Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi Guys,

Seems like the perfect combination of things for us all to be obsessing over.... yet I can't find much about it on here. I'm interested if this is actually something worth doing or indeed if the peak has already passed.

So:
Is anyone doing this?
What luck have you had?
Does it cost more in energy than you make as a return?

I've mined about 3,700 Doge Coins so far, which are worth about US$5 at the moment (but rising). It's cost me about $20.

Huh?

I've just read some articles about it forcing up the price of some graphics cards. Realised you don't need much to start. But after reading a few articles I'm not really sure what its all about. Although I do like the idea of using a pc to make money.

Are they worth $5 though? What can you actually buy with them? Can to transfer that $5 into your bank account?

From what I've read. You can convert them into BitCoin and then convert them into cash... or at least US$.

I remember an article about someone losing his keys which a few years a go were worth a fiver but today are worth a few hundred thousand. Never found them.

He should try an old jacket, or down the back of a sofa.

Didn't one of the original bitcoin developers flogg off his stock for a few hundred dollars and they would now be "worth" a fortune.

Yeap... not sure this is the one but 8,000 coins on 2 pizzas.... today that would be just under 800,000 euros. Thats could have been many more pizzas... (653,792 in pounds)

When bitcoins were about $5 I thought "this is cool, I should buy some". Then when they were $200 I thought the same thing.

Then they hit $1000 and I weeeped.


I know a guy at work who bought about $200 worth back when they were $0.05 or something. He's having trouble converting his millions in GBP millions and also unsure of how this all works with the taxman. What a horrible problem to have, right?

I have about 12,000 doge but frankly I can't be arsed with it any more.

So how does mining make them money?

Because mining is literally making new bitcoins from scratch so you make money because when you're done mining a bitcoin you've got a bitcoin. Um, surely?

I think grim means how does it make the owners money. The answer is that it causes manageable inflation.

Something along of "Bitcoins are created by a process called mining, in which participants verify and record payments in exchange for transaction fees and newly minted bitcoins." So essentially you're witnessing transactions and verifying them.

and:
"Growth of the Bitcoin money supply is predefined by the Bitcoin protocol,[28] and in this way inflation is kept in check. Currently there are over twelve million bitcoins in circulation with an approximate creation rate of 25 bitcoins every ten minutes. The total supply is capped at 21 million,[28] and every few years or so the creation rate is halved. This means new bitcoins will continue to be released for more than a hundred years."

All from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin"

also I think theres more to it than just this.... but not sure.

Bit sarcastic, but yeah.

Once all 1 billion Dogecoins have been mined I expect the prices to go up significantly. I'll probably cash them out if they ever get up to $1.

It'll be tulips all over again, mark my words.

I want to do it. How do I do it?

I honestly want being sarcastic. I added the 'um surely' bit in case I was talking bollocks.

I can only advise on Dogecoin, but the general principle is the same no matter which currency you choose to mine. I would advise against using your home computer as it'll take fucking ages and significantly shorten the life of your GPU and CPU. I use Digital Ocean as per the following guide because mining isn't currently against their ToS.

https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/2436-g ... the-cloud/

It's one of those things that has cost about fuck all and if there's a small chance they end up being worth something in the future then it's a bonus.

What hashing rates are you getting, dude? That how to guide suggests you'll get about 6kh/s out of each "droplet", which is pants - I run it on my home machine (although I haven't for a while as I'm DVD ripping instead) and I was getting ~300kh/s.

Yeah, about that. I'm not ruining my GPU though.

Kind of tempted to try this on my gaming PC (mining Dogecoin) but am coming to the conclusion that it won't be worth it.

My GPU is a Sapphire HD 7850 - this seems okay for mining but nothing special, and the amount mined is going to be small.

However, some questions:

a) I assume that once the PC is mining it can't do anything else? IE the mining doesn't take place when the PC is running Windows so I need to boot into Linux or similar? Or can it just run in Windows and I can continue browsing the net, etc? If the forming then night-time mining seems like the only option.

b) Electricity costs - this is likely to be the main stumbling block. Presumably my power consumption is going to outweigh the value of the coins, unless they drastically go up in price?

You can use it alongside other stuff in Windows, although if you set the intensity of the miner high enough it'll make everything else unresponsive - fortunately, in my case, doing that puts my GPU into temperatures I'm not comfortable with so I lower it again.


Probably. I've never really worked it out, it was just something to do.

I have about thirty PCs at my disposal. Currently they fold protiens when they aren't doing anything else.

This sounds way more interesting.

Feex.

Which miner do you use?



I wouldn't mind paying an extra few quid a month, but if it gets to be more than that then I won't bother.

My current lodgings has free bills. and I am away with work all the time..

