[quote]Diddy Ryder wrote:
I was looking in to Bitcoin mining and apparently around ?10k is what you’d need to spend to get a profitable rig.[/quote]
Has that boat sailed? I was under the impression that at this point, mining is a good way to turn $2 of electricity into $1 of bitcoins.
[quote]Derek542 wrote:
Is this considered a lot of money?
[/quote]
Considering that $38,000 is the the current individual annual median earnings; I suspect at least half the population would consider is a significant windfall. If you came across 25% of your annual wouldn’t you feel the same?
[quote]carbiduis wrote:
Ask Derek if you can invest in his company??
[/quote]
Now we are fucking talking.
[quote]BlueCollarTr8n wrote:
[quote]Derek542 wrote:
Is this considered a lot of money?
[/quote]
Considering that $38,000 is the the current individual annual median earnings; I suspect at least half the population would consider is a significant windfall. If you came across 25% of your annual wouldn’t you feel the same? [/quote]
Thank you that puts it in perspective. I mean 10 k is a couple of weeks for me.
Do you have any debt? Better to pay that off than waste money on interest. I know I would use it to pay off the rest of my student loan.
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]Diddy Ryder wrote:
I was looking in to Bitcoin mining and apparently around ?10k is what you’d need to spend to get a profitable rig.[/quote]
Has that boat sailed? I was under the impression that at this point, mining is a good way to turn $2 of electricity into $1 of bitcoins.[/quote]
It looks like it. I googled around and the verdict was that profitable mining is now pretty much the reserve of businesses and criminals. One article said that you needed to spend at least $11k if you wanted to turn a profit, and even if you do, once that was offset against the cost of running the rig you wouldn’t exactly be on your way to a quick million.
According to another article, the best (only?) way to make money is to infect people’s computers with a virus and have them work for you as slaves.
Another way people try to stay ahead of the computing power needed to generate a bitcoin is to group together into syndicates, all working towards a common goal and then splitting the results.
I was looking to spend a few grand and just have some passive income ticking over, but decided that it isn’t worth it.
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
you should probably think about donating some of this unearned money to a cause you believe in. How much is up to you, but I think it is the right thing to do when you come into money that you did not earn yourself…
Do not concern yourself with other people’s expectations of how this money should be spent. It is yours now.
[/quote]
Right. So don’t donate one cent if you don’t want to.
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
you should probably think about donating some of this unearned money to a cause you believe in. How much is up to you, but I think it is the right thing to do when you come into money that you did not earn yourself…
Do not concern yourself with other people’s expectations of how this money should be spent. It is yours now.
[/quote]
Right. So don’t donate one cent if you don’t want to.[/quote]
Right.
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
you should probably think about donating some of this unearned money to a cause you believe in. How much is up to you, but I think it is the right thing to do when you come into money that you did not earn yourself…
Do not concern yourself with other people’s expectations of how this money should be spent. It is yours now.
[/quote]
Right. So don’t donate one cent if you don’t want to.[/quote]
Right.
[/quote]
Wow, quick draw. You had this response up by the time I finished scrolling down.
Btw, Derek; big humble brag.
Maybe not so humble…
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
you should probably think about donating some of this unearned money to a cause you believe in. How much is up to you, but I think it is the right thing to do when you come into money that you did not earn yourself…
Do not concern yourself with other people’s expectations of how this money should be spent. It is yours now.
[/quote]
Right. So don’t donate one cent if you don’t want to.[/quote]
Right.
[/quote]
Wow, quick draw. You had this response up by the time I finished scrolling down.
Btw, Derek; big humble brag.
Maybe not so humble…[/quote]
Sorry I almost went back to edit that. But I stuck my foot in my mouth. So kept it there.
I will just say I was a 17 year old father on welfare so no silver spoon.
[quote]Derek542 wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]twojarslave wrote:
you should probably think about donating some of this unearned money to a cause you believe in. How much is up to you, but I think it is the right thing to do when you come into money that you did not earn yourself…
Do not concern yourself with other people’s expectations of how this money should be spent. It is yours now.
[/quote]
Right. So don’t donate one cent if you don’t want to.[/quote]
Right.
[/quote]
Wow, quick draw. You had this response up by the time I finished scrolling down.
Btw, Derek; big humble brag.
Maybe not so humble…[/quote]
Sorry I almost went back to edit that. But I stuck my foot in my mouth. So kept it there.
I will just say I was a 17 year old father on welfare so no silver spoon. [/quote]
That’s okay, I actually like the humble brag. Done well it’s an art form. You need to work on being a little more subtle with it, btw.
