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How to mine for this internet money?????
- Thread starter Gabby1019
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2004
Well, that is quite a task, you may want to read the stickies to get a rough image and ask narrower questions.
But for a few answers off the top:
1 It is possible to mine for bitcoin, but unless you have purchased expensive specialized equipment (ASIC machines) the electricity you use to mine will cost many multiples of what you make off of it.
2 Of the altcoins, I think Monero is about the only one that you can still make more from it than the cost of electricity, but that will depend on how much your electricity costs are.
3 Of the 2 answers I've given the assumption is that you will be using video cards to to the mining. AMD usually has better bang for the buck than Nvidia in mining. There is another mining method out there that uses hard drive space - Burstcoin. However if you don't have at least 10 TB of free space to use for this form of mining, you are going to be waiting a long time to get a usuable amount of currency. For example, I'm mining Monero on 8 video cards (7 280X/7970 cards, and 1 7870), and Burstcoin on 7 TB of space. I'm getting about $5/day doing this. My electricity costs to run this is in the ballpark of $4/day I'm doing this mainly because my wife will let me buy stuff with bitcoin without complaining, and I cover the power bill. I'm also hoping to get enough to cover another 4-8 TB of hard drives, at which point I'll drop the monero. At about 9watts per hard drive, it looks a lot better than 100 watts minimum per video card.
4. You trade your altcoints for bitcoins on exchanges, then you can use them at retailers that accept them (there is a post in this sub-forum that lists retailers that accept bitcoin), or cash them out using places like coinbase.
You are probably about a year late to really cash in on mining. I made about $3.3K over the year, but most of that was ploughed right back into hardware purchases. But I'm going to be using the hardware to fold for Team 32 here once I can no longer mine on them. So, I do have a long term benefit I'm getting out of it.
I hope that helps. Feel free to ask more questions, but do please read the stickies.
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2003
I would say Feathercoin is slightly more profitable than Monero at the moment, but for me it seems to be a day to day thing. Sometimes Monero pulls ahead for a while.
Unless your power is free though, you're likely looking at a long struggle just to get the power paid for these days. At least with GPUs.
Unless your power is free though, you're likely looking at a long struggle just to get the power paid for these days. At least with GPUs.
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2004
Bitcoin didn't disappear. It is still out there, producing new coins, worth $381 per bitcoin. The problem is there is so much processing power that to mine a $381 bitcoin today on a GPU, it would take probably on the order of a few thousand dollars worth of electricity.
To be able to mine it profitably, as in getting more bitcoins than it costs in electricity to produce them, you need to use ASICs, or Application Specific Integrated Circuits. They are machines made with custom built chips that only generate hashes for the SHA256 algorithm. For an example, a 280X/7970 AMD GPU will generate about 700 million hashes a second. An Antminer S3 sells for about $400, so it is in the ballpark for the price of a 280X, just a bit more expensive. The Antminer S3 gets 441,000 million hashes per second.
That is 630 TIMES the hashing power of a GPU.
A Zeus V3 gets 4,500,000 million hases per second for about $4500.
The problem is that while the processing power keeps increasing, the number of coins generated do no. So as the overall hashing keeps increasing, your share of the pie keeps getting smaller. Eventually, what you get doesn't pay for the electricity used to produce it, and your ASIC becomes a space heater. The newer ASICs are that much more powerful, and people keep designing new ones. Plus several companies designed them, got the value out of them, then sold them to people who weren't able to get back a positive return on their investment. So people are really hesitant to plunk down $5000, or $10,000 or more on an ASIC that may never pay for itself.
Currently that Zeusminer will earn about $21 a day, and cost about $7 a day to run. Profit of $14 a day. That means, if the difficulty (amount of hashing power on the bitcoin network) never went up, it would take 321 days to pay for itself. But we haven't reached the top of the curve. Difficulty keeps going up, and as it does, you make less per day. It may never pay for itself.
The best I'm seeing on this page:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
Is the Achilles Labs AM-6000, that has a hash power of 6,000,000 Mh/s or 6000 Gh/s for $2895, and it pulls 3800 watts. It will take 150 days to break even at current difficulty. That may be doable.
