Bitcoins (and other crypto currencies)

[Addicted]

I don't want to get my head around mining as such. Just how you earned BTC, sadly it seems you just need a computer and some decent spec. What stops big companies with super computers mining?

Anyway I won't worry about it.

Computers now-a-days are absolutely useless for "mining" it, and there is actual hardware developed to do the job instead, here's a good example of how quick some of it is:

Top of the Range CPU - 40Mh/s (£300)
Top of the Range GPU - 700Mh/s (£450)
Top of the Range ASIC (thats out) - 400Gh/s (£3500)
Top of the Range ASIC (next year) - 2Ph/s £ (£8000)

So basically, any "normal" technology is absolutely useless (and would be better pissing in the wind), but the network is THAT big now that it would take a serious serious amount of money to attack the network.

Here's a good graph that shows it:

So that's in Thash/sec, even higher up than Phash/sec.


I went off on a bit of a tangent, but essentially super computers won't be designed in a way that makes "hashing" as efficient as this specific hardware is, so they wouldn't be that effective.




On another crazy note - if I was to sell my Dogecoin right now, I'd make just over 2 BTC from 24 hours of mining. LOL.

 

[Dink]

I don't want to get my head around mining as such. Just how you earned BTC, sadly it seems you just need a computer and some decent spec. What stops big companies with super computers mining?

Anyway I won't worry about it.

you earn BTC by trying hashes that make the next block so the more hashes you try the more you earn (within pooled mining)

so when a block is found the pool currently earns 25BTC and you get a share of this based on how many shares you try + a couple of other things.

it's fast hardware that is needed these days a simple usb asic miner would wipe the floor with most top end gaming pc's for mining BTC.

i believe that a lot of the companies that make asic mining hardware have kept it for themselves.

 

[Gally]

Mental. Isn't 2 BTC worth about £14? 24 hours for £14 at the moment with a view to it rising is fair for doing nothing. I'll research Asic.

 

[Gally]

Can someone give me a rundown on how an asic differs from a desktop computer?

 

[Dink]

2 BTC is worth about £700 at the mo

asic is just a chip that is built purely for one job (mining) and is quite good at it.

 

[iamdaryl]

Computers now-a-days are absolutely useless for "mining" it, and there is actual hardware developed to do the job instead, here's a good example of how quick some of it is:

Top of the Range CPU - 40Mh/s (£300)
Top of the Range GPU - 700Mh/s (£450)
Top of the Range ASIC (thats out) - 400Gh/s (£3500)
Top of the Range ASIC (next year) - 2Ph/s £ (£8000)

So basically, any "normal" technology is absolutely useless (and would be better pissing in the wind), but the network is THAT big now that it would take a serious serious amount of money to attack the network.

Here's a good graph that shows it:



So that's in Thash/sec, even higher up than Phash/sec.


I went off on a bit of a tangent, but essentially super computers won't be designed in a way that makes "hashing" as efficient as this specific hardware is, so they wouldn't be that effective.




On another crazy note - if I was to sell my Dogecoin right now, I'd make just over 2 BTC from 24 hours of mining. LOL.

How many Dogecoin you have at the moment? couple of mill I'm guessing lol

 

[Gally]

On another crazy note - if I was to sell my Dogecoin right now, I'd make just over 2 BTC from 24 hours of mining. LOL.

So he has made £700 from 24hrs mining?

 

[iamdaryl]

So he has made £700 from 24hrs mining?

Yes if people where to buy all of his Dogecoin at the current price

 

[Jay.S]

Addicted's car will soon to a GT3 RS.

Is it possible to make your own coin?

 

[iamdaryl]

With my 3-4000 dogecoin I couldnt even buy some suspension for the clio lol

Yes you could make your own coin, not quite sure on the method or how its done though, dogecoin is around 2 weeks old I believe.

 

[Chip-mk1]

Mental. Isn't 2 BTC worth about £14? 24 hours for £14 at the moment with a view to it rising is fair for doing nothing. I'll research Asic.

2 BTC is worth over a thousand dollars.

 

[Chip-mk1]

Can someone give me a rundown on how an asic differs from a desktop computer?

