nikaso Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 So I was reading an article in this month's PC Format about Bitcoin mining and it got me thinking, would the payoff to the school in terms of Bitcoins mined be worth the extra power consumed by leaving computers on to do it? We have roughly 200 desktop PCs with discrete graphics cards and combined would make a sizeable resource? I need to read a lot more about Bitcoins and how they work etc. (I have noticed a handy infographic using the forum search) but just wondered if anyone had mined Bitcoins (not necessarily on school equipment!) ?
Steve21 Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 How to Get Rich on Bitcoin, By a System Administrator Who's Secretly Growing Them On His School's Computers | Motherboard I think the big problem comes to what the "block" you're solving is actually about. If you're solving a "how to break into XYZ system" block it could be problems. Solving cancer etc? Maybe not so I'd have to wonder whether you'll actually create that much money, when you need to figure things like VAT etc being taken off payments etc etc? Steve
chazzy2501 Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 bitcoin mining in no way made me buy AMD based PCs last year
Jamman960 Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 I'm not too sure - Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster - Bloomberg is an interesting article I came accross on slashdot a while ago I guess the biggest problem is that even if it is worth it right now that doesn't mean it still will be in a few months time due to exchange rate fluctuations. I exchanged £12 for 1btc a few months back, if I hadn't already spent it would it would now be worth £75ish If the govenors/lea/whoever decide to take a look into it all when the benefits outweigh the gain they're going to want to know why you're wasting so much energy while everyone else is trying to save it thinking down the line you'd probably need to include additional costs due shorter equipment lifetimes James
sidewinder Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 would the payoff to the school in terms of Bitcoins mined be worth the extra power consumed by leaving computers on to do it? That's an almost certain no. Would have been possible in the past but as the mining always increases in difficulty (as there will only ever be a finite number of bitcoins) it's just not worth it. All the exposure Bitcoins have got recently has probably made it even harder as everyone and their dog wants a go. Seen lots of people trying to calculate it and the general consensus is, unless your electricity is free, it isn't worth it. It might be profitable if you happened to already have loads of machines with extremely high end graphics cards but still not for long
Theblacksheep Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 You're technically not making any money until you sell them or trade them. How much you get depends on the cards hash rates. It they are nvidia, no, they'll probably cost more to run. If they are AMDs from the last few years they should grind out some BTC if you pool them, but custom ASICs are getting deployed now and the difficulty is ramping up to the point of making GPU mining pointless.
sidewinder Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 How to Get Rich on Bitcoin, By a System Administrator Who's Secretly Growing Them On His School's Computers | Motherboard Case in point: that article was 2 years ago. He probably was making a lot of money then. He won't be now.
chazzy2501 Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 ok done the math, each of my a8-3850s (GPU = 6550d) can do 66.2 Mhash/s each x 64PCs = 4236.8Mhash/s so totally worth it:)
sidewinder Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 ok done the math, each of my a8-3850s (GPU = 6550d) can do 66.2 Mhash/s each x 64PCs = 4236.8Mhash/s so totally worth it:) This calculator Bitcoin Mining Calculator comes out at $15.41 or £9.90 a day from that. Does that cover the electric cost of running 64 PCs all day long?
Theblacksheep Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 People have been fired for using company electricity and systems to generate BTC.
chazzy2501 Posted June 7, 2013 Posted June 7, 2013 A meagre £3613.50 a year! To think you can buy a dedicated fga board bitcoin miner that does 5000mhash/s for $280 and uses 30 watts. Answer = Totally not worth it. Still my APUs can also play dirt2 really well
nikaso Posted June 7, 2013 Author Posted June 7, 2013 Well i think that has solved that question then! The custom bitcoin board might be worth it though, if it's netting £10 a day then it would pay itself off in under 20 days?
Danp Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Watch today's BBC Click, one guy on there says mining on a single machine take about 1 month to generate a single coin.
Arthur Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Show me where I can get a miner for $280 please The Butterfly Labs website. 1
plexer Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Allthough their backorders go back to june 2012. Ben
Arthur Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Although their backorders go back to June 2012. Yeah. Availability is a huge issue with the Bitcoin ASICs. If you were lucky enough to get one of the first Bitcoin mining units from Avalon you would now be making around $500 per day!!! :eek: Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner « Wired Those folks who've been lucky enough to get their hands on one of these early Avalon systems are cleaning up. Miner Jeff Garzik was the first person to take possession of a Avalon machine. Last year, he plunked down preorder money for a variety of custom ASIC rigs, including $1,300 for his Avalon system. “At the time, it was a very risky bet,” he said in an email interview. “None of the ASIC vendors were shipping, and all were funding their efforts through a pre-order model, akin to Kickstarter. This meant any buyer was paying months in advance for hardware that did not exist, and not even a guarantee of a refund upon failure.” But Garzik’s Avalon bet paid off. Big time. He got his system the end of January. Within 20 hours, it had earned him nearly 15 Bitcoins. Today it cranks out just under 4 Bitcoins per day. That’s about $500 at current Bitcoin exchange rates. “The first mover advantage is enormous,” Garzik said in an email interview.
