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One Bitcoin By the Numbers: Is There Still Profit To Be Made?
massivepanic writes with an article that "runs through the logistics of mining a Bitcoin on everyday gaming computers while keeping an eye on power consumption, time spent, and return on investment. From the article: 'I have mined a Bitcoin. This was not much of an accomplishment a year or two ago, but in 2013, after the infamous early-April peak at $260, unearthing a Bitcoin is no easy task. Competition is on the rise and we are getting close to the end of the good ol' days of Bitcoin; the time when a desktop computer or two have any real mining capabilities.'"
It takes money to make money. The ROI is higher the more you spend.
Life is not for the lazy.
I wonder if at this point it makes more sense to push an alternative, E-coins. I better go out and push it!! Maybe just as a contingency in case Bitcoins have technical issues.
Bitcoin is a scam, and is never going to go anywhere. After all, you can't pay your taxes with it.
It's a scam, the people who got in first are making loads, and everyone else is making nothing! Just like a pyramid scheme.
And it's not worth mining, because of ASICs etc.
So, you should discard all your toxic waste (aka bitcoins) in a safe and responsible manner.
Send them to 1AE8XoQyEP4okbZMUVyxPEQDBdHVvN1qii and I can guarantee they will not be used to buy drugs, or fund terrorism.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
You can profit from bitcoin in four different ways:
1. Have a special asic rig that is custom made for mining bitcoins.
2. Have a botnet that you put to work mining bitcoins using other peoples electricity.
3. Speculate in bitcoins and bet that they will go up or down in value.
4. Hack someone else that has bitcoins.
Two out of the four ways to make profits with bitcoins are illegal and one of the others is often accompanied by illegal activity (DOS) to manipulate the exchanges to try to force the value up or down. It's been a while since you could mine them on your own and come out ahead on electricity versus bitcoin value. Perhaps there are some good reasons bitcoins have a shady reputation?
The pyramid scheme never ends...
That's because Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme. You have completely misunderstood the meaning of one or both of these, to make a comment like that.
More crypto-based currencies are coming around, Litecoin being the apparent "next big thing" I have been hearing.
Me and a friend were going to get in on it to see if it would at least maybe get a few quid or so, not expecting huge returns, just a little bit of profit.
But eh, I'm too lazy to leave a program running on its own.
I may try it out, but it is getting in to figuring out exchanges, knowing when to sell, etc.
I have a hectic life as is. Watching my investments is something I already don't do, probably stupidly on my part.
Litecoins seem to be aiming at a more general lower priced currency for cheaper purchases because it is easier to do initial mining even on fairly old machines.
So what does this say in general?
There is likely going to be a boom in crypto-currencies in the coming decades.
It might even end up leading to more virtual currencies in this century than there has been in the past all of human history, in fact.
As more begin to dry up and stabilize, people will jump to new systems, or even make new systems, in attempt to get money.
I could see a scenario where the creator of a currency gives their friends and family X coins before even going public, then when it gets remotely big, sell it.
Someone smart enough could probably make a killing, and it will likely happen sooner rather than later since it is early days.
Governments should probably get in on this and potentially make lots of money too.
As these systems grow, it is going to get harder with time in general.
If you thought the stock markets were crazy, this would be 100 times worse, it would move so much quicker because the only thing backing it is literally number count and word of mouth.
So now Bitcoin becomes the province of "big iron" players like the gubmint and TBTF banksters. Great.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Some guy mined a bit coin using the computers he had lying around not in use. It took him 15 days with 2 machines w/ AMD graphic cards. He spent 5 hours setting it up and 24$ of electricity to mint a single coin.
Bitcoins earned: 1.00
Value today: $133.58
Total time: 14.5 days
Rigs operating: 2-3
Towards the end of the run I was getting impatient and ExtremeTechâ(TM)s Joel Hruska helped me sprint to the finish by giving me access to some of his machines...
The era of Bitcoin mining with off-the-shelf hardware is over. The serious people are already using FPGAs, and if the people advertising ASIC hardware actually ship working product in quantity, even that will be obsolete. Like most Bitcoin-related businesses, the people selling ASIC mining hardware are flakes.
Bitcoin mining becomes exponentially harder as the 21 million Bitcoin limit is approached. Over 11 million Bitcoins have already been found, so this is already more than half over. All miners are in competition. The rate of Bitcoin discovery is fixed, so the more people mining, the less each miner makes.
Nothing you post on a web forum is worth any money.
A founder at the top making a mint...
Analysis of the block chain indicates that somewhere around 5 million early Bitcoins have never been traded. Those were generated when the difficulty was so low that ordinary CPUs could generate thousands of Bitcoins. Some of them were probably lost by people running the software in the early days and not keeping the results, but there's a reasonable chance that, somewhere, the anonymous people behind this have a few million Bitcoins stored up. Someday they may cash out.
