WordPress now accepts Bitcoin: http://en.support.wordpress.com/bitcoin/

11/27/2012 5:08:42 PM

$13.37 and looking strong

12/4/2012 9:20:37 PM

lol33t

12/5/2012 1:56:11 AM

So just doing some reading here. Completely not worth any type of mining currently. Will barely cover electricity costs.

What is interesting is these new ASIC devices that are coming out:

http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

Say you spend $649 for a device that outputs 30Ghash/s. So roughly 30,000Mh/s.

Using this calculator at the current mining factor 100 you would get ~$67/day in profit.

http://dev.bitcoinx.com/profit/

That's assuming you can get a hold of one of these devices. My assumption is once they saturate the market the mining factor will go waaaaay down and you won't be able to make nearly that much...otherwise what am I missing?

[Edited on January 2, 2013 at 5:16 PM. Reason : s]

1/2/2013 5:16:15 PM

^

Quote :

"Things to consider that might eat into your profit: The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future. With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox, Tradehill, CryptoXchange. The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck. You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative. You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread. When the block count will hit ~200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc. A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife. Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it. You will not get a 100% uptime. You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here. Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards. A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable. Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market."

1/2/2013 8:15:04 PM

^The only relevant piece of information in there is:

Quote :

"A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable."

Which I kind of already stated...I guess my question was more rhetorical.

1/2/2013 8:23:45 PM

You probably can make a little profit off of it. But like you said, if these devices are really all they're cracked up to be (if you go look at the first few pages of this site you'll see hash rates at 1/10 that for equivalent price) you can bet there are miners able to afford them and the difficulty is going to shoot up. It's pretty much a given. It just depends on how long that takes.

1/3/2013 7:46:01 AM

Quote :

"You probably can make a little profit off of it."

With all three of my GPUS running I barely was hitting 250mh/s and including electricity (from the extra GPU load) I was losing ~$.30 a day.

1/3/2013 9:17:45 AM

So if electricity was of no cost, if I am reading the specs right, the butterflylabs product (60GH/s) would produce $4k/month?? It can't be that simple.

1/3/2013 10:23:49 AM

Well with those devices electricity is hardly a concern but my point is at the current mining factor 100 cost ($.25/100mhash/sec/24hr) you would make that much a month BUT once the market is saturated with those devices I'm guessing that mining factor will go waaaay down so just anyone can't make that much money.

But yes if you look at pools that produce 60gh/s then they do make that much money currently but it's split between lots of people.

-I mean I don't even have a dedicated build but I tried running my 430, 580, and 6570 for a sum total of maybe 250mh/s and I'd barely make $13-15/month which wouldn't cover the extra cost of electricity for running those cards 24/7.

[Edited on January 3, 2013 at 10:40 AM. Reason : s]

1/3/2013 10:38:55 AM

Has either the bASIC or BL shipments gone to anyone yet? Looks like both are in pre-order only mode, and can't find anyone with proof of existence. Seems to be a ton of scepticism around BL based on gross delays in shipping commitments, and CEO's fraud ridden background.

Still, tempted to go in on one of these units. I would throw $250 at a share of one.

1/3/2013 11:00:23 AM

Quote :

"With all three of my GPUS running I barely was hitting 250mh/s and including electricity (from the extra GPU load) I was losing ~$.30 a day."

What the hell? I didn't say with your current setup.

1/3/2013 3:55:53 PM

I wasn't implying that. Was just commenting.

1/3/2013 4:04:59 PM

Ah. I experienced a similar thing. A bought a card in 2011 that got about 200Mh/s. I think it was barely worth it at the time, but definitely not now.

1/3/2013 4:39:00 PM

holy shit wtf batman

$18.57

1/24/2013 9:23:37 AM

$20.5

This shit is bananas.

1/31/2013 7:07:36 AM

I dont regret buying several hundred when it was $3. Just offloaded 20.

1/31/2013 10:13:10 AM

I also offloaded recently, but damn I wish I had bought at $3.

$22.4

2/8/2013 12:37:32 PM

$24

I hope ya'll don't mind me bumping this thread. It's 10x what it was at the bottom of the crash and has nearly doubled in the last month alone.

