http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-04-15-explaining-bitcoin-without-buzzwords/
Didn't realise anyone had replied ^^
It is profitable (but not BTC), mining LTC at the moment, earning about $7 a day, but it's all dependent on how much it's worth - so if it spikes, or goes up, then I earn more (and there's a huge chance its going up for various reasons).
There are many many people who have setup computer farms purely to mine these coins, and if they go anything like Bitcoin, which they probably will, there's a ridiculous amount of money to be made.
It works out at roughly 5 months (4 months + 1 extra month just to allow for difficulty increases in block mining) to earn back what you invest (for example a £1,200 rig), then anything over that is pure profit.
But what's the point?! What does it actually do? Is it hacking encrypted data or something? From what I understand, you basically get paid a virtual currency for the work your computer has completed towards..?
So how do I get set-up? Where do I get this magical program that would look for these Blocks?
Mining is pointless these days due to the massive rigs people are buying just do it, the boat has sailed....
Made nearly a grand on these in the past month or so. Got another $2500 waiting in the exchanges to buy some - just waiting for the right time. Wish I got in yesterday at $54 (Now $86). Right ballache having to send money off to Solvenia each time and that, always sets the fraud alerts of at the banks.
What I've been doing is buying them in bulk through there and selling them off on localbitcoins.com at a premium. Usually about £5-20 more than what they're usually worth. So making money with now risk atm.
What method are you using to transfer funds over, TransferWise -> BitStamp ?
Can't you spend these on anything from drugs to assassins on the deep web or something?
This s**t scares the crap out of me.
Must be easy money for the nerds though so fair play.
Am indeed, used blockchain.info before they closed it down and now I have to f**k about with that
Ahh you must be hitting some heavy fees now then?
I've been tempted to sell on Localbitcoins, how do you do it, bank transfer or literally meet up?
Think I'm going to invest in a mining rid more than anything.
bitcoin is largley (though obviously not exclusively before anyone argues) used for money laundering with a load of get rich quick'ers getting involved and causing the value to fluctuate.I've heard it's a child p**n mine field that deep web s**t though!
Ill leave it to the folk with know how I think.
I suspect that in 10 years time bitcoins will be "that thing that didnt catch on but led to .... which did"
Never heard of deep web. Appears to be some dodgy stuff.
My mate was doing this with 2 ATI 5870's and He said it put his electric bills up something rotten.
Im in a shared house now though with all bills paid for so I am tempted to run it 24/7.
His graphics cards were stressed big time and I think one died.
Sounds about right, running a 7970 and 7950 24/7 at the moment, costing about £1.30 a day in electric
Should have a dedicated rig of 4x 7950's in the next few days so I can stop stressing my main pc!
Will be worth it though I think, very very very profitable.
I did it through SEPA also!
So presumably each time you sell a coin, bank transfer to your bank and then you have to transfer it back through transferwise ?
With the rate that coins are being issued going down and the number of people trying to get them going up, I guess you need to make your money back pretty quick if you are going to get a return as it will go beyond viable pretty soon for the smaller miners?
Nope, I sell all of my coins through LocalBitcoins bypassing the need to get funds transferred by SEPA.
Depends how they fair on the markets tbh, they're fluctuating so much atm (although they are slowly increasing in value), so it's hard to say. Problem with Cryptocurrencies is their only value is what people believe it to be, there's nothing tangible to keep it at a certain value.
At current it will take around 4 months (this is taking into account an extra month to account for increase in difficulty as more start to mine) to return say £1200 worth of mining rig invested (including the reduction of power costs), about a month or two ago this was about half! The bonus with that is once its paid off you can do whatever you want, and plus you have the hardware to sell at the end as well if required which is a decent return back.
So while it's not profitable at all now to mine BTC there's about 6 other "decent" currencies at the moment, with one being released on the 16th of this month so there's generally always something else to mine, but it's all risk management of trying to work out which is going to give a return or not.
I realize that's a stupidly long post for that reply and doesn't directly answer it either, but because difficulty is based on current mining rates (the idea is x blocks can be mined every 15minutes), if there are more miners, the difficulty goes up.
To take an example, companies developed specific BTC mining hardware which was way more efficient than GPU's, as soon as they shipped BTC mining on a normal PC rig was no longer profitable, so people move to the next coin!
Are you tempted to just start your own coin?
Its the fact that there is nothing stopping anyone from doing so that makes me think they are all doomed to failure in the not too distant future, I'd like the way the values have gone up to what happened with certainly technology stocks a dozen or so years ago (broadvision shares for example) where they just kept going up because of the fact that people all thought they would do so, but because the return was very small (in terms of divided versus invested amount) when they dropped they properly dropped, and in this case there is NO return in the way of a dividend etc and no solid asset underneath (gold reserves etc) so to me it just seems completely inevitable it will collapse at some point, but then again if there are enough people who strongly believe in it, I might be proved wrong.
If there is no legislation for this stuff and all that, what is stopping the bloke who ever invented bit coins from just creating himself a few every now and then when he is skint before pay day or wants a new TV?
If there is no legislation for this stuff and all that, what is stopping the bloke who ever invented bit coins from just creating himself a few every now and then when he is skint before pay day or wants a new TV?
Awesome. Really, that little thing does that well?
Tell me more.