A desktop computer is designed to be flexible to do lots of different tasks, if you are building instead to do just one specific task then the hardware and software can be optimised accordingly.

Imagine that mining is literally that, digging stuff out of the ground, your desktop is a swiss army knife and can just about be used to scratch around looking at the surface, the dedicated kit though is a shovel, and the stuff coming along soon is a JCB.

 

[Addicted]

Addicted's car will soon to a GT3 RS.

Is it possible to make your own coin?

Easy - that's how there's so many of them (and why so many of them are quite frankly s**t).

Most of the coins are open source, so alot of people have just taken the source code for Litecoin, change the names and a few values and then released it.

There's probably over 300 coins currently, but 99% of them aren't worth looking at.

http://www.coinmarketcap.com provides a good insight into the markets, and http://www.coinchoose.com provides interesting info as to the profitability of mining coins, with BTC being the base (youll see here that ASICs have had such an effect on the market that most coins are around 2000% more profitable to mine than mining Bitcoin directly), so if your endgoal was BTC, you'd mine another coin and exchange it to BTC.

I wish I could afford a GT3. As I said in PM, I lost out on $35k, but recouping the coins as quickly as I can for the next rise, though it will be nothing like that money this time round as it hasnt' dropped quite as much as I'd hoped

So he has made £700 from 24hrs mining?

More than that, and for me it's about what 2 BTC is worth in a few months or years time - I'm holding it for the longterm, so if we go back to $1200 or even higher, then it's alot more money again! Although it could drop, but for the sake of like £2 power, it's worth the risk.

It's worth noting that when a new coin is released - it's very easy at the start to get a large proportion of it when mining while the coin "adjusts" the difficulty (how hard it is to get the coin), so if you find a new coin that takes of and you're there from the start, you can make a few grand even mining from a CPU. But it really is pot luck about which coin goes mental.

 

[Jay.S]

Which site is trusted for buying LTC?

This anygood?
https://bitbargain.co.uk/buy?r=coinaddress

 

[iamdaryl]

Which site is trusted for buying LTC?

This anygood?
https://bitbargain.co.uk/buy?r=coinaddress

Bitbargin is pretty good, bought quite few coins from there yesterday morning

 

[Addicted]

Only used Localbitcoins for putting FIAT in, but Bitbargain is meant to be good too (though I think a little expensive).

If you can get BTC cheaper on localbitcoins, you could always just send it to an exchange and convert it yourself - depends how you want to play it

For exchanges my primary one is btc-e.com, and use cryptsy/bter.com for the coins not on there

 

[Gally]

Easy - that's how there's so many of them (and why so many of them are quite frankly s**t).

Most of the coins are open source, so alot of people have just taken the source code for Litecoin, change the names and a few values and then released it.

There's probably over 300 coins currently, but 99% of them aren't worth looking at.

http://www.coinmarketcap.com provides a good insight into the markets, and http://www.coinchoose.com provides interesting info as to the profitability of mining coins, with BTC being the base (youll see here that ASICs have had such an effect on the market that most coins are around 2000% more profitable to mine than mining Bitcoin directly), so if your endgoal was BTC, you'd mine another coin and exchange it to BTC.

I wish I could afford a GT3. As I said in PM, I lost out on $35k, but recouping the coins as quickly as I can for the next rise, though it will be nothing like that money this time round as it hasnt' dropped quite as much as I'd hoped



More than that, and for me it's about what 2 BTC is worth in a few months or years time - I'm holding it for the longterm, so if we go back to $1200 or even higher, then it's alot more money again! Although it could drop, but for the sake of like £2 power, it's worth the risk.

It's worth noting that when a new coin is released - it's very easy at the start to get a large proportion of it when mining while the coin "adjusts" the difficulty (how hard it is to get the coin), so if you find a new coin that takes of and you're there from the start, you can make a few grand even mining from a CPU. But it really is pot luck about which coin goes mental.

Interesting stuff. So it's pot luck whether you "mine" a coin or not? If you could guarantee the value of a coin via other coin every week why isn't everyone doing it? Just seems to good to be true. You made over 1k doing nothing?