2/10/2013 5:48:58 PM

$26

2/13/2013 10:54:23 AM

$28.4

2/19/2013 8:59:02 AM

I'm going to predict it is a bubble. But other than the graph, I have no basis for this position.

2/21/2013 10:46:12 AM

$31.1

It is less than $1 away from the all time high, after which it crashed back down to $10 within days.

2/22/2013 11:52:18 AM

2/23/2013 11:48:45 PM

^isn't that bullshit? the ones who have the most bitcoins are the ones playing it as an investment..

2/24/2013 4:16:36 AM

I like to check in on bitcoin every 6 mo or so for an update. Looks like its still a game for speculators and tech geeks and not much else.

2/27/2013 12:38:29 PM

$32.89

2/27/2013 8:12:12 PM

$40. This is fucking insane.

3/5/2013 5:01:57 PM

So how does this work? Is there some exchange where you go and buy and sell these phantom tokens?

Not interested in getting in, just fascinated by the phenomenon. Is it as simple as making a few clicks to buy and sell em?

3/5/2013 7:51:25 PM

Bitcoins are generated by running a program called a Bitcoin miner, which works on a provably difficult cryptographic problem involving the generation of a hash with a certain number of zeros at the beginning or something; each time one of these problems is solved, the miner sends the proof of work across the network to the other clients, and the block chain is somehow modified so that the wallet at the miner's Bitcoin address is associated with some more Bitcoins.

I think the reward was 50BTC per block at first, (might still be) but over time the amount of time required to get a block increases, and the value of each block will eventually decrease, so that the total number of Bitcoins in existence will slowly approach (but never reach) 21 million; because each Bitcoin can be divided into 10 million units, the total number of atomic units is 2,099,999,997,690,000 (almost 2.1 quadrillion), a little over, say, twice the total number of atomic units in the M2 money supply of US Dollars (which would be about 2.0879 quadrillion cents as of January), or about 4/3 of the similar total for M3 (extrapolated from the fact that over the year or so before the Fed discontinued publishing that data series, M3 was about 1.5*M2).

At the current rate of Bitcoin mining, it would take you on average a super long time to get Bitcoins this way, even running an outrageously elaborate computer on the scale that brings the DEA in to bust a suspected grow op because of all the electricity used and heat generated; therefore it makes more sense to join a mining pool, a group of people all using their computers to mine Bitcoin and share the winnings when one of them finds a block.

Either way, to spend Bitcoins, you send a certain amount of BTC from your wallet to the recipient's Bitcoin address, (with no possibility of a chargeback on your part, so let the buyer beware), and usually a fee of 0.01BTC per transaction.

The algorithms behind the system are AFAIK rock-solid: There is no known way to double-spend Bitcoins or to create Bitcoins without doing the mining work, turning electricity, CPU/GPU time, and accelerated heat damage into Bitcoin.

However, the process of converting standard, reliable fiat currency into Bitcoin is fraught with danger, and it's not just the current speculative bubble (it's also things like fraud and mismanagement of Bitcoin wallets); you need to find some entity or entities who have Bitcoins and want dollars or Euros or some other fiat currency in exchange, and the key word is "exchange."

The easiest way by far to get some Bitcoin for yourself, although fraught with the aforementioned danger and littered with fees, is via an exchange; the biggest is Mt. Gox (originally MTGOX, the Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange, giving you an idea of what the early adopters were like back in '09), but there are others, and regardless, you usually need to load that fiat currency into one of their accepted payment processors first (NOT like your bank or PayPal, something much sketchier that actually allows Bitcoin transactions), with their own fees.

all this for something that at best allows you to launder money or near-untraceably buy contraband (I mean the mail services will still record where your schwag came from and where you go to pick it up)

~♥~

About a year and a half ago, I collected my thouts in this very thread about why Bitcoin will prolly never catch on, and I still stand by my words: /message_topic.aspx?topic=614388&page=5#14914560

Another viewpoint (along with a fuckload of info) is provided at a pro-Bitcoin site: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths

[Edited on March 5, 2013 at 8:56 PM. Reason : tl;dr, there are exchanges, but it's not as simple as a few clicks

3/5/2013 8:56:03 PM

^

Coinbase is a ycombinator backed startup that allows you to buy and sell. Slightly less sketchy...

http://www.coinbase.com

[Edited on March 6, 2013 at 10:27 AM. Reason : a]

3/6/2013 10:26:36 AM

$48.8

Quote :

"Is it as simple as making a few clicks to buy and sell em?"

