My Bitcoin Challenge and Journey

I want to quit my job. My job is CL, and has been as a CL eWhore for years now. I'm not going to brag and tell how much money i make and made, what I am going to say is I'm sick and tired of the bullshit. The ghosting, the flagging, the 2 months making awesome money, followed by 4 months recovering from the most recent CL ass raping change. When i heard about bitcoins, I thought this was something that might be worth looking into.

So, I did a LOT of research. And what I found seems to me to make it plausable to make a decent bit of coin, pun intended. Now, I dont give a shit about the bitcoin "cause" or ideology. What I care about is this equation...

Computers = Bitcoins = Money

But what does that mean, and, why doesn't everyone else do it? Those are important questions. I think the reason is an expanded version of the above equation. I think a more accurate equation is...

Money X = Computers = Bitcoins = Money Y

Now as long as the first money, money X, is less than money y, then im in a very good place. If it takes $200 to make $1000, then it can also take and be said that $20,000 can make $100,000. This is a good place to be.

So i think the reason "everyone" is not doing it is because "everyone" doesnt have money to do it to a scale that actually makes money. And of the people that do have that kind of money, 90% or more will say "Bitcoins, get the fuck outta here" when presented the idea.

Once again, i dont care about bitcoin ideology. I'm presenting a practical and in many ways pragmatic view.

Let me be clear, I personally DO NOT think bitcoins will work indefinitely.

But in the meanwhile, indefinitly is a long time. In the short term, probably at least for the next 18 months until they difficultly gets to a much higher point, and the result for completing a "hash" falls to 25 coins instead of 50.
I know that's getting ahead of things, but, its relevant to my overall view.

In this case, money x = computers = bitcoins = money y, is not a problem for me, as long as money x will exceed money y in a decent amount of time.

Now how can we see if that's true? Well, we will have to test. And right now, I'm in the process, based upon all I've read and researched, of putting my "money x" where my mouth is

My plan.

I have 8 decently functioning pcs laying around, ones i used before i got new ones that i used to post ads with. So why not put these old 8 to use.

I "could" have 1 pc built with 3 video cards in it, but im not just paying for the video card at that point, and the components all go up in price, because to have a pc able to run u need a special motherboard, high watt power supply, and other things. So the cost of a pc able to do that, with 3 ATI 6970 cards in it would be about $2400. And Ati 6970 can be safely overclocked to about 400mhash/s. This is the number we always must consider when looking at cost and production. So three together would produce about 1200mhash/s, or 1.2ghash a sec for $2400

ON the other hand, adding a ATI 6970 to each of my pc's, one by one, including adding extra cooling, and a better power supply (current ones cant hang) will only cost me $550 per pc, $370 of that being the simple card cost. So to put one in three pc's would cost me $1650 for the same 1200mhash/s. Much cheaper initially using my old equipment.

However, I've decided that im going to instead of just doing 3, to do all 8. So, 8 x $550 is $4400, for a total of a projected 3.2ghash/s or 3200mhash/s. Taking a very conservative $15 a bitcoin I should be able to make about $$1,673 a month and recap my investment in 2-3 months.

So tomorrow im ordering the cards and accessories, and by next week I should have all the pc's retrofitted to producing 400mhash/s.

This is going to be a long road. If I see after the first week of Bitcoin mining that is seems to be working, I'm going to take my first weeks earning and try to then go into my second phase, turning my bitcoins into $$$

If my first week running the miners works well, I'm not going to wait until my first pay themselves off, I will consider it to be a evident truth that they will. I will then change the weeks earnings into dollars, and after seeing that works, will then go full retard into a bitcoin mining extravaganza.

I'm going to do pool mining, as opposed to solo mining, to start out with, until I can get enough mhash/s to be able to realistically solve a hash on my own in 1-3 days, which need about 30ghash/s. That's a lot of money in equipment.

One thing it seems at this point though is that your continually looking at a 2 month return on investment in hardware, whether u spend $2,000 or $20,000.