 

[Jay.S]

Cheers guys. I'll see which is the best option to get LTC. I suppose I could wait for my quarks to go up and then exchange them but I want to keep them long term.

Addicted you should start a coin up see how far you can take it.

 

[Gally]

A desktop computer is designed to be flexible to do lots of different tasks, if you are building instead to do just one specific task then the hardware and software can be optimised accordingly.

Imagine that mining is literally that, digging stuff out of the ground, your desktop is a swiss army knife and can just about be used to scratch around looking at the surface, the dedicated kit though is a shovel, and the stuff coming along soon is a JCB.

Decent way of explaining Chip cheers. So massive companies cannot develop these asic chips to mine better than any other, ie make millions?

 

[ThomasBrentnall]

Decent way of explaining Chip cheers. So massive companies cannot develop these asic chips to mine better than any other, ie make millions?

Yes they can, more company = better/newer gear.
Addicted posted this link a few days ago, this company make the leading ASIC hardware mining stuff https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.0

 

[Addicted]

Interesting stuff. So it's pot luck whether you "mine" a coin or not? If you could guarantee the value of a coin via other coin every week why isn't everyone doing it? Just seems to good to be true. You made over 1k doing nothing?

Uh mining is kinda based on luck/chance, where you have a probability of "finding" a block within a timeframe, and that has a "difficulty".

So higher diff means itll take longer to find a block (so for example with bitcoin the difficulty adjusts based on the people mining it so that one block (25 BTC) is mined every 10mins).

So in this sense, people mine in "pools" - which is basically just groups of users mining together (same reward due to probability, but spread over LOTS of blocks - with smaller shares per block), to reduce the risk of having bad luck. This works well because the pool as a whole gets so many blocks, you are more likely of being around 100% efficient because of this (if you solo mine you may see a block every few months, and if you add luck/probability in it could get quite nasty if you dont find a block within 6 months or 6 minutes if REALLY lucky).

With the last point, the problem is theres no guarantee of value, so you could mine the most profitable coin but by the time you have any it's no longer the most profitable, and you may miss out quite substantially.

As I say, it's purely based on luck (of me mining the right coin at the right time) - I found Dogecoin at a time where I figured it would take off, and not many people knew about it, so I could get a decent amount before it became hard to get (aka on Saturday I was estimated at getting 1 million coins a day, now people have jumped on it and the difficulty has gone up, im estimated to get around 50,000 a day). A normal "profitable" day would consist of around $10 at the moment mining a normal coin (not including say £2 power costs).


Sorry for the wall of text!


The increase of value of Litecoin (from around $2 to $48) has meant that the good mining graphics cards (graphics card mining is good on Litecoin as ASICs dont work due to different technology) are actually sold out pretty much completely in the US, and most of the UK (and other places) - so every man and his dog are trying to get in on it, but they will be sadly disappointed due to the current Litecoin price from the dip (and hopefully stop mining so the difficulty goes down ).

It fluctuates alot, when I stopped mining a few months back and cashed in, it wasn't profitable to mine any coin (it was costing more in power) as the value of Litecoin was so low then (but that was down to market manipulation and I'm a moron for believing it wouldn't go back up).

 

[iamdaryl]

Uh mining is kinda based on luck/chance, where you have a probability of "finding" a block within a timeframe, and that has a "difficulty".

So higher diff means itll take longer to find a block (so for example with bitcoin the difficulty adjusts based on the people mining it so that one block (25 BTC) is mined every 10mins).

So in this sense, people mine in "pools" - which is basically just groups of users mining together (same reward due to probability, but spread over LOTS of blocks - with smaller shares per block), to reduce the risk of having bad luck. This works well because the pool as a whole gets so many blocks, you are more likely of being around 100% efficient because of this (if you solo mine you may see a block every few months, and if you add luck/probability in it could get quite nasty if you dont find a block within 6 months or 6 minutes if REALLY lucky).

With the last point, the problem is theres no guarantee of value, so you could mine the most profitable coin but by the time you have any it's no longer the most profitable, and you may miss out quite substantially.