This link will show you the total hashing power being dedicated to the mining of bitcoins:
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate
It is right now around 300,000,000,000 Mh/s.
Is this helping you understand?
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2004
Well, assuming that you used 1 280X to mine Monero, then exchanged the Monero to Bitcoin.
1 280X will get you about 600 hashes a second (the algorithm for Monero is low) you would get about 0.734 Monero a day. A Monero is worth about 0.0014 of a Bitcoin today. That would give you about $0.39/day Figure about 300 Watts for a computer running 1 280X hashing constantly, and take that out. So, if you pay $0.10/KWH, you are going to be paying about $0.72/day to get that $0.39/day
Plus, the price on Monero has been dropping steadily for months.
If you were mining Bitcoin directly, you get 0.00318845 Bitcoin over the course of a year, worth $1.21, and costing you $262.80.
Hmm...I think I'm going to stop mining Monero. I pay less than $0.10/KWH over my base usage, but not that much less. I'm probably losing money if I wasn't also Burstcoin mining.
I hope that helps.
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2003
That's a Hynix RAM version... an Elpida will be lower. I've got one of each, and the Elpida will do about 540 if I push it really hard.
Most of the time, my Hynix 7950 outhashes the Elpida 280X.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2013
Damn Gabby, tad late 
At this point, you pretty much have to watch for new coins, and mine them like crazy for the first week or so, then sell them all right when they hit an exchange.
OR
Learn how to trade with crypto-currency.
The latter being the better route IMHO.
At this point, you pretty much have to watch for new coins, and mine them like crazy for the first week or so, then sell them all right when they hit an exchange.
OR
Learn how to trade with crypto-currency.
The latter being the better route IMHO.
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2003
GPU mining is really not worth it anymore, as sad as it may be for many of us I myself sold just about every GPU I had already, down to last 2
ASIC mining may still work, but you have to take the risk, because an ASIC is not good for anything other than mining and difficulty never waits for anyone unfortunately
I myself sold just about every GPU I had already, down to last 2ASIC mining may still work, but you have to take the risk, because an ASIC is not good for anything other than mining and difficulty never waits for anyone unfortunately
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2011
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
Better invest time into learning how to trade. I went from bitcoin to forex, and I can say it's a heck of a lot more profitable, and easier to predict. Bitcoin swings are just too dramatic, and you need a lot of money to make money trading it.
With an account at say fxcm or intertrade, or heck fxopen (they take bitcoin to fund it!), you can make at least 15% per month being conservative, but you have to at least deposit 200 dollars to be on the safe side (and study...I used a demo account for almost a year, and spent a lot of time, and some money on my trading education).
- - - Updated - - -
Better invest time into learning how to trade. I went from bitcoin to forex, and I can say it's a heck of a lot more profitable, and easier to predict. Bitcoin swings are just too dramatic, and you need a lot of money to make money trading it.
With an account at say fxcm or intertrade, or heck fxopen (they take bitcoin to fund it!), you can make at least 15% per month being conservative, but you have to at least deposit 200 dollars to be on the safe side (and study...I used a demo account for almost a year, and spent a lot of time, and some money on my trading education).
With an account at say fxcm or intertrade, or heck fxopen (they take bitcoin to fund it!), you can make at least 15% per month being conservative, but you have to at least deposit 200 dollars to be on the safe side (and study...I used a demo account for almost a year, and spent a lot of time, and some money on my trading education).
- - - Updated - - -
Better invest time into learning how to trade. I went from bitcoin to forex, and I can say it's a heck of a lot more profitable, and easier to predict. Bitcoin swings are just too dramatic, and you need a lot of money to make money trading it.
With an account at say fxcm or intertrade, or heck fxopen (they take bitcoin to fund it!), you can make at least 15% per month being conservative, but you have to at least deposit 200 dollars to be on the safe side (and study...I used a demo account for almost a year, and spent a lot of time, and some money on my trading education).
