# Bitcoins



## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

Just curious to see if any other Tempers dabble in Bitcoins or other types of virtual currency? I've been chatting about it recently in the ShoutBox, but now I'm bringing the discussion to the forums.

To experiment with my GF got me a USB Block Erupter, along with a fan and external powered USB hub. Waiting on the hub to get here so I'm using a spare. I found out that I can mine using my Raspberry Pi as a sort of central unit. It doesn't use much power, and nor does the USB Block Erupter (2.5 watts).

I've been experimenting and I get a decent 350~ to 400~ (And on the rare occasion 500~) megahashes a second. Meaning that if I mine Bitcoins in slush's pool I make $1 and change every 48 hours. From there I can cash out to a wallet. I've started using Cryptsy which allows me to easily buy/sell/trade different types of coins, which is nice. I originally wanted to mine Litecoin, but the USB Block Erupter doesn't support scrypt mining sadly. So I'm stuck with coins that allow SHA256 mining.

Any other Tempers mine? If so any insight on what you mine, what pool you mine in, or what everyone should be mining. Bitcoin at the start was extremely cheap. Now they got for $104 a coin. I'm currently mining Terracoin, at which I'll be making 1.265 coins a day.



Spoiler


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## PityOnU (Aug 4, 2013)

~$126 a day?

Not bad.

How much was all the equipment up front?


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

PityOnU said:


> ~$126 a day?
> 
> Not bad.
> 
> How much was all the equipment up front?


 

Oh no. I'll be making Terracoins, which are extremely lower valued then Bitcoins. At the moment.

The Erupter's $56.
The Raspberry Pi was $25 I believe. 
USB Fan was $16.
The USB Hub was $8.

Around $105. Of course just experimenting, and the Pi has other uses. They were all gifts though. If I mined Bitcoins directly, I'd make $18~ a month. Which would pay off that stuff in about 5-6 months. Or 7 taking into effect rising difficulty of the mining.


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## PityOnU (Aug 4, 2013)

Devin said:


> Oh no. I'll be making Terracoins, which are extremely lower valued then Bitcoins. At the moment.
> 
> The Erupter's $56.
> The Raspberry Pi was $25 I believe.
> ...


 
I've always felt there was a lot of money to be made in this stuff, but had never been able to get into it because of the large barrier to entry cost-wise and (more so) the extreme intricacy of the system.

if I had a bitcoin shirpa, though, I could probably get past the initial cost, especially with the power efficient soc's they have for mining now.


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

Definitely. Bitcoins sold for $12 a pop a little while ago, and now they're up to $104. You don't even need to mine coins, people sell them all the time. Buy a cheap coin now, let it sit in your account for a few years. Come back to money. Bit of a gamble though. I bought a new currency called Quark, which is dirt cheap now. I bought 923 Quark coins. It's not even a month old. Now I just plan on letting them sit in there, they can't go much lower than they're at currently.


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## Pedeadstrian (Aug 4, 2013)

PityOnU said:


> I've always felt there was a lot of money to be made in this stuff, but had never been able to get into it because of the large barrier to entry cost-wise and (more so) the extreme intricacy of the system.
> 
> if I had a bitcoin shirpa, though, I could probably get past the initial cost, especially with the power efficient soc's they have for mining now.


I always thought that school computer labs would be great for mining. I don't really know anything about it, though. In my mind, it's like folding, but instead of trying to cure cancer, you're trying to make money. I doubt it'd be a profit for me in the end, considering it'd probably make my computer's parts die quicker.


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## marksteele (Aug 4, 2013)

I mine bitcoins on my main computer in the winter. Average ~800MH/s on a amd 7970. Honestly though, with the new advances in ASIC mining rigs using anything other than one is a waste. The difficulty rating will ramp up too quickly.

That being said $300 for 5GH/s is a decent investment


edit: The real money for me is bitcoin gambling. If I didn't gamble it would take about a month to net $100. That would also require my computer running 24/7. Whereas if I gamble and get lucky I can take 0.02 bitcoins and turn it into 2 bitcoins


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

Pedeadstrian said:


> I always thought that school computer labs would be great for mining. I don't really know anything about it, though. In my mind, it's like folding, but instead of trying to cure cancer, you're trying to make money. I doubt it'd be a profit for me in the end, considering it'd probably make my computer's parts die quicker.


 

Yeah school computers aren't made for this kind of stuff. CPU mining's basically dead, and the computers probably have integrated graphics cards. Which is again terrible for mining. The power consumption cost, and time setting them up isn't worth it.