As I say, it's purely based on luck (of me mining the right coin at the right time) - I found Dogecoin at a time where I figured it would take off, and not many people knew about it, so I could get a decent amount before it became hard to get (aka on Saturday I was estimated at getting 1 million coins a day, now people have jumped on it and the difficulty has gone up, im estimated to get around 50,000 a day). A normal "profitable" day would consist of around $10 at the moment mining a normal coin (not including say £2 power costs).

Whats you kh/s to get around 50k a day? I should have really built up a rig when I was meant to in October when I got back off holiday

 

[Addicted]

Whats you kh/s to get around 50k a day? I should have really built up a rig when I was meant to in October when I got back off holiday

1.75Mh/s currently - from 2 AMD R9 290's watercooled and overclocked.

Did have a rig with 4x AMD 7950s which was around 2.6Mh/s, so not doing too badly - though I have everything but the GPUs still, so if I can find somewhere to put it (LOTS of heat), then I'll build it back up again.

It's kinda funny - my bedroom windows are wide open even with it being like 2c outside, and it's still warm in my room

 

[Jay.S]

Can you transfer coins around various sites i.e BTer, Cryptsy etc?

Ive noticed another site has the QRK at a higher price than BTer so could i simply transfer my QRK to that site and therefore gaining abit more value if i were to exchange back to BTC?

 

[iamdaryl]

1.75Mh/s currently - from 2 AMD R9 290's watercooled and overclocked.

Did have a rig with 4x AMD 7950s which was around 2.6Mh/s, so not doing too badly - though I have everything but the GPUs still, so if I can find somewhere to put it (LOTS of heat), then I'll build it back up again.

It's kinda funny - my bedroom windows are wide open even with it being like 2c outside, and it's still warm in my room

Damn! thats crazy. I was reading about bitcoin while on holiday and thought about jumping on litecoin and building something up and never got round to it. really gutted I didnt lol

 

[Addicted]

Can you transfer coins around various sites i.e BTer, Cryptsy etc?

Ive noticed another site has the QRK at a higher price than BTer so could i simply transfer my QRK to that site and therefore gaining abit more value if i were to exchange back to BTC?

Yep, generate the deposit address on exchange B, and withdraw from exchange A to exchange B.

If you are keeping it for a while, it maybe worth just transferring it to your wallet then you can pick the exchange you want when you come to sell (though of course if it spikes and you want to sell instantly you have to wait for it to transfer).

 

[Jay.S]

Thanks agian Matt.

I'll keep a eye on it.

 

[iamdaryl]

So eBay is going Dogecoin crazy, 1,000,000 is upto £402 at the moment.

 

[Gally]

So this mining doesn't just turn up bitcoins? It turns up all kind of coins? Mental. Just seems like a game to me with fake currency in a way.

If you could mine just BTC then fair enough as that is somehow valuable. Or someone said it was valuable. It's hard to grasp how someone can make something that is invisible worth money. Maybe it's the sceptic in me.

How does the "owner" of BTC make money? After all it's an invisible currency, no one is buying the BTC from "him" they are mining it. Forget the exchanges as that's just buying and selling shares.

 

[Addicted]

So eBay is going Dogecoin crazy, 1,000,000 is upto £402 at the moment.

eBay is too risky, so so many people get chargebacks and ebay always sides with the buyer

If it's one thing I've seen - never sell on eBay - had a friend sell 6 sets of coins, 3 were claimed back on.

So this mining doesn't just turn up bitcoins? It turns up all kind of coins? Mental. Just seems like a game to me with fake currency in a way.

If you could mine just BTC then fair enough as that is somehow valuable. Or someone said it was valuable. It's hard to grasp how someone can make something that is invisible worth money. Maybe it's the sceptic in me.

How does the "owner" of BTC make money? After all it's an invisible currency, no one is buying the BTC from "him" they are mining it. Forget the exchanges as that's just buying and selling shares.

