Been reading a few articles about this & came up with an idea but there are a few things im unsure about.

Is there a way to program an OS to boot up run a program & shut down at certain times of the day?

Also using this calc it quotes that i can earn $3.60 a day but it does not factor in difficulty level increase. https://cointweak.com/calculator/coin/flap

What are the likely difficulty increases over a year. Does anyone have any experience of mining on here?.

I don't have your answer Ant, but I suspect, if it was that easy, then every body would use their computer as a Mine. I have read up on it as well, but the processing power you need, but ( this is why ATI/AMD GFX cards are priced through the roof at the moment as they work harder and faster) so unless you have a dedicated PC purely for mining....I would forget it mate

Like they always say, if it looks like I cheap way to make money, it usually isn't LOL

Fordie

I don't know if the statement has any truth to it. but I heard unless you have dedicated mining rig, what you make in bit coins you will have to spend on the electricity cost to mine them.

Quote from simulation :

I don't know if the statement has any truth to it. but I heard unless you have dedicated mining rig, what you make in bit coins you will have to spend on the electricity cost to mine them.

Yeah I heard the same, that's why I said, unless you have a power processing machine it's not worth it, especially now it's all public and in the news, you know everybody is going to be jumping on it

Fordie

I figured the main drawback with doing it in the UK is the cost of electricity. So i thought i'd get some solar panels to power my mining rig. Problem with that is of course that the earth spins on its axis giving us day & night.

Hence the question about auto booting OS system. Yes im gona have to invest a bit but as long the coin holds its value (according to the calculator) it is possible to net a profit.

The part that worries me, is the difficulty level increase thingy. Which i still dont fully understand. (nor is it factored into calcs)

To get enough power from solar panels for any meaningful bitcoin mining you'd need a massive FIELD of panels, and the cost of that would mean you'd need to mine for like 500 years just to get back what you put in to the panels and batteries.

The cost to even power something tiny that only takes a few watts max like a Raspberry Pi with solar panels is over 100 euros (I looked in to doing it) so imagine what it would be like to do it with an array of AMD graphic cards which are easily 200-300W each. Mining with a single/mid-tier card isn't profitable anymore.

Bitcoin isn't really even worth doing it all anymore. Every professional economist I know of says it's a horrible idea as a currency. If you got in to it early, it was a great investment target, but it's a shit currency due to its volatile nature and the limited places that accept it today.

Quote from Matrixi :

To get enough power from solar panels for any meaningful bitcoin mining you'd need a massive FIELD of panels, and the cost of that would mean you'd need to mine for like 500 years just to get back what you put in to the panels and batteries.

The cost to even power something tiny that only takes a few watts max like a Raspberry Pi with solar panels is over 100 euros (I looked in to doing it) so imagine what it would be like to do it with an array of AMD graphic cards which are easily 200-300W each. Mining with a single/mid-tier card isn't profitable anymore.

Bitcoin isn't really even worth doing it all anymore. Every professional economist I know of says it's a horrible idea as a currency. If you got in to it early, it was a great investment target, but it's a shit currency due to its volatile nature and the limited places that accept it today.

Totally agree, and the fact it's been in the news so all of sundry know about it now......its a non profit investment now

Fordie

Profits can still be made (atleast until the bubble bursts again) but you need to have a thick wallet to do a proper rig with ASIC miners or an array of flagship GPUs... something like this to give a taste of the dedication required.





I personally think it's daft and a horrible waste of energy.

There's a few kids at my university who mine. They say the only reason its profitable for them is because they can do it in the library so that the school has to foot the power bill.

It's sad to see that great hardware being raped like that. They could've had a nice home at enthusiastic gamers' builds, but instead they are getting used for this bullshit.

Quote from Bose321 :

It's sad to see that great hardware being raped like that. They could've had a nice home at enthusiastic gamers' builds, but instead they are getting used for this bullshit.

Just look on the bright side. When the market crashes, they'll have to sell them to make up for some of their losses.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Just look on the bright side. When the market crashes, they'll have to sell them to make up for some of their losses.

