Has anyone tried Bitcoin mining before? I heard that it used to be pretty profitable with each bitcoin being worth $133 right now and shooting up. Heres a 2 min video about how it works if you arent familiar with it: You can exchange Bitcoins for real cash in any currency you want. I was wondering if its still profitable as I recently got interested in Bitcoins when I found out you can exchange them for real cash I leave my computer on most of the day anyways, why not have it mine coins for me while im at work or something ?
Quickly, right now if you have a high end AMD card then it's not too bad. It's not worth it with Nvidia cards at all. Very soon the difficulty will make GPU mining useless. Look up ASICS if you want to know more about why. I was looking into it a few months ago, but as I said, nvidia cards are useless for it.
Yeah I heard that those Asics are in a whole new league when it comes to bitcoin mining, instead of mining mega hashes they mine giga hashes and they use such a small amount of energy that you can plug them into a usb port and mine while your doing other stuff with your main computer. The introduction of ASICS will totally eliminate the profit that regular miners would make by mining bitcoins I think because the difficulty would increase so much that you would use more electricity than the profit that you make from mining. The only company that I know selling ASICS to the public right now is Butterfly Labs: http://www.butterflylabs.com/ but I heard that they havent actually shipped out any units yet and dont plan to until at least Summer of this year. The thing is though that if your investing into ASICS its not like if Bitcoin Mining doesnt work out you can use the ASICS rig for anything else, its not like a regular computer lol. I wonder if the inventor of Bitcoin saw something like ASICS as a possibility in such a short amount of time when he wrote the code.
ASIC: Application-specific integrated circuit. Basically it's a chip custom designed for the workload....GPU's have been these, really, but have grown to be more general. But they're really expensive to make at smaller/medium scale, especially from scratch. But Bitcoin mining isn't the most unique workload out there I'm sure it wasn't too hard to adapt an architecture. How long does it take to make $2500 from mining at 50GH/s?
You can't really forecast that accurately, at all. I can't imagine how you would factor in the difficulty increase once the asics hit the market. If you had one now, at the current difficulty, looks like a little over a week. The first people to get their hands on an asic are going to be laughing.
They already are, laughing their way to the bank. i mined all last winter, mined about 12 btc worth, got about 10.5 left difficulty has been increasing exponentially since February, its increase 10x since then.
Do you think Bitcoin has a future as it starts to become harder to regular users to acquire bitcoins? I think that the original developer was thinking that everyone would start mining on their home computers and everyone would have at least a few bitcoins (10-50 of them per average user) making it more popular with time but he didnt expect these super machines that mine bitcoins so quickly or for some sole users to hoard so many of them for themselves. Litecoin is getting more popular now but I dont think that it will really take off like Bitcoin did because its seen as an imitation building upon Bitcoins success. I think once ASICS hit the market the average bitcoin miners will just stop mining because it wont be profitable anymore (more electricity used than money made by mining). The people who have bitcoins will just buy them from miners to wait until they increase in price to sell them to people interested in buying bitcoins. The next phase will be the trading of bitcoins as a currency to make profit on estimating the rise/fall of the prices of bitcoins.
Well if no new coins are introduced the Bitcoin market becomes deflationary. So coins will always get more expensive because simply holding onto them increases thier value. Or course that makes a market crash so they become worthless...and it can happen all over again. The only way deflationary currencies can "work" is if new currencies sprout up to meet the demand for new currency. Bitcoin alternatives have to show up or else Bitcoin can never work long term. But when you can just make up a new currency all the time...why do the others have any value either? And how are you going to keep track of exchange rates and be sure that someone is going to accept your payment? Things one needs to ponder if you think there's a real future here.
If you have the amd video cards already, then mining can be quite worthwhile. buying cards to mine this late i believe wont be worthwhile.
It is a fun tech habit if you already have the hardware (and some companies are making a killing off of it), but hardly worthwhile in the long run. I imagine the currency will peak in a few years, and then die. It is a novel idea, but not sustainable.