Heck my i3 sucks at mining, (Like 54 megahashes a second.) and my integrated graphics card doesn't mine anything. Plus you don't want to mine with those due to them degrading faster with mining.


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

marksteele said:


> I mine bitcoins on my main computer in the winter. Average ~800MH/s on a amd 7970. Honestly though, with the new advances in ASIC mining rigs using anything other than one is a waste. The difficulty rating will ramp up too quickly.
> 
> That being said $300 for 5GH/s is a decent investment


 

Definitely. Just wish those miners from Butterfly labs would ship already.

(Double post I know.)


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## marksteele (Aug 4, 2013)

Devin said:


> Definitely. Just wish those miners from Butterfly labs would ship already.
> 
> (Double post I know.)


 
you got the 5GH/s model or did you go higher? 

The only reason I won't invest in a rig atm is because the US gov't is threatening regulation. If that happens the value will plummet faster than you can say "damnit"

edit: and ofc theres the issue of the volatility. I sold some coins at $110 the next day it was at $230 *cry*


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## Joe88 (Aug 4, 2013)

is that including electricity cost?


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

marksteele said:


> you got the 5GH/s model or did you go higher?
> 
> The only reason I won't invest in a rig atm is because the US gov't is threatening regulation. If that happens the value will plummet faster than you can say "damnit"


 

I wanted to, but then I saw people were waiting so long for their units they ordered like a year ago. I'd wait until people get their orders from this year.


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## marksteele (Aug 4, 2013)

Joe88 said:


> is that including electricity cost?


 

ASIC miners are really really power efficient. Your looking at 4 -5 watts per gigahash


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

Joe88 said:


> is that including electricity cost?


 

Haven't really calculated that. But from what I read the Pi's like 5 watts of power, and the USB Block Erupter is 2.5 watts. So really it's not that much. If this website's correct, with the cost of power in Florida. The cost of power's .02 cents a day.


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## Thanatos Telos (Aug 4, 2013)

Specs?

Also, should I use my GTX 760 or HD 7770 OC for bitcoins? AMD has the edge in mining, but the 760 is way stronger.


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## Niksy (Aug 4, 2013)

Interesting topic. I learned about Bitcoins too late and now it's a big hassle for a normal user to mine them. Still, I find the idea interesting.

Can someone explain what a USB Block Erupter is? And what these GH/s and MH/s are?

Also, another interesting, I think, piece of info - a guy on reddit invested ~30,000$ into BTC when they were cheap and now has millions in bitcoins.


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## Devin (Aug 4, 2013)

Niksy said:


> Interesting topic. I learned about Bitcoins too late and now it's a big hassle for a normal user to mine them. Still, I find the idea interesting.
> 
> Can someone explain what a USB Block Erupter is? And what these GH/s and MH/s are?
> 
> Also, another interesting, I think, piece of info - a guy on reddit invested ~30,000$ into BTC when they were cheap and now has millions in bitcoins.


 
http://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=store

They're like little USB sticks that mine coin. If your computer's terrible at mining then you can buy a USB hub, fan, and a bunch of the Erupters. Put the Erupters lets say 10 in the USB hub. Hook that up to your comp. You'll now pull 3.3GH/s. (The cost of 10 of them is $625.) At 3.3 GH/s (Which is the least they pull. My Erupter goes about 350 to 400~ MH/s. Sometimes it hits 500~ MH/s.) You'll be pulling in $140.33 at the current difficulty. Of course people mine another currency called Litecoin. If Bitcoin was Gold, Litecoin would be Silver. It's worth less, but is far easier to mine. (Too bad the USB Block Erupter doesn't support mining Litecoin or any other non SHA256 based coins.) It doesn't seem very cost effective, but just imagine at the start of Bitcoins. Extremely easier to mine due to the lower mining difficulty. People would rake them in. Now a few years later they're extremely rich. That guy with millions, is a billionaire most likely.

Hashes are if I'm correct. Are how fast you're mining. KH (Kilohash)-> MH (Megahashes), -> GH (Gigahashes).


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## Ericthegreat (Aug 4, 2013)

Devin said:


> Just curious to see if any other Tempers dabble in Bitcoins or other types of virtual currency? I've been chatting about it recently in the ShoutBox, but now I'm bringing the discussion to the forums.


 
I coulda bought bitcoins sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fucking cheap at one time >.< Who the fuck believed in a internet currency widely used for drugs/money laundering.


