU was good for mining at the beginning, when total hashrate was low, and people mine BTC every minute...