plexer Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 There's also cloud mining https://cloudhashing.com Ben
markwilfan Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 I bought 60 at £4.50 each. Got my stake back + £300 then sold a load more last week at £86 each. Kerching
Arthur Posted June 19, 2013 Posted June 19, 2013 @plexer. KnCMiner's Saturn and Jupiter Bitcoin ASIC miners are now available to order if you want one? They do 175GH/s and 350GH/s respectively, which is equivalent to approx. 245 or 490 AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards!!! www.kncminer.com/categories/miners http://i.imgur.com/ZVk1CdW.jpg
Sdrawkcab Posted June 19, 2013 Posted June 19, 2013 Oh god please don't invest in Bitcoin mining. You won't make your money back, and if you do it with school hardware you'll just end up wrecking the equipment and massively increase the electricity bill for the school too. Even if you do manage to make some coins, they won't hold their value for much longer because bitcoin is utterly useless as an actual currency. If you aren't looking to buy illegal drugs or questionable "adult" content, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere to actually spend your coins. Add on to that the fact that the value fluctuates by up to £50 per coin over a single day, and you have a completely unuseable currency in every way. If you decide to ignore all these facts and set up your equipment to mine anyway, good luck actually mining any coins. Graphics card mining is literally worthless now that people have ASIC machines up and running, as ASICs are capable of performing hashing calcuations thousands of times faster than graphics cards. Bitcoin mining works by increasing the difficulty of the next hash depending on the total hashing power of the network. This means that the more people there are mining, and the more powerful their mining rigs are, the less profitable mining is. You will not make money now unless you run an extremely large mining operation, and even then you won't make a great deal. Also lol at whoever linked BFL like they're some kind of legit mining company. I've been following them since they started pretty much, and they've had to change the spec on their boards about 10 times because they don't know how to properly build electronic systems. The units they're shipping now have a fraction of the originally promised power, and it could be up to two years before you even see the machine you've ordered because they have such slow production and such a massive backlog of orders. This is bad because it also means that by the time you receive your rig, hundreds of others will already have similarly powered rigs. This means that you will most likely never make a return on your investment, even if you mine 24/7. In conclusion I would like to remind you that bitcoin was never actually meant to be used as a currency. It was a proof-of-concept toy designed to show how a decentralized currency system could work, but it was never intended to be used as an actual currency. If you want to make money using a cryptocurrency system there are much easier ways to do it than mining bitcoins.
Sdrawkcab Posted July 1, 2013 Posted July 1, 2013 Bumping to say that the price per coin has dropped to $86 now on btc-e bitcoinity.org/markets It's still at about $94 on MtGox but that figure is largely irrellevant as MtGox have frozen withdrawals at the moment so you can't actually cash out. That's about $20 value lost on each coin over about 2 weeks. Who still thinks these are a good investment?
Greenbeast Posted July 2, 2013 Posted July 2, 2013 You could apply the same logic to trading any other kind of stock Pick a short period where MS or Apple stock drops and say 'Who still thinks these are a good investment?'
pcstru Posted July 2, 2013 Posted July 2, 2013 That's about $20 value lost on each coin over about 2 weeks. Who still thinks these are a good investment? In the future, a single bit coin will either be worth a small fortune or nothing. Whether they are a good investment is, IMO a question of how you like your risk. As with all investment (AKA gambling), don't 'invest' more than you can afford to lose.
plexer Posted July 2, 2013 Posted July 2, 2013 Oh god please don't invest in Bitcoin mining. You won't make your money back, and if you do it with school hardware you'll just end up wrecking the equipment and massively increase the electricity bill for the school too. Even if you do manage to make some coins, they won't hold their value for much longer because bitcoin is utterly useless as an actual currency. If you aren't looking to buy illegal drugs or questionable "adult" content, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere to actually spend your coins. Add on to that the fact that the value fluctuates by up to £50 per coin over a single day, and you have a completely unuseable currency in every way. Oh I've got a good place local to spend them Bitcoins for beer now in the UK - Mind Of The Geek Ben
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