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Operation Wants To Mine 10% of All New Bitcoins
An anonymous reader writes: "Mining new Bitcoins is computationally expensive — you can't expect to do much on your standard home computer. Many miners have built custom rigs to mine more efficiently, but it was only a matter of time until somebody went industrial. Dave Carlson's goal is to mine 10% of all new Bitcoins from now on. He's built literally thousands of units. They collectively use 1.4 million BitFury mining chips, which are managed by a bunch of Raspberry Pis. 'The current rigs each contain 16 boards, with each board containing 16 BitFury chips, for a total of 256 mining chips on each rig. Carlson said about 90,000 processor boards have been deployed, which would put the number of rigs at about 5,600. A new board [being designed] will have 756 chips on each rig instead of 256.' Carlson says his company spent $3-5 million to get everything set up. They current generate 7,000 — 8,000 Bitcoins per month, which, at current rates, would be worth over $4 million."
Litecoin has just enough credibility to have people trading it for non-trivial amounts of real money. The rest are generally worthless.
You'd be limited to SHA256 based coins. Most altcoins are scrypt based.
All serious Bitcoin mining is now industrial-scale using custom ASICs. CPU-based and GPU-based mining are dead. They can't even cover their own power bill. This guy's setup is primitive compared to this large high-density liquid-cooled mining facility in Hong Kong. The two biggest mining pools control over half of the mining power, and the biggest, "ghash.io", would have over half if they hadn't deliberately split up to avoid that happening.
The thing to remember about Bitcoin mining is that all miners are in competition for a fixed number of Bitcoins produced each week. More mining does not mean more Bitcoins are generated.