[quote]Diddy Ryder wrote:
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]Diddy Ryder wrote:
I was looking in to Bitcoin mining and apparently around ?10k is what you’d need to spend to get a profitable rig.[/quote]
Has that boat sailed? I was under the impression that at this point, mining is a good way to turn $2 of electricity into $1 of bitcoins.[/quote]
It looks like it. I googled around and the verdict was that profitable mining is now pretty much the reserve of businesses and criminals. One article said that you needed to spend at least $11k if you wanted to turn a profit, and even if you do, once that was offset against the cost of running the rig you wouldn’t exactly be on your way to a quick million.
According to another article, the best (only?) way to make money is to infect people’s computers with a virus and have them work for you as slaves.
Another way people try to stay ahead of the computing power needed to generate a bitcoin is to group together into syndicates, all working towards a common goal and then splitting the results.
I was looking to spend a few grand and just have some passive income ticking over, but decided that it isn’t worth it.[/quote]
I was just going to post buy some bitcoins until I saw this reply.
Disclaimer, I am heavily invested in bitcoins and some alt coins as a speculator, and as a miner.
I’ve been running a mining farm for 2 years. It started with a 60 dollar video card and I have grown it into 30k worth of equipment by reinvesting the profits. The farm lives in my garage, 2x30amp breakers at 240v running everything. Power draw is just over 10,000 watts. My electrical bill is about 1000 a month, at 0.11 / kwh.
First off there is no consumer level hardware that can mine bitcoins at a profit. You need custom equipment called an asic “application specific integrated circuit” to mine bitcoins. There are a few manufacturers who sell these machines, but why sell a money printing machine and not just use it? They will mine with the machine, extrapolate its lifetime earnings and then sell it for slightly more. The end user wont break even, unless bitcoin increases in value. With this logic it is better to directly buy bitcoins. Which is what i recommend for most people.
With that said, it is possible to mine other coins which don’t require specific hardware with video cards, such as litecoin, darkcoin, etc…
I use radeon r9 290x/280x cards, for the geeks here, and they are a bitch to manage all the heat.
Right now I am grossing about 60-70 a day with a power cost of 25, so you can see its not a get rich quick scheme, but from november-feb i was clearing 600 a day. The trick is to mine in secret while the market is quiet just breaking even an then dump everything during a rally and expand your gear. Ive been averaging about a 10x expansion per year.
I started mining bitcoins around $13, sold a bunch at 140, mined all last summer and sold in december around 1000. Its a balancing act where you hope you dont need to sell all your coins to pay the power bill. I sell a little every month to cost average expenses.
The Bitcoin protocol itself is revolutionary. I am heavily versed in physics/math/computer science, and have spent years understanding everything I could and I am completely sold on its aspects.
Now is a great time to buy, the price has bottomed and the market is stagnant.
I’m happy to explain more about the protocol, my setup, rigs in general.
[quote]nsimmons wrote:
Some great info
[/quote]
Thanks for that post. So the best way to get in to Bitcoins is as a speculator?
Is it possible to build an ASIC?
What do you think about buying a mining plan from someone with the hardware?
[quote]Diddy Ryder wrote:
[quote]nsimmons wrote:
Some great info
[/quote]
Thanks for that post. So the best way to get in to Bitcoins is as a speculator?
Is it possible to build an ASIC?
What do you think about buying a mining plan from someone with the hardware?
[/quote]
If you just want bitcoins to hold and maybe day trade a little just buy them directly from an exchange, like bitstamp. I use cavirtex, I’m Canadian. Use an atm if they are available to you, we have one in Vancouver, though I haven’t used it. Buy from localbitcoins, face to face for cash.
Once you have your coins, for the love of christ don’t leave them on an exchange. Leave them on an offline old laptop with the keys backed up. Or make a paper wallet and hide it.
I use a paper wallet. It has the receiving address and the private key to unlock them. I’ve made a couple copies and hid them. The paper itself doesn’t hold the coins its just a key, just like the coins dont ive on your laptop, only the keys do. The coins “live” on every computer that runs a client. So they cant be lost, only your ability to unlock them can be lost.
Can you build an ASIC, well yes and no.
The asic itself is a microchip. If you have the skills and bank roll you can design and have the chips created for a million or so. Degree in computer engineering required.
You can buy pre-made chips and build your own circuitry. I have bought some chips and designed a prototype pcb layout. I have the parts but I didn’t build it, since buy the time my design was down it would use more in power than it would make. I may build it one day for fun, etching the pcb is a pain in the ass. Degree in electrical engineering required.
An asic is a limited lifespan device. As time passes it becomes harder to mine bitcoins and your equipment becomes more and more deprecated. Eventually it wont pay for power cost and you toss it. At least with video cards, they can be sold or re purposed to a different coin.
