BITCOIN MINING


K_I_Z_A

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There is a website out there that calculates the payoff period for the investment.  Within the past few months it has become more expensive to buy the hardware then could ever be regained by generating bitcoins.

Yup, from the podcasts I have listened to lately they are nearly all saying that the cost of running the hardware and/or buying the hardware cost more than the cost of the bitcoin mining.

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  • 1 year later...

Looked into this ~1 year ago and then it couldnt really pay off mining. But with the current price boom it looks like it has changed a lot !

 

Could be fun just to make a card run in my unRaid rig. An old GPU to get things started....my CPU would be useless.

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I bought 6 bitcoins last year for about $80.  Sitting forgotten in the Blockchain wallet all but forgotten.

Now worth $1400.00 USD.  I am doing some casual mining with a ATI 7970. It makes about 9 buck a day. Not accounting for the cost of running it. I am thinking of using some of my windfall to buy a second gpu.

 

Have you seen what the Avalon Asic Preordered are going for. One recently sold for 40K on ebay.

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How easy is it to sell Bitcoins for real cash?

 

It's a bit of a pain. If you were to use the largest exchange, Mt. Gox, you'd have to create an account, transfer your bitcoins in, sell them on the exchange, transfer the USD back out via Dwolla, then from Dwolla you can deposit to a bank account.the entire process typically takes 10 days or so, the Dwolla transfer takes forever.

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I would love to see a bitcoin mining plugin for unRAID, I've had interest in bitcoin since 09' mostly as  tech hobby since I never thought it would take off like it did.

 

I only have a few bitcoins (made the silly mistake of getting nvidia gpu's rather than amd). But I have no interest in selling, if bitcoin is able to reach even 1% of the forex market we are looking at 100,000 to perhaps 1,000,000 USD per bitcoin. Personally I am against selling bitcoin for fiat, why would you want to sell an (fairly) anonymous, decentralized currency for fiat? That completely defeats the point of bitcoin.. IMHO use bitcoin to purchase goods and save your fiat if you want to gain 'wealth', thats how bitcoin will grow. But I support the right of those who want to sell bitcoin for fiat.

 

Anywho, bitcoin unRAID plugin +++

 

EDIT: Bitcoin by definition is NOT a ponzi scheme as there is a finite amount of bitcoin, 21million to be mined by 2140.

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It was almost 250usd. This correction was bound to happen. with lots of newly minted Bitcoin Millionaires taking profits. I sold mine at about 200usd last week. I really need to hold 100usd or you will see a real crash and panic selling. You would not be smart if you had like a 900% ROI and not sell some or all of your BTC.

 

Price is gonna be really interesting in the coming weeks and months. The higer prices and volatility  is attraction speculators and more Asic rigs are coming online which is going to make difficulty go way up.

 

Here is a post from an owner of a pair of Avalon Asic miners.

This question is to the owners of ASIC setups, or anyone with a large hashrate. How do you plan to withdraw your money into your bank accounts without it being seen by the big boys, government? This has been a questions I have been wondering for some time.

 

Theoretically speaking, if I had 2 Avalon units hashing at 66,000 each I would be pulling in on average 7.7 coins at the current difficulty, $1,900 a day. If I were to wait a week and want to transfer the funds to my account I would be looking at upwards of $9,500. If I were to deposit this every week into my account I am sure someone would notice something and start to ask questions.

 

I know I could purchase items with BTC, but this is more a questions about cashing out and making sure it goes unnoticed.

 

I cannot be the only one thinking about this.

 

 

Watch the action.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets?exchange=mtgox

 

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Mt.Gox has suspended trading for 12 hours, so you should be looking at the charts of the other exchanges for a better representation of real-time price, which is currently hovering just below $80.

 

Having said that, while I have toyed around with mining here and there over the last few years, the days of GPU mining are largely gone.  If BTC were to stay at elevated levels of price like $200+, sure you could still make a profit, but down around $100 (where I think it will stay) there's really no profit to be made from GPU mining.  Your electricity costs will be almost as much as your BTC profit.

 

Even if you are running a top of the line HD7970 GPU 24x7 (approx 750 MHash/s) you're looking at roughly 1.5 BTC/month AT THE CURRENT DIFFICULTY.  At current exchange rates of $80 that's about $120/mo.  Running that 7970 at 100% utilization 24x7 for a month straight is going to cause a noticeable spike in your electricity bill, just how much is for you to calculate at your current utility prices. 

 

Every time the difficulty goes up (roughly every two weeks) the amount of BTC you generate per timeframe (day, month, whatever) goes down.  Now that all of the ASIC miners are coming online, the difficulty has been rising significantly at every 2048 block reset.  So even if you can currently make a small profit GPU mining, you likely won't be able to in a month or two.  Of course this all depends on the price of BTC-USD exchange.  Personally, with the wild fluctuations in BTC price, I certainly wouldn't be counting on the price staying high so as to turn a profit.  If the risk/reward is acceptable to you then by all means go for it.

 

IMHO, the only way to turn a reasonable guaranteed profit from Bitcoin mining from this point forward is to buy an ASIC miner, assuming you can even get your hands on one.  Even then, by the time you got it (AFAIK all ASIC miner sales are backlogged for months) there will be so many ASIC miners online that the difficulty will be through the roof and you are back to making a nominal profit.  The only reason the current ASIC miners (like the ones you quoted above) are making tons of money is because there are very few out there and they currently hold a sizeable chunk of the hashing power, which will be diluted over time.  They will make big profits for a few months and it will taper over time, just as all forms of BTC mining do.