Mining will turn up whichever coin you are mining

If you are mining Litecoin you will get Litecoin, same with any other coin etc

Nobody technically "owns" btc - they run the source code and update the client etc, but in reality he doesn't gain anything from people buying/selling. The only way he makes money is the same as us (buying and selling), but presumably because they made the coin they will have a NICE stash of it as they mine it right from the start. It's rumoured that the guy who made Bitcoin (Mr Satoshi he's known as), owns 1% of all Bitcoin, but nobody truly knows. There's alot of research done that found the same person mined like 95% of the first few thousand blocks, so fingers would point to him, but nobody knows in reality.

So that's what makes it a nice thing for the future - it's not centralized to one person or entity, it's entirely distributed across the whole network and in that sense cannot be shutdown.

 

[BatFastard]

So this mining doesn't just turn up bitcoins? It turns up all kind of coins? Mental. Just seems like a game to me with fake currency in a way.

If you could mine just BTC then fair enough as that is somehow valuable. Or someone said it was valuable. It's hard to grasp how someone can make something that is invisible worth money. Maybe it's the sceptic in me.

How does the "owner" of BTC make money? After all it's an invisible currency, no one is buying the BTC from "him" they are mining it. Forget the exchanges as that's just buying and selling shares.

The "owner" first started mining the coins so has millions of them. Selling them in one go would completely crash the price of Bitcoins so it wouldn't be in his interest to do so....

 

[iamdaryl]

I'm sticking with Cryptsy if and when I can to sell my tiny amount of dogecoins lol

 

[Chip-mk1]

Mining will turn up whichever coin you are mining

If you are mining Litecoin you will get Litecoin, same with any other coin etc

Nobody technically "owns" btc - they run the source code and update the client etc, but in reality he doesn't gain anything from people buying/selling. The only way he makes money is the same as us (buying and selling), but presumably because they made the coin they will have a NICE stash of it as they mine it right from the start. It's rumoured that the guy who made Bitcoin (Mr Satoshi he's known as), owns 1% of all Bitcoin, but nobody truly knows. There's alot of research done that found the same person mined like 95% of the first few thousand blocks, so fingers would point to him, but nobody knows in reality.

So that's what makes it a nice thing for the future - it's not centralized to one person or entity, it's entirely distributed across the whole network and in that sense cannot be shutdown.

There are about 1.2 Million BTC believed to be in the hands of Satoshi from the early days of mining.

Thats a billion dollars or so worth, and he is still holding them as they would show up on the blockchain if he cashed them in and plenty of people are watching for it!

 

[Addicted]

There are about 1.2 Million BTC believed to be in the hands of Satoshi from the early days of mining.

Thats a billion dollars or so worth, and he is still holding them as they would show up on the blockchain if he cashed them in and plenty of people are watching for it!

Ahh that was it yep

There's also the Winkleboss (sp) who are supposedly holding a LARGE amount, and Richard Branson accepting it too. I'm sure alot of the big players with large amounts of money made from elsewhere will be getting some (if they haven't already).

 

[iamdaryl]

Ahh that was it yep

There's also the Winkleboss (sp) who are supposedly holding a LARGE amount, and Richard Branson accepting it too. I'm sure alot of the big players with large amounts of money made from elsewhere will be getting some (if they haven't already).

From an article on The Register "Earlier this year, Winklevoss claimed to own roughly one per cent of the world's Bitcoins with his brother. "

 

[Jay.S]

Anyone want to sell some dogecoin for the tiny amount of BTC i have left?

I cant find a site i can buy from.

 

[iamdaryl]

Addicted might, he has many coins, wow, big price, to the moon!

 

[Addicted]

To the moon indeed, just made 4 Bitcoins from most of my Doge..

much profit,
very win,
wow.


Safe to say, I'm chuffed.

 

[iamdaryl]

damn! how many did you have to sell? 4million at least? wish I had got onto this at the weekend. It won't do much now I dont think.

 

[Chip-mk1]

To the moon indeed, just made 4 Bitcoins from most of my Doge..

much profit,
very win,
wow.


Safe to say, I'm chuffed.

That is mental, 2 grand profit for f-all in a week, well done sir!!!