I might look in to it

cgminer 3.6.0 (or 1.6.0, can't remember the major version number)

I have cgminer running on my work PC. Actually, I've had it running on my work PC for about a year. The graphics card is shit - my decent card at home is roughly 4 times faster, so bear this in mind.

In that time, I have mined a grand total of roughly 0.13 bitcoins. My work PC has been running 24x7. Even if that was my home PC chugging the whole time I'd only be looking at maybe half a coin.

Of course, half a coin is now worth maybe £300, but that brings me to the second problem. Mining returns lately have diminished SHARPLY. I used to earn around 0.01 per month (the minimum payout from my pool), but my last payout was August and since then I have earned 0.036 of a coin. At the current rate I might get to my 0.1 payout some time in 2016.

The huge upsurge in Bitcoin popularity has rendered it fairly uneconomical for anyone not running dedicated machines. Even when I started I was too late to the party.

Final problem: Selling the fucking things. I sold my 0.1 coin at the end of November 2013 for about £68, a the peak of its value. I still haven't seen that money. It took around 2 months to get my account verified at Mtgox, and since then I've been trying to get the fuckers to actually pay me the money. I finally managed to initiate a bank transfer request at the end of January, and they still havne't processed it yet.

I opened a support ticket which took 6 days to be assigned to an agent, which replied and said 'We have a backlog'. No shit.

Unless you're shit hot, with decent hardware, and know what you're doing and where, don't bother with Bitcoin.

Oh, and with the miner turned on your graphics card is under the same kind of load as an incredibly intensive game. My home card pops to ~60 celsius within 15 minutes and stays there. I don't bother doing it on my home PC and I reckon it's not worth potentially shortening the life of the card and using way more electricity than I do already.

This is why I jumped on Dogecoin immediately after it launched. With every layer it gets harder and harder to mine any.

Thanks chaps, doesn't sound like it's worth the expense or hassle.

For a single home PC, I'd say don't bother.

If you control a network of 30 computers with decent cards and won't get questioned about electricity bills or hardware meltdowns, maybe try your luck.

I mine in a pool, as finding a coin mining by yourself is incredibly, incredibly unlikely. Of course, you'd bag 25 full coins for yourself (which now would be maybe £15k?) but you're probably as likely to win the lottery.

In a pool you mine with a load of other people, and winnings are split between all participants based on their contribution of blocks. It's a small payout, but it's something as opposed to the nothing you may get forever by mining alone.

The pool I use, should you care, is Slush's pool: https://mining.bitcoin.cz

Fairly well implemented, hosted on Amazon's AWS, and the guy running it has made it, over time, fairly resilient against the huge volume of DoS and intrusion attempts that have inevitably been made on it. The guy must be fucking loaded because the pool takes a nice cut from every block found.

Thanks, some useful info there. Will look into that.

GazChap introduced me to Dogecoin a few weeks back, and I've found it to be a good bit of fun. Mined about 13k coins before deciding to give it a rest until my next electricity bill comes through (rather dreading that) then may resume. For any rich generous shibes out there my wallet is at DTpKiGqyV1urpouAoaf6PZUQeKAFaXaHA5

Shit, I think something bad happened to Zeppo.

GazChap likes to lean across and mash my keyboard. Also, damn you autocorrect, shibe IS a word.

Mt. Gox has gone offline, apparently due to a massive hack/theft that's been going on for years.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... -implodes/

Wow, that is seriously inept.

So:

These virtual coins are 'mined'
Mining is a verification of transactions taking place
The fractions of the coin is a reward for using computer time to verify the transaction
These virtual coins can be sold for cash dollars
These virtual coins can be used to purchase things online that the users desire anonymity for

So, using verifying transactions for things being bought that require anonymity using a currency that can then be turned into real cash dollars is pretty much laundering the money for criminals, no?

I don't think your outcome is supported by your arguments there.

You should be presenting BBC Breakfast.

Actually, I'd like that! Give Malia the job!

How many people have actually sold their million pounds of bitcoins for actual money?

And to whom?

This is like a pyramid scheme in that at the end of it there will be someone left with Bitcoins, and nobody who wants to accept them.

I think the idea is that you wouldn't need to sell them for 'actual money' because BitCoin would become accepted in more places so you could just use it directly. How likely that is to ever happen, especially with shit like this going on, is questionable though. I think people are just sitting on their BitCoins at the moment because of all the chat about folk who bought a few when they were dirt cheap and who are now sitting on a (relative) fortune. Until the value stabilises there'll be this incentive not to 'cash out'.

There's some rumours now about this all being related to Mt. Gox being bought over:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/25/mt-g ... e-offline/

Well, yes The only way it will become accepted in more places is if you can cash it out for actual money.