But the longer I (or anyone else waits) the harder its going to be. So if I'm able to make this work, and pay off 20-30k in equipment in a couple of months then rake in profits till the bitcoin collapses, then so be it.

I'm writing this as my serious journey into bitcoin mining, and am welcome to and would love any suggestions or advice anyone has. I don't mind anyone take my advice or even copying me, as adding people to the mining community really doesn't seem to hurt the equation

I will be continuing to update this over time, and hopefully everyone, myself included, can learn a lot.

Btw, if anyone ever wants to or feels I've been helpful in bringing help in bitcoin awareness my bitcoin link is

1DMBAYFeHENLc15ZVDdyc3AQxQ95UBu2p8

Subscribed. Good luck man!

What mining pool would you be joining? Have you decided on that yet?

All the points in your post are well laid out and totally reasonable. I will follow this thread closely and at first sight of success probably jump aboard myself.

Last but not least, good luck man!

I did some math the other day too, and I don't know what all factors into the Mhash speed, but the 6950s at $200 might be more cost effective to get started if you already have the computers. From what I can tell the Mhash rate is still around 300+.

There are a few other cost effective cards...6850 and 6870, that start around $140 on newegg

I don't see the purpose of buying expensive rigs if you can throw one of those into a $250 barebones kit and get your money back in about 2 months (or 1 month if you already have the computer). Maybe getting a mobo that can handle two video cards would be the next step up.

If anyone know if there are other important video card specs to consider, like 1gb vs 2bg, that would be very enlightening

Thank you all for all your wishes, I really hope this works too!
To answer a couple of questions already asked

to daserpent:
"What mining pool would you be joining? Have you decided on that yet? "

I have decided I'm going to start with the eligius pool, to me it seemed the easiest and most straightforward. Also, with 3200mhash's I would typically seem to be anywhere from the 3-5th highest contributer in the us side of their pool (they have a 2nd Eu pool)

I already ran it on my pc when i was sleeping, sadly i have a nice video card in my computer, a GTX560 Ti, which is a great card, but Nvidia. Nvidia cards for the same price perform DRAMATICALLY worse. 68mhash/s. Through the night i earned .01 btc lol

to efwebs
"6950s at $200 might be more cost effective to get started if you already have the computers"

I agree that there were some really tough choices to make when finding the video card for this. The 6970 was the first presented to me, but i later began to think that a 5870 would be way more cost effective, for the same reason your saying, 200 less for about the same hash. Sadly, theres no availability for many of these cards.

the 6950 is about 100 less, and there's a lot of variants on its performance, typically the more output the more strain on the card. Its looks like stock it gets 272 but can go to about 400. It seems to still be in stock places, and could definitely be an alternative. I think that for reliability I'd rather tax the card less and get the 400mhash's from the 6970, but i easily could have gone your way too good point.

the 6850 is 171mhash\s to 244mhash\s with hard damaging overclocking
the 6870 is 232-329 it seems, a very wide variance.

I dont want to tax the card "too" much. It would mean downtime when/if they blew, and also they might not be replaced by manufacturer if they do. Along with any other things they damage.

Really its about the most bang for your buck, and not blowing your hard bought stuff out too.

I should say, I am NOT a real technically minded guy. I know everything just kinda self taught as you go. Its all just research on my part. I know im going to miss some stuff and make mistakes and probably overpay on things here and there. But I'm gonna do my best

I do not know much about graphic cards, but what kind of Mhash/s do you think the following cards can do :

GeForce GT 555M (1.5GB)
AMD Radeon 5650
Nvidia 9600M GT

Are you factoring in the cost of running 8 computers over the months, assume that electricity costs to be high, check youtube out for some super looking bitcoin rigs upto $100,000 worth in one of the videos

I really don't understand the concept of bitcoins and mining bit coins and bit coin rigs.

But good luck!

