Has anyone heard of Bitcoin mining? I am curious if it is safe or a scam. I have done some research and not found a lot on it except how to do it. I would like to know if anyone has any experience with it and if it is safe to do or if it is just a scam/spyware/malware/or virus? Thoughts? Mechh69
Bitcoin mining is safe but i wouldn't remortgage the house to get into it as once Butterfly labs release their ASIC mining kit the difficulty will go way up and make GFX card mining redundant. While there is money to make with bitcoins it's about to get very expensive to get in on the for profit side of mining.
The underlying concept isn't a scam, but from what I've heard, for the average user the cost of electricity required to mine bitcoins is a fair amount greater than the money you get from doing so- it really isn't profitable. I think to really gain anything from it you would have to either operate a huge botnet to leech from people's energy bills/ processor or design hardware specifically for performing the calculations required. It's not something to be done on your average gaming rig, I would imagine. I'm sure there's a computer scientist around here who can disprove everything I've just said, but oh well
Electricity cost is a major downside to mining with home PCs. Botnets are used for it by some miners and dedicated hardware exists. You can get FPGA mining hardware but performance wise it is no better really than a good GPU setup (and more expensive) and ASIC hardware is very close to being delivered to the initial buyers. Someone with a high end Crossfire folding setup will do very well mining bit coins but the electricity bill will be the limiting factor. Once ASICs hit then GPU mining will be killed off once the difficulty is raised.
It's only cost effective if you use works power, servers, money etc Or as above... Lol. In the beginning it wasn't so bad I hear.
Only just saw this thread but I wouldn't recommend it to be honest. I set up a pc with a couple of graphics cards in the machine and ran it for 1 month and got nothing back from it, except around a £30+ increase in the electric bill but that was around 6 months ago.
It's not a scam. Electricity costs in the UK are too high to make mining on everyday PC gear profitable. It used to be possible but the 'difficulty' has got too high now. Dedicated hardware (ASIC - application specific integrated chips) is now trickling onto the market, much later than first promised. This will push up the 'difficulty'. The only positive news is that the exchange rate for bitcoins to real-world currency has roughly doubled in the past few weeks - if it continues to climb then mining may become profitable again, but only with ASICs, now that they are out there.
The only thing I can see from the stuff Ive seen is that its fairly unstable with profits varying a fair bit.
There is a small feature on the FT about it, their "expert" reckons if it gets too popular one or more governments will start to regulate it, they're opinion is its a big bubble at the moment which is linked to its popularity on the web not real fundamental economics. Probably not a great time to buy any and I doubt it will ever be profitable to mine in uk due to aforementioned electricity costs.
It's basically a pyramid scheme, isn't it? As the difficulty increases with each bitcoin that is mined, it becomes increasingly unprofitable to mine, and the "wealth" is concentrated amongst those who started early and thus were able to mine the easier bitcoins. It's already reached a point where it's just not financially viable to start mining, so late adopters will never be in as advantageous as position as those who have already started. This artificially inflates the price of existing bitcoins, but it's a bubble and will burst eventually - just look at a graph of price over time to see examples of this happening previously.
Mining was probably a feasible project a few years ago when the majority of BitCoins hadn't been found. So only the early adopters had a chance at making money - and despite their efforts, they lost far more money on equipment and electricity costs than they ever made through mining. It's not a scam, but it's certainly a mug's game nowadays especially if you don't have the wealth to buy the ASIC hardware. Speaking of FPGAs and ASICs, the guys who developed those have made far money than the miners. The pickaxes turned out to be more profitable than the mining itself!!
Exactly. That's why EVGA got behind folding so hard. Yes, it's a better cause, but I bet it doesn't hurt high end hardware sales either
Pretty much this. ASIC hardware is estimated at $20k+ 1 bitcoin is $141 give or take the maths is not nice in its favour. It's aprox 142 bitcoins for break even before electric is considered. In the uk the high cost of electric means it will never be viable to do, just as folding at home has got expensive to do.
For people who don't pay for their electric, it's not so bad. I've been mining for a few weeks now, I'll make a return but slowly. Only mine when I am not gaming which to be fair hasn't been that prolific recently.
These days dedicated ASIC hardware. Expect to pay top price for it too. You can just about get a way with a decent Radeon mining rig but the days of GPU mining of bitcoins are waning, GPU mining is off to join CPU mining and the dodo.