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## trumpet-205 (Aug 4, 2013)

Thanatos Telos said:


> Specs?
> 
> Also, should I use my GTX 760 or HD 7770 OC for bitcoins? AMD has the edge in mining, but the 760 is way stronger.


With the introduction of these ASIC miner, it is now become impractical to mine using PC really. The thing about bitcoin is that it is subjected to inflation a lot.

AMD has an edge in mining since it can do 32-bit right bit shift (one of the calculation in SHA-256) in one cycle, vs 3 cycles in Nvidia. Unless you are using Titan, 780, or Telsa K20 (where CUDA 3.5 specifically adds an instruction for right bit shift), AMD still has an edge in mining.


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## raulpica (Aug 4, 2013)

A friend of mine and me wanted to buy ASIC miners from Butterfly Labs and get into the Bitcoins market, but the queue times are simply effin' ridicolous, and that threw me off a lot.

Mining with anything else than an ASIC miner is anti-economical here in Italy :/

The USB sticks have a ridicolous MH rate to justify buying them, imho.


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## Fishaman P (Aug 4, 2013)

I kinda wanted to start Litecoin mining, but since it's on a shared computer, I don't have admin rights.
My AMD GPU has horribly broken OpenCL in the currently-installed drivers, so that's a dead-end.
Then there's the fact that the retarded Norton Internet Security installed thinks Bitcoinminer is a threat.


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## PityOnU (Aug 4, 2013)

What's the most power-efficient way to mine at the moment?

I would actually consider investing into this as long as I don't have to run high-end PC parts and then end up melting them.


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## Flame (Aug 5, 2013)

is they like a guide or something on how we buys Bitcoins, i dont want to mine just buy, so i can buy something later.


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## PityOnU (Aug 5, 2013)

After looking into it, seems like the way to go now is something from Butterfly Labs paired with a Intel minnowboard.


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## FAST6191 (Aug 5, 2013)

Flame said:


> is they like a guide or something on how we buys Bitcoins, i dont want to mine just buy, so i can buy something later.



You can buy it like anything else you buy from another person* -- you just need a bitcoin wallet (download the program for your computer, a portable device or use an online one if you find one you trust -- http://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet ) and a method to communicate with someone that is selling bitcoins. Most people will probably go to an exchange though, https://www.mtgox.com/ is undoubtedly the most popular though there are others (anybody can set one up for free and without oversight** after all) and you would probably be advised to go in for one there. From there you can buy them using a variety of methods.

*some might say this is one of the points of the currency, abstract the payments away from existing financial institutions.

**you can, what your local laws say might be different.

Speaking of laws if you do buy into them and the inflation makes it so you have earned a packet for having your money sit there then you may or may not want to read up on taxes lest you get stung for it.

As for the matter at hand... eh. Saw it rising, found the legal situation that arose with it all to be interesting, debated putting my throwaway 200 into it and would have a packet if I did and occasionally watch what goes with regards to everything.


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## DanTheManMS (Aug 6, 2013)

I learned about it when it was trading at around $0.25 apiece.  I proudly participated in the very first mining pool using the CPU on my desktop computer from 2004.  I actually mined about 0.75 BTC using just that CPU, heh.  Once GPU mining became available, I dabbled in that very slightly, but my laptop's GPU could only pull about 2 or 4 MHash/s, and I got a few payouts of 0.20 apiece every few days from a pool before deciding that the difficulty increases made it completely infeasible.

Since that point I've held various amounts, selling off some when I needed some emergency cash, as I've long since made back my initial investment.  I've currently got about 37 BTC remaining, and recently got 25 LTC as well just for grins.

I really like the idea behind it, and the advantages in using it.  The tipping bot on Reddit is a great way to both reward quality posts in a manner similar to buying them Reddit Gold, and spread the word about Bitcoin without being *too* terribly evangelical about it at the same time.  I've also enjoyed playing some online gambling games, which feels more real than just using "play money".

I'm waiting for the day that it gets easy enough for the average person to use that it can actually become widespread.  I'm very impressed with the Blockchain.info app for my Android phone, and that's a huge step in the right direction, but it's still difficult to transfer money to someone using it.