People seem to be VERY concerned about the power consumption. I guess maybe I live in a very low cost power area, but my power costs fluxuate do to usage and time of day, but are always .04-.08 a kw hour. So I'm looking at maybe, and i do mean maybe 40-60 bucks a pc per month, but i don't even think that's likely. But in the grand scheme of things, it seems very miniscule and like nitpicking to me.

But then again, i feel like people nitpick about gas prices too, but, i guess for some people the extra little bit matters. I look at things in a much broader and grander sense.

Good luck - I thought about it but just have too much on my plate at the moment.

I actually put some money into a Mtgox acct but they were back to about $20 by the time it was active and have stayed there for a few days now. That seems a fair price to me, $30 was too high.

You need to do more research. The difficulty increased by about FIFTY PERCENT yesterday from 567K to 877k. Every 2016 blocks the difficulty changes (aka goes up a lot). The difficulty is changing fast now - about 7 to 14 days. The entire network is supposed to find 6 blocks (50 coins/block) per hour. After the next 2016 blocks, if the network is finding more then 6 blocks an hour, then the bitcoin algorithm adjusts the difficulty by making it higher.

3200mhash/s. Taking a very conservative $15 a bitcoin I should be able to make about $$1,673 a month and recap my investment in 2-3 months.

Click to expand...

This would be true IF the difficulty never changed. What if the difficulty increased by 50% again the next ~10 days from the current 877k to ~1316k? Now put 1316k difficulty and 3200mhashes/s into the calculator and see what you get: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php Not so good anymore is it? What if the difficulty went up again by 50% soon after? Look at this: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

I'm currently a bitcoin miner, but a lot has changed in the past two months with bitcoins since the media found out about it (mostly because of Silk Road). The best GPUs to buy the past month were the 5850s that do ~350mashes OCed for $150 new and the 5830s that do ~300mhashes/s OCed for $110 new on Amazon and Newegg. These are now sold out all over the world new for those prices and they are out of production.

Read the bitcoin.org forums for a few hours. Most people suggest buying and selling coins instead of mining unless you can find GPUs for CHEAP (craigslist, etc). I enjoy mining and I'm not saying you should definitely not start mining, but if you didn't know those stats I just said then you need to read more about bitcoins so you don't get screwed. Sometime in 2012 blocks will have 25 coins each. Don't get this confused with how difficulty works. Good luck.

Good Luck! Subscribed.

Good luck! Make sure you read posts on how to secure and backup your bitcoin wallet... One crash without a backup and all your coins could be lost!

I believe you're doing the wrong step, mate. Just look at the wild, wild west It never worked too good with mining, unless you were different (had a private mine or were the first).

Bitcoins are a fantastic invention, however the mining stage is over - this is no longer where the real money is.

People possess nearly 5,000,000 bitcoins, and have almost no places to spend this treasure. As I said, mining is over, now its the time for different breed - traders. Offer them service and you will earn much more than with year of mining.

There's probably more money in render farms if you have that amount of kit?

Plus you know it won't go away when the whole thing goes kaput.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_farm

I don't know what a render farm is or does, but if it goes kaput i can always look into what to do then. I think this bitcoin thing is definitely time sensitive though, its now or never

From what i can tell, doing some more calculations, the way I've started to think about it is this. For whatever you buy, you can currently expect to make your money back in 2 months. So that's one way of looking at it.

However, that really means, that however many $$$ you put into it (effectively mind you) you are actually buying a weekly salary or 13% of that.

So for example, its like paying $10,000 for a $1300 a week job that will last hopefully more than 2 months lol. Hopefully it will all work out that way

I paid for and ordered all my equipment today, should be coming in next week. So hopefully by next Friday I'll be a'mining!

Dude I am glad you started this thread because I am also very interested and it is clearly not too late to join the game.

Personally, investing in mining is not something I would do. Why? Because bitcoins are so volatile right now. As the mainstream has discovered them and discovered mining too, it seems that maybe there are more miners out there and hence price has dropped? The margins on mining are already low at the moment and I know a lot of miners are getting out of the game already.

I tell you what I'm more interested in is mining other people's computers!