 

So, all that was to basically say I don't see the point in a BTC plugin for unRAID, as GPU mining is largely dead already anyway.  Besides, it's a storage server, why would you want to drop a massive heat generating GPU in there?  If you already have a big GPU, I'm going to assume you have a gaming rig (else why would you have a big GPU), so just mine on that.

 

TL;DR - GPU mining is dead, or will be extremely soon, there's no point in running a Bitcoin miner on unRAID.

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there's no point in running a Bitcoin miner on unRAID.

 

Not entirely accurate, some of the asic miners don't run as their own standalone units but instead plug into a normal computer via usb and hook into existing mining software. So...since an unRAID box is running all the time anyways, you could argue its perfect for supporting an asic.

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there's no point in running a Bitcoin miner on unRAID.

 

Not entirely accurate, some of the asic miners don't run as their own standalone units but instead plug into a normal computer via usb and hook into existing mining software. So...since an unRAID box is running all the time anyways, you could argue its perfect for supporting an asic.

 

Fair point.  Although, to the best of my knowledge, the only ASIC that requires a host for the mining software is the Butterfly Labs ASIC, which is still vaporware.  If/when it ever ships then I could see a usefulness for unRAID supporting it.  That will require unRAID running custom mining software (like BFGminer or CGminer) either in addition to or instead of the Bitcoin client, just as any mining on unRAID would.

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In addition, as I stated before, getting an ASIC to mine with is virtually impossible (at least for the near future).  I don't see one of the gurus here spending the time to get a plugin working for what might eventually be a handful of people using it.  On the other hand, if someone gets their hands on an ASIC or is determined to GPU mine and produces a working plugin for their own needs (or a list of instructions on how to get everything installed and working), then I'm sure there are a few other people who might use it.

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Fair point.  Although, to the best of my knowledge, the only ASIC that requires a host for the mining software is the Butterfly Labs ASIC, which is still vaporware.  If/when it ever ships then I could see a usefulness for unRAID supporting it.  That will require unRAID running custom mining software (like BFGminer or CGminer) either in addition to or instead of the Bitcoin client, just as any mining on unRAID would.

Wouldn't quite call it vaporware, wouldn't quite say it exists either though. Sits somewhere in the middle. Apparently the guy behind CGminer has one and has it working with CGminer.

No idea what goes into the development of a plugin, just started looking up unraid a few days ago. Just didn't want to see something that might benefit me shutdown so quickly ;)

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Fair point.  Although, to the best of my knowledge, the only ASIC that requires a host for the mining software is the Butterfly Labs ASIC, which is still vaporware.  If/when it ever ships then I could see a usefulness for unRAID supporting it.  That will require unRAID running custom mining software (like BFGminer or CGminer) either in addition to or instead of the Bitcoin client, just as any mining on unRAID would.

Wouldn't quite call it vaporware, wouldn't quite say it exists either though. Sits somewhere in the middle. Apparently the guy behind CGminer has one and has it working with CGminer.

No idea what goes into the development of a plugin, just started looking up unraid a few days ago. Just didn't want to see something that might benefit me shutdown so quickly ;)

 

Good to know, didn't know there were any BFL ASIC's in physical form yet.  BTW, I'm by no means trying to "shut down" the possibility of mining on unRAID.  I'm simply stating that I don't believe anyone not interested in mining will take the time to write a plugin.  It's going to take someone with the hardware that's interested in doing it to figure out how to get it to work with unRAID and then share that work with others.

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Good to know, didn't know there were any BFL ASIC's in physical form yet.  BTW, I'm by no means trying to "shut down" the possibility of mining on unRAID.  I'm simply stating that I don't believe anyone not interested in mining will take the time to write a plugin.  It's going to take someone with the hardware that's interested in doing it to figure out how to get it to work with unRAID and then share that work with others.

 

From what I recall that one was "sent out" just to satisfy some shipping bet, so...they're certainly not out yet. And shutting it down simply referred to the fact that anyone stumbling across this thread would have seen a definitive "there is no point", and take that at face value. The expanded discussion dispels that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Interesting discussion, but UnRAID seems totally unsuited for this => the goal with an UnRAID server is generally to use as little power as possible;  the goal of a mining system is to max the power !!  (I suppose it's more accurately to "optimize" the power, so you can generate more value than you spend in electricity)

 

I've been following the availability and projected returns of the ASIC systems for a while -- and they seem a lot more like "vaporware" than reality.    In the "real world" of mining (gold, silver, etc.) the folks that sell mining equipment aren't actually miners -- there's more profit in selling the mining equipment than in doing the mining.    I suspect the same is true for bitcoin mining  :)

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  • 4 months later...

I am looking to build a home NAS and was looking into using unRAID and saw there was support for sabnzbd and sickbeard which is great. Wanted to see about bitcoin support for cgminer and found this thread. There is now the asicminer usb block erupter up for sale on amazon besides other locations. It's a low power USB ASIC miner. If I'm to have one server it would be nice to be able to use that. I am in the minority though I know. Just wanted to share my experience. Hardware raid and *nix it is.

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