A mining contract is a scam, but honestly that is how im making money now. I rent my rigs out to people via a third party. They pay, for example, 0.25 bitcoins a day to rent my rigs and they can mine ~0.15 btc worth of stuff. I don’t understand why they do it. They are hoping whatever coin they mine appreciates, so why not just buy the coin directly with 0.25btc??! Greed clouds peoples reasoning…
If you want to mine, you need to have a bank roll large enough to buy enough equipment to make a massive leap over your competitors. You will make decent money for a period, breaking even is another story, while they slowly catch up to your capacity. At my peak I was within the top 1% of miners on the network, now im around top 30%, but all my gear is paid for with profit, while the newcomers shelled out of pocket and might break even.
Competitive bitcoin bankroll, few hundred thousand dollars.If you can find the gear. You will profit then.
Other hobbyist type coins, maybe 50-60k, but the market is fracturing at the moment between algorithms if you buy scrypt gear it may be useless in a few months, x11 may overtake.
Honestly I am profitable, but I would have done better if I just bought bitcoins and held, but what fun is that. My reasoning is that i could loose everything if the price collapses. At least with mining I have hardware to resell.
Oh yeah, the city called about my grow-op a couple weeks ago. No raids yet…
Heres 3 rigs. I have 7 now.
Am I understanding this correctly; you can actually produce bit coins if you have enough computer power? Can I also produce myself a 20 year old Kelly Lebrock?
[quote]Derek542 wrote:
[quote]BlueCollarTr8n wrote:
[quote]Derek542 wrote:
Is this considered a lot of money?
[/quote]
Considering that $38,000 is the the current individual annual median earnings; I suspect at least half the population would consider is a significant windfall. If you came across 25% of your annual wouldn’t you feel the same? [/quote]
Thank you that puts it in perspective. I mean 10 k is a couple of weeks for me. [/quote]
It’s refreshing to see the completely un-humble brag every once in a while.
[quote]on edge wrote:
Am I understanding this correctly; you can actually produce bit coins if you have enough computer power? Can I also produce myself a 20 year old Kelly Lebrock?[/quote]
Yes to part 1, no to part 2.
Brief background. I am generalizing in a lot of respects.
So how do you prove that I gave bob a digital token, I didn’t keep it for myself and i didn’t just make a copy for bob. Presently we use a trusted third party, like a bank or escrow, for digital dollars. But i don’t like trusting anyone.
Bitcoin uses whats called a distributed consensus network. Its a way to have trust without having to trust anyone. Think about that for a sec.
The bitcoin network is peer to peer, like bittorrent. There is no central servers or central controlling authority. Every single user, like me, or you, who runs a bitcoin wallet program becomes a node. These nodes interact with each other to relay transactions back and forth. The network can’t be shut down unless every single last node is shut down.
Ok that’s the network, what about the coins themselves. Where do they come from?
The bitcoin uses a global ledger system, displaying the ownership of all the coins. This ledger is called the blockchain. Every single node has a copy of this block chain, so, for example, the ownership of my bitcoins are recorded everywhere.
A miner is a node that has the ability to write to the ledger.
I am being very general and hand waving a bit for the next part.
The nodes who choose to be miners compete in whats like a lottery. It is called “proof of work”. They have to guess a particular 256 character digit, that becomes a solution of such to a math problem. Ignore the details. If a node guesses correctly it earns the right to record to the ledger. It has “proved” it has done sufficient work (calculations) to solve the puzzle. The node then permanently records to the ledger the last 10 minutes of global transactions, and then relays this new information, whats called a block. All the other nodes then see the new block, add it to their ledgers and then the lottery starts over. Every 10 minutes on average.
The transaction records then become fact for the entire network. There is a million copies of the fact that I sent bob 1 bitcoin and from now on bob owns that bitcoin.
Ok so where do the bitcoins come from? As payment for the miners effort. The miner who guesses correctly is rewarded 25 bitcoins, plus any transaction fees that are present (it costs about 1/2 cent to send coins). Since it requires enormous computing power and electricity to guess the puzzle the rewards are rather large.
The protocol is designed so that it takes, on average, 10 minutes to guess the answer. If a lot of computing power comes online and the answers are guessed faster, the protocol makes the puzzle more difficult. This is called the difficulty. Likewise if miners leave and the puzzle takes longer, the difficulty is lowered.
So common questions, like yours.
Can someone just change the code to create more than 25 bitcoins? No, because all the peers on the network must be compatible you would need to have every single last user agree to upgrade their software. You might be able to convince a few of your friends and they you would have a small 4-5 node network of your own, but it would not be bitcoin. This is called a fork and 2 networks are not compatible. Just like tcp/ip and smtp are different protocols.
There is a hard limit of 21 millions coins that can be mined. We are at about 13 million? I think. With the difficulty curve the limit will be reached around the year 2140. So again, can someone just change the limit? No, not without convincing every last person to change software.
Each coin is tagged with a unique signature were as its origin and lifecycle can be traced.
Can they be “hacked”?