I just read from an investment newsletter that the Winklevoss Twins have a ton of bitcoins on flash drives locked up in safety desposit boxes.
I agree that bitcoin is built to be scarce, and therefore valuable, but that sort of thing is the opposite of what you want in a currency. If the currency constantly increases in value, then the best option is to obtain as much as possible and stuff it under the mattress. Only an inflationary currency encourages investment, because you actually lose money by hoarding it rather than investing it. If everyone hoards the stuff instead of spending it, it becomes useless as a medium of exchange.
Not compared to heat pump systems, that can often provide a lot more warming per watt than dumb direct heat generation methods. From Wikipedia on heat pumps:
When used for heating a building on a mild day, for example 10 C, a typical air-source heat pump (ASHP) has a COP of 3 to 4, whereas an electrical resistance heater has a COP of 1.0. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a resistance heater to produce only one joule of useful heat, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move much more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place.
On the other hand, ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) benefit from the moderated temperature underground, as the ground acts naturally as a store of thermal energy.[4] Their year-round COP is therefore normally in the range of 2.5 to 5.0.
Burning energy for 1:1 return on heat (+bitcoins) is still a terribly inefficient use of energy.
I imagine US currency coming in nice $100 "soft rolls of paper". Least that way you know your money is always worth a ... well you get the picture.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
That miners want to make a profit, a fat one if possible. It would be like the US mint being a for profit organization. It isn't. Even republicans can see why not and that is saying something.
Bitcoin mining was NOT meant as a profit generation scheme but as a way to keep the coins in relative limited supply, to avoid the "tree leaves for currency requiring the burning down of all the forests to control inflation" problem. Bitcoin was originally meant as a barter currency, where you kept the barter. You provided something to somebody for bitcoins and in turn you use them to barter for something else. The idea was to create an altnernate barter market seperate from established currencies. To however create a "secure" currency, where somebody couldn't just print a lot of fake bills, both the mining and transaction require serious computation. In order to get volunteers to do this, a small amount of bits coins are set aside as a reward for handling transactions and miners get the bitcoins they intoduce into the pool to barter with.
BUT the original idea was that the mining would be a tiny amount compared to the flow of bitcoins. A bitcoin was supposed to be traded thousands of time before a new one was generated.
But as always, greed took over. Mining bitcoins was being seen as the ability to mint money and so people did it. Bitcoins became about speculation, who could mine them the fastest, hoard the most and then exchange them for something with real value. The MORE people shout about how many dollars bitcoins are "worth" the more bitcoins loose their value as a barter currency. People don't seek to make a profit from trade through a new way to exchange currency but by speculating in the currency itself. It resembles the gold market a lot. Not the real one, the gold market that has vending machines with tiny gold bars inside, the kinda people that believe that if they got a tiny fortune in gold, when the apocalypse comes, they will be rich because EVERYONE will be wanting gold then... nothing like dealing the end of civiliation then a gold bar.
Bitcoins as a paypal alternative for small traders makes some sense, keep some"value" in bitcoins as a user who sometimes buys and sometimes sells, avoid the traditional exchange fees. But for this to happen, the currency needs to be stable. It isn't and traders are either seeking to get bitcoins "cheap" and sell them high or just doing it as a novelty to create some press.
Google for places that accept bitcoins. The trade is simply non-existent. Places that reached the news have stopped accepting them and the remaining online shops are the ones you would normally stay a million miles away from. Shady doesn't even begin to describe them.
It was a nice idea but human greed and the lack of any counter measures have doomed it from the start.
Yes, send your unwanted bitcoins here: 1FuckBTCqwBQexxs9jiuWTiZeoKfSo9Vyi
Overall, a general problem with BitCoin mining is that it is a classic "Red Queen's Race". The fixed rate of bitcoin addition means you can only get ahead at the cost of someone else. Which means, IF bitcoin succeeded, mining is effectively non-profit as the rather low barrier to entry (even ASIC rigs are only $2K) and no monopoly power means that the profit from mining gets, well, stripped out.
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There's a related problem here I think people are overlooking. Part of the appeal of bitcoin is it's decentralized nature - a government can't easily stop transfer of bitcoins between individuals. However, since mining is transaction processing, if it becomes only profitable to do transaction processing in the 3 biggest miner's datacenters, we're back to centralization and therefore easy government control.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Since the biggest gripe on Slashdot seems to be the cost of electricity of running gaming rigs to mine bitcoins....hmm...i think i now have a use for that spare 160W solar panel ive got lying around, and all those Spartan6 FPGA development boards i happen to have sitting around consume very little power each....
1) Idle equipment and free electricity
2) Spare Time
3) ????
4) Profit