Have a look at bitcoinplus dot com. It allows you to put an applet on your site that loads up when people visit your site and they all calculate for you i.e. they do your mining for you!

This would be great for things like movie sites where people stay on for a long time.

Anyone else have any ideas for good sites that are cheap but where people stay a long time? This offers a way to monetise freeloaders finally.

edit: I just embedded the embedded website miner on one of my sites. Now, given that they are being associated in the mainstream media with drugs (even though it has nothing to do with the currency and the USD is the biggest culprit if you use that definition), I did not risk it on my Hostgator.

However, I do have an offshore hosting and decided to embed it on one of my websites there that actually gets some good daily uniques. Lol my CPU heated to 90 degrees straight away

It's a little insidious and I wouldn't use it on normal sites because you are clearly using up their CPU. This idea of just using "spare CPU cycles is BS". It might be spare capacity but you make everything run harder, no doubt about it. Anyway, I'll report back how many bitcoins I can generate this way soon. The site itself generates something like 250 uniques per day and over 5,000 per month and has good content so people will stick around and hopefully generate a lot of coin for me

Here's the link to the embeddable miner detail:


You can see there that there is even a Wordpress plugin!

I think that there is still money to be made in mining. However, I do also agree that services are a great way of making money too. I don't think that one cant co-exist with the other, and I have some really great and revolutionary ways of making some money with these bitcoins and selling service to get them

My trial after getting the equiptment, is going to be learning how to lay off all the bitcoins i get. It seems simple, they have exchanges such as MtGox and Tradhill where u can get cash, but u can also exchange everything from gift wards, to prepaid atm cards (greendot)

Sadly with the exhanges it seems they have limits per day and per month on amounts u can trade, Mt Gox for example $1000 a day and $10,000 a month. But that's not to say u couldn't have multiple accounts with one for you, one for your gf, etc etc.

So as i said, that will be a very great part of this journey as well

your site visitors are going to be very pissed with you once their CPU fans and cooling start kicking it.

anyway there is no point doing it with javascript embedded on websites since it is still utilizing your site visitors CPU power instead of their graphic GPU so the returns is very minimal. A workaround is to code a browser plugin which will utilize graphic GPU instead but the problem here is how to get installs.

there are scripts which will start mining when the PC is idle and work in the background and disable when mouse or keyboard movement is detected.

florflor said:

Dude I am glad you started this thread because I am also very interested and it is clearly not too late to join the game.

Personally, investing in mining is not something I would do. Why? Because bitcoins are so volatile right now. As the mainstream has discovered them and discovered mining too, it seems that maybe there are more miners out there and hence price has dropped? The margins on mining are already low at the moment and I know a lot of miners are getting out of the game already.

I tell you what I'm more interested in is mining other people's computers!

Have a look at bitcoinplus dot com. It allows you to put an applet on your site that loads up when people visit your site and they all calculate for you i.e. they do your mining for you!

This would be great for things like movie sites where people stay on for a long time.

Anyone else have any ideas for good sites that are cheap but where people stay a long time? This offers a way to monetise freeloaders finally.

edit: I just embedded the embedded website miner on one of my sites. Now, given that they are being associated in the mainstream media with drugs (even though it has nothing to do with the currency and the USD is the biggest culprit if you use that definition), I did not risk it on my Hostgator.

However, I do have an offshore hosting and decided to embed it on one of my websites there that actually gets some good daily uniques. Lol my CPU heated to 90 degrees straight away

It's a little insidious and I wouldn't use it on normal sites because you are clearly using up their CPU. This idea of just using "spare CPU cycles is BS". It might be spare capacity but you make everything run harder, no doubt about it. Anyway, I'll report back how many bitcoins I can generate this way soon. The site itself generates something like 250 uniques per day and over 5,000 per month and has good content so people will stick around and hopefully generate a lot of coin for me

Here's the link to the embeddable miner detail:

Code:

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

You can see there that there is even a Wordpress plugin!

Click to expand...