No, the encryption the network uses is the same encryption used by banks, governments, nsa, etc. Both types of encryption have been public for decades now and have not been compromised. What you read about in the media is when people give up control of their coins (the keys) to a third party, like an exchange and the exchange disappears.
Remember I said i don’t like trusting anyone, so I don’t give my keys out. Its no different that giving out the combination to your safe, you get robbed and people claim gold is broken.
With these properties a finite, fungible token is created, that can’t be duplicated, inflated or manipulated is created. This is why they have value. The Bitcoin network is now has hundreds of times more computing power than the worlds top 500 super computers combined. It is the most powerful network on the planet.
Read everything, then check out bitcoin.org. Think on it a few days, then read again. It is hard to wrap ones head around. It took me a couple months before I got it.
[quote]nsimmons wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
Am I understanding this correctly; you can actually produce bit coins if you have enough computer power? Can I also produce myself a 20 year old Kelly Lebrock?[/quote]
Yes to part 1, no to part 2.
Brief background. I am generalizing in a lot of respects.
So how do you prove that I gave bob a digital token, I didn’t keep it for myself and i didn’t just make a copy for bob. Presently we use a trusted third party, like a bank or escrow, for digital dollars. But i don’t like trusting anyone.
Bitcoin uses whats called a distributed consensus network. Its a way to have trust without having to trust anyone. Think about that for a sec.
The bitcoin network is peer to peer, like bittorrent. There is no central servers or central controlling authority. Every single user, like me, or you, who runs a bitcoin wallet program becomes a node. These nodes interact with each other to relay transactions back and forth. The network can’t be shut down unless every single last node is shut down.
Ok that’s the network, what about the coins themselves. Where do they come from?
The bitcoin uses a global ledger system, displaying the ownership of all the coins. This ledger is called the blockchain. Every single node has a copy of this block chain, so, for example, the ownership of my bitcoins are recorded everywhere.
A miner is a node that has the ability to write to the ledger.
I am being very general and hand waving a bit for the next part.
The nodes who choose to be miners compete in whats like a lottery. It is called “proof of work”. They have to guess a particular 256 character digit, that becomes a solution of such to a math problem. Ignore the details. If a node guesses correctly it earns the right to record to the ledger. It has “proved” it has done sufficient work (calculations) to solve the puzzle. The node then permanently records to the ledger the last 10 minutes of global transactions, and then relays this new information, whats called a block. All the other nodes then see the new block, add it to their ledgers and then the lottery starts over. Every 10 minutes on average.
The transaction records then become fact for the entire network. There is a million copies of the fact that I sent bob 1 bitcoin and from now on bob owns that bitcoin.
Ok so where do the bitcoins come from? As payment for the miners effort. The miner who guesses correctly is rewarded 25 bitcoins, plus any transaction fees that are present (it costs about 1/2 cent to send coins). Since it requires enormous computing power and electricity to guess the puzzle the rewards are rather large.
The protocol is designed so that it takes, on average, 10 minutes to guess the answer. If a lot of computing power comes online and the answers are guessed faster, the protocol makes the puzzle more difficult. This is called the difficulty. Likewise if miners leave and the puzzle takes longer, the difficulty is lowered.
So common questions, like yours.
Can someone just change the code to create more than 25 bitcoins? No, because all the peers on the network must be compatible you would need to have every single last user agree to upgrade their software. You might be able to convince a few of your friends and they you would have a small 4-5 node network of your own, but it would not be bitcoin. This is called a fork and 2 networks are not compatible. Just like tcp/ip and smtp are different protocols.
There is a hard limit of 21 millions coins that can be mined. We are at about 13 million? I think. With the difficulty curve the limit will be reached around the year 2140. So again, can someone just change the limit? No, not without convincing every last person to change software.
Each coin is tagged with a unique signature were as its origin and lifecycle can be traced.
Can they be “hacked”?
No, the encryption the network uses is the same encryption used by banks, governments, nsa, etc. Both types of encryption have been public for decades now and have not been compromised. What you read about in the media is when people give up control of their coins (the keys) to a third party, like an exchange and the exchange disappears.
Remember I said i don’t like trusting anyone, so I don’t give my keys out. Its no different that giving out the combination to your safe, you get robbed and people claim gold is broken.
With these properties a finite, fungible token is created, that can’t be duplicated, inflated or manipulated is created. This is why they have value. The Bitcoin network is now has hundreds of times more computing power than the worlds top 500 super computers combined. It is the most powerful network on the planet.
Read everything, then check out bitcoin.org. Think on it a few days, then read again. It is hard to wrap ones head around. It took me a couple months before I got it.
[/quote]
nsimmons,
Thank you. That was a fantastic instructional on Bitcoin.
No problem. How about this. If I see some bitcoin addresses I’ll make some small donations.
I once came into a pile of money too.
Just the sight of it had me so aroused, I couldn’t contain myself.