http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22153687

Anyone here doing Bitcoin mining? Getting any real money from doing it?

I've thought about it, but not bothered due to not wanting to melt my processors!

There are a finite number of coins to be mined so it won't go on for ever, and I suspect this figure is probably misleading. It's not possible to determine what the power usage of the servers would be if they were not mining, and people with agendas tend to quote worst-case figures.

The rather small quantity of coins available is one reason I'm not a massive supporter. Once the user base exceeds a certain threshold, hyperdeflation is inevitable. Although this might be incredibly profitable for some people who time it just right, there is no guaranteed exit strategy. They are currently over valued and fluctuate so much that it's a game of roulette...

On the other hand, if you want to trade with Eastern European mobsters then it's the way to go.

But the currency goes down to 8 decimal places. So even when all 21 billion BTC are mined, you can still split these down no matter what the value.

I looked into it and decided against. I heard of one person setting up their machine to mine and it estimated 13 years for the first coin. Unless you have a ASIC mining set up you are now wasting your time. Yesterday I saw photos of some mining rigs and they were using kwhrs of power so the electricity bill will be horrendous. Cables everywhere so it requires loads of kit to actually mine and with the volatility of the price it seems like a huge gamble.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk.

My next door neighbour is a bitcoin miner. He has amassed about 150. We had a conversation about it and I admit that my only point of view was an article I read which accused bitcoin of being a Ponzi scheme. The investment in processing is no more than folding or SETI and his point of view is that of nothing ventured nothing gained. Fair play.

I can understand that. Though how much has he had to spend to amass those 150 bit coins?

I looked into this quite recently, but even GPU based mining is low yield - people have moved on to dedicated hardware, which isn't cheap.

Yes the best was $1299 and you still had to get it into this country and that would mean huge duty fees, VAT and customs charges.

https://products.butterflylabs.com/home ... miner.html

Fairly cheap really

Yes but the ASIC card that I saw was $1299 for a 60 Gh/s where as the 50 Gh/s was $2499 on that page. You need to be using a higher hash rate to get the bit coins. No mention of OS.

I think BFL is a scam, long time and not seen any conclusive proof of anyone getting one, doesn't help no one mentions their surname but the CEO has been convicted of fraud in the past apparently

I was thinking that of all the mining operations. I suspect that the only money to be made is in selling the specialist GPU to do the actual mining.