Bitcoin Mining

All the publicity about the "Bitcoin Bubble" over Christmas got me thinking.

Having discovered a piece of software called *very originally* "Bitcoin Miner" free in the W10 app store I let it run for a few days and made about 50p worth of bitcoin.

Next I discovered a free application called "Nicehash Miner", and proffed a couple of decent graphics cards from the office. Now I'm making £5.00 to £8.00 per day in exchange for 500 watts of electricity (about £1.50 per day).

I feel myself being "reeled in" by this brave new world. Anybody else got this problem?

[I'm sure the bubble will burst soon, but it's fun while it lasts].
Reply to
Vortex12
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That doesn't sound like very much.

Are you sure they're real bitcoins? Have you tried buying anything with them?

Reply to
Max Demian

I'm sure they're real.

The only practical option is to convert them back to pounds to spend, not difficult but of course there is always the chance a bitcoin could be worth £100k in the future. I'll hang on for now.

Really this is a bit of a "first world problem" It's only for fun and technical interest.

Reply to
Vortex12

Where are they 'coming from', if you aren't actually paying for them ?.

Reply to
Andrew

Fossil fuels, Uranium, future power station building costs :(

Only really free if ye are powered directly from free renewables.

Reply to
Adrian Caspersz

Start here:

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Reply to
Vortex12

And has mining become more efficient as my mate had a fairly big mining rig (10 video cards or summat) but it was costing more in electricity than he was mining at the time?

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

Any graphics card worth using seems to consume 100-200 Watts.

Furthermore the it is a 3.3 volt supply that GPU's need, (the yellow wires on your PC cable harness) so they require 30 amps or more! If you're not careful with the wiring there is a very real risk of I squared R's causing issues.

D
Reply to
Vortex12

There are dedicated 'mining' motherboards that will take 19 graphics cards and 3 ATX power supplies

Yellow wires on ATX power supplies are +12V, the orange wires are +3.3V, and the 6 or 8 pin PCIe connectors only have +12V

Reply to
Andy Burns

I stand corrected.

They still get hot if you're not careful!

Reply to
Vortex12

What you described above is the situation with bitcoin in the early days, before the exchange rate started to climb.

At present there are around 1384 cryptocurrencies of which bitcoin is simply the best known.

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If you check again I think you'll find you're generating one of the newer varieties.

Otherwise if something looks to good to be true - such as making ?5-?8 (?50-80) per day at a cost of only ?1.50 (?15) worth of electricity, while lying in bed or whatever - it usually is.

michael adams

....

Reply to
michael adams

I think you're into 'schum mishtake schurely' territory ...

Using an online mining calculator, assuming you have two top spec 1070Ti GPUs capable of 60MH/s together, that are free because you borrowed them, and burning 500W of power at 14p/kWh, at current BTC difficulty and reward rates, you're losing $2.40/day

Nicehash also seems to have a 5% service fee for you selling your GPU to them, plus a 0.0005 BTC fee for transferring from their wallet to your wallet, then whatever fees it would cost you to buy hard pounds or dollars from your wallet.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Not quite. Look at

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I set up the experiment to validate the claim because I did not believe it.

I've actually been using 3 x nVidia GTX1060's which appear to generate between 1.6 and 2.5 quid a day each (after charges) minus leccy cost no more than 1.5 per day. Actually 400 watts consumption for this setup with the monitor off!

Feeless transfer to coinbase.com wallet.

Certainly there is no loss going on based on the balances I see. But you could regard this as a very elaborate fan heater in the limit.

Reply to
Vortex12

I visited a friend last night. He has a 9kw micro hydro scheme, and below h is house he has a basement kind of flat. In the flat there is an electric h eater set to 16 degrees, no-one is in the flat just now. The heat could be supplied by the graphics cards, the electricity is being burned in a dumb heater to keep the place dry already. To him the cost woul d be the mining rig. Any pitfalls I am not seeing. The scheme yields pretty close to 9kw continuously.

Reply to
misterroy

That's the bit I don't see, two different calculators say you'll mine

0.000005 BTC per week = 4/100th of a penny with 54MH/s of GPU power

Exactly what amount in what currency have you earned? (if you don't mind me asking)

Reply to
Andy Burns

I remember watching "Startup" on Amazon Prime. It's more of a seedy thriller than a typical film about digital currencies and high tech startups. Complete with Haitian and Russian gangs.

Quite good if that's your sort of thing. Terrible first episode though.

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Reply to
pamela

Are bitcoins becoming harder to mine as we approach the 21 Million limit? We must be about 80 percent of the way there.

Reply to
pamela

Yes the difficulty factor increases every couple of weeks, to limit supply to 1 block every 10 minutes and at the moment the reward is

12.5BTC per block (which halves every 4 years)

Under 10m of the 22m coins have been mined so far.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Perhaps I should say "changes" rather than "increases". At the moment the worldwide horsepower dedicated to mining is increasing, so the factor increases, if people were to shut down a sizeable number of mining rigs then the difficulty will decrease to keep the rate athe same.

Reply to
Andy Burns

The total hash rate of all BTC miners is 22 quintillion hashes/sec this week (up from 15 quintillion hashes/sec a month ago)

1440 minutes/day = 144 blocks/day = 1800 coins/day = £14.5m/day

so Vortex's fractional share of that is

54,000,000 / 22,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 0.0000025 * £14.5m = 0.0003pence/day

That's why I can't see where the £5/day number comes from.

Reply to
Andy Burns

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