I know vaguely about bitcoins, but I've heard about just come across the concept of mining them and gather this can be used to 'create' money on my PC. I'm nothing if not fascinated! Anyone here doing this, and how easy is it to get started?
Tried a bit of googling but the noise is deafening, so would appreciate comments! Might be an interesting discussion.
"Special" ASRock motherboard[1], a few graphics cards and electricity consumption that's not very green...
Bring it on!!!
[1] -
A few years ago it wasn't worthwhile unless you had cheap electricity. Now ASIC miners are on the market, I think PCs are blown out of the water unless you're prepared to invest in banks of GPUs.
In all cases you're creating 'money' with electricity, so it's your electricity cost that really matters. /Unless/ you're using it for heating that you would have used anyway - could potentially work instead of an electric fire. But noisy.
Be interesting to do the comparison between bitcoin mining and air/ground source heat pumps in terms of the financial return.
Theo
Not on a PC. BitCoin is clever. The more there are, the more work is needed to mine the next one. We're now up to a level where only those with free a ccess to serious hardware are credible as cost-effective miners.
I got into this a few years ago. I was working with people who were (litera lly) a graphics CPU factory. As they had to do burn-in tests etc., they did indeed have suitable free hardware going to waste, and had turned it to mi ning. No-one got rich, but a few did get "well paid" for their time.
I strongly suspect that their Chinese counterparts in production now simply own the whole shebang.
Weta Digital have 32 water cooled machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. When they are not making a movie they may as well make some bitcoins!
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