Chances are they would be all using ASICs when XCoin crashes.

The basis of all of these virtual currencies/coins seems to be crunching someone else's data for money.

So my questions are, who's data are we crunching?

& who is paying us to do so?

What is driving the whole virtual coin thing?

Sorry for all the questions but i want to understand it.

Unfortunately, you aren't crunching any usable data.

And who is paying you?
People who think investing it it might bring them $$$$.

Good thing about is, you can profit from it.
Bad thing is - if you are one of 'investors' you might lose money. Or 'earn' some.
Though more likely first one

Unless you have serious dedicated hardware you will make nothing or next to nothing for your effort. In most cases it will just be a money drain in power costs

You are years to late into the game. Miners have moved from CPU -> GPU -> Dedicate hardware

The dedicate hardware are low power and high hash rate. I have seen articles where people have rooms filled with tanks of 100s of liquid cooled rack mount cards.

Your home pc will not make a dent unless you get very very lucky but the brute power out there means your chances are near 0

Not really 'years' late. From February to April I managed to pay off my R9 280x card
But now, it's not profitable at all...

Not really.
Pyramid scheme is pure fraud system.
Bitcoin is more similar to regular stock exchange.

It's just like any commodity, like gold, coal, copper, oil etc but in the case of bitcoin it's data. A particular string of numbers which verifies as 'yes, this is a valid bitcoin'. And just like other commodities, it has to be 'mined' - it's a complex sequence, valid codes of which can only be found using brute-force number-crunching techniques, and the ease of finding it decreases as more are discovered, again, similar to mining a physical commodity.

Unlike other commodities is it essentially worthless (you can't burn it for energy for example) but it's vaguely analogous to gold which is a fairly useless metal, far too soft to use (although we are finding its electrical properties can be useful) but is 'quite pretty' so people pay far more than its functional value.

Just like other commodities, its value is tied to how much other people are prepared to pay for it. Currently this is 'lots' but the HUGE risk with virtual currencies like Bitcoin is that due to them having absolutely zero inherent value if people suddenly decide that they are prepared to pay 'nothing', you are left with exactly that. The price of coal may go up or down but you can always burn it for heat, and gold will always be pretty.

The only good idea here was the solar panels . Tie in with the energy grid (don't get an expensive battery). You can (in the US anyways) sell the excess energy that you produce in the day time for retail price, and then the energy that you do use at night is already paid for with your day time energy. The difference you'll either have to pay for or you will get paid for. Much better than Bitcoins

http://www.solarcity.com/learn ... standing-netmetering.aspx

If of course you have the cash on hand to finance this. Bitcoins are a good way to lose a lot of money just like the stock market (in the short term. Stock market usually earns in long run, but bitcoin is yet to be seen). Buy something that is close to it's true value (book value for stocks) that are still generating a profit. Gold, bitcoin, ect. don't generate any money, and are well over their true value due to derived value placed on them by society. Money (cash) is the same way actually. Solar panels produce energy which is very valuable (gains value massively in the event of "dooms day" unlike gold, silver, bitcoins, ect. ), and they increase the value of your home while saving you a lot on each energy bill.

...I could never get my head around the whole mining process

I really haven't a clue about mining to be honest (other than the hour or so months back spent reading up on it) and it all seems a huge waste of resources to me...I mean, whats the *!@king point of wasting so many cycles going round and round chasing the impossible in ever-increasing difficulty stages on the far side of an ever evolving tech curve which are set as means of controlling the currency and stopping it from eating itself?

...surely there is some other scientific use for all this processing power other than seeing who has the largest e-penis in the bitcoin world by crunching garble and wasting power.

Power - unless you're getting it cheap or free and have heavily invested in mining equipment you're pissing against the wind in the mining world it seems, that said, if you got this in your back garden my advice would be to start mining straight away! [Planet Mechanics (BBC)http://youtu.be/2K-iG7i2Q1E