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## exangel (Aug 6, 2013)

DanTheManMS said:


> I learned about it when it was trading at around $0.25 apiece. I proudly participated in the very first mining pool using the CPU on my desktop computer from 2004. I actually mined about 0.75 BTC using just that CPU, heh. Once GPU mining became available, I dabbled in that very slightly, but my laptop's GPU could only pull about 2 or 4 MHash/s, and I got a few payouts of 0.20 apiece every few days from a pool before deciding that the difficulty increases made it completely infeasible.
> 
> Since that point I've held various amounts, selling off some when I needed some emergency cash, as I've long since made back my initial investment. I've currently got about 37 BTC remaining, and recently got 25 LTC as well just for grins.
> 
> ...


+1 for www.blockchain.info as a wallet. Liked reading your story altogether.


-----------------------

ButterflyLabs is *not* the way to go. They have been shown to commit very poor business practices. They were cornered into admitting that they sold pre-orders before they even had a working prototype on their own forum. Their pre-sales questions forum is what clued me in to what a scam they are really running. They say the pre-order is 2 months but it's likely much more than that.
If you really want specialized mining equipment from a non-professional standpoint, USB Block Erupters are the only thing you can order right *now* and have a chance of getting while it's still relevant, if you HAVE to mine Bitcoin.

If you have a halfway decent AMD GPU, mine Litecoin. On my Radeon HD 7970, at current exchange rates it still earns a lot more than Bitcoin (~US$55/mo LTC vs ~US$30 BTC). I'm in the Litebonk pool. Although I have membership in a USD to Litecoin exchange, I send my litecoins to Cryptsy to hold or to convert to bitcoin for the purpose of buying up other currencies.

As a US resident I'm a member of the Coinbase Bitcoin exchange for buying/selling and they have a solid reputation among other US residents (I was referred there by a mod of the Coinchat.org chat room), but they require being linked to a bank account like a verified PayPal account does.
There is also www.Localbitcoins.com for cash and other types of exchanges which may be more useful to non-US people who are interested in this.

Mt. Gox is terrible, especially for US-based depositors (if you're interested in buying). I experience connection issues to them frequently and they are based in Japan and can only take USD deposits by Wire Transfer (and this usually comes at a $15-25 fee per deposit depending on your bank/CU). Unless you are dealing in substantial volumes, Coinbase will offer you better rates and they consistently trade 5-10 dollars lower than Gox. (Though transactions are not instant).

I use a combination of Coinbase and Preev to get a sense of BTC's minute-to-minute value although Bitcoincharts is a good resource too as it compares multiple exchanges.


After months of casual research and weeks of active research and talking with other BTC investors and some miners, the best thing to do starting from zero, is accumulate alternate currencies and trade them on an exchange like Cryptsy or mcxNOW, or actually buy a moderate chunk of BTC/LTC or both, and sit on it.

Buying mining hardware is rarely recommended except as a novelty because the Return-on-Investment may never be realized -- If you want to have a high end graphics card that mines when you're not using your computer, you're not likely to be disappointed by increasing difficulties.
BUT spending $650 on bitcoin-exclusive mining hardware that could take 6+ months to pay for itself even if the difficulty doesn't increase is a bad idea, if you're not already doing plenty of research on how else you can use that hardware if the Bitcoin returns aren't high enough. The scarcity and value of the coins is going up due to the massive difficulty hikes (which are exponential), and many of my acquaintances feel it's better to just sit on the coin than buy anything at all. I'm starting to think that's the right idea, and I'm hanging onto around 7 bitcoins right now. I had been planning to get about 9 or 10 Block Erupters, but I don't think I'll get more than four block erupters now, at least not more than four at first. I'd rather have more coinage at hand if the exchange rate spikes again.

edit: also, I want to do this: http://learn.adafruit.com/piminer-raspberry-pi-bitcoin-miner/initial-setup-and-assembly


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## DanTheManMS (Aug 7, 2013)

exangel said:


> There is also www.Localbitcoins.com for cash and other types of exchanges which may be more useful to non-US people who are interested in this.


 
+1 for LocalBitcoins. After the MtGox+Dwolla method stopped being viable as a way to sell BTC for dollars, I switched to offering to locals. It does feel a tiny bit sketchy, as you're arranging online to meet in person for a cash deal, but everyone I met was friendly enough (always met at a public location like a McDonalds).

For those looking to profit from day-trading of Bitcoin like a stock, there are a couple of people who do technical analysis of the market, using algorithms normally used on the stock market.  I know of two (may require subscription):  http://www.btcanalyst.com/ and http://www.bitcoinbullbear.com/

I want to emphasize that Bitcoin's exchange as a stock is not of course its intended use.  Just providing the info for those who may be interested.


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