Getting in and out of mtgox recently was a huge PITA. It used to be fairly straightforward but now they require verification, including government issued photo ID and proof of residence. Kind of defeats the purpose of psuedoanonymous currency, doesn't it?

Coinbase and other exchanges may be a lot easier.

[Edited on March 6, 2013 at 11:30 AM. Reason : asdfasdf]

3/6/2013 11:28:00 AM

lol every time I see this I just think "Damn, people are buying a shit load of drugs this week"

3/8/2013 10:02:06 PM

$71

Do I need to point out how ridiculous this is?

3/21/2013 9:29:57 PM

what in the blue bloody fuck

3/21/2013 9:54:44 PM

I'd expect there will be some good comics that covers the recent bitcoin bubble...

3/22/2013 9:01:32 AM

oh, man, i guess now is the time to buy in?

i'm-a gonna be rich!

3/22/2013 12:01:01 PM

And here I was thinking of buying them when they hit $20... then I was like "naw man, it'll crash down to 14 or 5 again..."

3/22/2013 12:57:48 PM

so who wants to help me found a competitor called Bytecoin? early adopters to a fake currency make out to be millionaires in real currency apparently!

3/22/2013 1:29:04 PM

lol i had 1 or 2 BTC left over from when they were 10 bucks and I bought something but I lost my Tails flash drive and doubt I could remember the encryption password anyway.


HMM, I suppose I should look for that since there's a possibility my change just turned in to 140 bucks.

[Edited on March 22, 2013 at 1:51 PM. Reason : ]

3/22/2013 1:48:17 PM

that seems worth it, but it would be kinda funny that by the time you find it, the BTC market crashes back down to 10 per unit... lol

3/22/2013 5:36:57 PM

Quote :

"so who wants to help me found a competitor called Bytecoin? early adopters to a fake currency make out to be millionaires in real currency apparently!"

This just screams of the logic people use when they claim a wine can't cost $200 a bottle because it doesn't cost that much to make.

Just think about that guy that bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC a few years ago...

Relevant: http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G001.pdf

There was speculation that the Cyprus thing was the reason for the doubling in value this week.

[Edited on March 22, 2013 at 6:28 PM. Reason : a]

3/22/2013 6:26:55 PM

My buddy mentioned Cyprus and when I went searching I found another Silk Road article. I don't know what type of exposure it grants in the UK, but I know the first insane spike was when Gawker exposed SR in 2011. I imagine some more fluctuation the week leading up to April 20th.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/22/silk-road-online-drug-marketplace

3/22/2013 6:43:18 PM

Well... where are all the Russian playboys and drug dealers going to hid their money now that their precious tax haven has fallen and the local government was threatening to steal some of it...

3/22/2013 6:58:24 PM

I thought some of the uptick was from reddit accepting bitcoin for redditgold bit it just went nuts for the last two months.

3/22/2013 7:35:58 PM

$88

3/27/2013 5:26:32 PM

I cashed out a bunch today. Saved about half to see if it would go up more.

I also bought a couple of the butterflylabs jalapenos with some of the coin, they may be worthless by the time I get them, but mining 1 or 2 coins a month has been good to me so far.

3/27/2013 7:47:02 PM

damnz getting close to 100 a unit. So how long does it take to mine for them now with it getting so popular and everyone is adding to the transaction?

3/28/2013 4:41:10 AM

I'm not so sure that mining activity is increasing, just speculation.

3/28/2013 5:35:20 AM

Mining activity looks to be increasing quite a bit, went from 20,000 Ghash/s two months ago to 50,000 Ghash/s and the difficult rises along with it. Even looking at just the last two weeks, it went up on average of 10,000 Ghash/s.

3/28/2013 6:23:08 AM